[continued from previous message]

There is also what is called Sardismos, a style made up of a mixture of several kinds of language, for example a confusion of Attick with Doric, Aeolic with Ionic. We Romans commit a similar fault, if we combine the sublime with the mean, the ancient
with the modern, the poetic with the vulgar, for this produces a monster like the one Horace invents at the beginning of the Ars Poetica:

Suppose a painter chose to put together
a man's head and a horse's neck,
and then added other limbs from different creatures.


She continues...'Only by preserving a pure Roman expression uncontaminated by dialect forms can one avoid producing a monstrous style made up of "limbs from different creatures, " added to a man's head on a horse's neck. Quintilian thus turns the centaur
and other monsters into tropes for language unrestrained by proper boundaries. (Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric)

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Jonson - Timber
{Topic 67}} {{Subject: AFFECTED language}}

DE VERE ARGUTIS. - I do hear them say often some men are not witty, because they are not everywhere witty; than which nothing is more foolish. If an eye or a nose be an excellent part in the face, therefore be all eye or nose! I think the eyebrow, the
forehead, the cheek, chin, lip, or any part else are as necessary and natural in the place. But now nothing is good that is natural; right and natural language seems to have least of the wit in it; that which is writhed and tortured is counted the more
exquisite. Cloth of bodkin or tissue must be embroidered; as if no face were fair that were not powdered or painted! no beauty to be had but in WRESTING and WRITHING our own tongue! Nothing is fashionable till it be DEFORMED; and this is to write like
a gentleman. All must be affected and preposterous as our gallants' clothes, sweet-bags, and night-dressings, in which you would think our men lay in, like LADIES, it is so curious. 

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Shakespeare

Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love.

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Jonson, ‘On Poet-Ape,’ Epigrams (1616), No 56.:
Poor Poet Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e’en the FRIPPERY of WIT,
From Brokage is become so bold a thief
As we, the robbed, leave rage and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
To a little wealth, and credit on the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own,
And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose ‘twas first, and aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or SHREDS from the whole piece.

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Outlaw Rhetoric, Jenny C. Mann (con't.)

Puttenham's English term for soraismus, the "mingle mangle," aptly expresses the problematic of neologizing: the borrowing of foreign words enriches the English vernacular while also alienating that vernacular from itself. Earlier English rhetorics also
describe soraismus as a linguistic "mingling": Richard Sherry defines the figure as "a mynglyng and heapyng together of wordes of diverse languages into one speche," and Henry Peacham likewise describes the figure as "a mingling together of divers
Languages." Puttenham's English term further identifies the figure's  "heapyng" and "mingling" as a "mangling," a mixture that is also a mutilation or a disfigurement. The term "mingle mangle" also showcases English's unique ability to make compound
words, what Sidney calls "happy...compositions of two or three words together." Peacham's Garden of Eloquence (1577) acknowledges the potential specificity of the figure to the English vernacular, observing that "some think wee speake but little English,
and that our speech is for the most parte borrowed of other languages, but chiefely of the Latine, as to the Learned it is well knowne." This reference to how "some" might disparage the English vernacular as a mingled tongue indicated how linguistic
mixing registers as a kind of disfigurement perpetuated by the English language in particular. It also suggests that soraismusc ould be construed as a figure for the mixed English vocabulary.

In fact, many sixteenth-century complaints about the growing impurity of the English vernacular draw on the language of the English soraismus. Sir John Cheke advocated the preservation of the vernacular from the "mingle mangle," explaining in a preface
to Sir Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's Courtier (1561) that "I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed bi time, ever borowing and
never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt." Ralph Lever's The Art of Reason (1573) criticizes those who "with inckhorne termes doe change and corrupt the [mother tongue] making a mingle-mangle of their native speache," while the
preface to Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) similarly complains that writers who patch up "the holes [in our mother tongue] with peces and rags of other languages...have made our English tongue a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of al other speeches.
" Such comments often analogize a mingled English vocabulary to a mangled English nation, as we can see in the prologue to John Lyly's Midas (1592), which adopts the terms "mingle mangle" to deride the mixture of the native and the foreign in the English
nation. The prologue explains that "Trafficke and travell hath woven the nature of all Nations into ours and made this land like a Arras, full of devise, which was Broadecloth...Time hath confounded our mindes, our mindes the matter; but all commeth to
this passe, that what heretofore hath been  served in severall dishes for a feast, is not minced in a charger for a Gallimaufrey. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, for the whole worlde is become a Hodge-podge." These passages
liken the mingled stock of the English vernacular to a bankrupt borrower in debt to foreign tongues, a plain garment patched with foreign fabric, and a mishmash of food served in a single dish. Such formulations identify the English vernacular - and in
Lyly's case, the nation and even  the "whole worlde" - as soraismus, or the "mingle mangle."

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The New Art of Writing Plays
BY

LOPE DE VEGA

TRANSLATED BY

WILLIAM T. BREWSTER

THE NEW ART OF MAKING PLAYS
IN THIS AGE

Addressed to the Academy at Madrid.

1. You command me, noble spirits, flow-
er of Spain, who in this congress and re-
nowned academy will in short space of time
surpass not only the assemblies of Italy
which Cicero, envious of Greece, made fa-
mous with his own name, hard by the Lake
of Avernus, but also Athens where in the
Lyceum of Plato was seen high conclave of
philosophers, to write you an art of the
play which is today acceptable to the taste of
the crowd.

2. Easy seems this subject, and easy it
would be for anyone of you who had written
very few comedies, and who knows more 
out the art of writing them and of all these
things; for what condemns me in this task is
that I have written them without art.

3. Not because I was ignorant of the pre-
cepts; thank God, even while I was a tyro in
grammar, I went through the books which
treated the subject, before I had seen the sun
run its course ten times from the Ram to the
Fishes;

4. But because, in fine, I found that com-
edies were not at that time, in Spain, as their
first devisers in the world thought that they
should be written; but rather as many rude
fellows managed them, who confirmed the
crowd in its own crudeness; and so they were
introduced in such wise that he who now
writes them artistically dies without fame
and guerdon; for custom can do more
among those who lack light of art than reason and force.
5. True it is that I have sometimes writ-
ten in accordance with the art which few
know; but, no sooner do I see coming from
some other source the monstrosities full of
painted scenes where the crowd congregates
and the women who canonize this sad busi-
ness, than I return to that same barbarous
habit; and when I have to write a comedy I
lock in the precepts with six keys, I banish
Terence and Plautus from my study that they
may not cry out at me; for truth, even in
dumb books, is wont to call aloud; and I
write in accordance with that art which they
devised who aspired to the applause of the
crowd; for, since the crowd pays for the
comedies, it is fitting to talk foolishly to it to
satisfy its taste.
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Shakespeare's
O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me then and wish I were renew’d;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell, ‘gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
Nor double penance, to correct correction.
Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye
Even that your pity is enough to cure me. 

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Sidney's Womanish Man
Mark Rose

Idleness was understood to be the first shaft that 'Cupide shootethinto the hot liver of a heedlesse lover', so in desiring to give in to idleness the prince is only proving true to type. Distaff Hercules was the conventional image for just such a
condition of effeminate idleness induced by passionate love. The distaff itself was an old symbol of idleness, and Sidney would have read in Amyot's Plutarch:

...that men given to idle luxury are like Hercules 'au palais royal de la royne de Lydie Omphale, vestu d'une cotte de demoiselle, se laissant souffletter & tresser aux filles & femmes de la Royne'.

'WIL you handle the spindle with Hercules, *when you should SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?*" asks a character in Lyly's Campaspe. Barnaby Rich states that lascivious women have made 'valiant men effeminate, as Hercules'. And Robert Burton uses '
Herculean Love' as an uncomplimentary epithet for passionate love. Sidney's own contempt for distaff Hercules is clear from the Defence of Poesie:

So in Hercules, painted with his great beard, and furious countenance, in a womans attire, spinning, at Omphales commaundement, it breedes both delight and laughter; for the representing of so straunge a power in Love, procures delight, and the
scornefulness of the action, stirreth laughter. (iii. 40)


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Moffett's _Nobilis_ or_ A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney_,

dedicated to WILLIAM HERBERT: Jan 1594 (?)

"A few, to be sure, were observed to murmur, and to envy him so great preferment; but they were men without worth or virtue, who considered the public welfare a matter of indifference- fitter, in truth, to hold a DISTAFF and CARD WOOL AMONG SERVANT GIRLS
than at any time to be considered as RIVALS by Sidney. For no one ever wished ill to the honor of the Sidney's except him who wished ill to the commonwealth; no one ever for forsook Philip except him whom the hope that he might at some time be honourable
had also forsaken; and no one ever injured him except him for whom virtue and piety had no love. He was never so incensed, however, by the wrongs of malignant or slanderous men but that at the slightest sign of penitence the heat of his disturbed spirit
would die down, and he would bury all past offenses under a kind of everlasting OBLIVION. (p.82 Nobilis (The Noble Man), Moffett)

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