Gilgamesh | El rey del poema que se adelantó a la Biblia

IRENE VALLEJO - El infinito en un junco, la gran historia de los libros ...

El infinito en un Junco - 2

📖 'El Infinito en un junco', de Irene Vallejo @irenevalmore ya tiene su versión en cómic. Tras el éxito del ensayo y una primera edición con imágenes, el ilustrador Tyto Alba ha plasmado en viñetas el universo creado por la autora. pic.twitter.com/NeaTCDNI15

— Aragón Noticias (@AragonNoticias_) April 8, 2024

Con planes como este se empieza mejor la semana ⬇️

🗓️ HOY
⏰ 19h
📖 @irenevalmore presenta la adaptación gráfica de «El infinito en un junco» junto a Tyto Alba y Héctor Oliva.
📍 Edificio Grupo San Valero (pl. de Santa Cruz s/n) #Zaragoza

Entrada libre hasta completar aforo pic.twitter.com/kQ0UYZwW5H

— Editorial Debate (@debatelibros) April 8, 2024

 

Calentando motores…

⏰ A las 19h comienza la retransmisión en directo de la presentación de la adaptación gráfica de «El infinito en un junco». Charlaré con Tyto Alba y @mrtfernandez.

Podéis verlo en @EspacioFTef 👉 https://t.co/mxLpcr1TsI pic.twitter.com/2ryZelUI0b

— Irene Vallejo (@irenevalmore) April 5, 2024

Un comentario le hago, o le pongo:

Enhorabuena por un libro que nos trae la gran historia de cómo se hicieron las historias. Un libro que ha conseguido hacernos conscientes de cómo, gracias a la escritura, la historia, el mundo y la realidad explotan en una galaxia de historias, mundos y realidades, y cómo todas las historias fornan a la vez parte de esa gran historia en la que estamos en cada momento. Caben muchos mundos en un libro sólo y un libro solo se queda solo en cualquier estantería polvorienta, esperando volver a la vida cuando alguien lo abre.

 

—oOo—

Luis Alberto de Cuenca- 'Orígenes de la leyenda artúrica'

Evolución del teatro español

 

Le 'Dit du Genji'

 

Bronson, A Short History of American Literature

 

Bronson, Walter Cochrane (Professor of English Literature, Brown U). A Short History of American Literature: Designed Primarily for Use in Schools and Colleges. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1900. Online facsimile at Internet Archive. 2006.*

https://archive.org/details/hisamerschool00bronrich

 

 

 

 —oOo—

 

The Restoration (Barnard)

 

Ch. 7 from A Short History of English Literature, by Robert Barnard (2nd ed.):

 

The Restoration

In the popular English imagination, the Restoration of 1660 is one of those watersheds of history, a period when the whole atmosphere changed from that of a gloomy prayer-meeting to one of licence, ribaldry and unashamed pleasure. No doubt the popular view is nonsense as far as the vast majority of the inhabitantes of the British Isles were concerned: the average villager (and Britain was still very much a rural civilization) would doubtless have registered that church services had regained a little of their old ceremony, that country pastimes such as maypole-dancing were no longer to be regarded as works of the devil, but there would have been no great change otherwise in their lives. It needed more than a new regime in Whitehall to change the patterns of existence in Little Totham by the Wold. 

But in so far as the king set the tone for metropolitan life and the life of the gentry in general there is a grain of truth in the popular myth. The new ruling class—many of whom, like the King, had spent formative years in exile on the Continent—looked to France for their culture and their manners; the dominant tone of the Court and of upper-class London life in general was gay, cynical and permissive. The King himself—in every way the opposite of his virtuous, domestic and unwise father—used all his considerable political skills to avoid 'going on his travels again'; he was gregarious, democratic in his habits, unashamedly promiscuous. Londond gossip fell delightedly on the doings of his mistresses, from the flagrant Duchess of Castlemaine, busty, greedy and vicious, to the charming and earthy Nell Gwynne. It was all very different from Oliver Cromwell's time.

One inevitable consequence of Charles II's jubilant and acclaimed return was the reopening of the theatres: the thirst for drama was such that he had hardly set foot on English soil before troupes of actors were being formed and the old plays dusted down. Nevertheless, when things settled down, the new theatres were physically and spiritually very different from the old. For a start, the theatre confirmed the trend of the pre-Commonwealth stage: it moved entirely indoors. It was roofed in, lit by artificial lighting, with scenery, and the stage area divided off from the audience by the proscenium arch (though in early years there was an 'apron' out into the audience, one tiny relic of Elizabethan customs). In addition, the female roles were now played by women, as on the Continent—an innovation which was made, according to Charles, 'in the interests of morality,' though the reverse might have been a more honest justification. All these changes marked great gains for the theatre as a place of illusion, though many of them involved a loss of that speed, vigour and free play of the imagination which had characterised Elizabethan theatre at its best.

Charles was no more anxious than the city worthies of Elizabethan times that the theatre (though it provided him, in one way or another, with his main forms of entertainment) should blossom in an unrestricted manner. Performances in London were licensed, and restricted to two companies. Perhaps the most significant fact about Restoration drama is this: until the end of the century two theatre, and often only one, supplied the needs of play-going London; yet even so, plays were seldom performed more than five or six times, the performances frequently being little better than shambles. Nothing could more vividly illustrate the contraction of the audience for drama than this. The theatre may have attracted a fair cross-section of the nation, but it was a very tiny segment, and in the middle and lower reaches the theatre-goers were only typical of the more 'liberated' members (the diarist Samuel Pepys is a good example). The theatre was no longer the mirror of the nation, but was dominated by a small, like-minded clique, who looked to the theatre to confirm its prejudicesm cynicisms and aristocratic illusions.

One sees this very clearly in the comedies of the time: the principal characters are generally drawn from the charmed circle of aristocratic life in the metropolis, and anyone outside that circle is a booby, a villain or a butt. The city businessman or the rural squire is equally to be ridiculed and deceived. There are, to be sure, fools within the charmed cirlce: elegance overdone becomes foppery, and is mocked; amorousness in women is admirable until the lady becomes middle-aged, then it is depicted as a ravening fever close to nymphomania. But as a whole the characters display the qualities that were admired: balance, judgment and cool, cynical sense. The dramatists, in other words, turned a blind eye to the uglier sides of aristocratic life under Charles—to the violence, the disease, the exhaustion of excess. The court wanted to see themselves as an exquisitely refined elite, as the witty custodians of civilized values. And that, for the most part, was how they were shown. 

One of the few playwrights who was a partial exception to this was William Wycherley (?1640-1716). He was himself a fringe member of the Court circle (he was one of the many lovers of the Duchess of Castlemaine, which argued a strong constitution rather than a delicate stomach), yet he seems to have been as much repelled as attracted by it. There is no doubt he perceived the heartlessness and hypocrisy behind the elegance and charm. He seems to have been a tormented, uncomfortable, bitter man, a moralist and a libertine, a strange mixture of old values and new. The contradictions find expression in his plays. The Country Wife, the most famous of them, was for two centuries unperformed in its original version, thought in our own more lax time it is perhaps the most frequently revived Restoration comedy. It has two concurrent, intersecting plots. In one Horner, a London gallant, has the rumoiur spread through town that—as a result of an unsuccessful operation for the pox—he is now impotent. The result is that whereas once he was the terror of all husbands, they now rush to offer their wives to him, seeing him as a harmless companion for them while they, the husbands, go about their own business. The wives, once the secret has been revealed to them, enthusiastically play along, for they are voracious harpies to a woman. The second plot concerns Pinchwife, an elderly roué, who has married a 'country wife' much younger than himself. Much of the action concerns his attemps, inevitably vain, to keep her faithful to him, and culminates with Horner's both cucolding Pinchwife yet managing to keep his secret safe.

Wycherley's satiric flail cuts to left and right: sex-crazed wives, negligent husbands, reformed rakes and foolish men of fashion fall beneath its blade. Words change meaning in the mouths of these fashionable hypocrites: 'honour'—as in the phrase 'man' or 'woman of honour'—becomes synonymous with dishonour, unchastity, limitless sexual appetite, similarly with 'reputation,' which means nothing but a false front. In the famous 'China' scene, a masterpiece of elegant obscenity, Lady Fidget, who has been copulating with Horner in the next room, emerges holding a piece of his china collection, and in the ensuing dialogue 'china' gains a monstrous patina of sexual significances:

LADY FIDGET: I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear.

HORNER: Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could.

MRS SQUEAMISH: Oh Lord, I'll have some china too. Good Mr Horner, don't think to give other people china and me none; come in with me too.

HORNER: Upon my honour, I have none left now.

MRS SQUEAMISH: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan't put me off so. Come.

HORNER: This lady had the last there.

LADY FIDGET: Yes, indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

MRS SQUEAMISH: O, but it may be he may have some you coulde not find.

LADY FIDGET: What, d'ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never think we have china enough...

The elegant indiscretion of this is not altogether typical of Wycherley. More often his wit has a whiplash quality: the innate honesty of Wycherley's mind cuts through pretence, it shouts 'Look how things really are':

HORNER: But prithee, was not the way you were in better? Is not keeping [a mistress] better than marriage?

PINCHWIFE: A pox on't! the jades would jilt me. I could never keep a whore to myself.

HORNER: So, then you only married to keep a whore to yourself.

What modern critics find puzzling,  even disturbing about Wycherley is what were his positives: they find it inconceivable that Horner the libertine should be able to waltz through the play, bedding women right, left and centre, yet should find himself at the end unexposed, quite prepared to continue with his rake's progress. Why, the man even seems to be happy! In bewilderment, critics have called him a 'horned beast', a shell of a man unable to find real emotional fulfilment; one critic has even called the joyous seduction of the delightful Margery Pinchwife 'moving drama, the result of a realistic imagination as powerful, almost, as Ibsen's.' That is not hjow it seems in performance. On stage the play becomes a delighted celebration of Horner's enterprise, initiative and cunning. And I have little doubt that that was what Wycherley intended.

Most Restoration dramatists made more effort than Wycherley to cover a brutal sexual code under a cloak of elegance and wit. The typical Restoration comedy plot concerns the efforts of a gentleman of fashion to disencumber himself of stale amorous entanglements, and win the hand of the heroine, who is, typically virtuous (for double standards prevail for almost all the dramatists except Wycherley), witty, and 'a good match' from the financial point of view. Dorimant, in Etherege's Man of Mode, is the archetypal Restoration hero: his attitude to women has been described by John Wain the novelist as  a sort of 'fighter-pilot's mentality: he wants to get them before they get him.' After several acts in which we have seen his ruthless, contemptuous, purely accumulative attitude to women, it is not easy to get any warm, pleasurable feeling when finally he wins the charming Harriet. But perhaps, we are not meant to; perhaps hoping for such a feeling is a modern sentimentalism. To most Restoration writers marriage seems to be less of a matter of love than of dynastic necessity: one married to perpetuate one's line, and the honeymoon is no more than an interlude between pursuing beddable women and pursuing more beddable women. It is hard to take. At least Wycherley did not commit the hypocrisy of granting Horner a happy marriage at the end of The Country Wife. 

The most elegant of all the Restoration writers was Congreve (1670-1729) and it is in his work that the uglinesses of the age were transmuted into something infinitely witty, imaginative and delicate. Even his butts—the country boobies, the ageing but amorous women of fashion—express their oddities with such verbal distinction that the edge is taken of the brutality. In his masterpiece The Way of the World the elderly Lady Wishfort (i.e. wish-for-it, and the reader should be able to guess what she wished for) is a case in point. An absurd, posturing, amorously optimistic creature, her language removes her into a realm of artificiality and fantasy, so that she becomes almost a person of distinction. She is not a butt, more an oddly misshapen pottery firm. Her misuse of the English language is more subtle and imaginative than Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop in the next century, and less likely to bore on repetition: 'You must not attribute my yielding to any sinister appetite, or indigestion of widowood, nor impute my complacency to any lethargy of continence. I hope you do not think me prone to any iteration of nuptials.' It is mostly when she is emotionally disturbed by a member of the opposite sex who might (with luck) have designs on her that her language becomes deranged. At other times it has a directness that is still imaginative yet precise: 'I look like an old peeled wall.'

With Congreve, in fact, we move away from comedy as social comment and towards comedy as fantasy. When Millamant, the heroine, comments that when she does her hair she always uses poetry for curl-papers, because it never will sit pleasantly with prose, we are very close indeed to the world of Oscar Wilde. This makes it difficult to see the progress of Millamant and her admirer Mirabel towards a modus vivendi that will enable them to endure married life as anything as serious as a 'rationalization of sex', as some critics have called it. It is true that the high-point of the play is the scene in which both of them state their terms for matrimony, the necessary conditions which will render marriage tolerable enough for Mirabel to give up his life of promiscuous pleasure and for Millamant to (as she puts it) 'dwindle into a wife.' But since the conditions put forward by both of them all concern the conduct and rights of the wife, its nby no means easy to see the scene as a serious or impartial investigation of the state of marriage. In fact, if we bring any sort of moral code to bear on the play at all, Mirabel's actions throughout are nothing short of loathsome. It is Congreve's achievement that he persuades us to leave such codes along with our hats and coats in the cloackroom, and enter a world of high, fantastic comedy, purged of the grossness of earlier Restoration plays.

There was good reason why the blatant crudities of Wycherley and Etherege had been refined out of Congreve's style. In the closing years of the century there had been published Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which Congreve had been singled out for attack, though for the wrong reasons. Collier, like the Elizabethan puritans before him, saw the theatre as a sink of iniquity, a place where vice was recommended and virtue ridiculed. His ire was in no way diminished by the existence of a more elevated sort of play in the Restoration theatre: the heroic tragedy. These plays, classical in conception, French in inspiration, were often full of splended rhetorical poetry (Dryden's All for Love is the best known example but Otway's Venice Preserved is perhaps more theatrically viable), yet their expressions of invincible heroism and undying loves are ultimately unconvincing, and sit uneasily in the English dramatic tradition. Collier's attack was most opportunely timed: in 1698 the hectic, permissive world of the Restoration was gone; since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which chased out the Catholic James II, a Dutchman had occupied the throne, worthily and unspectacularly; the revels were over, responsibility and  dullness reigned.

Restoration comedy never really recovered from the attempt to clean it up. Perhaps it was unscrubbable. In the early years of the eighteenth century there werer several lively, eminently stageworthy plays: Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer are works of no great distinction, but they can still charm audiences in performance. But when the middle-classes started tricling back to the theatres and demanding a more sentimental, more overtly moral typ of comedy, the stage was set for a long period of decline in the British theatre.

If we look in vain to most Restoration dramas for firm principles, for consistent moral and social attitudes, these qualities were to be foun in abundance in the greatest poet of the age. John Dryden (1631-1700). This may seem odd at first sight: Dryden began his poetic career with Heroic stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell yet spent most of his life as a defender of the restored Stuart sovereings; he wrote one long poem in defence of the Protestant religion as enshrined in the Church of England, and another, after his conversion, in parise of Catholicism. Nevertheless, the old gibes that Dryden was a truncoat and a time-server could not be further from the truth. Like many who grow up in times of social upheaval (his adolescence covered the period of the Civil war, his young manhood the dictatorship of Cromwell), his first commitment was to public order, to a strong, accepted central authority. Radical or revolutionary movements seemed to him at best to bring dubious benefits, at the cost of certain misery. Authoritarian rule which sprang from and respected the ancient traditions of the country seemed infinitely better than (what he saw as) a democracy supported by a rabble and led by power-crazed egotists. It was inevitable that Dryden should support the country's legitimate monarchs, inevitable that his religious quest should lead him finally to the Catholic Church.

It is Dryden's political ideas, and his political gut-reactions too, that give such strength and urgency to his greatest satire, Absalom and Achitophel. It was written to order, about a particular situation at a particular time, the 'Catholic plot' crisis of 1679-1681, and it was intended to influence the situation. In the late 1670s the joy that had greeted Charles II's Restroation had given way to scepticism and disillusion: restorations always bring disappointment, for they are expected to restore times which are gone forever. A new opposition party began grouping, consisting of members of the gentry who felt they had failed to get their just rights, puritans who had opposed the Restoration throughout, traditional Parliamentarians, and Protestants with a genuine and deep-rooted fear of the Catholic Church. The catalysts of the crisis was an exceedintly unsavoury character called Titus Oates, a man with a Catholic past, a dubious theological degree (like Dr Ian Paisley in our own day, and the comparison need not end there) and a new-found but loud devotion to the Protestant religion.  It was Oates's 'revelation' of a series of Catholic plots centred on Charles's brother and heir, James, Duke of York, and involving Charles's Catholic queen, that brought this heterogeneous opposition together. Soon anti-Catholic hysteria gripped the nation in much the same way that anti-witchcraft hysteria was to grip American Salem not long afterwards. The opposition began to demand the exclusion from the succesion of the Catholic Duke of York, and the adoption of Charles's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth (the white Protestant hope) as heir to the throne.

It was into this situation that Dryden weighed with his scoriating satire Absalom and Achitophel. His choice of a biblical parallel to the present situation was a stroke of genius. Charles II becomes King David from the Old Testament, and at once his profligacy takes on a new, attractive, even a spiritual look:

In pious times, e'er priestcraft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man on many multiplied his kind,

E'er one to one was cursedly confined,

When nature prompted, and no law denied

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

Then Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,

His vigorious warmth did, variously, impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scattered his Maker's image through the land.

Thus the loose moraled Charles is transformed into David, father of his people, living in the days before monogamy was ordained, and before priests of varying religions began causing trouble and restricting natural pleasures (Dryden was no friend to priests of any religion: it is worth looking closely at the first line, with its suggestion that priests diminish rather than increase piety, and its wicked pun on the word 'craft'). Sexual licence becomes 'vigorous warmth'—something good and (literally and metaphorically) life-giving. Charles's habit of scattering bastards in his wake is transformed into something like largesse—a shower of gold descending on his subjects: 'scattered his maker's image through the land.'

After a no-holds-barred description of the English (called here, of course, the Jews) as 'a headstrong, moody, murmuring race,' and one that had veered from religion to religion over the last century of so ('Gods they had tried of every shape and size / That God-smiths could produce, or priests devise'), Dryden comes to the heart of his poems and his pupose. This is a series of satirical portraits of the main conspirators against Charles II. Dryden is one of the great artists of the satirical portrait, the thumbnail sketch of a man that utterly demolishes his reputation and credibility, and at the same time both establishes him as an eternal type and suggests general reflections on human nature. For example, the Earl of Shaftesbury ('Achitophel'—one of the main conspirators, and evil genius to the young Duke of Monmouth) is depicted as fiery, turbulent, cunning, the incurable and perennial conspirator, and a man 'for close designs and crooked counsels fit.' Then Dryden broadens out the picture to establish him as a type: he makes him into a crazed, over-venturesome sailor, good in high seas, but bored in calm waters:

Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high,

He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.

And then he immediately comes in with a trenchant couplet of generalized reflection that has become the classic quote to describe not only the brilliant political adventurer, but all erratic men of genius—a quote that is as relevant in our own days as in his:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide . . .

The portraits in this rogues' gallery range from the crude, comptentuous daub to the most subtle pieces of ironic brushwork. Exuberant mud-slinging is good enough for the mean, slippery Sheriff of London, who 'Did wisely from expensive sins refrain, / And never broke the Sabbath but for gain.' More subtle arts of destruction were called for by the various, talented, changeable Duke of Buckingham ('Zimri'), who, according to Dryden, changed sides as he would his coat, dabbled in everything and excelled in nothing:

Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,

Was everything by stats, and nothing long:

But in the course of one revolving moon

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon.

The placing of those last four nouns is in itself a lesson in the techniques of satire.

If these portraits are the central achievement of the poem, Dryden shows almost equal mastery in the action of the poem, which is mainly a dialogue between Achitophel and Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth) in which, amid echoes of Paradise Lost, Achitophel takes on Satanic dimensions as the tempter, and Absalom becomes the weak, narcisssistic pawn in a political game he barely understands (for Charles loved Monmouth, as David did Absalom, and any more culpable involvement could not be suggested). The poem is by turns subtle, vigorous, dangeerous and uproarious — atriumph of suggestion, tact and sheer impish cleverness. It has claims to be the greatest satire in our language.

Dryden's other great satire is MacFlecknoe, in which a rival poet, Thomas Shadwell, author of some bad poetry and some lively and very dirty plays, is crowned King of Dullness by his predecessor Flecknoe (another dreadful poet):

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years;

Shadwell alone of all my sons is he

Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

But we should not forget that Dryden is not just a satirist. In fact, he can claim to be among the most various poets in our language. He was a master of the Ode, with two outstandingly brilliant Odes to St Cecilia (patron saint of music), of which the second, Alexander's Feast shows him still at the height of his technical powers, and still experimenting, in the last years of his life. His tributes to friends and kinsmen (for example To the Memofy of Mr Oldham) are as positive and sober as his satire is destructive and hilarious. His occasional poems (such as that celebrating the return of Charles II from exile, or Annus Mirabilis, in which he depicts the year of the Great Fire of London and the Plague) are much above the average for such productions, and no doubt gained him the Poet Laureateship (he was one of the few to hold this office while still wriring good poetry). His poems on serious and religious matters are restrained but often moving statements, and his translations are frequently brilliant — he made Chaucer available again after generations of neglect due to the transformations of the language since his time. We know virtually nothing of Dryden the man. If we judge him from his poetry he was versatile, trenchant, contemplative, witty, and supremely sane.

Dryden stood alone among Restoration poets; there were others with talent, notably the Earl of Rochester, whose life of daring and varied debauchery, ending in that ultimate debauch a death-bed repentance, intefered with his poetry too greatly for him ever to do justice to his talent. But there is something in the literary history of the Restoration period which is of reater significance for the future than any bouquet of minor poets: this is a vigorous crop of prose writers, forging a prose idiom to march the already established dramatic and poetic idioms. Aubrey's Brief Lives of his contemporaries are quirky and delightful contributions to the as yet new art of biography, and we get an even more vivid picture of notable personalities from the best diaries of the period, notably Evelyn's and Pepys's. 

But of all the writers in thie new and rather difficult medium of prose the one whose influence was greatest was John Bunyan (1628-1688), for his Pilgrim's Progress was staple reading for generations, the sort of book that is read first in childhood (as George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver reads it) and constantly returned to for delight and spiritual refreshment thereafter. Modelling his prose on the Bible (the influence of the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible on English prose cannot be exaggerated), he describes the pilgrimage that to him life was in the from of an allegory. Christian, the principal pilgrim, travels with other like-minded people of varying degrees of determination and genuine piety through a series of perils — natural, human and supernatural — to his destined heaven. Bunyan's experience as a preacher (in and out of jail) is obvious, but so is his natural talent as a story-teller, and his feeling for language that is at once simple, fortright, homely, yet vivid. 

A very different sort of narrative was that provided by Aphra Behn (1640-1689), the first woman writer to be mentioned in this survey (and, alas, it will be a century before another gains a place). Mrs Behn wrote a series of plays, notably comedies that went a good deal further in bawdy than even most male writers of the time. But what she is remembered for today is some prose narratives which are clearly stepping-stones from the Elizabethan short tale to the novel as we know it today. The best remembered of these is Oroonoko, the tale of a noble savage sold into slavery in Surinam. The impeccable nad high-toned moral sentiments of this noeble creature are not likely to appeal to the modern reader, but the believable setting and inter-racial relationships are the result of Aphra Behn's own stay in the colony. Aphra Behn created a narrative that seemes to people at the time to be not really fiction, but a documentary account of events and people that actually took place. Defoe in the next century created several such works, and they lead us directly to the novel proper.

 

 

 By the Sword Divided  - Restoration

 

—oOo—

Later 19th Century American Literature

Avatares de un género literario: los relatos de viajes

British political writers of the 1790s

From The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, chapter XI:
THE PERIOD OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

I. BURKE

Edmund Burke (1729-97), the writer who used most completely the oratorical style in English prose, was a Dublin Irishman, born of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, and educated as a Protestant at Trinity College. He came to London and entered the Middle Temple in 1750, but was never called to the Bar. His first tentative excursions into literature were an ironical answer to Bolingbroke in A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an essay in aesthetics after Addison in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). They are not important, though we get from them intimations of Burke's personal convictions. Throughout his life, feeling, and not reason, was the power that moved him.

Burke's public career began in 1759 when he became editor of The Annual Register and secretary to William Gerard Hamilton—"Single Speech Hamilton"—Chief Secretary for Ireland. In 1765 he entered the House of Commons and became Secretary to Lord Rockingham, then in power. Suring the short life of Rockingham's first ministry and the sixteen years of opposition that followed, Burke was the animating spirit of the Rockingham Whigs. He fought for the freedom of the House of Commons against the subsidized interests of the "King's Friends", and the freedom of the American colonies against the claims of the King's friends to tax them directly. The writings in which his views are most fully preserved are Observations on a late publication entitled "The Present State of the Nation" (1769), Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), the speech On American Taxation (1774), that On moving his Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) and A Letter . .  . to  . . . [the] Sheriffs of . . . Bristol (1777). As the American war drew to an end, Ireland and India became Burke's chief concern. By his support of Irish trade, he lost in 1780 the representation of Bristol, which his opposition to the American war had gained for him in 1774; and Two Letters . . . to Gentlemen in the City of Bristol (1778), with the Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol, previous to the Late Election (1780), are the noble record of his courage, independence and wisdom in the hour of defeat. Burke had hiven much time to a study of Indian affairs, and in 1785 he entered the campaign against Hasting which was to occupy him for ten years. To 1785 also belongs the famous Speech on the . . . Nabob of Arcot's Private Debts. His last crusade was that against the new government in France. A crescendo of indignation swells through a rapid succession of publications: Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Letter . . . to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), and Letters . . . on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (1795-7). Burke died in 1797 with his last hopes for justice to Irish catholics shattered, and believing that England was about to make dishonorable peace with the enemy across the Channel.

Of the tracts named above, the first in which Burke's principles are stated with the eloquence that gives him a place in literature is that known as Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The policy of the King and the "King's Friends" towards the Middlesex election and towards the American colonies seemed to Burke highly dangerous. There was, he felt, no safer method of government than the openly debated "pro" and "con" of party. The attempted reassertion of royal prerogative took us back to the fatal days of Charles I. No modern student of history bases any convictions about the American struggle on the mere taxation question. The great point at issue was the right way of securing the loyalty of any overseas dominion to the home government. In Burke's view, acts of state should be guided by three main principles which can be indicated in three questions: Is this expedient or worth while? Is this good for the persons most affected? Is this justified by experience? He alone seems to have understood the problem of governing and maintaining the empire which Chatham's successful wars had called into existence. Of his American speeches, the greatest, as it is the most elaborate, is the second, On Conciliation; but the first, On American Taxation, combines in a wonderful manner simplicity and directness of reasoning with ardour and splendour of eloquence. 

The obstinate stupidity which Burke deplored in the policy of George III and his ministers towards America he found undiminished in their policy towards Ireland. His Irish tracts are among the least read of his pieces, but they deserve attention, both  for the excellence of their matter and for the temperateness of their utterance. In the letters To a Peer in Ireland on the Penal Laws (1782), To Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) and the earlier Speech at the Guildhall, in Bristol (1780) the theme is simply this: stupidity has lost us America, stupidity will lose us Ireland. Events have justified the indictment.

Burke felt strongly that India should be govverned for the good of its inhabitants, and not for the profit of the East India Company and its servants. Warren Hastings was to him the type of misrule, and against that unhappy man he directed all his power of invective. But Hastings, whatever his faults may have been, was a great ruler, and we cannot help feeling, when we read the ferocious denunciation, that Burke was engaged, not in prosecution but in persecution.

Burke's violent opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 seems unnatural, but it is not inexplicable. The eloquent champion of the American farmer and the Indian ryot appeared to have nothing to say for the French peasant. All his eloquence was reserved for the oppressors. The cause of his antagonism was twofold and was deeply inherent in his nature. He could no more believe in "the rights of man" than he could believe in the rights of kings; further, he was sure that any assertion of such rights savoured of atheism. Burke's instinct was true. The Revolution was a challenge, not only to kingship, but to all establishments. A change was coming in the way of human thought. He felt it, he feared it, he opposed it. With the Reflections should be read An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), published anonymously and written in the third person. These two pamphlets form the most complete statement of Burke's anti-revolutionary philosophy. Unsound as he seems in his veneration of mere prescription, Burke was thoroughly sound in his suspicion of "Reason" enthroned as the sovereign power. Burke's revolt against the Revolution is almost exactly parallel to Wordsworth's revolt against Godwinism. From "political justice" Wordsworth turned to the emotions and the prejudices of the peasant, and found himself a poet again. It is easy to dislike Burke on the Revolution; but it is not difficult to be warned by him  against the perpetual menace of the doctrinaire. He died before any final issue was even in sight, and there is no evidence that he foresaw the shape and course of events.

Two productions of Burke stand a part from his great crusades; they are the speech on Economical Reform (1780) and the Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). The first is the most quietly persuasive and genial of his writings; the second is a formidable piece of controversy. Burke had been granted a pension, and none had better deserved it. The grant was bitterly attacked, especially by the Duke of Bedford, who appeared to consider that any grants, pensions or places should be reserved for those who did not need them, did not deserve  them, and did not come from obscure families. Burke's Letter is not merely a great example of invective, it is a great example of a very rare thing, invective that is creative. 

Burke's eloquence belonged to a past age. The splendour of his imagery and the sonorousness of his periods link his prose with that of the great sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. He brought into politics the faults as well as the genius of a major prophet. He is at times unrestrained, unjust, unwise; nevertheless the greatness of his mind ourweighs his faults, and he remains the only orator whose speeches have secured a permanent place in English literature.


II. POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS

In 1784 the King once more triumphed over the Whigs, and young Pitt became master of Parliament. The devotees of Fox formed the Esto Perpetua Club and began to harry the enemy. Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock epic, and in The Morning Herald appeared a series of "Criticisms of The Rolliad". The Rolliad was a mythical epic named from John Rolle, M.P., a stolid Tory who had tried to cough down Burke. He was provided with an ancestor, the Norman Duke Rollo, whose imaginary adventures supplied matter for a burlesque of the Aeneid. The new style of skit proved very popular, and the authors did not carry it on too long. It was succeeded by another kind of burlesque, Political Eclogues, in which Pitt and his friends appeared as Virgilian shepherds. This, in its turn, was followed by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship, then vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785. The poetical level of all these pieces was not very high, but at least they were more civilized than the political satires of Churchill. The only one of the authors worth mention is George Ellis, the scholar.

One outstanding figure among the verse satirists on the Whig side is "Peter Pindar", the pseudonym adopted by John Wolcot (1738-1819) at first a doctor and afterwards a clergyman,. He discovered the genius of Opie the painter, ran him as a speculation, and quarrelled with him. He imitated The Rolliad in The Lousiad (1785) and in 1787 produced another skit, Ode upon Ode, which attained great popularity. The absurdities of the yearly official odes to the King invited reprisals, and Wolcot, hampered by few convictions and fewer scruples,  found a ready market among indignant Whigs for his small scandal. He is, perhaps, the best of English caricaturists in verse. Bozzy and Piozzi (1786), the title of which explains itself, is another excellent piece of caricature. 

When Pitt boldly faced the aggressiveness of French republicanism abroad and of its partisans at home, he found a lively and trenchant ally in The Anti-Jacobin (1707-8), founded by George Canning. It remains the best thing of its kind. The deadly conviction of its attack was made more effective by its witty manner. Among the writers were the many-sided, brilliant Canning, George Ellis, by this time a fervent Tory and repentant of The Rolliad, and John Hookham Frere, country gentleman, diplomatist, traveller, translator of Aristophanes, and the first to imitate in English the satiric Italian epic. The editor was William Gifford (1756-1896), whose literary brutalities have blackened a character admirable in many ways. He was one of those luckless persons born with the instincts of scholarship in penurious circumstances that denied him a scholar's education. After a miserable boyhood he was sent to Oxford, and was able to make something of a name by his satires, The Baviad (1795) and The Maeviad (1795), directed against the ridiculous "Della Cruscan" school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day. When The Anti-Jacobin was set on foot, his sledge-hammer style nad industry made him a suitable editor; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did this task well, and in 1809 became first editor of The Quarterly Review and held his post for fifteen years. He seemed to find relief for the bitterness engendered by his menial years in savage attacks upon all suspected of Liberalism. The shameful onslaught in the Quarterly upon Keats can be neither forgotten nor forgiven. The verse of The Anti-Jacobin "guys" very gaily the early revolutionary bleatings of Southey and his friends. The "Knife-Grinder" sapphics in imitation of Southey are immortal.

One of the butts of the Anti-Jacobin was "Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe"—in real life William Godwin (1756-1836), a political philosopher and novelist, to whom harsh justice was measured in life, and to whom true justice will never now be done, because he is not quite important enough to pay for resuscitation. He is remembered as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) and the father-in-law of Shelley; he ought to be remembered as a sincere thinker in whose character there was not a trace of self-seeking or self-display. Much conscientious, ephemeral work was done by him in history and literature; but he was brought into sudden prominence by a book of startling opinions, Political Justice, published in 1793. The influence of his book was great among the younger generation. Godwin was a born system-maker; philosophy and politics were, for him, indistinguishable, and of his views on both he was an eager advocate in public and private. So we find him writing proselytizing novels, Caleb Williams and St. Leon, which he hoped would insinuate his views in the general mind. During these years, he met and married another writer of innovating beliefs. Mary Wolltonecraft, to use her maiden name, is a far more attractive person than her placid husband. After beginning as a teacher she passed several years as a publisher's hack, till her Vindication of the Rights of Woman made her name known in 1792. It was the first blast of the trumpet in the battle for woman's freedom. Unfortunately, Mary Wollstonecraft was too consistent. She entered upon a conscientious "no-marriage" with a far from conscientious American, Gilbert Imlay, who left her with a daughter, known as Fanny Imlay, to support. Mary failed in an attempt at suicide. Soon after, she and Godwin formed an attachment, which, in accordance with their principles, was free; but they married in 1797 in order to safeguard the interest of their children. Before the end of that year, the birth of a child, the future wife of Shelley, was fatal to the mother. She had been a generous, impulsive woman, always affectionate and kind. Godwin's second choice of a wife was less fortunate and conduced to the unhappy experiences of his latter days. Always in difficulties of one kind or another, he lived out a courageous philosophical life of eighty years. William Godwin and Mary Wolltonecraft were gallant rebels of immense courage; but they were unfortunate advertisements of a new social order. They committed the crime of failure. Tragedy was bound up in the texture of their lives. Mary died just as hope and happiness seemed dawning for her. Shelley's passion for her daughter, mary, led to the suicide of his first wife. Poor Fanny Imlay committed suicide at twenty-two because she refused to be a burden upon Godwin. Claire Clairmont, daughter of the second Mrs Godwin and step-sister of the second Mary, played a dubious part in the lives of Shelley and Byron, the latter being the father of her daugher, Allegra. To exclaim with Matthew Arnold "What a set!" is tempting, but unjust. Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft rank high, and deserve to rank high, among those who have tried to solve the eternal problem "How ought man to live?" That their way was not Matthew Arnold's way does not prove they were wrong. And it was a throny path they trod.

In one respect Mary's way was quite wrong. Whether marriage is, or is not, a kind of servitude is a debating-society topic; but whether a girl is, or is not, a kind of boy is a practical question. Mary was a complete educational rebel. She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and the whole point of her argument is that a woman should be educated on equal terms with a man. This was taken to mean that a woman should have a man's education. A century and a half later, people were beginning to re-discover that a woman ought to have a woman's education, and that a good girl's school was not necessarily an exact imitation of a good boys' school. Her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a brave piece of pioneer work, and its influence upon later reformers was powerful and creative. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is a footnote to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and should be read with that work. Mary Wollstonecraft's letters are attractive and moving. 

Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice was a Bible to young revolutionaries like Wordsworth in the days when he could write:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.

Some of the blissful youths of that dawn, in Hazlitt's ironical sentence, lost their way in Utopia and found it in Old Sarum. But with massive placidity Godwin continued to believe in man. The weakness—and it is the fatal weakness of al the "planners") is that he believed mankind had only to be given good reasons for a better life and Utopia would follow. His faith was boundless. All that was necesasary for the success of his system was a perfect world inhabited by perfect beings. Godwin's Political Justice must not be judged by the criticisms of those who found it profitable to apostatize. Even Coleridge repented of the harshness he had dealt out to a book he once had loved. Hazlitt remained faithful, and his sketch of Godwin is still excellent. Godwin's style deserved some success. He was always clear and forcible; his sentences convey his exact meaning without effort, and display a kind of composed oratorical effect. He gained a larger audience for his novels, but the only one that can be said to survive is The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, published in 1794. Another, St. Leon, is memorable for its portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. H. L. Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (1913) is the bes introduction to their work.

From Godwin, who, in his worst days, kept round him a tattered cloak of magnanimity, it is an abrupt change to his fellow-revolutionary, the coarse-grained, shrewd Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Yet Paine's public spirit led him to disregard all profit from his widely sold political works. He was a born pamphleteer, never happy unless he was divulging his opinions for the welfare of the human race as he conceived it. He spent all his earlier years in the struggle to make a decent livelihood, and at last emigrated to Philadelphia. In 1776 he became famous by his pamphlet, Common-Sense, which consolidated American opinion in favour of war. Peace brought him moderate rewards an a retirement which he could not endure. He returned to England and soon became involved again in politics. The French Revolution provided a new turning-point in his career. In 1791-2 he attacked Burke in the two parts of The Rights of Man. To escape arrest he fled to France, where he became a member of the Convention, and, barely escaping the guillotine because of his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, founded the new sect of Theophilanthropists. In 1803 he went once more to America, only to find that his Age of Reason, published in 1794-5, had lost him nearly all his friends. Paine was a prince of pamphleteers, and his work rarely rises above the pamphleteering level. He was shallow, but he was shrewd; his style was always clear, and though it had no charm, it had sincerity. He was not, like Godwin, a social philosopher: nevertheless, he expounded a radical constructive policy, including parliamentary reform, old age pensions and a progressive income tax. 

The heir to the pamphleteering eminence of Paine was a much more original and memorable person. The father of William Cobbett (1762-1835) was a small farmer and innkeeper in Hampshire, and William educated himself with indomitable pluck while serving as a soldier. He went to France, learnt the language, emigrated (like Paine) to Philadelphia, and took up the pamphlet-writing trade. Under the apt pseudonym of Peter Porcupine he conducted a pro-British and anti-French campaign, until he was ruined by libel cases and obliged to return to England in 1800. He was welcomed in Government circles, and started work as a Tory free-lance. His first venture, The Porcupine, failed; but his second, Cobbett's Political Register, a weekly newspaper which he began in 1802, gained the public ear. At first Tory, then Independent, at last strongly Radical, he maintained till his death an influence of which no persecution and no folly could deprive him. Besides other publishing ventures, including Parliamentary Debates, later undertaken by Hansard, and State Trials, he combined business and pleasure as a model farmer. All went well until, in 1810, he received a sentence of two years' imprisonment on account of an invective against military flogging. Throughout the reign of George IV he was a leader of political opinion. He knew the marketable value of books combining instruction and exhortation with a strong flavour of personality, and his Advice to a Young Man (1829) and even his English Grammar (1817) are still thoroughly readable. By 1830 his fortunes were re-established; the Reform Act opened the doors of Parliament to him, and he sat in the Commons till his death in 1835.

Cobbett's enormous personal vanity must not lessen the esteem due to his outspoken criticism of public life. He was essentially a farmer and hated large towns, especially the "Great Wen" (London) and the stock-jobbing and paper-money upon which the towns throve. He not only loved the country, he knew it, and he was a master of a style in which to express his knowledge. The Rural Rides (1830), which depict the England of his day, have an assured permanence. Others might paint rural scenery; Cobbett scans the looks and manners of the labourers and considers whether they have enough to make life bearable. The autobiography he intended to write under the title The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament was compiled from his writings by William Reitzel, published under that title in 1933, and reissued as The Autobiography of William Cobbett in 1947. his Register was the model and inspiration of later Radical popular journals such as Richard Carlile's Republican, Henry Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian and John Cleave's Gazette. Paine and Cobbett together were the main inspiration behind the lives recorded in such autobiographies as Samuel Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844), The Autobiography of a Working Man (1848) by Alexander Somerville of the Scots Greys, the Autobiography (1872) of the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper, The Life and Struggle of William Lovett (1876) by the cabinetmaker who assisted Francis Place—"The Radical tailor of Charing Cross"—to draft the people's Charter in 1838, and largely responsible for the abolition of the newspaper tax in 1855. The struggles of Cobbett and his successors against this and other government measures are recorded in Collet Dobson Collet's History of the Taxes on Knowledge (1899). 

The great tradition of parliamentary oratory was maintained by Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, Canning and Grattan; but their speeches are not now read either for enjoyment or enlightenment. Like the great actor, the great orator survives as a memory. Burke stands apart, for he did not succeed as an orator; he spoke his written compositions, and his auditors hurried out to dine.

Reflecting on the Mind

—oOo—

Retropost (30 de diciembre de 2008) - 1599: A Year in the life of William Shakespeare

Retropost (30 de diciembre de 2008)

1599: A Year in the life of William Shakespeare

Reseñaré en una serie de posts el libro de James Shapiro (Columbia University), 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. (Londres: Faber and Faber, 2005).

Esta es una biografía de Shakespeare centrada en un año de su carrera, 1599, sobre el que existen abundantes datos—especialmente ahora, una vez los ha organizado el libro de Shapiro. Es un año crucial en la carrera de Shakespeare como autor, "the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre" (371). Y tal como lo usa Shapiro este año es como una mirilla a través de la cual vemos mucho más de lo que hay en él: en cualquier año vemos por una parte el pasado acumulado que ha llevado a él y que ha hecho que las cosas sean como son. Y por otra parte vemos las semillas del futuro, quizá invisibles aquel año, pero contenidas en él y visibles desde la perspectiva de hoy. Así pues, una estrategia a la vez original y eficaz para construir una biografía. Lo que se pierde en panorámica temporal se gana en intensidad y en inmersión en la complejidad de un momento concreto. Para la reconstrucción de los detalles de ese mundo, maneja Shapiro una impresionante bibliografía presentada en un ensayo bibliográfico al final.

Como dice su autor, no es éste un libro sobre "Shakespeare in love", sino "Shakespeare at work", Shakespeare escribiendo sus obras en contacto por una parte con el día a día de su compañía teatral, y por otra parte con el ambiente sociopolítico de los últimos años de la era isabelina, la vida colectiva de Londres, la propaganda política, la situación internacional y las habladurías… De Shakespeare el individuo privado poco hay, ciertamente, y nada de sus amores, si los había. La persona Shakespeare sale mejor conocido de aquí sólo a través de su obra y del mundo en que vivió; en cierto modo sigue tan impenetrable como siempre.

Recogeré algunos de los episodios más llamativos de este año, siguiendo a Shapiro por capítulos.

En el prólogo, se nos muestra a la compañía de Shakespeare, los Lord Chamberlain's Men, desmantelando, con acusaciones de allanamiento de propiedad, su teatro The Theatre, al norte de Londres, para llevarse la madera que emplearían en la construcción del Globe, en la orilla sur del río. De este episodio quedan huellas por los litigios que siguieron con Giles Allen, el abusivo propietario del solar...  (y quedan las huellas de los cimientos que se localizaron este verano pasado de 2008). Shakespeare se convertiría en accionista copropietario ya no sólo de la compañía, sino del teatro del Globe, y también de otro teatro interior en la City, el Blackfriars. Era un año de transición en su carrera. Su hijo  Hamnet había muerto hace poco (las reacciones explícitas a esta muerte son nulas en su escritura) y poco después Shakespeare había "comprado" en el Colegio de Heraldos un escudo de gentilhombre para su padre y para sí. Estaba trabajando duro, al decir de Shapiro, y no tenía tiempo para amores (aunque esto ya es especulación…). Las condiciones de intensidad laboral del teatro isabelino hacían no sólo que trabajase intensamente, sino que se enfrentase al público más experimentado que haya habido jamás, en cuanto a experiencia teatral se refiere. Shakespeare terminaba su ciclo histórico con Enrique V mirando atrás en su epílogo, rarísima referencia explícita a su obra en su obra. Como también es rarísima la alusión abierta a un acontecimiento político contemporáneo—la campaña militar de Essex en Irlanda—en esa misma obra.

Frente a los autores que escribían en colaboración, Shakespeare escribía solo este año (estos años); escribía a la vez para el público culto y el popular, y en las alusiones populares se rastrea que, como nadie, estaba inspirando a su público, manteniéndolo atento a él, y dándole claves para interpretar la realidad que les rodeaba.


INVIERNO

1. A Battle of Wills. Will Shakespeare, autor, contra Will Kemp, actor principal.

2. A Great Blow in Ireland.  La expedición a Irlanda de Essex, contra la rebelión de Tyrone.

3. Burial at Westminster. El entierro de Spenser, poeta laureado.

4. A Sermon at Richmond. Ante la reina y Shakespeare, un sermon bélico.

5. Band of Brothers. Enrique V y las huellas de la expedición de Essex.



PRIMAVERA

6. The Globe Rises. El nuevo teatro estrenado este año.

7. Book Burning. Por orden de los obispos: la historia de Henry IV de Hayward.

8. 'Is This a Holiday?' La agitación popular en Roma y Londres, en Julius Caesar.



VERANO

9. The Invisible Armada. Los preparativos ante el temor de un ataque español.

10. The Passionate Pilgrim. Shakespeare y los piratas. Las revisiones del Soneto 138.

11. Simple Truth Suppressed. La nueva complejidad de Shakespeare en As You Like It.

12. The Forest of Arden. Viaje a Stratford, y antipastoralismo en As You Like It.



OTOÑO

13. Things Dying, Things Newborn. Muere la Caballería representada por Essex. Nace el capitalismo.

14. Essays and Soliloquies. La influencia del ensayo sobre Hamlet.

15. Second Thoughts. Versiones y revisión de Hamlet: varias obras y proyectos.



Termina el libro con los festivales teatrales de fin de año en la Corte. Isabel seguía espectacular y omnipotente: el fracasado Essex había perdido su favor, y el espectáculo de la corte seguía sin él. Pronto se alzaría en rebelión y sería ejecutado, con la compañía de Shakespeare oscuramente implicada en el asunto… aunque saldrían con mejor fortuna que él, actuando para la reina mientras Essex era conducido al cadalso. Se representaron este fin de año obras de Dekker y Jonson—las nuevas de Shakespeare eran demasiado arriesgadas políticamente para llevarlas a palacio; en parte Shakespeare había transformado su drama absorbiendo la atmósfera políticamente cargada de este año en concreto. Quizá representasen los Lord Chamberlain's Men la comedia de este año, As You Like It. Pero en todo caso, Shakespeare se había convertido en el autor de referencia con quien competir: se había apoderado de la escena popular. Este año empezó escribiendo Enrique V, su obra histórica más compleja; ensayó un nuevo rumbo para la tragedia con Julio César, y terminó trabajando en Hamlet. Este año llevó su obra a un nivel superior de complejidad y calidad. Un botón de muestra de la contextualización que logra Shapiro:

With Hamlet, the cross-pollination of the plays reaches another level when Polonius unexpectedly tells Hamlet, 'I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i'th'Capitol; Brutus killed me' (III, ii, 99). John Heminges, who played older men, probably spoke these lines and also played Caesar. The in-joke, which audiences at the Globe would have shared, is that Richard Burbage, who was playing Hamlet and had played Brutus, was about to stab Heminges again! (367)

Este año había estrenado la compañía de Shakespeare su teatro del Globe, con su lema probablemente a instancias del propio Shakespeare "todo el mundo actúa como un actor", lema reconocible también en un famoso parlamento de Jaques en As You Like It, escrito también este mismo año. Según Shapiro, Shakespeare es el primer dramaturgo moderno que desarrolló esta conexión estrecha con un espacio teatral concreto, el del Globe, y un público muy concreto—capaz de seguirle y captar estas referencias. (Otra que se me ocurre es el 'kiss me Kate' de Enrique V a su princesa francesa: una alusión a otra obra de Shakespeare quizá recientemente retomada por su compañía, La fierecilla domada). En un contexto más amplio, esto tenía lugar en el marco de una especialización creciente de los teatros y públicos londinenses: los Chamberlain's Men desarrollaban el teatro más complejo y avanzado de Shakespeare, mientras que sus rivales los Admiral's Men vivían del pasado con una oferta más popular y tradicional, y las compañías infantiles se especializaban en drama lírico y aristocrático. El centro lo dominaba Shakespeare, que combinaba atractivo intelectual y gusto popular. Escribe obras más exigentes con sus actores, y es consciente de que el público busca en él, y ha encontrado, un intérprete incisivo de sus tiempos. Usando una de sus imágenes favoritas, de tantas basadas en contratos y préstamos, había dicho a finales de 1598 "hacedme una rebaja y os pagaré algo, y como hacen la mayoría de los deudores, os prometeré infinitamente"—una complicidad, o un toma y daca con el público, que aún dura.

Ackroyd's Shakespeare

—oOo—

The Arthurian Legend

(From George Sampson's Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd ed.).

XII. THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND

The mystery of Arthur's end is not darker than the mystery of his beginning. While the ancient tradition is everywhere, the facts and records are nowhere. The earliest English Arthurian literature is singularly meagre and undistinguished. The romantic exploitation of "the matter of Britain" was the achievement, mainly, of French writers, and, indeed, some critics would have us attach little importance to British influence on the development of the Arthurian legend. The "matter of Britain" very quickly became international property—a vast composite body of romantic tradition, which European poets and story-tellers of every nationality drew upon and used for their own purposes. Arthur was non-political and could be idealised without offence to any ruling family. The British king himself faded more and more into the background, and became, in time, but the phantom monarch of a featureless "land of faëry". His knights quite overshadow him in the later romances; but they, in their turn, undergo the same process of denationalization, and appear as natives of some region of fantasy, moving about in a golden atmosphere of illusion. The course of the story is too obscure to be made clear in a brief summary which must necessarily ignore the hints and half-tones that count for much in the total effect, and which can take no account of French, German and Italian contributions to the legend. Old English literature, even the Chronicle, knows nothing whatever of Arthur. To find any mention of him earlier than the twelfth century we must turn to Wales, where, in a few obscure poems, a difficult prose story, and two dry Latin chronicles we find what appear to be the first written references, meagre and casual, but indicating a tradition already ancient. The earliest is in Historia Britonum, which, as we have seen (p. 9), dates from 679, though the existing recension of Nennius was made in the ninth century. The reference of Nennius to Arthur occurs in a very short account of the conflict that culminated in Mount Badon, usually dated 516, though some would put it as early as 470. Gildas, who was a youth in 516, also mentions Mount Badon; but the only hero he names is "Ambrosius Aurelianus". In Nennius the hero has become "The magnanimous Arthur", who was twelve times victorious, last of all at Mount Badon; but he is a military leader, not a king—or, perhaps, as the anthropologist Lord Raglan thinks, "a god of war".

The poems of the ancient Welsh bards have been discussed almost as fiercely as the poems of Ossian; yet there is no doubt that together with much of late and doubtful invention they contain something of indisputably ancient tradition. But the most celebrated of the early Welsh bards know nothing of Arthur. Llywarch Hên, Taliesin and Aneirin (sixth or seventh century?) never mention him; to the first to Urien, Lord of Rheged, is the most imposing figure among all the native warriors. There are, indeed, only five ancient poems that mention Arthur at all. The reference most significant to modern readers occurs in the Stanzas of the Graves contained in the Black Book of Caermarthen (twelfth century): "A grave there is for March (Mark), a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; a mystery is the grave of Arthur." Another stanza mentions both the fatal battle of Camlan and Bedwyr (Bedivere) , who shares with Kai (Kay)  pre-eminence among Arthur's followers in the primitive Welsh fragments of Arthurian fable. Another Arthurian knight, Geraint, is the hero of a poem that appears both in The Black Book of Caermarthen and in the Red Book of Hergest (fourteenth century). One of the eighteen stanzas just mentions Arthur by name. The Chair of the Sovereign in The Book of Taliesin (thirteenth century) alludes obscurely to Arthur as a "Warrior sprung from two sources". Arthur, Kai and Bedwyr appear in another poem contained in The Black Book; but the deed celebrated in the almost incomprehensible lines of this poem are the deeds of Kai and Bedwyr. Arthur recedes still further into the twilight of myth in the only other Old Welsh poem where any extended allusion is made to him, a most obscure piece of sixty lines contained in The Book of Taliesin. Here, as Matthew Arnold says, "The writer is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret". Arthur sets upon various expeditions over perilous seas in his ship Pridwen; one of them has as its object the rape of a cauldron belonging to the King of Hades. Ancient British poetry has nothing futher to tell us of this mysterious being, who is, even at a time so remote, a vague, impalpable figure of legend.

The most remarkable fragment of the existing early Welsh literature about Arthur is the prose romance of Kulhwch and Olwen, assigned by most authorities to the tenth century. It is one of the stories that Lady Charlotte Guest translated from the Red Book of Hergest and published in The Mabinogion (1838). Of the twelve "Mabinogion", or stories for  the young (the word has a special meaning but is loosely used), five deal with Arthurian themes. Two, Kullwch and Olwen and The Dream of Rhonabury, are British; the other three are based on French originals. In The Dream of Rhonabury, Arthur and Kai apper, Mount Badon is mentioned, and the fatal battle of Camlan with Mordred is referred to in some detail. The Arthuro Kullwch and Olwen bears little resemblance to the mystic king of later legend, except in the magnitude of his warrior retinue, in which Kai and Bedwyr are leaders. Arthur, with his dog Cavall, joins  in the hunt for the boar Twrch Trwyth through Ireland, Wales and Cornwall, and his many adventures are clearly relics of ancient wonder-tales of bird and beast, wind and water. The wild and even monstrous Arthur of this legend is equally remote from Nennis and from Malory; but the charm of the story is someething that the long-winded Continental writers could not achieve.

The serious historian William of Malmesbury, who wrote a few years earlier than Geoffrey of Monmouth, refers to Arthur as a hero worthy to be celebrated in authentic history and not in idle fictions. He adds, "The sepulchre of Arthur is nowhere to be seen, whence ancient ballads fable that he is to come." Plainly, Arthur was already a popular tradition. The transformation of the British Arthru into a romantic hero of European renown was the result of contact between British and Norman culture. No doubt the Normans got their first knowledge of Arthurian story from Brittany; but the real contact was made in Britain itself, where the Normans had succeeded in establishing intimate relations with the Welsh. Thus the true father of the Arthurian legend is Geoffrey of Monmouth. How much he derived from ancient sources we shall probably never find out; but we can reasonably assume that he did not invent the fabric of the story, however fancifully he embroidered it. And, after all, the real point is not how much he invented, but how he used his matter, historical or legendary. Geoffrey had the art of making the improbable seem probable, and his ingenious blending of fact and fable not only gave his book a great success with readers, but made Arthur and Merlin the romantic property of literary Europe. So it has been urged thet we shoul take Geoffrey's compilation, not as a national history, but as a national epic, doing for Britain what the Aeneid did for Rome, and finding in the mythical Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas, the name-giving founder of the British state. In such a story all the legends have their natural place. Geoffrey's History is thus the first Brut—for so in time the records of early British kings with this mythical starting-point came to be called. The first few books of Historia Regum Britanniae relate the deeds of Arthur's predecessors. At the close of the sixth book the weird figure of Merlin appears on the scene, and romance begins to usurp the place of sober history. Arthur is Geoffrey's hero. He knows nothing of Tristam, Lancelot or the Holy Grail; but it was he who, in the Mordred and Guenevere episode, first sugggested the love-tragedy that was to become one of the world's imperishable romances.
In the Latin Life of Gildas written at about the time of Geoffrey's death there is a further interesting allusion. Arthur is described as being engaged in deadly feud with the King of Scotland, whom he finally kills; he subsequently comes into collision with Melwas, the wicked king of the "summer country" or Somerset, who had, unknown to him, abducted his wife Guenevere, and concealed her in the abbey of Glastonia. This seems to be the earliest appearance o the tradition which made Melwas (the Mellyagraunce of Malory) an abductor of Guenevere. Some of the Welsh traditions are used in Peacock's delightful story The Misfortunes of Elphin, Melwas and the abduction both appearing.

The value of the Arthurian story as matter for verse was first perceived in France; and the earliest surviving standard example of metrical narrative or romance derived directly or indirectly from Geoffrey is Li Romans de Brut by Wace, who, born in Jersey, lived at Caen and Bayeux, and completed his poem in 1155. Some of the matter is independent of Geoffrey's History. Thus, it is Wace, not Geoffrey, who first tells of the Round Table. The poem, 15,000 lines long, written in lightly rhyming verse and in a familiar language, was very popular. Wace's Brut, possibly in some form not now existing, or in some blend with other chronicles, provided the foundation of Layamon's Brut, the only English contrubution of any importance to Arthurian literature before the fourteenth century; for, so far, all the matter discussed is in Welsh or Latin or French. Layamon added something personal to the essntially English character of his style and matter, and he gives us as well details not to be found in Wace or Geoffrey. Thus, he amplifies the story of the Round Table and narrates the dream of Arthur, not to be found in Geoffrey or Wace, which foreshadows the treachery of Mordred and Guenevere, and disturbs the king with a sense of impending doom. Layamon's enormous and uncouth epic has the unique distinction of being the first celebration of "the matter of Britain" in the English tongue.

Not the least remarkable fact about the story of King Arthur is its rapid development as the centre of many gravitating stories, at first quite independent, but now permanently part of the great Arthurian system. Thus we have the stories of Merlin, of Gawain, of Lancelot, of Tristram, of Perceval, and of the Grail. A full account of these associated legends belongs to the history of French and German, rather than of English, literature, and is thus outside our scope. In origin Merlin may have been a Welsh wizard-bard, but he makes his first appearance in Geoffrey and quickly passes into French romance, from which he is transferred to English story. Gawain is the hero of more episodic romances than any other British knight; when he passes into French story he begins to assume his Malorian (and Tennysonian) lightness of character. He is the hero of the finest of all Middle English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, and, as Gwalchmai, he plays a large part in the story called Peredur the Son of Evrawc, included in the Mabinogion. Peredur is Perceval, and the story comes from French romance. The love of Lancelot for Guenevere is now a central episode of the Arthurian tragedy, but Lancelot is actually a late-comer into the legend, and his story is told in French. The book to which Chaucer refers in The Nun's Priest's Tale and Dante in the famous passage of Inferno VI is perhaps the great prose Lancelot traditionally attributed to Walter Map (see p. 21). The Grail story is another complicated addition to the Arthurian cycle. Out of the quest for various talismans, no doubt a part of Celtic tradition, developed the story of Perceval, as told in French and German romances; and the "Grail", a primitive symbol, proved capable of semi-mystical religious interpretation, and came to be identified with the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer. The story of Tristram and Iseult is probably the oldest of the subsidiary Arthurian legends, and we find the richest versions in fragments of French poems and fuller German compositions. The English literature of Tristram is very meagre. The whole story bears every mark of remote pagan and Celtic origin. Finally, as an example of how independent legends were caught into the great Arthurian system, let us note the Celtic fairy tale of Lanval, best known in the lay of Marie de France (c. 1175), a fascinatingly obscure personality who, possibly English, wrote in French. And as a postcript we may note that the sceptical twentieth century has nevertheless not lagged behind the Middle Ages or the Victorians in its devotion to King Arthur, as witness the Arthurian trilogy Merlin, Lancelot and Tristram (1917-27) by the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reshaping of the Grail legend in John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance (1933), Charles Williams's Taliessin through Logres (1938) and The Reign of the Summer Stars (1944), and T. H. White's trilogy The Once and Future King (1958), which inspired the American stage and film success Camelot.

Through all the various strains of Arthurian story we hear "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing"; and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its fables of the "little people", we owe much of the fairy-lore which has, thorugh Shakespeare and poets of lower degree, enriched the literature of England. Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have no doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of the Fairy world:

In th' oldë dayës of the King Arthoúr,
Of which that Britons speken greet honóur,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen with hir joy companye
Dauncëd ful ofte in many a greneë mede.

So let us believe with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in his unquestioned place as the supreme king of Romance.

La structure de La Mort le roi Artu

—oOo—

The Celts: From Camelot to Christ:

Michel Onfray - Une contre-histoire de la littérature

Michel Onfray, Une Contre-histoire de la littérature, vol 1: Le réel n'a pas eu lieu —le principe de Don Quichotte:




Une contre-histoire de la littérature, vol. 2 (Sur Sade, le gnosticisme, le structuralisme):

Leslie Stephen: History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century

The Part of the Humanists

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937).

Book III - The Preparation for the Renascence (1516-78)

Chapter I - THE PART OF THE HUMANISTS

I. Special Characteristics of the English Renascence.— The Renascence showed in England almost all the characteristics which it had throughout Europe: thought was liberated and broadened so that it broke its scholastic framework; destiny and morals ceased to be the matter only of dogma and became problematical; a rebellion against the spiritual authority was first incited by the Reformation, which was soon afterwards the enemy of this ally, the Renascence; men loomed with a new wonder at the heavens and the earth as they were revealed by the discoveries of the navigators and astronomy; superior beauty was perceived in the literature of classical antiquity, particularly in the recently discovered works of ancient Greece.

At the same time, the Renascence had in England certain additional characteristics which were so special that they gave rise to a truly national literature. The difference was mainly at the time of flowering and in the quantitative mixture of elements, but it was also an outcome of the power each nation simultaneously acquired, when once it was enfranchised from the unifying Catholic discipline, of revealing its own character and of standing in opposition to other nations instead of blending with them. It was from the time of the Renascence that the various European nations began to follow the divergent paths which ended in the contrasts they now present.

The chief peculiarities of the English Renascence, as compared with the same movement in Italy and France, may be stated as follows:

The renewal affected literature later and more slowly in England than in those countries. Not because humanism was tardily introduced, for England's initiation into humanism was, if subsequent to that of Italy, yet quite as early as that of France. But humanism in England had for a long time no decided effect on poetry and prose. The national language was still immature. Prose lacked a strong tradition and glorious precedents, and the best humanists still made use of Latin. It is significant that the two books which appeared in this period attained to European fame—Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620)—were both written in Latin. As for verse, it had, since Chaucer, been irregularized, and it did not definitely regain equilibrium and measure until Spenser's work began in 1579; all the preceding years of the sixteenth century show no more than a series of incomplete experiments, ground which was won and then lost. In consequence, English literature had its flowering season when the magnificent Italian literature had already entered on its decadence, when France had produced Rabelais and Ronsard and his Pleiad, and Montaigne's essays were appearing. Malherbe was nine years old when Shakespeare was born. It was therefore in a generation enriched by all the substance of France and Italy that England realized for the first time her high literary ambitions.

Secondly, the Renascence held more aloof from the plastic arts in England than in Italy or even in France. The English renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or Renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or statues except those bought abroad, and in which the most determined reformers were zealously protesting against images. It had therefore a more inward and moral effect than the similar movements on the Continent. It reached its triumph not before, but after, the Reformation, when the Anglican religion had spread throughout the country and was beginning, here and there, to be tinged with Calvinism. In so far as the Renascence was an aspiration to every form of beautyh and the cult of every kind of energy, it was not quite at ease in the already Puritan atmosphere breathed in this country. There were doubtless free spirits in England, but they were rebels and notorious. A morality which was sincere and natural in the majority had, on pain of obloquy, to be assumed by the others. The total result was increased seriousness, increasing pangs of conscience, less serenity, and intensified passion in the matter of faith and conduct.

On the other hand, although the spread of Protestantism all over England caused her to break with the Middle Ages more decidedly than France and Italy, her literature remained more nearly medieval than that of either of those countries. The fact is the more striking because literature in the preceding centuries had been a less direct expression of national sentiments of England than elsewhere. English literature had been almost all imported from France, had mainly consisted of translations and adaptations. It had not assumed a truly national shape. The greatest poet, Chaucer, had been essentially French. None the less, the truth remains that, although the Renascence and the Reformation beckoned to new paths. England was faithful to the cult of the past longer than the Continent. The fact is explained by the continuance of popular influences. While in France the Renascence was eminently aristocratic, in England it was always regardful of the masses. It preserved and increased the vogue of the ballads. The theatre, the home of the most magnificent product of the period, was accessible to all men, appealed to the humble as to the great. For the people follow in literature fashions derived from former days, hold to them tenaciously and do not abandon them.

A patriotism more and more intense and passionate, even aggressive and disdainful, favoured this continuity by glorifying the annals of the nation, its history, legends, traditions, and antiquities. While this patriotism gave rise to an ambition to rival the masterpieces of Greece and Rome as well as those of Italy and France, it inspired at the same time antagonism to the foreign influences which seemed to threaten the national genius. It was an obstacle to Italianism, that most potent of the infatuations of the Renascence. It is impossible to say whether in England, in this century, Italy were more the object of wonder or of scandal, of admiration or of disapproval. Increasingly England felt and wished herself to be different from the rest of Christendom.

2. The Beginnings of Humanism (1490-1578). (1) —During some thirty year, from 1490 until about 1520, when the religious quarrels began, there was in England an efflorescence of humanism which was accompanied only by a few elect spirits, but was pure, serene, and full of hope. Some young Englishmen were attracted to Italy by the desire to learn Greek, knowledge of which had been carried thither by refugees after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1493. They were eager to see the manuscripts of the masterpieces these fugitive Greeks had saved and brought with them, and in quest of this revelation they journeyed to Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and Rome. Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), grammarian, physician, and translator of Galen, should be named among them, and William Grocyn (1446-1519), both of whom returned to Oxford about 1490 and there established the teaching of Greek on sound principles. John Colet (1467-1519) found in Italy, perhaps while he listeend to Savonarola, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, the inspiration of that enlightened and purified Christianity which he preached in London and Oxford, and founded on renewed study of the text of the New Testament and an historical examination of Saint Paul's mission. By the foundation of St. Paul's School in 1504, Colet also provided the first model for a reformed secondary school of which the teaching should be based on Latin and Greek. For this school he caused William Lily (1468-1522) to write and Erasmus to revise a Latin grammar which was to reign supreme in schools until our own day, and to become in the eighteenth century, after some rearrangement, the Eton Latin Grammar.

Such prestige did the New Learning acquire from these three masters, that Erasmus, when he resolved upon a profound study of Greek, being dissatisfied with Paris and the college of Montégut, but too poor to go to Italy, made several visits to England, from 1499 onwards, as much to complete his own education as in search of an easier life. Under Colet's influence his studies took a more religious turn, and he devoted himself for a time to the reform of Christianity, which both he and Colet would have wished to see accomplished by persuasion, knowledge, and the purification of morals, without a break in unity.

(a) THOMAS MORE.— The other side of the nature of Erasmus, his admiration for antique thought and form shown in his Adages (1500), his wit, his mockery which had free play in his Praise of Folly (1509), was better echoed by another of his English friends, Thomas More (1478-1535) (2). It was under More's roof that he wrote the Praise of Folly, and of him that he said: 'When did Nature mould a temper, more gentle, endearing and happy than the temper of Thomas More?' It was with Erasmus in his mind that More wrote his Utopia, the masterpiece of English humanism.

More was the pupil of the Oxford Hellenists and the friend of John Colet and William Lily. He was associated with Erasmus in the translation from Latin of some excerpts from Lucian. But he did not live only with books. He was a well-known lawyer and at one time a member of Parliament. In 1515 he was sent to the Continent to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Low Countries, and it was while on this mission that he began his famous book, which reveals a sagacious observer of his own times as well as the adventurous dreamer who was Plato's disciple. The other English humanists of his day were scholars and educationists. Only he of them all had the creative gift, and had he written his Utopia in his mother tongue instead of Latin, although European glory would doubtless have come to him less speedily, he would to-day be one of the leading figures in English literature. Instead he has strictly no place in it, except in right of some controversial treatises and a history of doubtful authorship.

His Utopia, which was not translated into English until 1551, cannot, however, be neglected because of the language which clothed it, for it is the true prologue of the Renascence. With most vigorous emphasis it opposes all the conceptions of the past. Better than any book it marks the new turning in the paths of thought.

The inspiration is twofold. Its frame is furnished by the recent maritime discoveries of the Portuguese and Spaniards. more particularly by the stories of Amerigo Vespucci. But fundamentally the book is derived from Plato's Republic, that Greek philosopher's dream of an ideal state, and from the impulse to react against the stiff, inert conception of society which had reigned for centuries.

More is in opposition to established ideas in almost every particular. He makes fun of scholasticism, which barred the way to thought with dialectical forms. He establishes that Greek is superior to Latin philosophy, which he considers insignificant save for some writings of Seneca and Cicero. His hero Hythloday earns a right in the gratitude of the Utopians by introducing them to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch.

More is in revolt against the spirit of chivalry. As much a humanitarian as a humanist, his hatred and contempt for war are like Swift's. Soldiers are to him 'men-slayers,' and he makes little of the point of honour and of military glory, of all that made up the atmosphere of the admired romances which Caxton had lately broadcast through the land. War was, according to More, justifiable only in the last resort, and should be waged in a purely utilitarian spirit, using the tricks of espionage and treachery. Unwittingly he was taking up the same ground as Machiavelli, who at this moment was writing Il Principe.

He extols communism, forbids the acquisition of property, and, reverting to the ideas of Lycurgus, discredits gold, which he would put to the meanest uses. He would make work compulsory for all men, but only for nine hours a day. Thus theft would disappear from Utopia and there would be no occasion to apply the hard penal laws of England.

In More's mind, there is an ideal  of a life which would be easy for the whole community. He is not of those whose consolation for the miseries of this present life is a picture of the life to come, for he cites happiness as the end of existence. He protests against asceticism and the contempt of well-being and honourable pleasure. It is from him that Rabelais borrowed the doctrine of his abbey of Thélème.

Like all Utopians, More bases himself on faith in the goodness of human nature. He believes in it as did Rousseau. His disapproval of asceticism causes him to glorify the senses which reveal natural marvels and God who made nature. He is regardful of everything which pertains to the body, of bodily health, necessary to the health of the soul, and of the comfort of dwellings. The Utopians do not suffer a man to be either cruel to himself or 'unkind to nature.'

In Utopia all religions are authorized and toleration is the law. Even the Christian religion, which has been introduced thither, enjoys no privileges. No religion has anything to recommend it beyond the examples it provides.

This book should be read as the exercise of a mind giving itself free play and unconcerned with the practical application of its own theories. More wrote in Latin, not for the people but for the learned. We are brought to ask, in astonishment, whether he did not, more than once, write against his own deep convictions. For the creator of this Utopia was a fervent Christian, a submissive Catholic, and an ascetic who wore a hair shirt. This apostle of toleration was, as chancellor, a persecutor of the first Protestants and ended by dying a martyr to his faith. The contrast between his Utopia and his own life betrays a principle of unreality. The ideas of his book were on a level with his intelligence rather than deeply rooted in his conscience.

Yet this book cannot be called the unstable product of a youthful imagination. More was thirty-eight years old when he wrote it, and more than one of its pages contains reflections suggested by his practical experience as a lawyer and a member of Parliament. When he sees in the existing society 'a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,' he is not guilty of mere rhetoric. He supports his assertion by facts which are contemporary and English, the enclosures of land which were depopulating the countryside, especially in the south-east, the eviction of small tenants because rich landlords found that grazing farms were more profitable than their holdings. The lessened demand for workers on the land was causing great misery, so that 'even a beast's life seems enviable' as compared with theat of a labourer. When More attacks the barbarous penal laws he is aiming a blow at the executions with which, as a lawyer, he was too familiar in a country where twenty criminals could be seen hanging from a gallows in a reow. He is the very antithesis of the judge Fortescue, who was proud of the bravery of English robbers. When he recommends houses of 'a gorgeous and gallant sort,' well lit by glazed windows,  he is thinking of the pleasant dwellings he had seen in Holland and comparing them with the dark, inconvenient, and miserable homes of the London and England of his day.

This book is partly the work of a dreamer led by his fancy and a logician who systematizes his ideas. But it is also written by a satirist who attacks the errors and evils bequeathed by the Middle Ages. It is unlikely that More thought his conception could be realized in its entirety, but he very heartily wished to awaken the desire for certain necessary changes.

His Utopia stands alone as representing England's literary contribution to pure humanism. Ten years after he wrote it More himself was drawn into the religious controversy, and obliged, whether whe would or no, to abandon the sphere of intellectual exercises for that of narrow ecclesiastical quarrels, in which he is next found.

It is a great pity that he did not write a work of such general interest as Utopia in English. His humanist's culture is not evinced only by his Latin writings. He left behind him certain pages in English which show, no less than Utopia, the degree to which this admirer of Plato was impregnated with Socratic dialectics. The dialogue between the old prisoner Anthony and his nephew Vincent, which More wrote in his prison, to prove that he was neither more unfortunate nor more of a prisoner than the rest of mankind, is so admirable that Socrates might have approved it or envied him its authorship. And if he be indeed the author of the historical fragment on Richard III attributed to him, he must be recognized as a rival of Tacitus, so vivid is the portrait he paints, so strong his colours, so intense his attack. It is to this fragment that the atrocious, implacable figure which has remained in men's memory is due, the character on which Shakespeare founded his famous tragedy. Whether the picture conforms to reality is doubtful, but artistically it is an astonishing success. It has unity of structure and effect far beyond anything hitherto achieved by an English chronicler.

The pages which prove More's solid classical culture represent only a part of his rich and complex personality, curious of everything in life and nature, conscious of the variety in the souls of various men. His favourite pastime was to observe the habits and instincts of animals. He had a spontaneous and most lively dramatic talent, and although he never wrote for the stage, he dramatized, in the driest controversial treatises, living and comic characters, who speak their own language or even their native dialect. His English prose abounds with humorous passages such as his predecessors lacked. It contains also many turns of familiar talk, sayings and popular expressions which he seems to have been the first to coin or circulate. One wonders if he took them from current speech, or invented them entirely. His natural gaiety, 'the kind and friendly cheerfulness with a little air of raillery' which was, Erasmus tells us, expressed on his face, season his prose, as it showed itself in his speech throughout his life and on the very scaffold. We do not know whether to praise him most for his humour or his wit.

Nevertheless, we cannot follow those who have called him the earliest of the modern English prose-writers. This humanist seems, if the doubtful case of Richard III be excerpted, to have done all his artistic work in Latin. His English prose is all improvisation, and he lets loose in it, without rule or measure, his extraordinary lawyer's flow of language. His latest critic calculates that some of his sentences are as much as four yards long, measured line by line in the original edition. He never sought to mould English prose, which then, above all things, needed to be made light and more definite. He left this task entirely to men who were much his inferiors in genius, openmindendess and liveliness of observation, men who recognized their duty of giving, on the model of the ancients, firmness and regularity to the structure of English sentences. Yet to More belongs the honour of having provoked one of the best prose works of his time, his biography by his son-in-law, William Roper, which was written about 1535 but did not appear until 1626, in Paris. This is an admirable book from every point of view. Nothing could be simpler, clearer, or more pathetic than its story of More's last moments, and it makes an impressive advance in clarity and construction on More's own writings.

(b) THE EDUCATIONISTS: ELYOT, CHEKE, WILSON, ASCHAM.—The men who were inspired by classical antiquity after More were educationists rather than imaginative writers. They have more in common with More's masters than with More himself. But they have over him the advantage that they wrote their best works in English and have not only a marginal place in English literature.

It is thus with Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) (3) whose Governour appeared in 1531. This treatise on moral philosophy and education, written for those who would be called to govern their country, was founded on the Italian works of Pontano and Patrizzi and is full of the spirit of antiquity. It abound with Greek and Latin reminiscences.

The influence of the civic morals of Rome is very evident in it, although Elyot was a convinced Christian. He adapts the manner of Plutarch to English history, for instance in the scene in which he shows the prince, afterwards Henry V, obeying the judge who sends him to prison, and the king congratulating himself on a fearless magistrate and a son submissive to justice. By this scene, of which the historical truth is mot doubtful, Elyot inculcates the Roman respect for law. His prose is less of the people and less spontaneous than More's, but, on the other hand, more restrained and classical.

The humanism of a man brought up on antiquity is also the most salient characteristic of a book written against the seditious, The Hurt of Sedition, how grievous it is to a Commonwealth (4), by Sir John Cheke (1514-57), teacher of Greek at Cambridge. This good Hellenist, noted for the love of Greek which he spread around him, gave in 1549 forcible expression to English conservatism in his Hurt of Sedition. It is directed against the Norfolk rebels who were led by the tanner Kett. Already we have that hostile picture of popular risings which recurs half a century later in Shakespeare's Henry VI and Coriolanus. Cheke shows himself vigorous in argument eloquent, and occasionally homely and humorous. He has both the tone and the arguments which are heard again from the Shakespearian Menenius Agrippa.

Form was almost as important to Cheke as matter, and he made attempts to reform the English language. Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81) (5) was concerned solely with style in his Arte of Rhetorique, published in 1553, in which this so-called English Quintilan recommends purity and simplicity of language. He reviews and derides all the verbal affectations of his time, and proscribes 'inkhorn terms', 'outlandish English,' the barbarous legal language made up of deformed Anglo-Norman words, and the abuse of archaism by the 'fine courtier' who 'wil talke nothing but Chaucer.'

These men are good masters, sensible and sure, fashioning both mind and style by their precepts and example. But their personalities are too restrained to have made a deep imprint on their prose. Roger Ascham (1515-68) (6) had qualities which threw him more into relief. He was the most popular of the educationists of his time, and the most pungent of the group of writers—Cheke, Wilson, Sir Thomas Smith, and Watson—who about the middle of this century transferred from Oxford to Cambridge the honour of guiding England along the paths of the Renascence. Ascham was Cheke's friend, and in some degree his pupil, tutor to Elizabeth in his sixteenth year, a good Protestant, even tinged with Puritanism, yet prudent enough to be Mary Tudor's Latin secretary. He left behind him two books of which one was devoted to the physical education of the young and the other to their intellectual instruction.

The first of them, Toxophilus (1545), is intended to revive the love of archery for which Ascham felt an almost romantic passion. He even considers the bow to be a superior weapon to the cannon, and believes that the physical and moral health of his country is bound up with the practice of this obsolete sport.

His other book, The Scholemaster, was published in 1570, two years after his death, and contains his advice to masters on the teaching of Latin.

Ascham puts life into these treatises by his personal presentment of his ideas. He brings forward his own practice and experience, his memories, and interesting anecdotes related first-hand. His parentheses stimulate flagging attention. His preoccupation with Latinity does not debar him from a moral point of view. He admires the great writers of Rome of his own time. He vigorously attacks the Italianism of the English nobility, especially the dangerous sojourns in the country of licence which rich young men of wealth and fashion were wont to make. He cares less for literary beauty and refinement than for solid and healthy education.

He also has the merit of having worked assiduously to advance the progress of the English language. He is aware, he says in his preface to Toxophilus, that to write in Latin would have been 'more honest for my name,' but he decides to use English both to further 'the pleasure or commoditie of the gentlemen and yeomen of Englande,' and because everything has been written in English 'in a manner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.' Indisputably he helped to perfect the language by his use of it. His style is much laboured, penetrated with Latin turns of phrase and Latin elegancies. Numerous symmetrical, balanced, antithetical sentences, sometimes marked by alliteration, occur in his work, all that is best in the prose of the Euphuists without their eccentricity and false ornament. It is true that Ascham in his Romanized dress is a little stiff and hampered. But his faults are trifling as compared with the benefit prose derived from submitting to the discipline of the ancients, especially Cicero and Seneca, whose periodic style and nervous conciseness Ascham imitates by turns. The training which he imposed on himself and which he recommended for schoolboys had a salutary effect. He desired that a pupil should first translate a passage from Latin into English, and then, after a sufficient interval, be required to put his own English version back into Latin. By repeated use of this exercise Ascham himself acquired a relative facility of expression. The too heavy clothing of his thoughts finally became so pliable that the man, sincere, sensible and good-humoured, can be descried beneath it. He is one of the earliest writers of classical English prose.

These were the chief of the educationists, such of them as left a name behind them. The work which was being accomplished at this time cannot, however, be understood unless we add to their number all the nameless makers of the Renascence, all the unknown masters who were training their English pupils in the universities and the schools to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity.

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(1) For this chapter see the general histories of literature cited at the beginning: Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, Chap. I: Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. i, Chap. V and vol. ii, Chap. I; Morley, English Writers, vol. vii; Jusserand, Histoire Littéraire du peuple anglais, livre iv, Chap. I. See also Green, A Short History of the English People, and G. Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1890).

(2) The English works of Sir Thomas More, published in 1557. His poems reprinted in 1906. His Utopia translated into English by R. Robynson in 1551; by Richards in 1923 (Oxford). Edition of Latin and English text published in 1895. Studies on More by H. Morley, English Writers (1891); W. H. Hutton (1895); H. Brémond (1904); and J. Delcourt, Essai sur la langue de Sir T. More (1913).

(3) Edited by Croft (1889).

(4) 1st edition 1549. Reprinted by G. Langbaine (Oxford, 1641) and in Holinshed's Chronicle.

(5) 1st edition 1553. Reprinted, Oxford, 1908.


(6) Toxophilus, 1st edition 1545; reprinted by Arber (1861). The Scholemaster, 1st edition 1570; reprinted by Arber (1870), by Aldis Wright (1904) , and in Elizabethan Critical Essays by Gregory Smith. Complete works, ed. Giles, 4 vols. (1804-5). German life by Dr. Katterfeld (1879).

English theatre 1520-1578

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