The Winter's Tale and The Fire Next Time

Right now, I'm working on Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1611)in between chunks of The Faerie Queene (1590), Chartier's The Origin of the Book, and other miscellaneous works. As of right now, I've made it through the IV.3. So, I do not have anything substantial to say at this point; however, I have noticed a few things that I want to kind of point out so I will not forget them. To begin with, I am intrigued by Leontes' unsubstantiated jealousy concerning Hermione. He even becomes suspicious of one of his Lords, Camillo. This jealousy arises because Leontes enlists Camillo to kill Polixenes, Hermione's suspected lover. Camillo defaults and informs Polixenes of the plot, and they both leave Leontes' Sicilia under the cover of night. Leontes, enraged now, has Hermione arrested and put on trial. The trial proclaims her innocent; however, a prophecy also gets passed down, that Leontes will not have an heir until his "bastard" daughter is found. His son dies, and Hermione also dies.

What interests me here is the jealousy that Leontes feels. It really reminds me of Malbecco and his wife in Book III cantos ix and x of The Faerie Queene. Here, Malbecco fears that his wife, Hellenore, will run away with any man who enters his castle. She does, with Paridell. There is more to the story than this, but the idea of sequestering the maid and feeling jealousy without evidence to support the feeling really intrigues me. At the end of canto x, Malbecco actually turns into jealousy. Along with Malbecco, I also think about Leantio in Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women (1616). Here, Leantio marries Bianca and essentially keeps her in his house while he is away because he is afraid of her possibly inconstancy. While he is away for work, she does get out of the house, with the help of Leantio's unwitting mother, and she does become inconstant by messing around with, and eventually marrying, the Duke.

In conjunction with the sequestered nature of women, I also started thinking about the idea of foundlings, especially since this concept appears over and over again in Spenser's epic with characters such as Arthur, Belphobe, and Amoret. What to make of this right now, I don't know, but I like the idea.

Finally, I really enjoy the fact that Act I of Shakespeare's play begins with Polixenes' to leave Sicila. Leontes cannot convince him to stay, but Hermione can. At the beginning of Act IV, after 16 years have passed, Camillo attempts to leave Polixenes and Bohemia. However, Polixenes convinces him to say. Along with this conjunction between the first and second halves of The Winter's Tale, I also found the Shepherd's opening comments in the play (III.3) interesting. He says,

I would there were no age between ten
and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the
rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting
wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing,
fighting.

While these lines convey real wisdom from a rustic, they also, at least as far as I have read, convey a foreshadowing of Florizel's departure from court to visit Perdita. He's sixteen at the time. There may not be anything here, but I think the the Shepherd's comments then Polixenes' argument to keep Camillo in Bohemia have some type of connection. I could make something out of the pastoral setting, especially in relation to reading Spenser right now, but I will not.

The Fire Next Time

What can I say? Nothing really. Whatever I write here will utterly fail to do any justice to James Baldwin's words and ideas. So, I will begin with a brief clip from a speech he gave circa 1979 at UC Berkley.



When I get a better idea of what I want to say about the two work in The Fire Next Time, I will post them. Until then, let me know what thoughts you may have.

Driving Music

Today, I didn't do a lot of reading. Instead, I took Juliette to her grandparents, and I got a chance to listen to some music on the way home. So, this post will just be videos of a couple of songs I listened to, some for the first time, and really like right now. To start off, I heard Brother Ali's "Fresh Air" for the first time. (Odd since I listen to a number of songs off of that album regularly. Anyways, I really like "Fresh Air" because it talks about being content and happy with your life. The video I found on Youtube is cleaned up lyrically, so enjoy.



The next song is Krs-One's "Outta Here."



Sage Francis' "I was Zero"



They Will Destroy You's "Quiet." I heard this at the end of the ESPN documentary on the Fab Five and really liked it.



Less Than Jake's "Johnny Quest Thinks We're Sellouts." I found the CD/DVD reissues of Losing Streak and Hello Rockview for $2 each at a Friends of the Library Sell. So, I listened to almost all of Losing Streak, singing very offe key to every song. Oh the memories.



Finally, The Everyday Visual's "Limb From Limb." I really like this video, so please enjoy and comment. I will return, in a day or two, with comments about literary works.

John Donne

Before I get started talking about two or three of Donne's poems, I want to say that I have not looked at British sixteenth and seventeenth century for about five or six (since my M.A.). Coming back to it now, I am completely engrossed in it. Why? I don't know. I think part of it has to do with the teachers I had at ULM and the ones I have now at ULL. For some reason, they were, and are, some of the most enthusiastic teachers I have ever had, and that enthusiasm, of course, rubs off on the students.

Now, there are two poems I really want to talk about: "Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness" (1623?) and "A Valediction: Of Weeping" (1633). I may also sprinkle in a little of "The Flea" if it fits my fancy.

Upon first reading the poems, the use of maps and cartography drew my attention. In the second stanza of "A Valediction," which I believe was one of four poems speculated to be have been written about his wife's trip to the European continent in 1611, the image of freshly minted tear turns into a image of a globe:

On a round ball
A workman, that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all.
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolvèd so.

The globe begins as an empty "round ball" that can become populated by the workman something. In the same way, the tears become something, a message of sadness at their departing. The other part that caught me here comes in the penultimate line of this stanza. In "The Flea," the lovers' blood mixes within the flea. Here, the tears mix, but I still got the same feeling. The two, separate, individuals become one. After the second stanza, the image of the globe disappears and a deluge comes about at sea. Since I am concerned with the cartography right now, I will move on.

Donne's "Hymn to God" also uses map imagery. It, supposedly, was written about 12 years after "The Valediction," Here, while the speaker, Donne, lies in bed sick, the doctors come in and look to him. the second stanza begins the map imagery. Here, the physicians become cosmographers:

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
Per fretum febris, by these straits to die ;

The doctors map out Donne's body and trace his "south-west discovery." The south represents heat, and since the sun sets in the west, it represents death. From here, he moves to a discussion of the straits he must go through on his passage to the "holy room" he references in stanza one.

I joy, that in these straits I see my west ;
For, though those currents yield return to none,
What shall my west hurt me ? As west and east
In all flat maps—and I am one—are one,
So death doth touch the resurrection.

He can only travel one way through the straits to the west; however, the further west he moves, on a globe, the further east he travels also. So, does the movement east reflect the end? Or, does it reflect the beginning? What does all of this cartography mean? I have to assume that part of it has to do with the fact that England started colonizing America around this time. In 1607, settlers founded Jamestown. 1620 saw the Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth Rock, and in 1630, the Arabella, with John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, and others, arrived in Massachusetts.

Finally, if you are interested in this, the geography department at The University of Wisconsin has a cartography project and both of these poems are in it. Another tool to use if you are interested in Donne is Texas A&M's Digital Donne.

P.S. "A Valediction: Of Weeping" really reminds me of Blindside's "Across Waters" and "Across Waters Again."

Spenser and Venture Smith

Today has been a very eclectic day. First, I read Book II canto xii of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. I read this canto for class, and it is, in fact, the only canto I have read from Book II, so I cannot necessarily say a whole lot about its context within the narrative of Book II. However, I can discuss the aspects that caught my attention.

Book II relates Guyon's travels through, and eventual destruction of, the Bower of Bliss. Guyon's path to, and through, the Bower, echos Odysseus's travels in Homer's The Odyssey. Guyon and the Palmer, who I assume is Guyon's guide, must sail their boat through narrow straights to reach the Bower. The first section contains a whirlpool on one side and a rocky cliff on the other. These natural objects echo Homer's Charybdis and Scylla. Along with this, the mermaids recall the sirens of The Odyssey and the enchantress at the end of the canto recalls Circe.

To me, though, the character of the Palmer jumps out the most. In essence, he is a Christ figure and also part of Guyon's conscience. Taking in everything that Palmer does (calming the sees, continually subduing animals, and steering Guyon away from temptation) I cannot help but see this character as Jesus in control of a Christian's life. Along with this, the fact that Spenser relates the trek to the Bower over 40 stanzas in the canto, recalling Jesus' temptation in the desert, his forty days on earth after the resurrection, and other biblical references. What this means right now, I do not now, but I enjoyed it.

The second text I read comes from The Cambridge Companion to The African American Slave Narrative. It's an entry by Yolanda Pierce entitled "Redeeming Bondage: The Captivity Narrative and the Spiritual Autobiography in the African American Slave Narrative Tradition." The article examines Venture Smith's and George White's slave narratives. She begins, of course, by discussing the literary tradition of the captivity narrative and its relationship to the slave narrative. However, she does not mention one of the most well known captivity narratives, Mary Rowlandson's. This could be because she focuses on male authors. With the captivity narrative, Pierce examines Venture Smith's narrative. She focuses on the fact that Smith presents himself as a "self-made man" like we see in the captivity narrative, and she also discusses why we see such a focus from Smith on capitalism and wealth instead on specific protests against chattel slavery. Pierce argues that Smith gives us a great insight into African culture during the eighteenth century, especially in regards to family structure and wealth. Part of this insight possibly shows us why Smith does not necessarily attack chattel slavery directly even when he was slave. For example, Smith's father taught him honesty and integrity. As Pierce says,



Contrary to eighteenth-century sentiment, Smith does not embrace bondage because his African racial ancestry somehow makes him suited to it. He detests being a slave, but in his mind willful wrongdoing is far worse than forced captivity. (88)




She then proceeds to discuss the formative event in Smith's life and its relation to his narrative. This event occurs when European captors beat his father to death for not telling them where he hid his treasure. Part of what Smith does, Pierce argues, is build an "African village in a New World" (91) by buying his family and three other individuals out of slavery. In order to do this, he must have money. Perhaps the most important note I can take from the section on Smith deals with the reversal of the "savage" and the "civilized" that we see in the captivity narrative. Pierce writes,



Because of his [Smith's] formative instruction by his African family, Smith never believes that he is the one who is savage; he never believes that he is the moral of intellectual inferior of his captors; he never believes that his native home is uncivilized wilderness, and that his fellow African descendants are destined by God to be slaves for life. (91)




This reversal, of course, can also be see in Equiano's narrative. One aspect that I wish Pierce explored a little more, would be Smith's economic accomplishments and growth in relation to Benjamin Franklin's. I say this because Elisha Niles, Smith's amanuenses, compares Smith Benjamin Franklin and George Washington.

The second part of Pierce's article focuses on George White's slave narrative and its use of the spiritual autobiography tradition. Since I have not read White's narrative, I cannot say much about this section; however, I will point out items that I think are important. The section begins with a definition of the spiritual autobiography. Two items jump out in the discussion of White's narrative. One deals with the reason why White chose to continually attempt to receive his minister's license from the Methodist Church. It took him five attempts to finally acquire it. Pierce argues that he did this, instead of accepting his role as an exhorter, because "White desires the liberty to speak directly from the Bible, because to preach from this sacred text is to speak from a position of authority" (95). As an exhorter, White could not preach from the Bible. He had to base his teachings off of a minister's choice of scripture and words. He did not change denominations, Pierce proposes, because he wanted to preach to blacks and whites alike. If he moved to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he would be limited to preaching to blacks. One of White's main beliefs was that we should be "enslaved to the righteousness of God" (96). As for White's lack of direct of attacks against chattel slavery, Pierce again points to a specific incident in White's life that accounts for this. Instead of focusing on the temporal existence of the earthly world, White focuses on the spiritual afterlife. Part of this focus could be because of the fact that he becomes removed from his mother, in the temporal realm, at a young age like many other slaves were. He sees her later in life, but they were unable to spend much time together. In the eternal afterlife, they will be able to spend eternity together. While Smith's and White's scenes point to the reasons the authors take the approaches that they do, Pierce acknowledges that these specific scenes, along with other instances, serve as ammunition against chattel slavery during the late 1700s and early 1800s.

The final text I looked at comes from The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Written by Geoffery Sirc, "Never Mind the Tagmemics, Where's the Sex Pistols" explores the convergence, or lack thereof, of composition studies and popular culture during the late 60s to late 70s, using Punk as a metaphor. I do not have time to go through this right now, so I will leave you with a video of The Sex Pistol. Online letters at CCC in response to Sirc.

Time to Change Things Up: Ben Jonson

In about seven to eight months, I will take take my doctoral comprehensive exams: four tests in four weeks. For the past few months, or even the past year, I have been studying for these tests, reading primary and secondary texts in order to prepare for the insanity and stress that will surely infiltrate my being come September. Honestly though, the stress has already started to manifest itself in the form of nightmares and cold sweats; I'm very afraid to see what happen when the tests get closer. With that said, as I read texts, I want to use this space to collect immediate thoughts on what I just read. The thoughts will not necessarily be well thought out; they, in essence, will be initial reactions to the readings. I hope to post thoughts every day (that is very ambitious) or at least every other day. Let the madness begin.

Ben Jonson

This semester, I have been auditing a class on major authors of the British Renaissance. Up to this point, we have read five plays by Thomas Middleton, a few of John Donne's devotions, and various excerpts from John Milton. Along with these texts, I have started looking at Ben Jonson's plays (my first introduction to him). Earlier in the semester, I read Volpone (1605-06), a play that displays avariciousness at its most extreme. Volpone, since he has no heirs, decides to entertain himself by pitting three who desire his fortune against one another. Feigning death, Volpone has one of the men disinherit his son and he even has another one, Corvino, give him Celia, Corvino's wife. Comedy transpires, and the avarice nature of Volpone, Corvino, Carbaccio, and Voltore leads to their punishment at the end of the play.

Since I read this play about a month and a half ago, I do not have fresh thoughts in my mind about it; however, over that past few days, I have read Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609) and Bartholomew Fair (October 31, 1614). Reading these plays, I couldn't help but think about carnival and the carnivalesque. I assume I did this because this last weekend, and today, we celebrated Mardi Gras in south Louisiana. At any rate, specifically while reading Epicoene, I continually thought about the inversions found in carnival. The play centers around Morose and his nephew Dauphine. Morose has disinherited Dauphine, and Dauphine devises a way to return to his uncle's will. The whole of the play involves tricks, jests, and masks that work to reinstate Dauphine and some of the jests just serve as entertainment for the company of knights and collegiate ladies, nothing more.

In Epicoene, the two items that caught my attention in regards to carnival occur with the masking and with the inversion of gender roles. Masking, in the play, occurs throughout. However, one of the most evident links to carnival comes with the masking of Thomas Otter, a sea captain. In Act V, Morose wants to divorce, or at least annul his recent marriage to Epicoene. To see if this would be possible, Truewit, a knight who devises most of the jests in the play, tells Morose that he will find a diviner and a canon lawyer. Truewit disguises Otter as a diviner and Cutbeard, a barber, as a canon lawyer. During carnival, the sacred, or the natural order, becomes inverted. Down becomes up and vice versa. In this case, a lay person becomes a member of the clergy. Along with these masks, the key mask comes in the form of Epicoene (having the characteristics of both sexes). Throughout the play, Morose, and the audience, perceives Epicoene as female. However, this could not be further from the truth. She is, in fact, a boy dressed as a woman. Dauphine places the boy in a position to marry Morose. Through this trickery, Dauphine regains his inheritance from his uncle.

Epicoene's unmasking at the end also plays into the inversion of gender roles that run rampant throughout the play. The knights, La Foole and John Daw (Epicoene's servant), should be brave and masculine men; they, however, are effeminate. While trying to have fun at La Foole and Jack Daw's expense, Clerimont says,

Yes, but this fears the bravest; the other a
whiniling dastard, Jack Daw! But La Foole, a brave
heroic coward! And is afraid in a great look and a
stout accent. I like him rarely. (IV.v 244-47).

In contrast to the effeminate knights, the play contains strong, masculine women in the form of Thomas Otter's wife and Lady Haughty's collegiate ladies. Mistress Otter continually reminds her husband of her role in the marriage and how he should treat her. She repeatedly says that he needs to treat her as a princess. When he converses with the knights, away from Mistress Otter, Otter, being egged on by the knights, berates and puts down Mistress Otter. Overhearing his comments about her, Mistress Otter berates Otter and beats him in public. As for the collegiate ladies, the main thing I can think about with them deals with masking. Truewit, and other knights, even one of the ladies herself, Centaure (I believe), discusses the mask, make up, that a woman puts on to appear in public. The main inversion of gender roles comes in the form of Epicoene himself/herself. Since this boy takes on the characteristics of a woman, a strong woman at that, Epicoene serves as a masked character and an inverted one, in regards to gender roles. While I have not had the chance to read it yet, I am interested in reading David Cope's article discussing Epicoene and Thomas Middleton's The Roaring Girl: "Cross Dressing with a Difference: The Roaring Girl and Epicoene."

As for Bartholomew Fair, I am interested in the use of rhetoric, specifically when it comes to the disputation scene between Cokes and the puppet in Act V. Along with this, something may be made out of the carnival setting, Bartholomew's Day. Win, Littlewit's wife, is pregnant, adding to the carnivalesque imagery. The play contains comments on body parts and bawdy humor, both elements of teh carnivalesque. Another aspect of this play that I find interesting in the portrayal of Puritans. Jonson portrays Busy, to a certain extent, as a fool. His arguments against certain vices do not make much sense.

In conclusion, at least for now, I want to mention the connection between these two plays and Sir Philip Sidney. At the beginning of Epicoene, in a prologue, Jonson writes,

The ends of all who for the scene do write
Are, or should be, to profit and delight.

Of course, the purpose of poetry, and rhetoric for that matter, to teach and entertain comes from Horace. However, Sidney draws upon Horace and uses these two purposes in his Defence of Poesy. I would not mention this had it not been for the mention of Argalus, a character from Sidney's Arcadia in Bartholomew Fair. Since I am testing in British Renaissance and Rhetoric, I am interested in looking into the use of Horace in British Renaissance literature. I do not know, off the top of my head, the number of times Horace pops up in the two Jonson plays I have just discussed. That is all for now. Below, you will find a video of David Bevington discussing the collected works of Ben Jonson, enjoy.