My dearest archive,

31 May 2008 at 10.18 pm (Maintenance)

I must confess, I am a little shocked at your recent carelessness of my affexion. All last week, as I lay upon my sick bed, tossing feverishly as the ill are wont, I wondered urgently at your long departure. The doctors and nurses have even recounted to me that at the more desperate times, as I succumbed to the waking dreams that are the not infrequent customs of the febrile and the mad, I cried out to you. Alas that such cries were fruitless! No messenger arrived to alert me of your near visit; no telegraph was sent with even the smallest Barthes witticism to cheer me.

I cannot conceal from you how this experience has shaken my faith in the bond between us. Why, I ask of you, have you grown so very austere and distant towards me of late? Are you such a scoundral to trifle with my sensibilities? Or was my trust in you too precipitously (and, I must add, foolishly) placed?

I wish you to know that this missive has cost me many hours of moral affliction: though I do not wish to play the hysterical woman, I must know the reasons for your absence during my most dire moments. I must know the truth of your affexions for me.

Not quite yours in recovery,

The English Undergraduate.

Post scriptum. Enclosed is a clipping from the Illustrated London News concerning the recent assassination attempt on our beloved Queen. I trust you will understand my full meaning in sending it to you at this time.

31 May 1882 ~ St. Catharines

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Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew: Bartholomew convalesces.

25 May 2008 at 3.48 pm (Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew)
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Bartholomew, cut down to size.It was bound to happen sooner or later: all those late nights reading plays, typing and deleting introductory paragraphs, and writing a quick* article before sleep, have worn at my defenses; the microbes have invaded and converted my corpus into a battlefield. The site of the conflict: my middle ear.

It doesn’t seem so bad, does it? An ear infection: confined to a single location, not contagious via the air, and it doesn’t even come with much of a fever. The ear is a complex and delicate organ, however, and also very small: any swelling then (which invariably attends infection) is extraordinarily painful, making it, at times, difficult to concentrate on anything else.

Besides this, I’ve temporarily lost some of my hearing. I don’t think many of us realise how much we rely on our sense of hearing to orient ourself within our surroundings: without proper use of both ears, sounds nearby become muted, and blend with background noise (which becomes louder). Being in noisy areas, then, is disorienting. Add to this the difficulty of listening to music, turning my head, chewing, or talking, and the whole experience is rather irritating, and interferes with my regularly-scheduled activities. [i]

What has any of this to do with Bartholomew? Well, you may recall that when I introduced him, I commented that in anthropomorphising and regularly featuring him in my archive, I hoped I would pay more attention to him, and prevent him from suffering the dehydrated death of all my previous plants. The plan was actually quite successful: I remembered to water him, to trim any dead or decaying leaves, to turn him as he follows the sun, so that he grows straight. Paying such close attention allowed me to observe minute changes in his growth and appearance; these (rather unpredictable) changes were to be the subject of Bartholomew’s next article. [ii]

Then, tragedy struck. Bartholomew grew a bit too tall and collapsed under the weight of his own leafy vine. I was forced to trim a rather large section at his base where the stem had broken and turned black. He grew rather rapidly again after that, and, to prevent a like occurrence, I provided him with a little stake/flagpole to support his weight as he creeped up. It worked, for a few days, until he again curled away from the stake into the ground.

Since then, I’ve done some reading, and learned that though they attempt to grow upwards, young ivies should actually be encouraged to grow horizontally until their stems are thick enough to support their own weight. So then, the trick is not to tie him up, but to pin his stem to the soil in his pot.

The happy, and rather amazing fact, is that ivies are nearly impossible to kill [iii], and Bartholomew, though I’ve cut him down twice now, continues to grow rapidly. I even managed to save his last cutting which is currently floating in a water/fertiliser mixture. Soon he’ll grow roots and will be replanted in soil and, if I remember my biology correctly, will have the exact DNA as the other half of him; even though he will appear as two distinct plants, he is technically only one.

One plant in two distinct bodies; colonies of autonomous bacteria in me: this type of inter-relatedness of organisms is precisely the information that recent eco-critics like Niel Everndon or Don McKay use to complicate our notions of territoriality and individuality: the natural co-dependence of organisms within a single body suggests the theoretical approaches and methods we ought to take towards our social and political operations. [iv]

This is all fascinating to me, but poor Bartholomew still looks a little sad. To cheer him up, I thought I would read a bit to him from Peter Ackroyd’s “biography” of London, a book which Gaurav gave to interest me while my auditory senses are suffering. I must say, it does the trick nicely: Ackroyd has painstakingly combed chronicles, annals and diaries, as well as plays, letters, and law-codes, and volumes (literally) of other sources[v] to uncover the sensory and visceral details of London at all its stages of life (from prehistory to contemporary day).

It’s a massive tome (822 pages, including the index), so no complete review will be in the works for some time yet. I did, however, (and perhaps ironically) just complete “London Contrasts,” two chapters on the sounds and silences of London during the early medieval period. It’s fascinating to learn that London, not even at a population of one million yet (a feat which it would not achieve until 1801), was actually louder then than it is now (at a population of over 7.5 million). While modern cities value quiet as sign of efficiency and progress, in those days

noise itself is associated with energy and the specifically with the making of money. Sound was intrinsic to the trades of the carpenters and the coopers, the blacksmiths and the armourers. Other occupations, such as dockers and porters, the loaders and unloaders by the wharves, actively employed noise as an agent of business; it was the only way of affirming or expressing their role within the commercial city. (72)

A noisy blacksmith’s means a productive blacksmith’s, while only traders with goods to sell have anything about which to shout. Similarily, in non-economic activities, church bell-ringing was a competition of sorts, and used to salute the “health” of the city (since they took a deal of youthful energy to ring).

London has its silences too, of course, and Ackroyd reveals that strict curfew was kept: in the previous chapter “You be all law-worthy,” we learn that working and drinking after curfew was forbidden and that any figure out after curfew had rung would be “arrested as a night-walker”. Too, citizens were encouraged to ‘raise hue and cry’ against any transgressor of the peace” (61). The hue and cry itself, then, indicates a kind of life flourishing in London: perhaps almost bacterially, interrupting (and defending) the natural rhythms of the city itself, but it emphasises the relationship between sound and the life systems of a large city (and perhaps questions both the modern emphasis on silence and the myths of individuality and anonymity of the city’s inhabitants).

Ackroyd, then, does take an eco-critical approach to his work: a fact indicated by his labeling of his book as a “biography”. Indeed, Ackroyd prefaces his work with an introduction titled “The city as a body,” one where the “byways of the city resemble thin veins and its parks are like lungs” (1). At times the city is “refreshed” (2), at other times diseased: the health of London depends, however, on the smaller collective and individual bodies that run within this enormous circulatory system.

End Notes:

[i] scheduled activities. Thesearch has slowed a little. I have, however, had ample time to read other works (hence the increased number of book reviews in the last week). I recently finished James’s The Turn of the Screw, but am going to wait awhile to review it, first, because I read the majority of it while waiting in the clinic, while clips from Star Wars and Hannah Montanna played on the television, making it not the most ideal environment and circumstances in which to concentrate, and second, because I’m not the most informed on Victorian novels, and would like to read a bit of the critical material first (but can’t justify reading non-thesis related articles when I’m behind in my work).

[ii] Bartholomew’s next article. I was planning to read this alongside Levinas’s theory of the other; the moment has been lost, alas!

[iii] impossible to kill. Kari informed of this when I was considering my options at the plant orphanage: it is, in fact, the main reason I chose to adopt Bartholomew.

[iv] political operations. I discussed McKay’s theories on the environmental implications of anthropomorphoses in my article on Planet Earth. In his essay, “Beyond Ecology,” Everndon asks

Where do you draw the line between one creature and another? Where does one organism stop and another begin? Is there even a boundary between you and the non-living world, or will the atoms in this page be a part of your body tomorrow? How, in short, can you make any sense out of the concept of man as a discrete entity? How can the proper study of man be man if it is impossible for man to exist out of context? For the ecologist, then,the desire of some in the humanities to deal only with the fragment of reality they term “human” is nonsense. (95)

For McKay, metaphor (a “literary” tactic) becomes useful in (re)forging relations with the environment. For Everndon, we are already in a relationship with the environment, and must therefore take care to direct our studies to account for the inter-dependency of organisms. Ackroyd takes this approach in many ways: by examining the different social and political groups that interact within the city, and the city’s relationships with the landscape without the city walls, and by examining human relationships with the stones and water (especially the Thames, and the English rains), and other meteorological events that shape the city and thus the survival strategies of its inhabitants. This approach explains why the book, though arranged roughly in chronological order, tends to jump forward and backwards in time, so that different aspects, causes, and resolutions of different relationships can be illuminated in different ways.

[iv] other sources. I do wish Ackroyd had cited his quote sources within the chapters or an endnotes section, but I think this would interfere with the reading narrative he has established. He does include an essay on source and further reading material at the end of the work.

Works Cited:

Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. London: Vintage, 2001.

Everndon, Niel. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1996. 92-104.

25 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Quick. adj. A word that is actually inapplicable to nearly anything I’ve ever written.

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Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 6.

23 May 2008 at 12.25 am (General musings)
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Besides the endless support for my work? Well,

1. Accumulating entertaining resources on London.

2. Making horrible puns.

Actually, this feature is fairly ridiculous: I’ll keep it going, but really Gaurav’s usefulness far exceeds anything that fits in this archive.

That doesn’t mean I agree with his views on Samuel Johnson. Or any of those modern Irish chaps.

23 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

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Non-Accredited [Play] Reviews: John Marston.[i]

22 May 2008 at 10.58 pm (Non-Accredited Book Reviews)
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Marston, John. The Insatiate Countess. Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies. Ed Martin Wiggins. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 1-73.

N.B. A short summary of the five act plot of Marston’s drama precedes the review itself. I don’t think this ruins the plot, first, because plot isn’t the most important or even most enjoyable part of any drama (I think the language, character, symbolism, and dramatic response is what makes a play truly interesting), and second, because, as part of my review observes, Marston’s plot is fairly predictable every step of the way: it’s his interesting departures from conventional tragedy that make this play oh-so-clever.

Basically, I’m treating my review here with the same attitude as most critical responses, assuming you’ve read the play, or are familiar with its genres ahead of time; I have no wish, however, to spoil the whole thing, so if you’d like fewer plotty reveals, please skip everything in purple.

Act 1. A triple wedding. Roberto marries the Countess Isabella, only lately widowed (some say several days, some say “One hour” 1.1.131). Mortal enemies Claridiana and Mizaldus marry close friends Abigail and Thais, respectively. Revenge between the two enemies begins almost immediately, as Mizaldus and Claridiana hatch schemes to sleep with the other’s wife. Meanwhile, the noble Mendosa gets nowhere with the chaste Lady Lentulus.

Act 2. A masque. Isabella sights the Count Rogero, falling in lust with him. A few scenes later, she “Exeunts”* with him. Abigail and Thais hatch a counter scheme to exchange houses with the other on the night their husbands are to cheat on them, and in this way save their chastity.

Act 3. Isabella and Rogero have fled to Pavy where liveth Rogero’s old chum Gniaca [ii]. Isabella falls in lust with Gniaca. Gniaca protests her love, saying “I will not wrong my friend” (3.2.89). A few scenes later, the two “Exeunt” (3.4.81) [iii]. Rogero is understandably upset, and makes a long speech about the inconstancy and depravity that is Woman (conveniently forgetting he himself ran away with another man’s wife). Back in Swevia, Mendosa falls from the Lady Lentulus’s window and is picked up by the local guard. To save LL’s reputation he tells them he was attempting to rob her. Lots of bawdy puns about stealing a woman’s chastity. Claridiana and Mizaldus (who conveniently live on either side of LL) are caught in their attempts to break into the other’s house. Rather than live as cuckolds, they claim they attempted to kill Mendosa, and should therefore be hanged.

Act 4. Gniaca and Rogero meet and remember they are chums. The sitcom “let’s never let another woman come between us again” moment. Isabella, feeling a bit jilted and more than a little maligned at their long-winded insults, woos the famous Colonel, Don Sago. He promises to avenge her honour and, without much delay, shoots Count Rogero. Swevia again. After the old “put ‘em in separate rooms and get ‘em to contradict the other’s story” routine, it becomes fairly obvious Mizaldus and Claridiana are lying about attacking Mendosa, but they continue to insist upon being hanged.

Act 5. Don Sago realises killing Rogero was wrong, repents, and is freed. Isabella is arrested and put up on the scaffold where she is visited by her once-second-husband-now-monk Roberto, and she too repents, but instead of being freed, is executed. Abigail and Thais visit LL who convinces them they should probably reveal that their husbands are not actually cuckolds. They do. Their husbands decide they don’t want to die after all, but they still hate each other. Long speeches by the pair of them on why women should be feared. Lady Lentulus misses the entire conclusion. Exeunt.

This plot may seem a little absurd, what with the number of quick changes of affection between friends and lovers. These vacillations, sometimes three or more for a single character in a single act, with very little development leading up to the change, were striking to me, and especially so when juxtaposed with the nearly-perfect rhyming iambic pentameter and impassioned speeches that run through the text. While the speeches (like the one quoted below) are moving and at many times simply a lot of fun to read aloud (and, I imagine, to watch on stage), I can’t help but feel like the entire effect is meant to be more than a little artificial and excessive. One might claim, ironic.

Examine, for example, Rogero’s vehement diatribe against women at the end of Act 3:

Farewell thou private strumpet, worse than common.

Men were on earth an angel, but for woman:

That seven-fold branch of hell from them doth grow:

Pride, lust, and murder, they raise from below,

With all their fellow sins. Women were made

Of blood without souls: when their beauties fade

And their lust’s past, avarice or bawdry

Makes them still loved. Then they buy venery,

Bribing damnation, and hire brothel-slaves.

Shame’s their executors, infamy their graves.

Your painting will wipe off, which art did hide,

And show your ugly shape in spite of pride.

Farewell, Isabella, poor in soul and fame,

I leave thee rich in nothing but in shame.

Then soulless women know, whose faiths are hollow,

Your lust being quenched, a bloody act must follow. (3.4.174-189)

The speech is a tad overdone, considering Rogero himself has newly had an affair with his best friend’s mistress. Yet it’s a tricky problem: in Jacobean patriarchy, misogyny is pretty much a way of life, and all of the arguments used in Rogero’s speech here, that women are weak, prone to lust, deceptive, and even soulless, are commonplace philosophical, theological, and even medical beliefs, and can be found in almost any drama of the time (though maybe not all at once, as in Marston’s play). Nor would it be entirely unusual for the males in the drama (like Don Sago) to be reprieved for murder, while females like the Countess Isabella are executed for their lust. Morality plays of this nature were a common means of reminding women of their duties to be chaste, silent, and obedient.

It’s tempting for the feminist scholar to reclaim the play as a kind of ironic protest against misogyny, but such readings might be unwarranted. In his introduction to the play, Wiggins asks a question on this matter:

[The double standard in the play is] [a]pparent to us, of course, but what about the Jacobeans? It is never easy to differentiate between texts which deliberately represent misogyny and those which merely participate in it, and we should never underestimate any play’s capacity merely to confirm its audiences prejudices. (xii)

The reader, then, must search for other hints that suggest Marston is poking fun at Jacobean conventions. This search might involve examining the play in comparison to general plots and characters of Jacobean (sex) tragedy. The reader embarking on this comparison might conclude, for example, that Isabella fills the conventional “repentant whore” role, and is countered by the “madonna” (or “chaste maid”) figure of the Lady Lentulus. Similarly, Mizaldus plays the trope of the “revenging Jew.” Yet the characters and plots of Marston’s drama also depart from these conventions in complex ways. Looking at the footnote to Mizaldus, the reader learns that even though he “has the red beard of the stage Jew”(331) Mizaldus is also often referred to as a Catholic. The reader also learns that Marston, who himself had a red beard, would often play with this convention as a humourous allusion to himself in his own plays[iv]: a tactic which importantly suggests that the poet is not without a sense of humour.

He’s also a cleverly manipulative poet. The passage above reads almost like iambic pentameter. I at first suspected it was a sonnet with an alexandrine* couplet attached to the end, but, upon examining the passage more closely, I notice that most of the lines are iambic with an extra half foot at the end (resulting in 11 syllables per line instead of the usual ten). The form could suggest Rogero’s barely-contained anger (that extra half-foot usually indicates something askew in the world of perfectly-controlled sonnet form[v]); except Marston manages to mute the extra foot either by choosing disyllabic* end words where the stress naturally occurs on the first syllable, with the second syllable following rapidly behind, almost blending in with the preceding one (COM-mon, WOM-an, 174-175), or by hiding the end syllable through enjambment* (so that it becomes difficult to keep track of the actual line breaks: lines 177-181). In this way, Marston gives the pretence of iambic pentameter and a speech that resembles the length and form of the sonnet without actually writing a sonnet. The extra syllables in the form automatically guide us to read the “sonnet” faster than we are normally accustomed (giving the lines their emotional tension), but the whole thing seems deceptively like the concluding “rimes”* of a more conventional tragedy (the heroic alexandrines only add to this effect). The passage, then, is actually extremely complex, but appears simple.

Complex while seeming simply conventional: the reader can apply this assessment to the play as a whole. Isabella’s abrupt and apparently unmotivated repentance, then, a move which probably would be unquestionable in an early Elizabethan morality play, but which seems odd coming from the same poet who also writes Rogero’s speech above, begins to makes sense when read in an ironic context, one which reflects on, and interrogates tragic conventions, as I think the play does.

It does seem odd to me, that in a tragedy with nearly 40 characters, only two of these characters die for certain: Rogero and Isabella, both characters who seem untroubled by conscience throughout the play. Neither suffers any uncertainty or hesitation before they commit their infidelities; and neither seems quite to fit Aristotle’s description of the tragic hero [vi]:

unqualifiedly good human beings must not appear to fall from good fortune to bad; for that is neither pitiable nor fearful; it is rather repellent. [...] Furthermore, a villanous man should not appear to fall from good fortune to bad. For although such a plot would be in accordance with our human sympathy, it would not contain the necessary elements of pity and fear [...] What is left [...] would be a person who is neither perfect in virtue and justice, nor one who falls into misfortune through vice and depravity; but rather one who succumbs through some miscalculation. He must also be a person who enjoys great reputation and good fortune[...] (67-68 )

Neither Isabella nor Rogero possesses “a great reputation”: indeed, the Count Guido’s introduction of Isabella is one that suggests the entire city of Swevia is scandalised by her overhasty remarriage. Rogero agrees the Countess’s remarriage is a scandal, and is later mortified when he accidentally falls in her lap, but puts up no protest at all when Isabella pursues him. Both characters then, the plot suggests, are simply creatures of their lust and so do not elicit the pity and fear of the conventional tragedy.

The one figure who might be considered truly virtuous is Lord Mendosa, who dies to save his lady’s honour. Yet Mendosa is, first, a little ridiculous: he is only wounded and caught because he proves a clumsy Romeo, falling from his mistress’s balcony. Second, though he promises to die for the Lady Lentulus, his actual execution seems uncertain: Lady Lentulus promises to acompany Thais and Abigail when they rescue their husbands, claiming “He that’s willing to die to save mine honour, I’ll die to save his” (4.3.34-35), but neither character appears in the final scene, and the only potentially tragic plot remains unresolved.

If the play is a complicated tragedy, though, it is an almost impossible comedy. Yet the trickery Abigail and Thais play upon their husbands would not be out of place in a Jonsonian or Middletonian city comedy. Further, the unmarried status of the chaste Lady Lentulus seems rather similar to the mournful chastity of Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Even problem city comedies with darker ends, like Jonson’s Volpone, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (both of which contain the threat of excessive punishment or death at the end) or Middleton’s Chaste Maid (which re-enacts the disastrous fake death of Romeo and Juliet -this time with a comic ending – and thus involves a coffin on stage during the concluding restoration scene), have at least a superficial restoration of order at the end. In Marston’s play, however, the initial feud between Mizaldus and Claridiana is deepened by the conclusion, and the pair, according to their own speeches on the untrustworthiness of women, remain humiliated cuckolds (Mizaldus claims “cuckolds are of woman’s making” 5.2.210, and prays to be delivered from future plots, while Claridiana suggests a husband must always be jealous of “Dian’s” [...] bed” 228-229). This lack of trust, taken with Abigail’s offhand comment that she “fears not to come [too] late” to save her husband (4.3.44), with Lady Lentulus’s continued exclusion from the institute of marriage, and with the play’s running and unpunished violations of the Oedipal taboos of incest and patricide [vii] denies the conventional restoration of comic order.

With a plot that is too excessive and unsympathetic to quite be a tragedy, and yet too dark to be a comedy, it might not be reaching too far to claim that Marston challenges not only the early modern assumptions concerning women, but also the generic and poetic conventions of drama in general.

End Notes:

[i] John Marston. Marston actually only wrote the first draft of the play before abandoning it after his imprisonment in 1608. Actor “William Berksted and his associate Lewis Machin” (Wiggins, xxxvi) completed the draft c.1610 using the non-dramatic poems Myrrha and Hiren as sources.

[ii] Gniaca. I assume this is pronounced similar to “gniocchi,” with a silent “g”.

[iii] “Exeunt”. I use this phrase for consistency of innuendo, but actually, the stage direction is that they “Exit,” and re-enter after the page sings a short song. I imagine this pause in the drama could either be very awkward or very hilarious.

[iv] his own plays. I’ve lost the footnote for this reference, and shall include it as soon as I find it again.

[v] perfectly-controlled sonnet form. See Shakespeare’s sonnet 20 “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted” for a famous example of how an extra half-foot in the sonnet form indicates a bit of a departure from the natural order of things (hint, the sonnet is ostensibly addressed to a woman, but the speaker suggests his love has a bit of “something” added to the woman’s “nothing”*).

[vi] Aristotle’s [...] tragic hero. I realise that not all early modern plays necessarily conformed to the guidelines of Aristotle’s Poetics, but by Marston’s time, Aristotle was fairly well-known, and many plays were at least beginning to respond to his poetic theories. Also, as contemporary critics frequently use the poetics as a guideline against which to measure drama, I feel justified in using his work in my response here.

[vii] incest and patricide. Gniaca promises that “were Rogero my father’s son / Composed of me, he dies” (4.5.35-36), and also manages to sleep with his “brother’s” love, while Don Sago, more excessively, claims “To gain your love my father’s blood I’ll spill” (4.2.209)

Works Cited:

Aristotle. Poetics. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David Richter. 3rd Ed. Boston, new York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 59-81.

22 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Alexandrine. n. The popular dramatic verse form before iambic pentameter: it consists of six iambic feet, and usually contains a caesura (slowing, or stopping punctuation) halfway through the line. The last two lines in Rogero’s speech at 3.4 are perfect alexandrines.

Disyllabic. adj. Consisting of two syllables.

Enjambment. n. & v. To run a sentence over two or more lines of poetry so that concluding period ( . ) does not coincide with the line break.

Exeunt. v. To exit for the duration of the scene.

Nothing. n. (obs.) Female genitalia.

Rime (also, “rhyme”). n. & adj. A style of overly simple, unpolished, or amateur verse. For a humourous example, see Jonson’s “A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme.“

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Non-Accredited Book Reviews: Virginia Woolf.

20 May 2008 at 6.24 pm (Non-Accredited Book Reviews)
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Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

How does one begin to review Virginia Woolf? Both her wit and her prose styles [i] are intimidatingly brilliant. Too, a text like Orlando, like most of Woolf’s novels, does not so much possess a “plot” (in the conventional sense of that word) as a series of observations about life. Indeed, the cover of the Penguin edition I read [ii] claims that Orlando depicts “a brilliant panorama of changing society.” I thought this was awfully vague until I got about forty pages in to the text.

The premise of Orlando, you see, is that a young lord named Orlando, born in later 16th century England, lives through the major political, literary, and social events of the 16th and 17th centuries. It would be incorrect to say that he then lives through the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, because even though Orlando does live these next 300 years, “he” has become a she: the Lady Orlando.

This change of gender (which no one in the novel finds at all odd) allows Woolf, expectedly, to provide commentary on gender roles throughout the centuries: the Lady Orlando must give up her position in the military, learn to flirt, and to be a hostess for her male patrons. Though she has money and her ancestral manor, she is not wholly autonomous: indeed, one of the few questions London society raises about her change in gender is the question of whether she ought to be entitled to continue holding the legal rights to her property. Despite the outer change in Orlando, however, the reader who has seemingly direct access to the Lady’s thoughts, notes that the protagonist’s mind remains unchanged: at least, it does until Orlando begins to consciously perform as a woman. Even then, upon self-reflection, the Lady Orlando is able to reclaim her “male” thoughts and personalities.

One cannot help but read this text alongside Woolf’s famous conclusion to A Room of One’s Own, where she proposes the social cultivation of the “androgynous mind”. It may be more accurate, though, to simply read Orlando alongside itself[iii]. The Lord/Lady Orlando cannot be reduced to a mere duality:

For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not — Heaven help us — all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two-thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence the astonishing changes we see in our friends. (217)

With multiple protagonists, multiple eras, and multiple fashions, societies, and cultural events occurring in a text shorter than 250 pages, one might begin to imagine the sheer amount of observations speedily condensed into this “panorama” of England, a panorama which takes the place of a single streamlined plot.

Reading Orlando is a strange experience: I found myself entertainingly caught up in Orlando’s daily visits with friends, politicians, and poets, with her walks about town, and her extended musings with her housemaid — with her daily life — but when I stop to think about why these mundane events are entertaining, I find myself pausing: because nothing truly notable happens, you see. Even notable events, like Orlando’s loves, are quickly forgotten. For twenty pages or so in the first chapter, Orlando falls in love with a Russian noblewoman, who jilts him, making him renounce love. While the event causes a change in his temperament (he grows a little), the event is seemingly forgotten until recalled as one of Orlando’s selves in the final chapter. That is, there is not much consistency of cause-effect in Orlando’s narrative – much like in real life.

Too, though we are party to Orlando’s thoughts, often s/he slips so gradually into a different person it’s difficult to notice the change, until, Woolf, recalling an earlier self, reminds us of how different Orlando has become. All that time, too, spent in Orlando’s mind, tends to obscure the changing time, since Orlando herself, having endless time at his/her disposal doesn’t seem aware of the passing time (too, being much like the rest of us, too caught up in her own life to make much observation of such things). Since the biographer narrating Orlando’s life only rarely makes notice of the changing time[iv], the reader must guess through details like changing styles, the reigning monarch, and the reigning poets. Even so, it’s a difficult task: we know, for example, about when the 18th century begins by the revelation that “Addison, Dryden, Pope” (118 ) are the wits and poets of the day, but as Alexander Pope’s life crosses the 17th and 18th centuries — and Orlando is friends with the poet for much of this time — it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what year it is at any given time. Too, as Orlando’s friendship with the poet waxes and wanes, Pope is not always present to mark the changing time, and Woolf does not mark for us the instance of his death.

The one persistent relationship in Orlando’s life is the one s/he maintains with his/her poem “The Oak Tree”: and while the relationship is not always the same — at times Orlando must write constantly, at times s/he renounces it altogether, sometimes she writes just for herself, and at others urgently feels the need for readership and discussion of her work — it remains constant (even when she has renounced writing altogether she carries the poem with her). Writing and texts, then, are a simply a part of Orlando’s ontology.

Orlando’s relationship with text allows Woolf to make extended commentary on the development of text, the print trade, and criticism, and is, for me, one of the most fascinating parts of the novel. It is interesting to note the novel’s literary preferences: Woolf is most satirical when writing of Addison, Dryden, and Pope [v], and most unchallenging of the works of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson[vi]. Of the 19th century, Woolf seems to have mixed feelings:

Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Orlando was appalled by the consequences of her order. For, of course, to the Victorians themselves Victorian literature meant not merely four great names separate and distinct but four great names sunk and embedded in a mass of Alexander Smiths, Dixons, Blacks, Milmans, Buckles, Taines, Paynes, Tuppers, Jamesons—all vocal, clamorous, prominent, and requiring as much attention as anybody else. Orlando’s reverence for print had a tough job set before it but drawing her chair to the window to get the benefit of what light might filter between the high houses of Mayfair, she tried to come to a conclusion.

And now it was clear that there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature—one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to choose the second; and so we proceed. Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half–a–dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten–pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half–a–dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures on the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all those fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle’s sound–proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit. (205-206)

For the first time in the novel, Woolf mentions a female writer: Christina Rossetti, and also notes the growing democracy of print: for the first time in the novel, too, reading and writing is not restricted to males with wealth and “genius”; writing, however, also seems to values the opinions of pompous critics like Woolf’s fictional Nick Greene, who, two centuries later, has reversed his opinions of the genius of the Elizabethans, but who still seems to value only the old ways, allowing him to endlessly detest everything presently available to the everyday reader: there is an elitism in his criticism.

Yet Woolf seems to admire the multiplicity of voices available, and the merging of criticism and fiction. Though she makes no comment on the literature of the present day (where the novel ends), her own novel with its several voices, its combination of social, literary and political criticism, and fictional forms (including verse, conventional prose and languages, and a proto-stream-of-consciousness style), encapsulate the literary trends developing in the nineteenth century into a single text. Yet, because of the text’s awareness of its own limitations (in the form of the hesitant biographer), the text avoids the egotism of the 19th-century critic.

Woolf’s interest in 19th-century criticism has me intrigued: in pursuit of this intrigue, the next Woolf novel I plan to read is The Years, which, my Penguin edition tells me, is “Woolf’s most popular novel [in her lifetime and] is one of the most powerful indictments of ‘Victorianism’ ever written.” Before I embark on that venture, however, I’m going to go back and reread Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, if only so I can brush up a bit on her politics and poetics. Before I do that, however, I’m taking a Woolf break and finishing Marston’s The Insatiate Countess [vii]and then reading some Henry James for the first time.

End Notes

[i] prose styles. I do admire Woolf’s ability to write in very different styles: bits of Orlando read like Voltaire or Austen or Johnson* (that is, orthodoxically structured, with long clauses), while other bits (mostly in the final chapter), or a text like The Waves is fragmented and subjective.

[ii] Penguin edition. This is somewhat of an inauthentic reading experience, as Woolf’s usual publisher was Hogarth Press (she even mentions it in Orlando: page 188)!

[iii] alongside itself. Also, as I haven’t read A Room of One’s Own in its entirety in three years or so, I have a fear of misusing it.

[iv] changing time. I can recall only two instances in which the time is exactly noted: at the end of chapter four, when the biographer notes “The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun” (159), and at the moment when “it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was 11 October. It was 1928. It was the present moment” (210-211).

[v] Addison, Dryden, and Pope. Of these men, Woolf writes the following:

‘Lord,’ she thought, as she raised the sugar tongs, ‘how women in ages to come will envy me! And yet—’ she paused; for Mr Pope needed her attention. And yet—let us finish her thought for her—when anybody says ‘How future ages will envy me’, it is safe to say that they are extremely uneasy at the present moment. Was this life quite so exciting, quite so flattering, quite so glorious as it sounds when the memoir writer has done his work upon it? For one thing, Orlando had a positive hatred of tea; for another, the intellect, divine as it is, and all–worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcases [...] Added to which (we whisper again lest the women may overhear us), there is a little secret which men share among them; Lord Chesterfield whispered it to his son with strict injunctions to secrecy, ‘Women are but children of a larger growth…A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them’, which, since children always hear what they are not meant to, and sometimes, even, grow up, may have somehow leaked out, so that the whole ceremony of pouring out tea is a curious one. A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen. All this, we say, whisper it as low as we can, may have leaked out by now; so that even with the cream jug suspended and the sugar tongs distended the ladies may fidget a little, look out of the window a little, yawn a little, and so let the sugar fall with a great plop—as Orlando did now—into Mr Pope’s tea. Never was any mortal so ready to suspect an insult or so quick to avenge one as Mr Pope. He turned to Orlando and presented her instantly with the rough draught of a certain famous line in the ‘Characters of Women’. (150-151)

[vi] Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Of whom the foolish critic Nick Greene makes light of:

Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk, which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, ‘Stap my vitals, Bill’ (this was to Shakespeare), ‘there’s a great wave coming and you’re on the top of it,’ by which he meant, Greene explained, that they were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how this prediction turned out. ‘Poor foolish fellow,’ said Greene, ‘to go and say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth—the Elizabethan a great age!’ (63)

[vii] The Insatiate Countess. This should only take me another afternoon, so another review may be forthcoming soon.

20 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Johnson, Samuel. An inferior Johnson. He wrote a few odds and ends in the 18th century. I mean, he’s not very well known, but I’ve heard rumours about a “dictionary” to which he made a few contributions.

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Purely brilliant.

15 May 2008 at 3.07 pm (General musings)
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Today is the 250th anniversary of the opening of the current (that is, the third) incarnation of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, England. By coincidence*, today is also the anniversary of the date of my birth.

I considered taking advantage of this opportunity to write something entirely Erin-centric. It turns out, however, that this entire archive is Erin-centric: I already spend all my time here inflicting my rather unqualified opinions about my favourite poets, theorists, and musicians, writing about the mundane details of my days, reveling in my contradictory love for Ben, and my not-so-contradictory love for Virginia Woolf, and sharing absurd photos of my plant, Bartholomew, who has been personified to nigh-epic proportions[i]. Consequently, I have no idea how I could possibly make a bigger fuss over myself in this medium. Unless I outright assert my total brilliance.

Which, of course, I do.

Cheers to the ROH: may it celebrate many more years of musical brilliance!

End Notes:

[i] nigh-epic proportions. Literally. I’m actually considering making him the hero of an epic poem: I just can’t decide whether to style after Virgil, Dante, or Milton.

15 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Coincidence. n. Usually “notable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connexion.” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Ed. 1964. 233). In the phenomenon of my date of birth coinciding with the opening of the third house, I pretty sure that a dead Meyerbeer pulled some strings somewhere to arrange the concurrence. It does explain my amateur fascination with opera. We’re fortunate I wasn’t born December 7th, when the original house opened, or this would be an archive primarily featuring English Renaissance composers like John Bull and William Simmes.

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“‘let them pass / As transitory things’: Simulated bodies in The Staple of News and The Roaring Girl.”[i]

14 May 2008 at 7.19 pm (Ben)
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You may have noticed the absence of a certain English undergraduate from the non-material world of late[ii]. Lest you, dear reader, find yourself with an image of your humble protagonist in her pyjamas at three in the afternoon, watching old episodes of LOST[iii], allow me to catch you up on my doings in the last week.

Previously, in Erin’s existence:

There’s not much exciting to share, actually: I spent most of the week revising and adding the footnotes to my first chapter, a task that occupied more of my time than it should have because I took only half-notes the first time I read many of my critical articles. I suppose I was busy with end of term papers then, but, honestly, the time saved has been lost this week as I scrambled to recall the various arguments, and re-read when I didn’t. There’s been a lot of re-reading.

In the course of re-reading, I learned another pair of lessons that will shape my reading strategies in the future: first, I will not, for the next chapters, divide my readings evenly, reading all the criticism on one play at all once and then all the criticism on the next. This strategy worked out well for about 7-10 articles, as my familiarity with the type of arguments grew and I was able to quickly assimilate articles into my memory. After about ten articles on the same play and subject, however, things started to become a bit monotonous, and, growing tired, it became a struggle to pay close attention to the nuances of each article’s take on the subject. Only those articles starting a new investigation were making any impression on my memory. I suspect alternating research subjects a bit will avoid this problem.

I will, however, continue to read articles in order of the most recent date to the earliest. Reading in this order meant I was always most alert during the most recent criticism (the work that fewer people have already responded to, and thus the areas where the most development can occur). Also, these critics, since they too are responding to earlier research, usually provide thorough summaries of the different interpretive branches that have developed on different plays and themes: this allows me to situate my own argument somewhere within these branches. It also allows me to know, when I get to a earlier article, how influential the article has been in recent studies, how much time I should devote to it, and, finally, because I’ve already read a few summaries of it, allows me to read more quickly, being somewhat familiar with its arguments.

I’d like to give at least a few of these scholars some recognition here, but, having spent many late nights most of the last week with them, am not going to give any lengthy summary or review. Just a few notes. Many of the articles are in journals that available online: if you have access, and are interested in the accredited work in this field, track them down and give them a read.

Barton, Anne. “The Staple of News and Eastward Ho!” Ben Jonson Dramatist. Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1994. 237-257. [Barton's literary biography of Jonson is fairly influential in the world of Jonson criticism, and is an entertaining read as well.]

Champion, Larry S. “Allegory of the Golden Mean.” Ben Jonson’s ‘Dotages’: a reconsideration of the late plays. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1967. 45-75. [An early (and one of the few) examinations of the morality conventions of The Staple of News.]

DiGangi, Mario. “Sexual Slander and Working Women in The Roaring Girl.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003). 147-76. [A Marxian examination of the madonna-whore complex in Jacobean London and city comedies.]

Farmer, Alan B. “Play-Reading, News-Reading, and Ben Jonson’s the Staple of News.” The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers. and Readers in Early Modern England. Ed. Marta Straznicky. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2006. 127-158. [One of the most recent evaluations placing The Staple of News in the context of the developing news-trade and the Thirty Years War (most critical studies on Staple are done on this subject).]

Garber, Marjorie. “The Logic of the Transvestite: The Roaring Girl (1608).” Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. Ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. New York: Routledge, 1991. 221-234. [A neat (and influential) Lacanian study of Moll.]

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. [The social and economic conditions of playgoing. in early modern London.]

Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithacaand London: Cornell UP, 1990. [A good general study of feminism and gender theories in the Renaissance (Continental and English).]

Kuchar, Gary. “Rhetoric, Anxiety, and the Pleasures of Cuckoldry in the Drama of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 31.1 (2001). 1-30. [A neat Lacanian study of Jonson's Volpone, The Devil Is an Ass and Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters.]

Levine, Laura. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. [One of the framing texts for my entire paper.]

Maus, Katherine Eisaman. “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body.” Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. Ed. James Grantham Turner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 266-288. [A discussion of male poets' appropriation of the womb.]

Newman, Karen. “Engendering the News.” The Elizabethan Theatre, XIV. Ed. A.L. Magnusson and C.E. McGee. Toronto: Meaney, 1996. 49-69. [Contains a discussion of the allegorising of "news" as a woman, and the conventions of morality drama. A significant portion of my Jonson discussion for this chapter is in response to this article.]

Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The performance of gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. [A discussion of masculinity and its relationship with anti-theatricality in early modern London. The other framing text for my entire paper (alongside Levine and Butler).]

Reynolds, Bryan, and Janna Segal. “The Reckoning of Moll Cutpurse: Transversal Reimaginings of The Roaring Girl.” Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations. Ed. Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 27-63. [A post-Marxian study of the ways critics have appropriated the figure of Moll in counter-hegemonic ways.]

End Notes:

[i] “simulated things.” Previously known as “Chapter One.”

[ii] non-material world. Well, alright, the internet is not really non-material: I mean, it has text, after all: and I seem to remember Juliet Fleming writes quite a bit about the materiality of sound (of words) itself in her Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2001), one of the more fascinating readings in 4V04* last term. For all it’s textual (and other) materiality, however, I can’t help but feel sometimes that the internet is somewhat of a metaphysical entity. In that I don’t really understand it. Which is a bit frightening, when I consider how my studies, my job, and this archive itself, depends almost entirely on it and other computer-related technology.

[iii] old episodes of LOST. Which is not to say that this event doesn’t occur. Occasionally.

14 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

*4V04. “Early Modern Textual Collections,” a course devoted to the examination of the development of the printing press, the commonplace book, and the modern library, as well the theories of knowledge behind these developments, and the social, political, and theological ramifications of the same. The course relied half on the study of original documents (or at least facsimiles of these downloaded from EEBO), and half on contemporary critical studies of the same.

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Reflecting on Ben (as usual).

13 May 2008 at 12.11 am (Ben)
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In preparing the footnotes for “Chapter One,” I’ve been re-reading a number of critical articles over the past week,[i] and lit upon Richard Waswo’s “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre.”

Waswo takes as his departure point the number of lawsuits filed over debt in early modern England. Drawing his stats from Craig Muldrew’s Economy of Obligation, Waswo records that “the annual rate of litigation at one lawsuit for every household in the nation (over 1.1 million), never equaled since” (57). Waswo continues to discuss the continued reliance on an economy of credit in early modern England, despite the apparent lack of logic behind that system:

what remains constant in the period is that it still makes no ‘distinction between the utilitarian world of economics and a more “subjective” social world of feelings and events’. There is as yet no dismal science, no pure calculation; exchange and negotiation are material and affective — and, we may add, symbolic — at once. (57)

Waswo then goes on to discuss the similarities between monetary and social credit and trust: to persuade a potential buyer to invest in one’s business, for example, involves the same processes as those used in persuading a “mate” (whether lover or friend) to invest value in one’s body:

desire can be satisfied by whole classes of appropriate persons or objects — it is only the pure irrationality of live that invests a single individual with that power [...] The splendid arbitrariness [of investing bodies with erotic value] [...] is a dramatization in the erotic economy of the newly unsettling principle of the material one. What we see is not what we get, and may or may not be there , but it merely what we want. If enough of us want it, however, than our imagination invests it with supreme value, It is the principle of the dramatic economy of comedy, too: we the audience, want the happy ending, the appropriate amourous pairings or social reconciliations, and we do not much care how implausibly it may occur. (60)

Essentially, the body underneath is not essential at all: it does not matter whether a body is beautiful or virtuous, or (from the point of view of the audience watching the boy actor on stage) male or female: the individual, and then the collective, invests what kind of value they want to get out of the body.

In my analysis of Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, I posited that Middleton seems to agree with Waswo[ii], and portrays his London as a kind of simulacra: that is, a world where all value and exchanges (of bodies and other commodities) are based on series of simulations and dissimulations, of gender, of desire, of wealth and reputation. Simulations being a type of performance (or performance being a type of simulation), Middleton’s world becomes a space where females, especially, can á la Judith Butler, gain autonomy through the performance, or transversal parodying of conventional gender.[iii]

More generally, though, Waswo’s article brought to my attention a factor to which, I realise, I had not devoted enough time and consideration: that is, audience response.

While the performance of gender, desire, or economic stability and trustworthiness (if you are wooing investors) is a formulative part in deciding the worth of a body or commodity, this value is not ultimately decided by the performer: it is the buying public who chooses whether to accept or re-describe (once again) the performer’s evaluation of a body’s worth (whether it is one’s own body or the body of another). What this means, then, is that the performer must know his audience(s)/potential investors. This entails, as Waswo suggests, navigating the audience’s complex and “illogical” emotions towards individual and collective bodies and processes in society.

In The Roaring Girl, Sebastian Wengrave’s performance of love for the transvestite Moll Frith may be convincing, but it is also effective because Sebastian is able to accurately judge and play off of his father’s fear of shame when the other knights in the play learn of his son’s courtship of the sexual deviant, as Moll is labeled throughout. Sebastian uses his father’s desires (for a socially conventional marriage) to persuade him to invest in his own “Moll,” Mary Fitzallard.[iv]

Jonson, though he admits the necessity of playing to his audience’s desires in The Staple of News in the inclusion of Lickfinger the cook[v], also ultimately refuses to play this role of cook and caterer to his audience, however: though he anticipates his audience’s desire for topical gossip, in his prologue, in the representation of the merchant class who buy from the Staple of News in the play, and whom he also represents in the form of an on-stage audience of gossips around the play, Jonson serves instead a modernised version of a morality play, one which insists upon a patriarchal republic where gendered and social bodies are fixed and thus impervious to the redescription of value on which the London market depends.

Well, poor Ben: no wonder the play wasn’t that successful. A shame, as it also inventive, and offers complex reflections on poetry and the theatre itself. Too, I think Jonson is aware how conflicted the play is, which may explain why he reconsiders its themes in the next of his Caroline dramas, The New Inn.

End Notes:

[i] over the past week. Actually, you may recall I started this article last Thursday. The time is a bit out of date then.

[ii] agree with Waswo. More accurately, Waswo agrees with Middleton.

[iii] conventional gender. Feminists like Butler have used the disjuction between body and social constructs (value) to their advantage, suggesting that the individual can construct one’s social position and worth through (re)performance(s); this argument is (as you may recall from my previous articles) one of the main departure points for my analyses of women’s positions in Jonson’s masques and late plays.

[iv] Mary Fitzallard. Too, though Sebastian does redescribe social conventions a little by the end of the play, he also perpetuates them (by using Moll Frith’s outsider position in society to his advantage).

[v] Lickfinger the cook. About which the song-writer Madrigal says “He holds no man can be a poet, /That is not a good cook, to know the palates, /And several tastes of the time.” (3.1)

Works Cited:

Jonson, Ben. The Staple of News. Ben Jonson’s Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol.2. London: JM Dent, 1963. 347-425.

Waswo, Richard. “Crises of Credit: Monetary and Erotic Economies in the Jacobean Theatre.” Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy. Ed. Angela Dieter Mehl and Anne-Julia Stock. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. 55-73.

13 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

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Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 5.

8 May 2008 at 8.19 pm (General musings)
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Today just felt like a day for footnotes. I was also going to post something more substantial and Ben & Middleton-related, but, with the articles I’ve been reading all today, I’m exhausted. You, dear reader, must wait until tomorrow eve. In the meanwhile, enjoy “Edition 5″:

1. He read Volpone. [i]

2. He let me steal Candide. [ii]

3. He advertises my archive. For free! [iii]

End Notes:

[i] Volpone. I’m not certain if this is “useful,” but it does delight me.

[ii] Candide. Yet he won’t let me steal his Norton Shakespeare’s Histories…

[iii] for free. Even if he does occasionally make snide remarks about it.

8 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

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“In this best of all possible worlds…”

7 May 2008 at 8.00 pm (General musings)
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people like Stephen McCrainie write comics like this one that was in my inbox this morning, courtesy of Gaurav.

Know why it’s funny? It’s not only that the words “Shakespeare” and “ninja” appear in the same strip. Nor that the young lad is intelligent and pretentious beyond his years. It’s that Voltaire* is the light, uplifting read in comparison.[i]

I wish I had been a child like this one…

End Notes:

[i] uplifting read in comparison. I outright stole this observation from Gaurav. Well, I pretty much stole his penguin edition of Candide as well. I’m hoping he’ll be nice enough to let it pass relatively unnoticed.

7 May 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Voltaire n. nom. (François-Marie Arouet). 17th-century French philosophe who was practically better than JJ Rousseau in every way. With emphasis on the “practical.” Voltaire used his amazing powers of lawyering to reinstate the lands of the wrongfully-accused Calas family. His Candide (published 1759) includes death by hanging, rape, death by earthquake, cannibalism, death by auto da fe, siphilis, death by war, and other atrocities.

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