Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry

Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1961.

In the past “baroque” was thought to derive from the Portuguese and Spanish barroco, an irregular pearl or a promontory… Recently it has been convincingly derived from baroco, a term used by the Schoolmen to describe a kind of syllogism. This derivation has the advantage of historical support, both linguistic and semantic [3] … For our purposes it is important to note that the word baroco was pure artifice and that, through practically all later logic books in the Middle Ages and Renaissance it became part of every schoolboy’s mnemonic grab bag. … whether by random selection or by reason of their explosive sounds: [the letters in the word] … baroco survived the longest and, leaving behind its artificial and homely origin, entered a new and exotic life. Thus we may hope to dispel the naïve hope that the origin of the word may tell us what it now means.
(3, 5)

The later history of “baroque” is more obvious. By the end of the eighteenth century the term was associated particularly with architecture and means something like “bizarre” or “extravagant.” Jacob Burckhardt gave it historical limits when he used it to describe the style of architecture that developed out of the “decay” of the High Renaissance. But Heinrich Wolfflin in 1888 seems to have been the first to suggest a favorable approach to Baroque architecture. In doing so he freed the term from necessarily pejorative connotations and recommended that it be applied also to the other arts. … Baroque has become standard in art history as a period concept refined now to the point of designating the style that prevailed in Western Europe between Mannerism and Rococo. (5)

In Italy, since there were no great playwrights or novelists to consider, literary historians had to acknowledge the central importance of Marino. The terms marinismo and secentismo were in current use in the nineteenth century as designations for the dominant style. (6)

England, perhaps more than France, had put up the strongest resistance to the concept of Baroque. England’s literary Renaissance was rather belated and in many ways episodic. The first major phase seemed to coincide more or less with the reign of Henry VIII and the second with that of Elizabeth; it was therefore convenient to give them political labels. (6-7)

There is, all the same, a growing curiosity about it; and perhaps in time that curiosity, together with the more conservative tendency under way to minimize the stark old contrast between Elizabethan and Jacobean and the recent movement to “reconcile” Donne and Milton, will lead to the formulation of a period concept which might just as well be called Baroque. (8)

It is reasonable to suppose tentatively that some “essential” development in the style took place between the Renaissance and the age of Neoclassicism. … We must call the putative style something, and the term nearest at hand is Baroque; indeed we could hardly impose any other. But it must be understood as literary Baroque , without irrelevant commitments from its use in the other arts and without any necessarily pejorative connotations. (15)

There are, on the other hand, poems which diverge from the casual time scheme of conversation and which find in their divergence a conspicuous, even a dominant, source of strength and structure. Such poems seem first to appear in the Baroque age. In face, the use of time as a significant structural device and, in more general terms, the poetic awareness of “structural” time as contingent and manipulatable seem to be peculiar achievements of the Baroque poets. (23)

Time and the sun’s career are, in terms of the poem, actually made to depend upon the speaker’s attitude. … One could go on citing instances from Baroque poetry (the most familiar would be Marvell’s richly ironic manipulation of time in “To his Coy Mistress”), and it would still be possible to oppose them with earlier poems’ but actually the novelty consists not in mere presence but in directness, in emphasis, and in frequency of occurrence. (24)

Movement toward the future, either full or incomplete, is perhaps the commonest movement to be found in the Baroque lyric. It had been common also in previous ages (see especially Petrarch or Wyatt), but had rarely assumed a complex or gradual form: (36)

Marino and his followers, on the other hand, could hardly escape the influence of Petrarch. However they distorted the Petrarchan love conventions, their imagery dereived largely from the Canzoniere, and their view of love can be interpreted as a disillusioned, not to say cynical, version of Petrarchan love. (102-3)

[Marino’s] “Amori Notturni” is concerned with little more than a lover’s meeting. What appears to interest the poet is not praise or idealization of the beloved, but rather the successive moments of passion. (104)

In Italy the major lyric poets never freed themselves sufficiently from the Petrarchan tradition to allow full scope to new tendencies. All the same, there is—in some of the poems of Marino, for example—a new complexity, approaching evolution, of attitudes. Partly the new tone derives from the tension set up between the old Petrarchan style and world-view and the new virtuosity and, on e might almost say, cynicism. There was also a tendency to exploit suspense and surprise (one remembers Marino’s dictum that the poem should strive to astound) and to express the exaggerated and the grotesque. (153-154)

Those who speak of the Baroque style in poetry as decadence or disease are guilty of a number of misconceptions. Usually they make Baroque too narrow and find it only in the most extravagant works of poets like Marino, Crashaw, or Gongora; and usually they define Baroque only in terms of the conceit or other rhetorical devices. But once we make it a period concept and test it without prejudice against the total style of the age, we discover that isolated extravagances are often manifestation of a broader tendency that we might have imagined. During the Baroque age, the greatest poets discovered new and original techniques for structuring poetry and enabling it to express complexities. Conceit and metaphor were not new means of structure but part of the traditional resources of the poet. If they were used extravagantly in Baroque poetry, the same can be said of other periods in the history of literature. It has not yet been shown precisely what characterized their use in the Baroque. Looking elsewhere, we find that new means of structure and complexity can be discovered in universal elements of poetry which before had been taken for granted: in time and drama. /
The use of time as a means of structure was part of a broader tendency to view time under the aspect of eternity as contingent and manipulatable. It is an ancient commonplace to say that time flies or crawls, according to the way one feels; “subjective” time designates a universal human experience. But to think of time in relation to eternity is to enter into a realm of speculation full of paradox. Christian theologians were used to thinking in such terms, yet poets were not. [Doctrinally, of course, Dante was well aware of the difficulties of expressing eternal things in temporal terms] Time in poetry, as expressed in tense and temporal reference, had not been actively exploited as a conspicuous means of structure. It was in the Baroque age that poets first took up the notion of time viewed through eternity and found that its paradoxical nature admitted liberties that common sense and subjective time did not. In this way we can explain, in terms of the history of ideas, what at first seems an odd and extravagant use of time. The whole tendency, as reflected in poetry, reached its culmination in those lyrics which use time as a conspicuous means of structure. Poetically, the drastic tense changes in the “Nativity Odes,” for example, can be seen as a major part of the total structure of the poem; indeed, they reinforce its whole ideology. It is significant both for the history of poetic style and for the history of ideas that time is used as a conspicuous means of structure in poems as diverse as the “Polifemo,” the “Nativity Ode,” and “Lycidas.” It is a characteristic of Baroque poetry in general, not merely of one national tradition. True, it found its best expression in England and Spain, but that is not surprising, since those countries produced the best lyrics of the age. Moreover, the same tendency is evidence in other countries. (161-2)

Drama… Complex states of mind, of course, existed in reality long before they were represented in imaginative literature. If we should posit a tradition whose exemplars are Catullus, Petrarch, and Ronsard, we could perhaps infer a developing ability to express complex attitudes in the lyric. Our tradition would culminate in the Baroque, … But it remained for the English, Donne and Milton, not to mention Vaughan or Marvell, to mark full use of the rhetorical situation in creating a complex evolution of attitudes. Before the Baroque, complex ideas had, of course, been expressed in the lyric. One need only recall Dante’s three canzoni which he himself explicates so tortuously in the Convivio. But never before had complex attitudes been evolved gradually as a main part of the structure of a poem. (163)

Among its other limitation, my contribution to defining Baroque lyric style neglects treating imagery. It has not yet been shown how any meaningful distinction can be made between Baroque imagery and the imagery of other styles. (166)

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, transl. Aloysius and Harold Bolton, Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola New York, 2003.

Theories most popular at the moment ascribe the Imitation to two or three men, members of the Brethren of the Common Life, an association of priests organized in the Netherlands in the latter half of the fourteenth century. That Thomas Hemerken of Kempen, or Thomas a Kempis as he is now known, later translated a composite of their writings, essentially a spiritual diary, from the original Netherlandish into Latin is generally admitted by scholars. This Thomas, born about the year 1380, … (vii)

…the Imitation became and has remained, after the Bible, the most widely read book in the world. (viii)

Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars. He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not happy when praised by men. (Book 1, The Second Chapter, page 2) [know thyself… know thy limitations]

Shun too great a desire for knowledge, for in it there is much fretting and delusion. Intellectuals like to appear learned and to be called wise. Yet there are many things the knowledge of knowledge of which does little or not good to the soul, and he who concerns himself about other things than those which lead to salvation is very unwise. (2)

The more you know and the better you understand, the more severely will you be judged, unless your life is also the more holy. Do no be proud, therefore, because of your learning or skill. Rather, fear because of the talent given you. (2)

Happy is he to whom the truth manifests itself, not in signs and words that fade, but as it actually is. Our opinion, our senses often deceive us and we discern very little. (3rd Chapter, 3)

He to whom the Eternal Word speaks is free from theorizing. (3)

I am often wearied by the many things I hear and read, but in You is all that I long for. Let the learned be still, let all creatures be silent before You; do You alone speak to me. (3)

Truth, not eloquence, is to be sought in reading the Holy Scriptures; and every part must be read in the spirit in which it was written. For in the Scriptures we ought to seek profit rather than polished diction. (5)

Our curiosity often impedes our readings of the Scriptures, when we wish to understand and mull over what we ought simply to read and pass by. (5th chapter, 5)

Do not be self-sufficient but place your trust in God. … Put no trust in your own learning nor in the cunning of any man, but rather in the grace of God… (7th chapter, 6)

It is a very great thing to obey, to live under a superior and not to be one’s own master, for it is much safer to be subject than it is to command. (9th chapter, 7)

Saddened by his miseries and sufferings, he laments and prays. He wearies of living longer and wishes for death that he might be dissolved and be with Christ. (12th chapter, 9)

If you would persevere in seeking perfection, you must consider yourself a pilgrim, an exile on earth. (17th chapter, 13)

…in the evening examine yourself on what you have said this day, what you have done and thought, for in these things perhaps you have often offended god and those about you. (19th chapter, 15)

Leave curiosities alone. Read such matters as bring sorrow to the heart rather than occupation to the mind. (20th chapter, 16)

No man deserves the consolation of heaven unless he persistently arouses himself to holy contrition. (20th chapter, 17)

But woe to those who know not their own misery, and greater woe to those who love this miserable and corruptible life. Some, indeed, can scarcely procure its necessities either by work or by begging; yet they love it so much that, if they could live here always, they would care nothing for the kingdom of God. (22nd chapter, 20)

Indeed, a long life does not always benefit us, but on the contrary, frequently adds to our guilt. (chapter 22, 21)

In truth, you cannot have two joys: you cannot taste the pleasures of this world and afterward reign with Christ. (24th chapter, 24)

Therefore, faithful soul, prepare your heart for this Bridegroom that He may come and dwell within you; He Himself says: “If any one love Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, … (Book 2, 1st chapter, 28)

Consider nothing great, nothing high, nothing pleasing, nothing acceptable, except God Himself or that which is of God. (5th chapter, 33)

Blessed is he who appreciates what it is to love Jesus and who despises himself for the sake of Jesus. (7th chapter, 34)

Why do you look for rest when you were born to work? (10th chapter, 38)

For He wishes you to learn to bear trial without consolation, to submit yourself wholly to Him that you may become more humble through suffering. (12th chapter, 41)

Blessed are the ears that catch the accents of divine whispering, and pay no heed to the murmurings of this world. (Book 3, 1st chapter, 44)

“I am that you can hear what the Lord your God speaks within you. (44)

And who am I that I should dare speak to You? I am Your poorest and meanest servant, a vile worm, much more poor and contemptible than I know or dare to say. Yet remember me, Lord, because I am nothing, I have nothing, and I can do nothing. You alone are good, just, and holy. (A Prayer for the Grace of Devotion, 47)

Your progress in spiritual life does not consist in having the grace of consolation, but in enduring its withdrawal. (7th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 52)

Nor is he very brave or wise who becomes too despondent in times of adversity and difficulty and thinks less confidently of Me than he should (Voice of Christ, 7th chapter, 53)

When a spirit of fervor is enkindled within you, you may well mediate on how you will feel when the fervor leaves. Then, when this happens, remember that the light which I have withdrawn for a time as a warning to you and for My own glory may return. (7th chapter, Voice of Christ, 53)

That you conform your desires entirely according to My good pleasure, (The Voice of Christ, 11th chapter, 57)

Behold, they who prosper in the world shall perish as smoke, and there shall be no memory of their past joys. (The Voice of Christ, 12th chapter, 58)

Habit already formed will resist you, but it shall be overcome by a better habit. The flesh will murmur against you, but it will be bridled by fervor of spirit. (The Voice of Christ, 12th chapter, 58)

Be zealous against yourself. (13th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 59)

Not every desire is from the Holy Spirit, even though it may seem right and good. It is difficult to be certain whether it is a good spirit or a bad one that prompts one to this or that, … commit the whole matter to Me with true resignation, and say: “Lord, You know what is better for me (Voice of Christ, 15th chapter, 61)

Whatever I can desire or imagine for my own comfort I look for not here but hereafter. For if I alone should have all the world’s comforts and could enjoy all its delights, it is certain that they could not long endure. Therefore, my soul, you cannot enjoy full consolation or perfect delight except in God, (16th chapter, The Disciple, 62)

From the moment of My birth to My death on the cross, suffering did not leave Me. I suffered great want of temporal goods. Often I heard many complaints against Me. Disgrace and reviling I bore with patience. For My blessings I received ingratitude, for My miracles blasphemies, and for My teaching scorn. (The Voice of Christ, 18th chapter, 64)

Grant, most sweet and loving Jesus, that I may seek my repose in You above every creature; above all health and beauty; above every honor and glory; every power and dignity; above all knowledge and cleverness, all riches and arts, all joy and gladness; (21st chapter, The Disciple, 67)

My child, do not be curious. Do not trouble yourself with idle cares. What matters this or that to you? Follow Me. What is it to you if a man is such and such, if another does or says this or that? You will not have to answer for others, but you will have to give an account of yourself. (24th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 72)

It is the mark of a perfect man, Lord, never to let his mind relax in attention to heavenly things, …but having by the certain prerogative of a free mind no disorderly affection for any created being. (The Disciple, 26th chapter, 74)

Behold, eating, drinking, clothing, and other necessities that sustain the body are burdensome to the fervent soul. … It is not lawful to cast them aside completely, for nature must be sustained, but Your holy law forbids us to demand superfluous things and things that are simply for pleasure, (The Disciple, 26th chapter, 74)

Of what use is anxiety about the future? Does it bring you anything but trouble upon trouble? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. It is foolish and useless to be either grieved or happy about future things which perhaps may never happen. (30th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 77)

There is great difference between the wisdom of an enlightened and devout man and the learning of a well-read and brilliant scholar, for the knowledge which flows down from divine sources is much nobler than that laboriously acquired by human industry. (31st chapter, The Disciple, 79)

‘A Man Should Not Be Unduly Solicitous About His Affairs.’ My child, always commit your cause to Me. I will dispose of it rightly in good time. Await My ordering of it and it will be to your advantage. (The Voice of Christ, 39th chapter, 87)

Lord, I am nothing, of myself I have nothing that is good; (The Disciple, 40th chapter, 88)

My child, if you place your peace in any creature because of your own feeling or for the sake of his company, you will be unsettled and entangled. But if you have recourse to the everliving and abiding Truth, you will not grieve if a friend should die or forsake you. Your love for your friend should be grounded in Me, and for My sake you should love whoever seems to be good and is very dear to you in this life. Without My friendship has no strength and cannot endure. Love which I do not bind is neither true nor pure. (42nd chapter, The Voice of Christ, 89) [an insult to love]

My child, there are many matters of which it is well for you to be ignorant, and to consider yourself as one who is dead upon the earth and to whom the whole world is crucified. (The Voice of Christ, 44th chapter, 91)

And why do such small matters pierce you to the heart, unless because you are still carnal and pay more heed to men than you ought? … But look into yourself more thoroughly and you will learn that the world is still alive in your, in a vain desire to please men. For when you shrink from being abased and confounded for your failings, it is plain indeed that you are not truly humble or truly dead to the world, (46th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 94)

What you do, do well. Work faithfully in My vineyard. I will be your reward. Write, read, sing, mourn, keep silence, pray, and bear hardships like a man. Eternal life is worth all these and greater battles. Peace will come on a day which is known to the Lord, and then there shall be no day or night as at present but perpetual light, infinite brightness, lasting peace, and safe repose. (The Voice of Christ, 47th chapter, 95)

My child, often, when the fire is burning the flame does not ascend without smoke. Likewise, the desires of some burn toward heavenly tings, and yet they are not free from temptations of carnal affection. Therefore, it is not altogether for the pure honor of God that they act when they petition Him so earnestly. (49th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 98)


My judgments are to be feared, not discussed, because they are incomprehensible to the understanding of men. (58th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 111)

These are all Your words, O Christ, eternal Truth, through they were not all spoken at one time nor written together in one place. And because they are Yours and true, I must accept them … (Book 4, 1st chapter 1, The Disciple, 115)

The most devout King David danced before the ark of God with all his strength as he recalled the benefits once bestowed upon his fathers. He made musical instruments of many kinds. He composed psalms and ordered them sung with joy. He himself often played upon the harp when moved by the grace of the Holy Ghost. He taught the people of Israel to praise God with all their hearts and to raise their voices every day to bless and glorify Him. (1st chapter, The Disciple, 117)

‘It is profitable to receive communion often’ Behold, I come to You, Lord, that I may prosper by Your gift and be delighted at Your hold banquet which You, O God, in Your sweetness have prepared for Your poor. Behold, all that I can or ought to desire is in You. … I must often come to You, therefore, and receive the strength of my salvation lest, deprived of this heavenly food, I grow weak on the way. Once, most merciful Jesus, while preaching to the people the healing their many ills, You said: “I will not send them away fasting, lest they faint in the way.” Deal with me likewise. (The Disciple, 3rd chapter, 120)

It is indeed necessary for me, who fall and sin so often, who so quickly become lax and weak, to renew, cleanse, and inflame myself through frequent prayer, confession, and the holy reception of Your Body, lest perhaps by abstaining too long, I fall away from my hold purpose. For from the days of his youth the senses of man are prone to evil, and unless divine aid strengthens him, he quickly falls deeper. (3rd chapter, The Disciple, 121)

Lament and grieve because you are still so worldly, so carnal, so passionate and unmortified, so full of roving lust, so careless in guarding the external senses, so often occupied in many vain fancies, so inclined to exterior things and so heedless of what lies within, so prone to laughter and dissipation and so indisposed to sorrow and tears, so inclined to ease and the pleasures of the flesh and so cool to austerity and zeal, so curious to hear what is new and to see the beautiful and so slow to embrace humiliation and dejection, so covetous of abundance, so niggardly in giving and so tenacious in keeping, so inconsiderate in speech, so reluctant in silence, so undisciplined in character, so disordered in action, so greedy at meals, so deaf to the Word of God, so prompt to rest and so slow to labor, so awake to empty conversation, so sleepy in keeping sacred vigils and so eager to end them , so wandering in your attention, so careless in saying the office, so lukewarm in celebrating, so heartless in receiving, so quickly distracted, so seldom fully recollected, so quickly moved to anger, so apt to take offense at others, so prone to judge, so severe in condemning, so happy in prosperity and so weak in adversity, so often making good resolutions and carrying so few of them into action. (7th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 125)

What more do I ask than that you give yourself entirely of Me? I care not for anything else you may give Me, for I seek not your gift but you. (8th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 126)

God can do more than man can understand. A pious and humble searched for truth He will allow, a search that is ever ready to learn and that seeks to walk in the reasonable doctrine of the fathers. (18th chapter, The Voice of Christ, 139)

Margreta de Grazia, The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece

Margreta de Grazia, The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Ed. Margreta de Grazia, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Born in the same year (1818), Jacob Burckhardt and Karl Marx together (though quite independently) gave birth to the Renaissance. Not to the Renaissance as the rebirth of antiquity but to the Renaissance as the birth of the Modern—the Renaissance, that is, as Early Modern—the period that anticipated the future rather than recovered the past. In Burckhardt’s 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, that birth took the form of individualism; in Marx’s 1867 Capital, it took the form of capitalism. (17)

The play has accordingly been read as dramatizing any number of relations to that momentous transition form one social formation to another (feudal to capitalist) and from one type of individual to another (loyal to self-interested). We thus have readings that, empowered by Lawrence Stone’s Crisis of the Aristocracy, see Lear tottering on the brink between old and new, Hooker and Hobbes, drives and impulses. Other readings see Lear clearing the way for this break by dramatizing the exhaustion of older structures and beliefs (absolutism, supernaturalism, spiriutalism) that cave in from the very weight of their own contradictions in unwitting preparation for their supersession. (20)

Each reading sees the play as more or less intrepidly gesturing toward (or away form) the future, as if it were doing its part to start (or forestall) the rolling historical ball on its teleological course into the Modern. /
So what we have is a range of readings positioning King Lear in relation to the Early Modern; pre-, proto- retro-, avant-garde, and ultra/trans-early Modern King Lear respectively. (20)

There is a way in which seeing the Renaissance as the Early-Now commit itself to the very universalizing tendency that historicizing set out to avoid in the first place. … It is what Foucault following Nietzsche would avoid by replacing a teleologically driven continuum with proliferative genealogies or archaeologies. The reading that follows below makes no pretense of avoiding periodization, however, for it too exists in relation to it. Set resolutely against the Modern, it could easily be added to the list compiled above, with a new prefix: anti-Early Modern. The essay is about how King Lear blocks the mobility identified since the nineteenth century with the Modern—through its locking of persons into things, proper selves into property, subjectivity effects into personal effects—in an attempt to withstand flux or fluidity, superflux or superfluity. (21)

Martha Nussbaum, Sophistry About Conventions

Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge; Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990.

Sophistry About Conventions

That is my initial unsorted reaction to Stanley Fish’s paper, much of which I found alarming. It will be evident that I am expressing two related worries—one about the content of some of the views expressed, the other about a way of proceeding in giving them expression. One about a loose and not fully earned extreme relativism and even subjectivism, the other about a disdain for rigor, patience, and clarity in some of the discourse articulating this subjectivism or relativism. (220)

For if one really believes that each person (or group) is the criterion of truth and/or that there is no salient distinction between rational persuasion and causal manipulation, one is not likely to have much respect for traditional philosophical ways of attending to validity and clarity. (220)

One fashionable one was the view that came to be called Protagorean subjectivism, though it is unlikely that Protagoras himself held it. This is the view that, given the variety and non-homogeneity of the deliverances of perception, and given the apparent absence of any “harder” criterion of adjudication, each person must be regarded as the criterion of truth. If the wind feels hot to A, it just is hot for A; if it feels cold to B, it just is cold to B; and nothing more can legitimately be said. A more radical version dropped the qualification “for A” and “for B”; its holders were thus forced to suspend the Principle of Noncontradiction. The wind is at one and the same time both hot and cold, just in case we can find two people to say so. (The view was not confined to cases like heat and cold, where its appeal is at least comprehensible; it was a quite general view about all assertions.) (221)

The Protagorean position implies that argument is not really argument; it removes the idea of a common truth concerning which we are striving to come into agreement. In its mild form it tells us that there are no arguments, only assertions of one’s views and perceptions. In its radical form it knocks a vital prop out from under all argument by doing away with non-contradiction. What, then, is going on when people purport to argue and to instruct? And why should we listen to a professional instructor? Gorgias provided one famous answer. What discourse really is, is a kind of drug, a tool for the casual manipulation of behavior. Like Stanley Fish, he (or his spokesperson Helen of Troy) asserts that there is no distinction between persuasion and force. It is all manipulation, and the ability to manipulate can be taught. (222)

The discovery that there is not a divine code fixed eternally independently of our existence and thought, the discovery that truth is to some extent or in some manner human and historical, certainly does not warrant the conclusion that every human truth is as good as every other and that such time-honored institutions as the search for truth and the rational criticism of arguments have no further role to play. (222)

Aristophanes, wise here as in so many things, provides a revealing example. A young man comes home from a day of sophistical education. He says to his father, “Dad, I can prove to you that sons ought to beat their fathers.” … So then I, being a human being, can perfectly well make my own new convention, that sons should beat their fathers in return for the beatings they received as children. … There is an important truth lurking—namely, that this son wants to beat his father. The argument appeals not because it is a good argument, which it plainly is not (for there are all sorts of good human grounds for preferring the old set of human institutions to this one), but because it is a handy, elegant justification for what this son want to do anyway. He doesn’t want truth, he just want power. This shows us something about him, not something about truth. It does not show us that truth is power, or that there is no such thing as the search for truth as distinct from the search for power. (222)

Aristotle… attempt to restore the search for truth (in all areas) to its place of honor is a good one for us to examine, since (as I have argued elsewhere) it relies on no idea of a reality “as it is,” given to us independently of all conceptualization; and yet it argues that within the “appearances,” that is, the world as perceived and interpreted by human beings, we can find all the truth we need, and much more that the sophists believe. (223)

To the extent to which it is appropriate to say of a principle or belief that it is optional for us, to that extent it is not deep in our lives. To the extent to which it is constitutive of our procedures of life and thought, to that extent it is not optional at all. Aristotle was, I believe, correct in thinking that among the primary jobs of philosophy, if not the primary one, is the sorting out of our beliefs and principles to see where they fall along this spectrum. And he was also correct in thinking that once this painstaking task was underway, we would discover that we get back just what the Protagorean and the Gorgian want to deny us, namely, full-blown notions of public truth, of rational justification, of objectivity. When we are confronted with a contradiction between two principles, we do not say, well then, since there’s no uninterpreted given, it’s all free play and any story has as good a claim as any other if it can be made persuasive. We try to resolve the contradiction first, of course. But if we cannot, we recall the very basic commitment we have to the Principle of Noncontradiction as necessary for all thought and discourse. Using this, then, as a regulative principle (refusing to assert the contradiction), we set ourselves to adjudicate between the competing principles, asking in each case what the cost would be of giving each up. and we opt for the one that “saves the greatest number and the most basic,” as Aristotle puts it, of our other beliefs. (225)

Let me take an example from contemporary ethical theory. John Rawls has advanced various arguments against Utilitarianism and in favor of his own principles of justice. One of them goes, roughly, like this. (I hope that I shall be forgiven for the oversimple and schematic character of this summary.) we first show that Utilitarianism is committed to a picture of the aggregation of desires that neglects or treats as ethically irrelevant the boundaries between separate persons. We then ask the Utilitarian whether he or she does not share with us a conception of the person that makes these boundaries highly relevant, indeed fundamental. If the Utilitarian agrees with our diagnosis, she agrees that there is an internal inconsistency in her position, which can be resolved by her giving up whichever of the conflicting principles (either the conception of the person or the Utilitarian principle) appears less deep or fundamental. Rawls bets that most Utilitarians will find the conception of the person to be more fundamental and thus that the two of them will decide to agree on the principles of justice. /
Here is an example of rational argument, or rational justification, that in no way relies on an uninterpreted given; it can be said to yield, in a perfect recognizable sense, ethical truth. It is altogether different from mere rhetorical manipulation because it proceeds by the patient clarification of alternatives and by the detection of incoherence and contradiction. (226)

As we ask, concerning any belief, what its depth is for us (let us say, the belief in the incommensurability of ethical values, or the beliefs about persons mentioned above), we need to be imagining vividly what a life would look like both with and without that belief, allowing ourselves, in imagination and emotion, to get a sense of what the cost for us would be if we gave it up. (227)

My comments are addressed to what seemed to me to be some general problems with the arguments concerning truth and convention that were used at the conference—but especially to Stanley Fish’s arguments in his paper, entitled “Anti-Professionalism.” Fish argues that the only criterion of truth we have for judgments made in a given profession is the prevailing (currently dominant) view of things among practicing members of the profession. “Prevailing” is explicitly denied all normative epistemological content: it is a descriptive term having to do with such things as power, prestige, and income. According to Fish, there is, in any case, no significant distinction to be found between persuasion and manipulation, or even violence. (228)

John R. Cooper, Voice in Ben Jonson's Tetrameter Lyrics

John R. Cooper, Voice in Ben Jonson’s Tetrameter Lyrics, in The Ben Jonson Journal, Volume 12, 2005.

Yet it was his tetrameter lyrics that first gave me the impression long ago of a distinctively Jonsonian voice, and it was also those lyrics that seem to have been most influential on his “sons.” Trimpi acknowledged this when he said that it was Jonson’s “slighter poems rather than his more original and more didactic verse” that had the most influence among “his most talented admirers”. (94)

That a syllable on the ictus of an iambic pentameter line may be either accented or merely stressed is the reason for the expressive flexibility of this verse form. While Surrey, the inventor of the iambic pentameter line in Early Modern English, generally put words that were semantically important and therefore accented before a caesura and at the end of a line, later poets, starting with Sidney, started putting semantically accented syllables at various places in the line so that the intonational contours of the lines varied. That, in fact, was Sidney’s great stylistic contribution to English verse. (97)

Shakespeare took increasingly advantage of the potential flexibility of iambic verse. Through his career there is a steady decrease in the importance of end-of-line words in his blank verse. Sidney also taught poets to vary the pace of iambic pentameter lines, slowing them by placing stressed syllables off the metrical beat (e.g., “With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies”) or speeding them by having only unstressed syllables off the beat (e.g., “In martial sports I had my cunning tried”). (98)

Metrically, and even rhythmically, these poems are very similar. The most prominent rhythmical feature of each of them is an obvious four-beat meter. Yet, at least impressionistically, Jonson’s poem seems quieter and less obviously song-like. Jonson’s text gives more resistance to the meter. /
In the first place, Marlowe’s metrical accenting adheres to the standard pattern, with the second and fourth beat in each line being accented more than the first and third. … Here the even-numbered beats are all on semantically more important syllables than the odd-numbered ones. (101)

Meter will also encourage an unidiomatic accenting of “to” in the last stanza. In the poem by Jonson, by contrast, the meter is less insistent and does not force stressing or accenting hat is different from ordinary speech. (102)

Nevertheless, Jonson’s practice is, in important ways, different from Marlowe’s. His syntactic structures do not coincide with the verse structures so precisely. There is first of all a good deal more pausing within the lines in Jonson, and his caesura’s are of a different character from Marlowe’s. Marlowe’s mid-line pauses are all between the second and third beats, the normal break in a four-beat line. Moreover Marlowe supports the structure by creating parallels in sound or sense… Very few of Jonson’s caesura’s produce this kind of symmetry. Instead, his internal pauses produce various kinds of asymmetry in the lines… (102)

Indeed, much of the subtlety of Jonson’s art lies in the way that he varies the syntax form the line to line and couplet to couplet, much as Sidney did with iambic pentameter. No line or couplet has the same syntactic structure as the one next to it. Moreover he employs a more complex syntax than Marlowe, making in particular freer use of parenthetical phrases marked by punctuation. As a result, performing Jonson’s verse produces a good deal of variety in intonation. (102-3)

Not only is Jonson’s syntax not tied to the structure of the four-beat line, but the syntax is itself more complex than in the Marlovean poem or, indeed, in earlier four-beat poems in general. (105)

The more complex syntax, not surprisingly, is connected to a more complex ordering of ideas. (106)

While in Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd,” the relation of concepts is roughly “and, and, and,” a linear presentation of equivalent ideas, Jonson’s thought pattern in these four lines is “this (by implication not that)” and “even if… then.” The next four lines are even more complex conceptually, with a still freer relationship between syntax and verse line. The distinction made by the “not so much…as” structure is not represented schematically by “not x but y,” but rather “not merely though possibly x (honoring thee) but rather and perhaps also y which implies x (preserving the wreath also honors the lady).” (106-7)

All of these generalizations have been based on a few poems, but they will survive a comparison of other Elizabethan tetrameter kinds of words metrically stressed or accented. Jonson regularly raises more syllables metrically than do the Elizabethan poets, by placing function words on the metrical beat, with a consequent slowing of the pace. Still more significant from the point of view of intonation, however, is Jonson’s greater freedom in fitting syntax to verse line. The Elizabethans make their natural syntactic breaks coincide almost invariably with their line endings and their caesuras occur between the second and third foot more regularly than Jonson does. (108)

…consider the meaning of the words that get metrical accents, then we see not only that Jonson accents fewer nouns and function words than Marlowe and other Elizabethan lyric poets, but also that his nouns are more abstract than theirs. Marlowe’s catalogue of sensuous delights with which the passionate shepherd tempts his nymph is perhaps too obvious a contrast, but even Shakespeare’s funeral song from Cymbeline, with its references to “golden lads,” “chimney sweepers,” and “dust,” uses more concrete language than Jonson’s erotic appeal to Celia in “Come my Celia.” Jonson’s poem eschews all sensuous imagery and offers only the unspecified “sports of live” and the “sweet theft” of stealing “love’s fruit.” “Sweet” has, of course, noting to do with the sense of taste, and for “fruit” Jonson probably had in mind the original meaning from the Latin fructus, namely, something to be enjoyed. Putting all of these stylistic features together—Jonson’s varied syntax, the way that his syntax produces intonation and pausing that work against rather than with the structure of the four-beat line, the softening and slowing of the bat by the raising and lowering of syllables by the meter, and the abstractness of the language—we have, I believe, a good explanation of why Jonson’s tetrameter lyrics sound more like rational speech and less like song than earlier tetrameter lyrics. (109)

In locating, on Marxist grounds, the historical context for the rise of iambic pentameter, Easthope associates the rise of iambic pentameter with bourgeois civilization, and it could certainly be argued that iambic pentameter was invented to suit an age of increasing individualism. I have tried to show that what Jonson did to the tetrameter lyric echoed developments in iambic pentameter. The traditional four-beat poem, song, or ballad was a form suited to communal performances. Song can be performed by a chorus, but even when performed by an individual, the form is so conventional that the author becomes in effect—as often literally—anonymous. Jonson by contrast presents himself explicitly in his poetry. He published his Works with his name in an act of unprecedented self-assertion. While the real Donne remains obscure behind the various personae of his poems, Jonson insists on his own actual identity… (111-112)

Jonson’s successors, though they learned from him how to use the tetrameter lyric to make a graceful social gesture, did not use the form didactically as he did. Jonson wished to be read correctly and heard correctly because he spoke not as a member of an essentially aristocratic culture but as its teacher. His didacticism is obviously more evident in his pentameter poems, but even his supposedly “slighter” lyrics involve serious attempts at persuasion and not just seduction. (112)

Douglas Bush, on Jeremy Taylor, in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century

Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, from the Oxford History of English Literature, Ed. F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobree, Oxford at the Claredon Press, 1962.

Taylor’s first publication (1638), an anti-Romanist sermon delivered at Oxford on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and dedicated to the archbishop, was a thorny argument which contained no budding roses. His second book (1642) was a defence of episcopacy such as might have been expected from a young divine nurtured in the school of Laud. His anonymous Discourse concerning Prayer Ex tempore (1646) was a bold criticism of the new Directory for Public Worship and, enlarged in 1649 as An Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy, was boldly dedicated to the king just before his execution. In these, along with a deep loyalty to the Church of England. (330)

…his first vital book, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), a book which offended his royal master, though its liberalism was not un-Laudian. … As a whole the work is the best example of Taylor’s earlier prose, lucid, sober, unadorned, and animated by deep and sad conviction. (330)

Holy Living… the style, though not the plain, workmanlike instrument of The Liberty of Prophesying, has achieved the copious, limpid flow without much of the richness that we associate with Taylor. (332)

To us Holy Dying makes a much stronger appeal than its predecessor. Its compelling theme awakens in Taylor the qualities he shares with Browne and Shakespeare and the rest, with the authors of the mortalities and the many works du contemptu mundi. (332)

His book has nothing of the subtle and individual intellectualism of Donne’s Devotions. Taylor’s power is his capacity for feeling and expressing the great commonplaces. Even his circling repetitiousness has the effect of heightening the physical and spiritual frailty, the inescapable misery, of puny man, of multiplying mirrors in a labyrinthine charnel-house, and, thought we pay less heed to this, of multiplying the evidences of God’s chastening love and mercy. (332)

Like The Fairy Queen and Paradise Lost, Holy Dying may be viewed as an interwoven series of variations on contrasting themes, God and man, heaven and hell, good and evil, light and darkness, health and disease, life and death, and—when they are not united—Christianity and paganism. … Much of it is plain, to be sure, and even the most ornate passages are pure and simple in diction and, however solemn, almost lightly fluid in rhythm. Taylor’s mature prose is as remarkable for its natural and sensuous images as Donne’s is for the lack of them. Though he is stirred by pomp and circumstance, his characteristic imagery is common and fresh as the morning—water, wind, flowers, birds, stars, and above all the light of the sun. Perhaps Taylor’s closest affinity, temperamental and didactic as well as artistic, is with Spenser. When we compare Taylor’s best-known purple patch—‘But so have I seen a Rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood…’—with a parallel stanza in The Fairy Queen (II. Xii. 74), we may think that it is the divine and not the lay poet whose visual and decorative sense obscures his serious intention. (333-4)

…we should remember that purple patches quoted by critics or assembled in anthologies give a distorted view of Taylor’s pulpit style, as they do of Donne’s. The figurative and poetical element—that which offended Restoration preachers and attracts us—is not large in proportion to the bulk of relatively plain discourse. In Taylor’s prose in general, variations in style are determined by both his emotional involvement and the nature of his theme, purpose and audience. His emotions are as certainly involved in the plain Liberty of Prophesying and Unum Necessarium as in the most ornate periods of Holy Dying and the sermons, but in the latter his appeal to the mind much oftener becomes an appeal to the heart and imagination. He may take wing from any of his common themes, life and death, time and eternity, sin, repentance, and inexhaustible mercy. We cherish him most in the typical quiet moods that reveal his love for the familiar things of nature, the phenomena of water, earth, and sky. Like Spenser, Taylor has a special tenderness for small creatures, for those ‘little images and reflexes’ of God, children, lambs, roses and ‘the softest stalk of a violet’, ‘the little birds and laborious bees’, the lark struggling bravely against the wind. (334-5)

And while Taylor, like Spenser, is firmly on the side of the resolved soul, some of his readers (like some romantic misinterpreters of Spenser in parallel cases) may—to borrow further examples from L. P. Smith—retain the picture of the libertine who, full of ‘wine, and rage, and pleasure, and folly’, goes ‘singing to his grave’, and forget ‘the severities of a watchfull and a sober life’; may remember ‘the harlots hands that build the fairy castle’ and not ‘the hands of reason and religion’ that must pull it down. (335)

Laura Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland

Laura Klos Sokol, Shortcuts to Poland, 2nd Edition, International Publishing Services Sp. z o.o., Warszawa, 2005.

Do you normally shake hands with (or kiss) everyone rather than wave hello or good-bye to the group? 3 points for yes; 0 for no. (9)

In Polish culture, … rudimentary greetings usually involve a couple of dzien dobry’s (hello’s) and head-noddings in the hallway. Sometimes I throw in a pan (sir) or pani (madam) to be extra polite. In response to “co slychac” (what’s new?) Poles (and their European neighbors) expect a meatier exchange… The God-Awful Truth is more socially acceptable in the initial stages of conversation with Poles than with Americans. Reviewing the imperfections of life can even be a sign of affection. (13)

Recently, some Poles complained to me about this barrage of questions they get from Americans. I was dumb-founded. Isn’t it flattering and gracious when someone asks you all about yourself? (15) … “Americans ask a lot of questions,” warns the culture section of a handbook written by Poles for Poles going to the States to teach and study. “Some of these questions may seem uninformed or elementary. You may be asked very personal questions by someone you have just met.” But don’t take offense, the handbook advises, “no impertinence is intended.” In other words, when Americans confound you with intrusive nosiness, they’re just trying to be nice and friendly. (16)

The number one question asked by Americans to new acquaintances—“What do you do?”—might sound a little odd to Poles if it comes out of nowhere. For a long time, work was not considered a source of self-satisfaction in Poland and therefore no guarantee of fruitful conversation. … The key is not to rely heavily on questions to jump-start a conversation. … I used to ask Poles a lot of personal questions and then wonder why they didn’t reciprocate. Sometimes, I felt a little hurt… If they do want to ask something personal, they sometimes say, “Sorry, can I ask you a personal question?” I say yes of course, bracing myself for an inquiry about my salary, pants size or sex life and they just want to know how I learned my faulty Polish or how long I’ve been in Poland. (16-17)

Unlike Americans, Poles don’t try to “get to know” someone within the first contact. Over a period of time, they observe you, exchange opinions with you, listen to your stories, problems, jokes and so forth before exchanging personal data. (17)

In American Cultural Patterns, authors Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett say that Americans “rarely form deep and lasting friendships in which friends become mutually dependent on each other.” Compared to other cultures, there’s an “American reluctance to become deeply involved with other persons.” The authors add that while members of other cultures might turn to friends for help and comfort, Americans trot down to the shrink’s office rather than burdening friends with troubles. An overstatement, in my opinion, but there’s no denying that the therapy business flourishes in the U.S. … It seems that some Poles are mystified or disappointed by friendships with Americans. [18] A Polish friend who seemed to drop off the face of the earth called recently. “I’m being American. I have no time,” she sighed. Another Pole complained that he was working so much that he was too busy to see his friends, “Like an American,” he said. (19)

What might be misleading is that many Americans are perceived as friendly, outgoing and open but this doesn’t mean that they are committed. Maybe that’s what’s disappointing to Poles. … Americans are more used to casual low-maintenance friendships. All this fits the value Americans place on self-reliance and independence. (19)

This American approach contributes to our reputation as a breezy and casual tribe of people. … Americans come off as informal because we don’t hesitate or wait to do what we perceive as mundane things. [20] … All this sounds unremarkable except that it’s the opposite of how many Poles behave. They’ll often hesitate or simply wait to be invited before doing such “small” things. And because of this, Americans might perceive them as formal, stiff or shy. / A Polish woman who is used to hosting Poles as well as foreigners describes Polish habits this way: “You have to tell Poles what to do. They wait for invitations and expect to be encouraged.” For example, she had some people over for a spontaneous lunch: “They came in, I had to say, ‘Put your coats here, go to the big room over there and sit down.’ I served them sandwiches and went back to the kitchen. Then I had to tell them to start eating… (20-21)

Another behavior that fuels the American easy breezy reputation is how they strike up conversations with strangers. … Americans’ body language (like leaning or draping extremities on furniture), smiling and using first names right off the bat rounds out the picture of ease. Again all of that contrasts with typical Polish behavior: People sit up straight, they smile less, and in some cases, still use titles. … In American culture, no higher compliment can be paid to an important person that the statement, ‘He’s a regular guy—real down to earth.’ That is, we want to treat everyone—and be treated—the same. … However, hierarchical behavior is starting to disappear among the younger generation of Poles. (21-22)

When American spot an argument down the road, they usually grab the conversational steering wheel and veer off to a safer topic. Poles, however, often don’t mind a head-on collision of opinions. … Americans seek harmony in conversation. There are even certain recognizable taboo topics—politics, religion and sex—that you don’t’ bring up unless you feel confident that others think similarly. [23] A text-book for learners of American English says: “Notice that you need to be very polite when disagreeing with an American—even someone you know quite well.” (23-24)

A Polish acquaintance and I were talking about Prague. I explained that while I enjoyed the architecture, I didn’t like the atmosphere because of too many tourists. It was better to live in Warsaw. “Well, you’re wrong, but that’s your opinion,” she said. I felt as if I had been slapped. By Polish standards, I was overreacting. (24)

All I wanted to do was thank my Polish hosts for their hospitality, hop in a taxi and go home. … However, my friends wanted to leave their cozy apartment on a freezing cold night to drive me home. I insisted on calling a cab and an argument ensued. I was apparently coming off as an obnoxiously independent American. This was not the first time I have been scolded by Poles for not requesting or refusing help. But the fact is Americans often hesitate before asking or accepting favors from other people. These are uncomfortable and face-threatening acts. (26)

This is not the case with Poles. Need is regarded as normal, so favors are easily exchanged. And it’s natural (and sometimes necessary) to depend on friends for rides, errands, babysitting, shopping, and telephone use. [i.e. because not everyone has a phone or car]. [27]… The notion of imposition is communicated between Poles when people don’t know each other well or when there’s a difference in status. (27)

Invitations from Poles to their homes are as serious as tax notices; if you don’t respond appropriately, be prepared to pay a heavy price. (29) … But the funny things is if you send out a written R.S.V.P. for more formal affairs in Poland, you can’t count on a response. Oral invitations and responses carry more weight.

Americans appear vague and light-hearted about extending invitations. Poles, among many other nationalities, complain bitterly about the apparent insincerity of the American suggestion “We should get together sometime”. (29)

I asked a Pole to explain how to turn down an invitation graciously. “You don’t, there’s no way,” she sighed. “This is the problem.” Apparently, the excuse has to be specific and air-tight. (29)

In the States, there’s a little known [followed] rule about an unoccupied hand at the table: it should not rest on the table but on your lap. But careful! In Poland, both hands from the wrists up should be kept above the table at all times. Another difference: Americans eat with the fork in the right hand but will pass it to the left hand in order to cut with a knife in the right. …Continental style means fork in the left hand, tines usually face down, and pushing food onto the fork with the knife in the right. (32)

Americans don’t mind serving themselves. … Poles, by contrast, will always serve others (women and guests first) or wait to be served. That means that, even under casual circumstances, Americans could wind up looking niekulturalny [without culture] if they innocently refill their own glass. (32)

Utensil codes… Lay your knife and fork parallel on the side of your plate to show you have finished… But if you want to continue eating, make an X by crossing the knife and fork on your plate. (33)

Opening the fridge or dumping your own dirty dishes in the sink in a Polish home could be an affront to hosting talents, especially for the older generation. (34)

Stuffing yourself silly is proper behavior. … When you’ve reached your limit, it takes a series of firm dziekuje’s (two minimum) to stop the process. The older and more traditional the host, the more assertive the hospitality.(34)

“No thanks” can be confusing when hosting a Polish guest, or when being hosted by a Pole. When you say “no thanks” it might be interpreted as the polite, indirect way of saying “yes please”; when they say “no thanks”, and you take the food off the table, Poles can become dismayed, because they want more.

One night my husband and I hosted a Polish couple who stayed and stayed. If they were Americans, I would have had no problem saying, “Well, it’s three in the morning, I guess we should call it a night.” This would be unforgivably rude by Polish standards. Guests are not supposed to leave, so any inclination towards the door should elicit protests… When you [as a guest] actually make it to the door, you gush gratitude. Count on spending more time at the threshold for conversation. (36)

The unspoken rule among Americans is that you never tell or even hint to other parents how to raise their children. … In Poland, parents treat children like public property, even in the cosmopolitan city of Warsaw. The most glaring example is how strangers (mainly grandma types) on the street will comment on child-care, most often concerning the child’s dress. Even in mild fall weather, strangers have told me that my daughter needs a hat, gloves, a scarf, a warmer coat, and in the summer, a sunhat. (40)

Strangers in Poland also go out of their way to make life easier for kids and parents. … Strangers usher child-encumbered parents to the front of the line, especially if the child is a newborn. (41)

Poles love to give advice. … for a long time daily life resembled a jigsaw puzzle in which fitting the pieces together was not always a transparent process. During the Communist times, people needed information on how to get through the maze of bureaucracy, and where and how to buy necessities. …Americans, on the other hand, are a little touchy about giving and taking advice. To some, unsolicited advice sounds like “Obviously, you don’t know what to do and I know better”—a big no-no in a culture in which autonomy and a mind-your-own-business approach are highly valued. (44-5)

A Polish friend told me that my Polish had improved, so I said thank you. “Oh, that wasn’t a compliment,” he corrected me, “It’s just an observation.” … Members of other cultures are sometimes surprised at how often Americans give compliments. … one linguist concluded that Americans use compliments for other things beside establishing solidarity. A compliment may be used to express gratitude (“That was a great dinner”) or to soften criticism (“You did a great job except…”). Sometimes we even use laudatory statements to open up conversations (“I enjoyed your talk”, or “Nice car”). … Compliments in Polish are often treated with suspicion. So a Pole might deny that a given comment was a compliment, to clarify that it’s not false flattery, as if compliments are naturally on shaky ground. (50-51)

Brief silences during conversation do not seem to pose as great a threat to Poles. (52)

Americans who teach in Poland are often frustrated by blatant cheating in the classroom. [57] …In other words, it’s not dishonest to cheat, it’s pragmatic. You’ll find the same attitude in other European countries. Kind of like paying taxes in some places: You’re a fool if you don’t cheat. / One Polish educator explains it this way: “The school system is part of the government and there’s nothing morally wrong with cheating the government.” Someone who refuses to cheat might be considered an outsider or a goody two-shoes. …And then there’s the attitude that if you can make a good cheat sheet then you know the material. You deserve to pass. … An American computer instructor confiscated the students’ cheat sheets during ht exam. She says they had an awwww-c’mon attitude, as if she were unreasonable and uncooperative. (58)

I was wearing a new wool sweater and a Polish friend asked if I had bought it in the States. Yes. “How much did you pay?” she asked immediately. … Prices hold a special fascination because money and materialism have relatively new importance in Poland. In the Communist days, everything cost the same, no matter where you bought it. … Compared to Poles, Americans have an underlying belief that in social situations, the mention of money is vulgar. (59)

When it comes to salaries, some Poles have a stereotype that Americans talk openly about their big fat paychecks. Not true—and in fact, many Americans might be surprised by Poles’ frank conversations about earnings. (60)

Employees at a major British airport complained that the Indian food servers in the staff cafeteria were “surly and uncooperative,” and not polite like the British servers. Linguist John Gumperez identified intonation as the culprit. The Indians used a falling intonation when offering food, so an offer of gravy came out as a statement: “Gravy.” As if to say, “This is gravy, take it or leave it.” British servers used a rising intonation, “Gravy?” which sounds like a polite offer in English. /
Polish intonation relies on a smaller range of intonation than American English so Americans might find Poles strangely cool or unenthusiastic at times. After returning from a tour in Canada, an actress friend described her experience there as swietnie (wonderful) with falling intonation. …My American ear just expected more rising and falling intonation to relay enthusiasm. / While Poles enjoy Americans’ zeal, sometimes the American contours of intonations strike them as exaggerated or superficial. … One Pole imitated American intonation (which sounded like squealing) and said, “Americans react like children. They sound infantile, but I like that.” (65)

When you’re squeezing by folks to get to your seat in the theater, think about where your backside is facing. Rear ends should face the stage or screen, not the person’s face. (73)

A newcomer to Poland might be taken aback by the lack of space between strangers, especially while waiting in line. … If you leave your two feet of American Stranger Space, someone might inquire, “are you in line?”, a polite way of asking , “what’s all this empty space doing here?”… Some Americans are unnerved by the Polish casual conversation zone, which seems to be about two to four inches smaller than the American one… (74)

In one study of café dwellers, Puerto Ricans touched each other an average of 180 times an hour, Parisians 110 times, and in London, no times at all. Experts say Americans are less inclined to express warmth through physical contact—we nudge, slap backs, give playful punches or squeeze an arm, but generally the contact is fleeting. When Poles really like you, you’ll be rubbed, stroked and cooed over. In the U.S. that kind of stuff is tricky between the sexes and can land you in court. (75)

Remember the American stereotype with the checkered jacket, mismatched pants and cigar in his mouth? He died. But he has a replacement: the American schlepping around in a sweatshirt and sneakers with no socks. … Poles who visit the States sometimes comment on what bad dressers Americans are—jeans, old t-shirts, droopy jackets and baggy pants. …But Americans know how to dress—for comfort. They’ll even pay a premium for clothes that are already worn-in and pre-washed. [76] In Poland, someone walking around in a broken-in pair of jeans and a sweatshirt looks like a student, a plumber, or an American. In the U.S., it could be anybody on a day off.

However, unlike in the U.S., in Poland there seems to be less of a corporate uniform. Office garb varies widely, depending, of course, on where you look. On the whole, professional dress is simply less conservative, and more flashy, than what Americans expect. (77)

Americans like to be get-to-the-point type of people when doing business. … We like to do business first and only then establish relationships. For much of the rest of the world, including Poland, it has traditionally be the other way round. (86)

The Polish director of a medium-sized clothing manufacturer and retail business says, “Polish people have guilty consciences. Sometimes I just want to discuss why something wasn’t done, but employees feel accused and get defensive. This is very Polish.” …From early education onward, errors are viewed as something to avoid (as opposed to part of the learning process.) Mistakes are reflections of your own inadequacies. … Dodging blame is a cultural remnant of Communist bureaucracy. Blame was passed from department to department, and it was never anybody’s fault. Some shifty-eyed manager was always above you, telling you exactly what to do. If some thing went truly wrong, it meant that you didn’t follow directions correctly. A black mark went on your record, or at least the incident wasn’t easily forgotten—situations to avoid. In some cases, another Pole says, people would never admit to blunders since “mistakes could cost people their jobs.” (93)

Tooting your own horn is firmly grounded in the American mentality—we’ve been conditioned to “sell ourselves” and behave confidently even when we’re not. That’s partially why Europeans consider Americans arrogant. [95] …traditional Polish thinking was that no one person should be better than the next. …Only in the last few years have Poles been living with the necessity of the self-sell. (95-6)

Asking people their age in Poland is especially tricky. Age reveals far more personal information about Poles than Americans. In Poland, age places people in distinct boxes of development and responsibility. In other words, social expectations are pretty clear—and that’s typical of traditional societies. There isn’t the idea of ‘you’re as young as you feel’ in Poland. It’s more like, ‘you’re as old as everyone else your age.’ (100)

To wish someone good luck, hold up your fist with your thumb concealed within. (I’m holding my thumbs for you.) This is the equivalent of crossing your fingers. (108)

When you want to show that something or someone is loony, tap the middle of your forehead with your index finger. (108)

To indicate that someone is drunk, make a chopping motion with your hand to the side of your neck. To communicate drinking in general, lean your head back, make an “O” with your mouth, and flick your fingers several times against the area under your chin. If you do it correctly, it will produce a mamrotek: the glug-glug sound made when you pour vodka out of a freshly opened bottle. (109)

To relay “I don’t believe a word you’re saying,” take a forefinger and tug down the lower eyelid. (110)

A gesture to indicate that someone can go shove something in an illicit place is a wiggly snaking motion with the hand, palm perpendicular to the floor. (110)

The well-know but less vulgar European equivalent of holding up the middle finger is: make a fist, grab the inside of the elbow with the hand, fling the fist upward, and stop it suddenly at about face level. This is known as the gest Kozakiewicza, named after the Polish Olympic pole-vaulter who was greeted with aggressive boos and hisses by the Russians at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. After making the jump that earned him a gold medal, he landed, turned to the Russian spectators, and made this rude gesture. On live tv. (110)

This vulgar one ranks high on the Scale of Obscene Insults and is for men only: Gesture as if you are shading your privates from the sun with your hand at an angle, palm down. Prepare for a fist fight if you use it on a Pole. (110)

Poles fanatically avoid bodily contact with any type of cold temperatures to stave off illness (it’s “temperature phobia,” says an American). If you walk around your house without slippers, you’re obviously crazy. Don’t cram drinks with ice like the wacko Americans—cold drinks cause sore throats or make them worse, they say. Eating ice cream with a sore throat reveals suicidal tendencies. And, you must keep your neck covered with a scarf AT ALL TIMES. Poles of all ages will tell you to wear a scarf to bed. And don’t forget your hat to protect your ears from the evil, evil wind. (112)

In Poland the big no-no flowers are chrysanthemums and lilies, appropriate only for funerals. So don’t know up for a dinner implying that the outing is social death. Another blooming loser is the carnation because of its association with official functions of unpleasant times past. Yes, for many, it’s the Communist flower. (118)

To some extent, Poles enjoy the upbeat American. But ask a Pole to imitate American behavior and chances are the result will include a wide smile, an elongated “Wooooooow!” and “Everything is fine!” with a thumbs-up. … I think I know where it comes from. The underlying belief is you create your own happiness—a carryover of the Protestant work ethic. (137)

C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy; A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990.

…much of Shakespeare’s comedy is festive in a quite special way which distinguishes it from the art of most of his contemporaries and successors. (3)

But in exploring this work, “festive” can also be a term for structure. I shall be trying to describe structure to get at the way this comedy organizes experience. The saturnalian pattern appears in many variations, all of which involve inversion, statement and counterstatement, and a basic movement which can be summarized in the formula, through release to clarification. /
So much of the action in this comedy is random when looked at as intrigue, so many of the persons are neutral when regarded as character, so much of the wit is inapplicable when assessed as satire, (4)

The saturnalian pattern came to Shakespeare from many sources, both in social and artistic tradition. It appeared in the theatrical institution of clowning: … It can illuminate occasion provides the clearest paradigm. (5)

Such holiday humor is often abetted by directly staging pastimes, dances, songs, masques, plays extempore, etc. But the fundamental method is to shape the loose narrative so that “events” put its persons in the position of festive celebrants: if they do not seek holiday it happens to them. A tyrant duke forces Rosalind into disguise; but her mock wooing with Orlando amounts to a Disguising, with carnival freedom from the decorum of her identity and her sex. The misrule of Sir Toby is represented as personal idiosyncrasy, but it follows the pattern of the Twelfth Night occasion; (6)

The plays present a mockery of what is unnatural which gives scope and point to the sort of scoffs and jest shouted by dancers in the churchyard or in “the quaint mazes in the wanton green.” And they include another, complementary mockery of what is merely natural, a humor which puts holiday in perspective with life as a whole. (8)

The butts in the festive plays consistently exhibit their unnaturalness by being kill-joys. On an occasion “full of warm blood, of mirth,” they are too preoccupied with perverse satisfactions like pride or greed to “let the world slip” and join the dance. (8)

While perverse hostility to pleasure is a subject for aggressive festive abuse, highflown idealism is mocked too, by a benevolent ridicule which sees it as a not unnatural attempt to be more than natural. It is unfortunate that Shakespeare’s gay plays have come to be known as “the romantic comedies,” for they almost always establish a humorous perspective about the vein of hyperbole they borrow from Renaissance romances. Wishful absolutes about love’s finality, cultivated without reserve in conventional Arcadia, are made fun of by suggesting that love is not a matter of life and death, but of springtime, the only pretty ring time. The lover’s conviction that he will love “for ever and a day” is seen as an illusion… (9)

Where the conventional romances tried to express intensity by elaborating hyperbole according to a pretty, pseudo-theological system, the comedies express the power of love as a compelling rhythm in a man and nature. (9)

The tolerant disillusion of Anglican or Catholic culture allowed nature to have its day. But the release of that one day was understood to be a temporary license, a “misrule” which implied rule, so that the acceptance of nature was qualified. Holiday affirmations in praise of folly were limited by the underlying assumption that the natural in man is only one part of him, the part that will fade. (10)

Shakespeare never made another play from pastimes in the same direct fashion. But the pattern for feeling and awareness which he derived form the holiday occasion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream becomes the dominant mode of organization in subsequent comedies until the period of the problem plays. (11-12)

The part of Shakespeare’s earliest work where his mature patterns of comedy first appear clearly is, as I have suggested, the clowning. (12)

But burlesque could also have a positive effect, as a vehicle for expressing aberrant impulse and thought. When the aberration was made relevant to the main action, clowning could provide both release for impulses which run counter to decency and decorum, and the clarification about limits which comes from going beyond the limits. (13)

In creating Falstaff, Shakespeare fused the clown’s part with that of a festive celebrant, a Lord of Misrule, and worked out the saturnalian implications of both traditions more drastically and more complexly than anywhere else. (13)

The comedy expresses impulses and awareness inhibited by the urgency and decorum of political life, so that the comic and serious strains are contrapuntal, each conveying the ironies limiting the other. Then in 2 Henry IV Shakespeare confronts the anarchic potentialities of misrule when it seeks to become not a holiday extravagance but an everyday racket. (14)

Festivals which worked within the rhythm of an agricultural calendar, in village or market town, did not fit the way of living of the urban groups whose energies were beginning to find expression through what Tawney has called the Puritan ethic. (16)

Shakespeare, coming up to London from a rich market town, growing up in the relatively unselfconscious 1570’s and 80’s and writing his festive plays in the decade of the 90’s, when most of the major elements in English society enjoyed a moment of reconcilement, was perfectly situated to express both a countryman’s participation in holiday and a city man’s consciousness of it. (17)

The general tendency, especially on the great festival occasions, was to organize it under leaders, usually a lord and a lady or a king and a queen, with attendants who paralleled the functionaries of a castle or a royal court. (18)

But there was a special group of entertainers representing the talent of the community. Some of these prepared a group dance like the morris, or a mummers’ play, or perhaps even a dramatic performance of some sort drawn from a more sophisticated source. Much of the entertainment, however, seems to have been of a simpler type, consisting of comic speeches or of special dances and songs by one or two characters. … After the local celebration the whole organization was often carried to the neighboring villages, the groups from villages in the same general region exchanged visits. Groups of performers also frequently went on rounds of visits to the castles of neighboring lords and to the more important towns during their holidays, becoming for the time bodies of strolling players. (18)

The May Game… they had it in their hands in the hawthorn branches: one name for hawthorn is “may.” The bringing home of May acted out an experience of the relationship between vitality in people and nature. … Nature is “May”—what they dance out to, and fetch home for decorating house and church. At the same time “May” is a lord, so they can express a relation to the season by doing honor to him and his lady Flora. (18-20)

Puritan Philip Stubbes in his popular Anatomie of Abuses..in the Country of Ailgna. … Against May, Whitsunday, or other time all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and mountains, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastime… And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendent and Lord over their pastime and sports, namely, Satan, prince of hell. … But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus: They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns, and these oxen draw home this Maypole (this stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings… (20-21)

The formal Lord of Misrule preside over the eating and drinking within-doors in the cold season. But the title was also applied to the captain of summer Sunday drinking and dancing by the young men of a parish, a leader whose role was not necessarily distinct from the Robin or King of the Maying. (24)

The winter lord of the feast reigns chiefly at night (24)

One can see why formal misrule would be most used in formal households, where people regularly ate, more or less in awe, under the countenance of My Lord. My Lord of Misrule, burlesquing majesty by promoting license under the forms of order, would be useful to countenance the revelry of such a group. (25)

The basic pattern of a mock king or lord was adaptable to a variety of occasions less formal than seasonal feasts: the Ale-cunner, for example, had this sort of role in presiding over village wake or church ale. Mock-majesty was often improvised in taverns, as we shall see in considering how Nashe presents Bacchus as a prince of tavern mates. (27)

In the Sunday pastimes of villages during the summer, a Lord of Misrule would be set up by “all the wildheads of the parish,” as Stubbes calls them… This could be a very different sort of role from that of the Lord of a gentlemen’s feast. … Then march these heathen company towards the church and churchyard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, … And in this sort they go to the church (I say) and into the church (though the minister be at prayer of preaching) dancing and swinging their handkerchiefs over their heads in the church, like devils incarnate, with such a confused noise, that no man can hear his own voice. Then the foolish people they look, they stare, they laugh they fleer, and mount upon forms and pews to see these goodly pageants solemnized in this sort. / Then, after this, … banqueting houses set up, wherein they feast, banquet and dance all that day and (peradventure) all the night too. And thus these terrestrial furies spend the sabbath day. (27-28)

Stubbes is clearly exaggerating when he talks as though such groups regularly interrupted divine service inside the church. But the churchyard was certainly a center for merrymaking, partly because the church had taken the place of the pagan fane which dances once honoured, partly because the churchyard was in any case the parish meeting place, partly perhaps because to go there was excitingly impudent. The wanton mood would be abetted by encountering someone who, refusing to give homage to My Lord in return for one of his badges, declared himself a craven or a kill-joy, was “mocked and flouted not a little,” (29-30)

The highest class shared in the feeling for holiday freedom. But the conditions of court life made its expression complex, and put a premium on detached artistic realization. Of course the pastime presented were often not even indirectly expressive of festive attitudes or themes. There was much solemn flattery of Elizabeth; there were presentations of local or family history or heroes; allegorical shows of virtues and vices; romantic narratives tied to the appearance of local nymphs whom only Elizabeth could release from vile enchantments. Literary pastoral and mythology were the most common idiom, frequently handled in a merely literal way. (31)

And the traditional popular pastimes themselves were often an element in the entertainment, either as a spectacle performed by “the country people” and watched with complacency and amusement by the court circle…. (31)

Nashe’s handling of Bacchus illustrates the pervasive Elizabethan tendency to organize wit around a festival Lord, and so presents a striking prototype of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, whether or not there is any direct influence. (68)

Shakespeare may or may not have seen Nashe’s pageant. But it is clear from such a figure as Nashe’s Bacchus that in creating figures like Falstaff and Sir Toby, Shakespeare started with an established role and rhetoric. (72)

Love’s Labour’s Lost … The change goes with the fact that there are no theatrical or literary sources, so far as anyone has been able to discover, for what story there is in the play—Shakespeare, here and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes. (88)

The story of Love’s Labour’s Lost is all too obviously designed to provide a resistance which can be triumphantly swept away by festivity. The vow to study and to see no woman is no sooner made than it is mocked. … Everything is done in turn: the lords are described in turn before they come on; each comes back in turn to ask a lady’s name; each pair in turn exchanges banter. The dancing continues this sort of action; the four lords and four ladies make up what amounts to a set in English country dancing. We think of dancing in sets as necessarily boisterous; but Elizabethan dancing could express all sorts of moods, (89)

Such comedy is at the opposite pole from most comedy of character. Character usually appears in comedy as an individual’s way of resisting nature: it is the kill-joys, pretenders, and intruders who have character. (90)

To honor a noble wedding, Shakespeare gathered up in a play the sort of pageantry which was usually presented piece-meal at aristocratic entertainments, in park and court as well as in hall. And the May game, everybody’s pastime, gave the pattern for his whole action, which moves “from the town to the grove” and back again, bringing in summer to the bridal. These things were familiar and did not need to be stressed by a title. (119)

These lines need not mean that the play’s action happens on May Day. Shakespeare does not make himself accountable for exact chronological inferences; … And in any case, people went Maying at various times, “Against May, Whitsunday, and other time” is the way Stubbes puts it. This Maying can be thought of as happening on a midsummer night, even on Midsummer Eve itself, so that its accidents are complicated by the delusions of a magic time. (May Week at Cambridge University still comes in June). (120)

It seems unlikely that the title’s characterization of the dream, “a midsummer night’s dream,” implies association with the specific customs of Midsummer’s Eve, … The observance of Midsummer Eve in England centered on building bonfires or “bonfires,” of which there is nothing in Shakespeare’s moonlight play. It was a time when maids might find out who their true love would be by dreams of divinations. There were customs of decking houses with greenery and hanging lights, which just possibly might connect with the fairies’ torches at the comedy’s end. And when people gathered fern seed at midnight, sometimes they spoke of spirits whizzing invisibly past. If one ranges through the eclectic pages of The Golden Bough, guided by the index for Midsummer Eve, one finds other customs suggestive of Shakespeare’s play, involving moonlight, seeing the moon in water, gathering dew, and so on, but in Sweden, Bavaria, or still more remote places, rather than England. (123)

In the absence of evidence, there is no way to settle just how much comes from tradition. But what is clear is that Shakespeare was not simply writing out folklore which he heard in his youth, as Romantic critics liked to assume. On the contrary, his fairies are produced by a complex fusion of pageantry and popular game, as well as popular fancy. Moreover, as we shall see, they are not serious in the menacing way in which the people’s fairies were serious. Instead they are serious in a very different way, as embodiments of the May-game experience of eros in men and women and tress and flowers, while any superstitious tendency to believe in their literal reality is mocked. The whole night’s action is presented as a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination. (124)

The consciousness of the creative or poetic act itself, which pervades the main action, explains the subject-matter of the burlesque accompaniment provided by the clowns. If Shakespeare were chiefly concerned with the nature of love, the clowns would be in love, after their fashion. But instead, they are putting on a play. … But an organic purpose is served too: the clowns provide a broad burlesque of the mimetic impulse to become something by acting it, the impulse which in the main action is fulfilled by imagination and understood by humor. (148)

After examining the structure and artifice of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we can now ask how much reality is masters by its mirth. This comedy is the first that is completely, triumphantly successful; but it has the limitations, as well as the strength, of a youthful play. (157)

When Nashe, in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, brings on a Christmas who is a miser and refuses to keep the feast, the kill-joy figures serves, as we have noticed, to consolidate feeling in support of holiday. Shakespeare’s miser in The Merchant of Venice has the same sort of effect in consolidating the gay Christians behind Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained.” (163)

What is mocked, what kind of intruder disturbs the revel and is baffled, depends on what particular sort of beneficence is being celebrated. The Merchant of Venice, as its title indicates, exhibits the beneficence of civilized wealth, the something-for-nothing which wealth gives to those who use it graciously to live together in a human knit group. It also deals, in the role of Shylock, with anxieties about money, and its power to set men at odds. Our econometric age makes us think of wealth chiefly as a practical matter, an abstract concern of work, not a tangible joy for festivity. But for the new commercial civilizations of the Renaissance, wealth glowed in luminous metal, shone in silks, perfumed the air in spices. (167)

The Elizabethans almost never say Jews except on the stage, where Marlowe’s Barabas was familiar. They did see one, on the scaffold when Elizabeth’s unfortunate physician suffered for trumped-up charges of a poisoning plot. The popular attitude was that to take interest for money was to be a loan shark—though limited interest was in fact allowed by law. An aristocrat who like Lord Bassiano ran out of money commanded sympathy no longer felt in a middle-class world. (178)

Just as a saturnalian reversal of social roles need not threaten the social structure, but can serve instead to consolidate it, so a temporary, playful reversal of sexual roles can renew the meaning of the normal relation. One can add that with sexual as with other relations, it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign. This basic security explains why there is so little that is queasy in all Shakespeare’s handling of boy actors playing women, and playing women pretending to be men. (245)

Terence Hawkes, Temlah, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory

Shakespeare & the Question of Theory, Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, Routledge, New York and London, 1991.

(Telmeh, Terence Hawkes)

On the train, a man is opening his mail. Among his letters he finds a square envelope containing the issue of the Modern Language Review (Vol. XII, No. 4) for October 1917. Leafing through it, he finds himself attracted to a particular article and “all unconscious of impending fate,” as he puts it, begins to read. /
The effect, to say the least, is odd. In fact, he later uses the term “overwhelming” and speaks of the experience as capable of throwing “any mind off its balance.” The man was the scholar and critic John Dover Wilson, then aged 36. The article was by W. W. Greg and it was entitled “Hamlet’s hallucination.” /
The thrust of Greg’s article lies in his clear perception that something goes badly wrong with the prince plans right at the beginning of The Mousetrap. Claudius fails to make any response to that initial and vital “action replay,” the dumb-show. The “full significance” of this, Greg argues, has never been appreciated. [318] … Greg concludes, “we have to choose between giving up Shakespeare as a rational playwright, and giving up our inherited beliefs regarding the story of Hamlet.” (318-319)

What cannot be disputed is its effect on Dover Wilson. I have described this as odd: a better phrase might be “seriously disturbing,” even “mind-blowing.” He himself describes it as “an intensely felt experience” which resulted in “a state of some considerable excitement.” It filled him, he reports, with “a sort of insanity,” and cast upon him, in his own words 18 years later, “a spell which changed the whole tenor of my existence, and still dominates it in part.” Give up Shakespeare as a rational playwright indeed! Give up our inherited beliefs! Having read the article “half a dozen times before reaching Sunderland,” an almost Pauline sense of mission seems to have descended upon him: “from the first [I] realized that I had been born to answer it.” … We might, of course, pick up the not-quite-covert hint that the response is itself engagingly Hamlet-like. Dover Wilson describes what he calls his own “spiritual condition” at the time as “critical, not to say dangerous, a condition in which a man becomes converted, falls in love, or gives way to a mania for wild speculation.” The war had its pressures, we are given to understand, and it perhaps did not seem inappropriate—it might even seem appealing—that a personality so highly charged might experience a reaction to such a situation which could be, as another critic was to put it of Hamlet, “in excess of the facts as they appear.” (319)

We can begin with the fact that, in November 1917, the war was not the only source of deep-seated disturbance in the world. In fact we could point out that, on any of the Saturdays in that month, news of the impending or actual Bolshevik revolution in Russia was likely to have been competing with news from the fronts. We have Dover Wilson’s own statement that “I found it difficult to concentrate upon anything unconnected with the War” (319)

…his reason, that is, for being on that particular train at that particular time. / Dover Wilson’s main employment then was as a school inspector of the Board of Education, stationed in Leeds. But, in common with other inspectors, he was also from time to time used in some war work: specifically, as an inspector for the Ministry of Munitions. [320] … For “trouble” to occur at any time in the munitions industry was obviously bad enough. Negotiations at local level with what were later indeed called “Bolshevik” shop stewards must have been, if you will pardon the expression, a potentially explosive business. (320-1)

In short, the revolutionary proposals of Greg’s article on Hamlet must have fallen into a powder-keg of a mind already in some degree prepared to be “blown” into “a sort of insanity” by them just as, in the wider context which the Leeds-Sunderland train seemed to be speeding, certain events were already shaking the world. (321)

Dover Wilson’s revised Russian World Picture of 1914 has developed, since his essay of 1906, features which surface regularly in our century as part of a recurrent siege mentality. It thus has much more than a coincidental resemblance to E. M. W. Tillyard’s well known war-effort, The Elizabethan World Picture of 1943. A discourse which, seeking for the final, confirming presence of authority, nominates the linchpin of the political structure as “God’s representative on earth” is clearly heard in both. Each represents, less an accurate picture of the world it purports to describe, than an intimate, covert measure of its author’s fears about the fallen world in which he currently lives, and in the face of which he has constructed a peculiarly English Eden. (324)

This is what I mean when I say that the absence of any mention of the Bolshevik revolution in Dover Wilson’s account of his train journey strikes me as significant. What it signifies is of course that the Bolshevik revolution is in effect being responded to, coped with in that “intensely felt experience,” that “spell which changed the whole tenor of my existence,” and that “sort of insanity” provoked by Greg’s article on Hamlet. /
Greg’s attack, after all, is on the smooth surface of the play seen as the product of Shakespeare the “rational playwright,” but effectively, of course, created by an “orthodox” interpretation which seeks for unity, progression, coherence, and, if possible, sequential ordering in all art, as part of a ruthless and rigorous process of domestication. [324] … It is directly, violently Bolshevik. (324-5)

Dover Wilson’s defense took various forms. There was an immediate diagnostic response to the editor of the Modern Language Review in the form of a postcard dispatched upon alighting from the train at Sunderland, which went so far as to nominate Greg as an unwitting agent of the arch-revolutionary himself: “Greg’s article devilish ingenious but damnably wrong,” it twinkled, and offered a rejoinder, which duly appeared. There followed two major salvoes: the edition of Hamlet prepared by Dover Wilson for the New Cambridge Shakespeare in 1934—a series which, provoked into editorship by Greg’s article, he says, he had become general editor in 1919—and the book What Happens in Hamlet, which purports to release him from thrall to the problem, by telling all. Those interested in the details of his argument can pursue them there. Suffice it to say that I do not myself find them convincing, so much as replete with the charm and ingenuity of the truly desperate. To suggest that Claudius does not notice the dumb-show, engaged as he is in the conversation with Polonius and Gertrude, seeks to “naturalize” the situation out of existence. … these salvoes represent Dover Wilson’s defense again Bolshevism in its specifically displaced Shakespearean form, (325)

My point is a simple one. Dover Wilson’s response to Greg’s article on that train to Sunderland in 1917 is an excellent example of the sort of interaction between literary interpretation and political and social concerns that always obtains, but normally remains covert in culture. Confronted by what I have called a manifestation of Temlah—i.e. by the disruption of the normally smooth and, in terms of individual “personality” (Hamlet’s or Shakespeare’s), explainable surface of a text that our society has appropriated as a manifestation of great (and thus reassuring) art—he replies with vigor and an emotionally charged nervous energy appropriate to it as what in fact it must have seemed to be: an attack or an offensive mounted against the structure of civilization as we know it—in short, an attack on our ideology. (328)

In short, I am not going to suggest that we can approach Hamlet by recognizing Temlah, or that Temlah is the real play, obscured by Hamlet. That would be to try to reconcile, to bring peace, to appease a text whose vitality resides precisely in its plurality: in the fact that it contradicts itself and strenuously resists our attempts to resolve, to domesticate that contradiction. I am trying to suggest that its contradiction has value, in that a pondering of some of the attempts that have been made to resolve it, to make the play speak coherently, within a limited set of boundaries, reveals the political, economic, and social forces to which all such “interpretation” is respondent, and in whose name it is inevitably, if covertly, made. I am not suggesting an “alternative” reading of Hamlet, because that would be to fall into the same trap. I offer my title of Temlah as what it is: a sense of an everpresent potential challenge and contradiction within and implied by the text that we name Hamlet. In this sense, Temlah coexists with, is coterminous with Hamlet, in a way that must strike us, finally, as impossible. A thing, we are taught, cannot be both what it is and another thing. But that is precisely the principle challenged by Temlah. (350)

And yet, to conclude, we only have to step beyond the shores of Europe to encounter a quite different notion of interpretation which will allow exactly what I propose: the sense of a text as a site, or an area of conflicting and often contradictory potential interpretations, no single one or group of which can claim “intrinsic” primacy or “inherent” authority, and all of which are always ideological in nature and subject to extrinsic political and economic determinants. /
The abstract model I reach for is of course that of jazz music: that black American challenge to the Eurocentric idea of the author’s, or the composer’s, authority. For the jazz musician, the “text” of a melody is a means, not an end. Interpretation in that context is not parasitic by symbiotic in its relationship with its object. Its role is not limited to the service, or the revelation, or the celebration, of the author/composer’s art. Quite the reverse: interpretation constitutes the art of the jazz musician. The same unservile principle seems to me to be appropriate to the critic’s activity. (330)