Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s ruin



In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the
authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):


THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which
are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)

The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how
disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...

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Henry Craik, ed.  English Prose.  1916.
Vol. II. Sixteenth Century to the Restoration
 
On the Vanity of Words without Matter
By Francis Bacon (1561–1626)


THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which
are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a
province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his
succours to make a party against the present time; so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite
travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an
admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose
writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the
phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quæ non novit legem) [the wretched crowd that has not known the law], for the winning and persuading of them,
there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the
schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie 1 of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than
matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter,
worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and
Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that
delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero]: and the echo answered in Greek, one, Asine. Then grew the learning
of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.
  1
  Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter: whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all time. And how is it possible but this
should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that
Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
  2
  But yet, notwithstanding, it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of
Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use; for surely to the severe inquisition of truth, and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance; because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the
desire of further search, before we come to a just period; but then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like; then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors
which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’s minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es [you are no divinity]; so there is none of Hercules’s
followers in learning, that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.
  3
 
Note 1. copie, i.e. copia, or abundant FLOW. 

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VANUS –
vain, empty, vacant, void
unsubstantial
figuratively groundless, baseless, meaningless
ostentatious, boastful
deceptive, untrustworthy


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What merit lived in me that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can NOTHING WORTHY prove;
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The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern

Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by


An affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of
the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement…Then did Car
of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was
rather towards copie than weight.



What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse. Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate all other discursive
functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses.” This sudden access
of eloquence is not a return of the repressed, however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.
     In assailing what one critic has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century, Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself. Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but
more than any other it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a recovering alcoholic:


…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and mathematicians; I believed that
the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.
(snip)

It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil behaviour as a natural complement
to the achievements of “lyberall science”; social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of a good Latin style now appears as part of a
larger process of “fashioning” subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress, and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is
equally certain that discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil
subject is an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that
is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours – with an imaginary
logic. (snip) p32

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Hebrew -Maskith – A showpiece, figure, imaginations, carved images ****************************
Empty Figures – ‘MY Shakespeare’:

Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
MY Shakespeare, RISE! (Jonson)

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What needs MY Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones...(Milton)

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"Vain Affectations": Bacon on Ciceronianism in "The Advancement of Learning" JUDITH RICE HENDERSON

When Francis Bacon writes that man "began to hunt more after words than matter" in The Advancement of Learning, he meant not just form and content but academic disciplines. Bacon explains that Martin Luther called for humanist educational reform to teach
the laity to read and theologians and preachers to analyze Scripture. In the Strasbourg gymnasium and academy, the Protestant rector Johann Sturm went too far in substituting endless drill in the arts of discourse for other subjects. Bacon deplores Sturm'
s influence [my note – Harvey/Audley End speech to Oxford] on the Cambridge humanists, especially Nicholas Carr and Roger Ascham, and Ascham's celebration of the Portuguese Ciceronian Jerónimo Osorio in the Marian court. When Osorio subsequently
attacked the Elizabethan religious settlement, Ascham and others dismissed his prose as Asiatic, for they had learned from the Protestant opposition to scholastic theology to identify good style with good doctrine. Bacon, seeking truth in God's Works as
much as in God's Word, would place dialectic and rhetoric late in the university curriculum, contending that students who labor to perfect argument and style before they have something to say fall into "childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation."

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Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson
By Richard S. Peterson

...Men should, Crites says [Jonson-type character in Cynthia’s Revels], ”Studie…/An inward comelinesse…that may conforme them…/To Gods high figures, which they have in power: (V.iv.643-6; IV, 158), and this is the goal the poet holds out to
his living subjects in the poems. The moral outline or shape Jonson produces is an ideal one, charged with a sense of potential, movement, and change, to which the subject ought actively to conform his soul or mind – or simply continue to conform it,
in the most admirable cases – by his own efforts and with the poet’s educative help. What Jonson says in Timber of the poet’s effect on his readers – adapting Quintilian on the orator’s effect on his listeners (Inst. Orat. II.5.8) – ideally
applies to praised subjects as well: he “makes their minds like the thing he writes” (ll. 792-3; VIII, 588). His Platonic (or Socratic) and stoic strategy in this respect is perhaps clearest in instances where the collaboration between the poet and
the owner of the soul proves an unequal one. If he has occasionally praised his subjects too much, Jonson declares in his epistle to Selden (according to the rhetorical mode of laudando praecipere, “praising to teach”) It was “with purpose to
have MADE them such” (Und. 14, l.22) Even more revealing is Jonson’s sharp complaint “To my Muse”:

Away, a leave me, thou thing most abhord,
That hast betray’d me to a worthlesse lord;
Made me commit most fierce idolatrie
To a great image through thy luxurie.

… … …
But I repent me: Stay. Who e’re is rais’d,
For worth he has not, He is tax’d, not prais’d.
[Epig. 65 1-4, 15-16]

This description recalls not only Sir Epicure Mammon’s “most fierce idolatrie” in wooing Dol Common, as he “talke[s] to her, all in gold” (Alchemist IV. i.25-39; V, 360), but the “great image” of gold, Nebuchadnezzar’s symbol, which he
dreams about and sets up to be worshiped (Dan. 2:31-8, 3:1-15) Failing a response, the noble shape raised by Jonson becomes merely a “great image” hollow or inert at its core, and his worship of its potential, mere tribute paid to an idol – a
strong contrast, as we shall see, to Jonson’s justifiable near-idolatry of the “full” and animated inner shapes that inhabit the cabinet which is Uvedale.note -
The sense of potential, of conduct as raw material from wish a shapely life of soul should be fashioned and raises like a statue, is forcefully conveyed in Jonson’s epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile (Und. 13). There the poet shows an accumulated “heape”
of virtuous manners being effortfully raised to “stand” as a triumphal arch, which is then metamorphosed, as we watch, into the implied human figure of a colossus, a “wonder” of the world and a landmark (“marke”) or “note” of virtue:

‘Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad
Profit in ought; each day some little adde,
In time ‘twill be a heape; This is not true
Alone in money, but in manners too.
Yet we must more than move still, or goe on,
We must accomplish; ‘Tis the last Key-stone
That makes the Arch. The rest that there were put
Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.
Then stands it a *triumphal marke*! Then Men
Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,
It was erected; and still walking under
Meet some new matter to looke up and wonder!
Such Notes are virtuous men.



The parallel we have traced earlier between the need to gather in and transform in conduct as in literary activity holds true here. In describing how the individual soul fashions its heaped stock of manners into a towering form of virtue, the poet
himself accumulates a generous heap of material from Plutarch (and from Hesiod, whose heap of money Plutarch has turned to a heap of virtue) and transforms the whole by adding a keystone from Seneca (Epist. 118, secs. 16-17): “one stone makes an
archway – the stone which wedges the leaning sides and hold the arch together by its position in the middle. … Some things, through development, put off their former shape and are *altered into a new figure*” (quaedam processu priorem exuunt formam
et in novam transeunt).
Indeed, Jonson’s works abound with “heapes.” These are admirable enough when they indicate bounty or a plentiful supply of raw material to be shaped. This in Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metmorphos’d (1621), King James, on approaching the
country house  of the Duke of Buckingham, is invited to “enter here/ The house your bountie hath built, and still doth reare/ With those highe favors, and those heap’d increases: (ll. 11-13; VII, 565). And in a brief later elegy (Und. 63) Jonson
consoles King Charles and his Queen for the loss of their firstborn by a reminder that “God, whose essence is so infinite, /Cannot but heape that grace, he will requite.” But on most occasions, heaps serve as symbols of inert material which is unable
to stand or empty of animating, shaping spirit – the very antithesis of Jonson’s ideal. [Men stand, heaps ‘rise’?) A nameless, vicious courtier is “A parcel of Court-durt, a heape, and masse/ Of all vice hurld together” Und. 21), hardly
distinguishable from the excrement in Fleet Ditch, “heap’d like a usurers masse” (“On the Famous Voyage,” Epig. 133, l.139); whole a lord fond of flatter is “follow’d with that heape/ That watch, and catch, at what they may applaud” (Und.
15, ll. 156-7). The healthy gathering instinct Jonson describes in the epistle to Sacvile is in sharp contrast to the hoarding of substance, unanimated by any generous impulse, described in the epistle to Sir Robert Wroth: “ Let that goe heape a masse
of wretched wealth,/……/And brooding o’re it sit, with broades eyes,/Not doing good, scarce when he dyes: (For. 3, ll. 81-4). A house, too, lacking an indwelling owner, like a body without a soul, becomes a mere heap…(snip)
If the repugnance of the inert “heap” lies in its resistance to shaping, its lack of any inner impulse that could raise it to stand, conversely it is possible to stand and yet be hollow. Consider Jonson’s startling picture (Und.44) of the ruined
form of virtue, unhoused and dispossessed, beseechingly holding up her broken “Armes” (in an evocation of a defaced antique statue combined with a deft pun on the military target of the satire, the refusal of contemporary nobility to bear arms) to
the empty “moulds” which have cast her out:

I may no longer on these picture stay,
These Carkasses of honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover’d with Tissue, whose prosperitie mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter’d virtue holds
Her broken Armes up, to the EMPTIE moulds. [ll. 98-102]

Other forms, empty yet nevertheless ambulatory, are seen moving woodenly through the world of the Epigrammes. Of “English Mounsieur” (Epig. 88), with his Frenchified attire, the poet remarks: “is it some french statue? No: ‘T doth move,/ And
stoupe, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove/ The new French tailors motion [puppet], monthly made, /Daily to turned in PAULS, and helpe the trade”(…)

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acervus
masculine noun
mass/heap/pile/stack; treasure, STOCK ; large quantity; cluster; funeral pile ****************************
Casting down imaginations:

2 Corinthians
(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God
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Horace, of the Art of Poetrie
transl. Ben Jonson

If to Quintilius, you recited ought:
Hee'd say, Mend this, good friend, and this; "Tis naught.
If you denied, you had no better straine,
And twice, or thrice had 'ssayd it, still in vaine:
Hee'd bid, blot all: and to the anvile bring
Those ill-torn'd Verses, to new hammering.
Then: If your fault you rather had defend
Then change. *No word, or worke, more would he spend
In vaine, but you, and yours, YOU SHOULD LOVE STILL
Alone, without a rivall, by his will*.

A wise, and honest man will cry out shame
On ARTELESS Verse; the hard ones he will blame;
Blot out the careless, with his turned pen;
Cut off superfluous ornaments; and when
They're darke, bid cleare this: all that's doubtfull wrote
Reprove; and, what is to be changed, not:
Become an Aristarchus. And, not say,
Why should I grieve my friend, this TRIFLING WAY?
These TRIFLES into serious mischiefs lead
The man once mock'd, and SUFFERED WRONG TO TREAD. *****************************
Quintilius/Jonson

I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never BLOTTED out line. My answer hath beene, would he had BLOTTED a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not
told posterity this, but for their IGNORANCE, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most FAULTED... 
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Oldham, on Jonson

XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, SORDID* NAME:
Thine was no EMPTY VAPOR, RAIS’D beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then GOES OUT...

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Gabriel Harvey – Oration to undergraduates of Cambridge
Do not fall into the Scythian swamp of Hermogenes, that endless and pretentiously vain art, concerning which it is recorded that Hermogenes was so elaborately ingenious he prided himself on being able to include countless figures and other rhetorical
subtleties in one and the same period. In which vain labor no few men of our time toil – men in other respects not to be despised, though unfortunately there are increasing numbers of them, especially of those whom your teacher Harvey is wont to call
PHILOGRECIANS and PSEUDO-STRASSBURGERS [my note - Sturm/Strasbourg], and whom I would term pseudo-Hermogenes, alias sophist, pseudo-rhetoricians or even rhetorical chameleons: they are not so much nourished with food as saturated with wind and rhetorical
hot-air. In truth, through their subtleties, *they make themselves more and more obscure until they gradually disappear in mere inanity*: they have no worse enemies than themselves.
Definition of inane (Merriam Webster)
(Entry 1 of 2)
1: lacking SIGNIFICANCE meaning, or point : SILLY inane comments
2: EMPTY, INSUBSTANTIAL


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Castigating Courtiers in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_:

Crites/Criticus/Jonson


O VANITY,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By LIGHT and EMPTY IDIOTS how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
RAIS’D on their Toes, to catch thy AIRY FORMS,
Still turning GIDDY, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the Stream
Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs?
I suffer for their Guilt now, and my Soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected Eyes)
Is hurt with mere intention on their Follies.
Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:
Or is't a rarity, or some new object,
That strains my strict observance to this Point?
O would it were, therein I could afford
My Spirit should draw a little neer to theirs,
To gaze on novelties: so Vice were one.
Tut, she is stale, rank, foul, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt Eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her Bawd custom dawbs her Cheeks withal)
She would betray her loath'd and leprous Face,
And fright th' enamour'd dotards from themselves:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,
(How antick and ridiculous so ere
It sute with us) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, than avoid it:
And if we can but banish our own sense,
We act our mimick tricks with that free license,
That lust, that pleasure, that security,
As if we practis'd in a Paste-board Case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.
Well, check thy passion, lest it grow too lowd:
"While fools are pittied, they wax FAT and proud


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Psalm 73:7
Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish; and the imaginations of their minds overflow [with follies].
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Chapman...

TO you whose depth of soule measures the height,
And all dimensions of all WORKES of WEIGHT,
REASON being ground, structure and ornament,
To all inuentions, graue and permanent,
And your cleare eyes the Spheres where REASON moues;
This Artizan, this God of RATIONALL loues
Blind Homer;
(snip)
TRUE learning hath a body absolute,
That in apparant sence it selfe can suite,
Not hid in ayrie termes as if it were
Like spirits fantastike that put men in feare,
And are but bugs form'd in their fowle conceites,
Nor made forsale glas'd with sophistique sleights;
But wrought for all times proofe, strong to bide prease,
And shiuer ignorants like Hercules,
ON THEIR OWN DUNGHILS; (...)

AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.

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Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_

But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
REASON as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence MIMIC FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
WILDE WORK produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:

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Milton, Comus (Lady to Comus)

871: Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
872: That hath so well been taught her DAZZLING FENCE;
873: Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
874: Yet, should I try, the uncontrolled worth
875: Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
876: To such a flame of sacred vehemence
877: That dumb things would be moved to sympathise,
878: And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and SHAKE,
879: Till all thy MAGIC STRUCTURES, reared so high,
880: Were SHATTERED into HEAPS o'er thy FALSE HEAD.

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...Sidney, like Seneca, belonged to a noble (although impoverished) line and lived the life of a courtier depending on the support of a monarch whose favors were fickle. The image that his contemporaries created of Sidney is in important ways like the
one that Seneca had tried to create for himself, that of a man who sought “to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great” (Dedication 12.7-7). Sidney appears to have had for the curriculum at Oxford the
same scorn that Seneca had expressed for its essentially Roman model: It teaches words rather than things. In a letter to his brother Robert, Sidney wrote: “So yow can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in
Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt”* (Works, 3). Seneca likewise had condemned both the philological (Ep.88.3-4) and rhetorical (Ep.100.10) focus on words at the expense of subject: Sic ista
ediscamus, ut quae fuerint verba, sint opera (Ep. 108.35). [Let us learn those things so that what have been words might become works].
* where, while they eagerly pursue words, they neglect things themselves. (note matter vs. Manner debate which had broken out among the Humanists.)
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Cynthia’s Revels, Jonson
P R O L O G U E.

F gracious silence, sweet attention,
 Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,
(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;
Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.
And therefore opens he himself to those;
To other weaker Beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,
To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,
In this alone, his Muse her sweetness hath,
She shuns the print of any beaten Path;
And proves new ways to come to learned Ears:
Pied ignorance she neither loves nor, fears.
Nor hunts she after popular Applause,
Or fomy praise, that drops from common Jaws:
The Garland that she wears, their bands must twine,
Who can both censure, understand, define
What merit is: Then cast those piercing Rays,
Round as a Crown, instead of honour'd Bays,
About his Poesie; which (he knows) affords
Words, above action: MATTER, above WORDS.
*****************************

HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN: MONSTERS, METAPHORS, AND MAGIC
BY ROBERT E. STILLMAN


[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, January 22, 2022 at 6:27:17 PM UTC-5, Dennis wrote:

Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s ruin

In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the

authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):

THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which

are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)

The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how

disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...

*******************************

Henry Craik, ed. English Prose. 1916.
Vol. II. Sixteenth Century to the Restoration

On the Vanity of Words without Matter
By Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which

are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. Martin Luther, conducted (no doubt) by an higher Providence, but in discourse of reason, finding what a
province he had undertaken against the Bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his
succours to make a party against the present time; so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. This by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite
travail in the languages original wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words. And thereof grew again a delight in their manner of style and phrase, and an
admiration of that kind of writing; which was much furthered and precipitated by the enmity and opposition that the propounders of those (primitive but seeming new) opinions had against the schoolmen; who were generally of the contrary part, and whose
writings were altogether in a differing style and form; taking liberty to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense and to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and (as I may call it) lawfulness of the
phrase or word. And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quæ non novit legem) [the wretched crowd that has not known the law], for the winning and persuading of them,
there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort. So that these four causes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the
schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copie 1 of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than
matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter,
worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment. Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price. Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the orator and
Hermogenes the rhetorician, besides his own books of periods and imitation and the like. Then did Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that
delicate and polished kind of learning. Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo; Decem annos consumpsi in legendo Cicerone [I have spent ten years in reading Cicero]: and the echo answered in Greek, one, Asine. Then grew the learning of
the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copie than weight.

1
Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter: whereof though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all time. And how is it possible but this

should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter? It seems to me that
Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.

2
But yet, notwithstanding, it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of

Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use; for surely to the severe inquisition of truth, and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance; because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the
desire of further search, before we come to a just period; but then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like; then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors
which write in that manner. But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’s minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es [you are no divinity]; so there is none of Hercules’s
followers in learning, that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth, but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness. And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.

3

Note 1. copie, i.e. copia, or abundant FLOW.

******************************

VANUS –
vain, empty, vacant, void
unsubstantial
figuratively groundless, baseless, meaningless
ostentatious, boastful
deceptive, untrustworthy

****************************
What merit lived in me that you should love
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can NOTHING WORTHY prove;
****************************
The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Richard Halpern

Looking back somewhat sourly on the culture of the sixteenth century, Francis Bacon wrote that it was marked by

An affectionate study of eloquence and copie of speech, which then began to flourish. This grew speedily to an excess; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition

of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement…Then did
Car of Cambridge, and Ascham, with their lectures and writings, almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning…In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was
rather towards copie than weight.

What concerns Bacon here is not an imbalance within literary style but the proliferation of stylistic elegance throughout all of serious discourse. Paradoxically, the very autonomy of style allows it to colonize and dominate all other discursive

functions; and as if to illustrate this peril, Bacon’s own language falls temporarily under the spell of style, succumbing to a delight in the “round and clear composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses.” This sudden access
of eloquence is not a return of the repressed, however, but a witty tribute to the lures of a humanist tradition from which Bacon only halfheartedly tried to extricate himself.

In assailing what one critic has called the “stylistic explosion” [Richard Lanham] of the sixteenth century, Bacon questions the values of the English literary Renaissance itself. Ciceronianism was only one small part of this movement, but

more than any other it came to represent a mysterious addiction to style. Gabriel Harvey famously described his own bout with Ciceronianism in the confessional manner of a recovering alcoholic:

…..I valued words more than content, language more than thought, the one art of speaking more than the thousand subjects of knowledge; I preferred the mere style of Marcus Tully to all the postulates of philosophers and mathematicians; I believed

that the bone and sinew of imitation lay in my ability to choose as many brilliant and elegant words as possible to reduce them into order, and to connect them together in a rhythmical period.

(snip)

It is no accident…that Erasmus, who reorganized the teaching of Latin around the concept of style, also wrote the first modern book of manners. De civilitate morum puerilium (1530) taught children the codes of civil behaviour as a natural complement

to the achievements of “lyberall science”; social manners and literary style thus cooperated to produce a subject “well fasshyoned in soule, in body, in gesture, and in apparayle.” The cultivation of a good Latin style now appears as part of a
larger process of “fashioning” subjects – a process that submits not only language but also manners, dress, and comportment to ideal of “exactness and refinement.” If it is clear that stylistic pedagogy is a form of social discipline, it is
equally certain that discipline is becoming stylized. For in defining civility as “outward honesty of the body” (externum…corporis decorum), Erasmus transforms a set of social behaviours into a bodily image. The “well-fashioned” or civil
subject is an aesthetic ideal that expands the concept of “style” to cover the whole range of social bearing. To produce a civil subject is to produce a “style” – of manners, dress, and discourse. And social style, like the literary style that
is now a part of it, is developed not through obedience to rules but through the mimetic assimilation of models. Thus De civilitate supplements a juridical approach to manners – the prescription and proscription of behaviours – with an imaginary
logic. (snip) p32

****************************
Hebrew -Maskith – A showpiece, figure, imaginations, carved images ****************************
Empty Figures – ‘MY Shakespeare’:

Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
MY Shakespeare, RISE! (Jonson)

****************************
What needs MY Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in piled stones...(Milton)

***************************
"Vain Affectations": Bacon on Ciceronianism in "The Advancement of Learning" JUDITH RICE HENDERSON

When Francis Bacon writes that man "began to hunt more after words than matter" in The Advancement of Learning, he meant not just form and content but academic disciplines. Bacon explains that Martin Luther called for humanist educational reform to

teach the laity to read and theologians and preachers to analyze Scripture. In the Strasbourg gymnasium and academy, the Protestant rector Johann Sturm went too far in substituting endless drill in the arts of discourse for other subjects. Bacon deplores
Sturm's influence [my note – Harvey/Audley End speech to Oxford] on the Cambridge humanists, especially Nicholas Carr and Roger Ascham, and Ascham's celebration of the Portuguese Ciceronian Jerónimo Osorio in the Marian court. When Osorio subsequently
attacked the Elizabethan religious settlement, Ascham and others dismissed his prose as Asiatic, for they had learned from the Protestant opposition to scholastic theology to identify good style with good doctrine. Bacon, seeking truth in God's Works as
much as in God's Word, would place dialectic and rhetoric late in the university curriculum, contending that students who labor to perfect argument and style before they have something to say fall into "childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation."

******************************

Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson
By Richard S. Peterson

...Men should, Crites says [Jonson-type character in Cynthia’s Revels], ”Studie…/An inward comelinesse…that may conforme them…/To Gods high figures, which they have in power: (V.iv.643-6; IV, 158), and this is the goal the poet holds out to

his living subjects in the poems. The moral outline or shape Jonson produces is an ideal one, charged with a sense of potential, movement, and change, to which the subject ought actively to conform his soul or mind – or simply continue to conform it,
in the most admirable cases – by his own efforts and with the poet’s educative help. What Jonson says in Timber of the poet’s effect on his readers – adapting Quintilian on the orator’s effect on his listeners (Inst. Orat. II.5.8) – ideally
applies to praised subjects as well: he “makes their minds like the thing he writes” (ll. 792-3; VIII, 588). His Platonic (or Socratic) and stoic strategy in this respect is perhaps clearest in instances where the collaboration between the poet and
the owner of the soul proves an unequal one. If he has occasionally praised his subjects too much, Jonson declares in his epistle to Selden (according to the rhetorical mode of laudando praecipere, “praising to teach”) It was “with purpose to have
MADE them such” (Und. 14, l.22) Even more revealing is Jonson’s sharp complaint “To my Muse”:

Away, a leave me, thou thing most abhord,
That hast betray’d me to a worthlesse lord;
Made me commit most fierce idolatrie
To a great image through thy luxurie.

… … …
But I repent me: Stay. Who e’re is rais’d,
For worth he has not, He is tax’d, not prais’d.
[Epig. 65 1-4, 15-16]

This description recalls not only Sir Epicure Mammon’s “most fierce idolatrie” in wooing Dol Common, as he “talke[s] to her, all in gold” (Alchemist IV. i.25-39; V, 360), but the “great image” of gold, Nebuchadnezzar’s symbol, which he

dreams about and sets up to be worshiped (Dan. 2:31-8, 3:1-15) Failing a response, the noble shape raised by Jonson becomes merely a “great image” hollow or inert at its core, and his worship of its potential, mere tribute paid to an idol – a
strong contrast, as we shall see, to Jonson’s justifiable near-idolatry of the “full” and animated inner shapes that inhabit the cabinet which is Uvedale.note -

The sense of potential, of conduct as raw material from wish a shapely life of soul should be fashioned and raises like a statue, is forcefully conveyed in Jonson’s epistle to Sir Edward Sacvile (Und. 13). There the poet shows an accumulated “heape�

�� of virtuous manners being effortfully raised to “stand” as a triumphal arch, which is then metamorphosed, as we watch, into the implied human figure of a colossus, a “wonder” of the world and a landmark (“marke”) or “note” of virtue:

‘Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad
Profit in ought; each day some little adde,
In time ‘twill be a heape; This is not true
Alone in money, but in manners too.
Yet we must more than move still, or goe on,
We must accomplish; ‘Tis the last Key-stone
That makes the Arch. The rest that there were put
Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut.
Then stands it a *triumphal marke*! Then Men
Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when,
It was erected; and still walking under
Meet some new matter to looke up and wonder!
Such Notes are virtuous men.

The parallel we have traced earlier between the need to gather in and transform in conduct as in literary activity holds true here. In describing how the individual soul fashions its heaped stock of manners into a towering form of virtue, the poet

himself accumulates a generous heap of material from Plutarch (and from Hesiod, whose heap of money Plutarch has turned to a heap of virtue) and transforms the whole by adding a keystone from Seneca (Epist. 118, secs. 16-17): “one stone makes an
archway – the stone which wedges the leaning sides and hold the arch together by its position in the middle. … Some things, through development, put off their former shape and are *altered into a new figure*” (quaedam processu priorem exuunt formam
et in novam transeunt).

Indeed, Jonson’s works abound with “heapes.” These are admirable enough when they indicate bounty or a plentiful supply of raw material to be shaped. This in Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metmorphos’d (1621), King James, on approaching the

country house of the Duke of Buckingham, is invited to “enter here/ The house your bountie hath built, and still doth reare/ With those highe favors, and those heap’d increases: (ll. 11-13; VII, 565). And in a brief later elegy (Und. 63) Jonson
consoles King Charles and his Queen for the loss of their firstborn by a reminder that “God, whose essence is so infinite, /Cannot but heape that grace, he will requite.” But on most occasions, heaps serve as symbols of inert material which is unable
to stand or empty of animating, shaping spirit – the very antithesis of Jonson’s ideal. [Men stand, heaps ‘rise’?) A nameless, vicious courtier is “A parcel of Court-durt, a heape, and masse/ Of all vice hurld together” Und. 21), hardly
distinguishable from the excrement in Fleet Ditch, “heap’d like a usurers masse” (“On the Famous Voyage,” Epig. 133, l.139); whole a lord fond of flatter is “follow’d with that heape/ That watch, and catch, at what they may applaud” (Und.
15, ll. 156-7). The healthy gathering instinct Jonson describes in the epistle to Sacvile is in sharp contrast to the hoarding of substance, unanimated by any generous impulse, described in the epistle to Sir Robert Wroth: “ Let that goe heape a masse
of wretched wealth,/……/And brooding o’re it sit, with broades eyes,/Not doing good, scarce when he dyes: (For. 3, ll. 81-4). A house, too, lacking an indwelling owner, like a body without a soul, becomes a mere heap…(snip)

If the repugnance of the inert “heap” lies in its resistance to shaping, its lack of any inner impulse that could raise it to stand, conversely it is possible to stand and yet be hollow. Consider Jonson’s startling picture (Und.44) of the ruined

form of virtue, unhoused and dispossessed, beseechingly holding up her broken “Armes” (in an evocation of a defaced antique statue combined with a deft pun on the military target of the satire, the refusal of contemporary nobility to bear arms) to
the empty “moulds” which have cast her out:

I may no longer on these picture stay,
These Carkasses of honour; Taylors blocks,
Cover’d with Tissue, whose prosperitie mocks
The fate of things: whilst totter’d virtue holds
Her broken Armes up, to the EMPTIE moulds. [ll. 98-102]

Other forms, empty yet nevertheless ambulatory, are seen moving woodenly through the world of the Epigrammes. Of “English Mounsieur” (Epig. 88), with his Frenchified attire, the poet remarks: “is it some french statue? No: ‘T doth move,/ And

stoupe, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove/ The new French tailors motion [puppet], monthly made, /Daily to turned in PAULS, and helpe the trade”(…)

****************************
acervus
masculine noun
mass/heap/pile/stack; treasure, STOCK ; large quantity; cluster; funeral pile
****************************
Casting down imaginations:

2 Corinthians
(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God
***************************
Horace, of the Art of Poetrie
transl. Ben Jonson

If to Quintilius, you recited ought:
Hee'd say, Mend this, good friend, and this; "Tis naught.
If you denied, you had no better straine,
And twice, or thrice had 'ssayd it, still in vaine:
Hee'd bid, blot all: and to the anvile bring
Those ill-torn'd Verses, to new hammering.
Then: If your fault you rather had defend
Then change. *No word, or worke, more would he spend
In vaine, but you, and yours, YOU SHOULD LOVE STILL
Alone, without a rivall, by his will*.

A wise, and honest man will cry out shame
On ARTELESS Verse; the hard ones he will blame;
Blot out the careless, with his turned pen;
Cut off superfluous ornaments; and when
They're darke, bid cleare this: all that's doubtfull wrote
Reprove; and, what is to be changed, not:
Become an Aristarchus. And, not say,
Why should I grieve my friend, this TRIFLING WAY?
These TRIFLES into serious mischiefs lead
The man once mock'd, and SUFFERED WRONG TO TREAD. *****************************
Quintilius/Jonson

I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn'd) hee never BLOTTED out line. My answer hath beene, would he had BLOTTED a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had

not told posterity this, but for their IGNORANCE, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most FAULTED...

*********************************
Oldham, on Jonson

XIII.
Let meaner spirits stoop to low precarious Fame,
Content on gross and coarse Applause to live,
And what the dull, and sensless Rabble give,
Thou didst it still with noble scorn contemn,
Nor would'st that wretched Alms receive,
The poor subsistence of some bankrupt, SORDID* NAME:
Thine was no EMPTY VAPOR, RAIS’D beneath,
And form'd of common Breath,
The false, and foolish Fire, that's whisk'd about
By popular Air, and glares a while, and then GOES OUT...

********************************
Gabriel Harvey – Oration to undergraduates of Cambridge
Do not fall into the Scythian swamp of Hermogenes, that endless and pretentiously vain art, concerning which it is recorded that Hermogenes was so elaborately ingenious he prided himself on being able to include countless figures and other rhetorical

subtleties in one and the same period. In which vain labor no few men of our time toil – men in other respects not to be despised, though unfortunately there are increasing numbers of them, especially of those whom your teacher Harvey is wont to call
PHILOGRECIANS and PSEUDO-STRASSBURGERS [my note - Sturm/Strasbourg], and whom I would term pseudo-Hermogenes, alias sophist, pseudo-rhetoricians or even rhetorical chameleons: they are not so much nourished with food as saturated with wind and rhetorical
hot-air. In truth, through their subtleties, *they make themselves more and more obscure until they gradually disappear in mere inanity*: they have no worse enemies than themselves.

Definition of inane (Merriam Webster)
(Entry 1 of 2)
1: lacking SIGNIFICANCE meaning, or point : SILLY inane comments
2: EMPTY, INSUBSTANTIAL

*******************************************
Castigating Courtiers in Jonson’s _Cynthia’s Revels_:

Crites/Criticus/Jonson

O VANITY,
How are thy painted beauties doted on,
By LIGHT and EMPTY IDIOTS how pursu'd
With open and extended Appetite!
How they do sweat, and run themselves from breath,
RAIS’D on their Toes, to catch thy AIRY FORMS,
Still turning GIDDY, till they reel like Drunkards,
That buy the merry madness of one hour,
With the long irksomness of following time!
O how despis'd and base a thing is a Man,
If he not strive t'erect his groveling Thoughts
Above the strain of Flesh! But how more cheap,
When, even his best and understanding Part,
(The crown and strength of all his Faculties)
Floats like a dead drownd Body, on the Stream
Of vulgar humour, mixt with common'st dregs?
I suffer for their Guilt now, and my Soul
(Like one that looks on ill-affected Eyes)
Is hurt with mere intention on their Follies.
Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:
Or is't a rarity, or some new object,
That strains my strict observance to this Point?
O would it were, therein I could afford
My Spirit should draw a little neer to theirs,
To gaze on novelties: so Vice were one.
Tut, she is stale, rank, foul, and were it not
That those (that woo her) greet her with lockt Eyes,
(In spight of all the impostures, paintings, drugs,
Which her Bawd custom dawbs her Cheeks withal)
She would betray her loath'd and leprous Face,
And fright th' enamour'd dotards from themselves:
But such is the perverseness of our nature,
That if we once but fancy levity,
(How antick and ridiculous so ere
It sute with us) yet will our muffled thought
Choose rather not to see it, than avoid it:
And if we can but banish our own sense,
We act our mimick tricks with that free license,
That lust, that pleasure, that security,
As if we practis'd in a Paste-board Case,
And no one saw the motion, but the motion.
Well, check thy passion, lest it grow too lowd:
"While fools are pittied, they wax FAT and proud

************************************
Psalm 73:7
Their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish; and the imaginations of their minds overflow [with follies].
************************************

Chapman...

TO you whose depth of soule measures the height,
And all dimensions of all WORKES of WEIGHT,
REASON being ground, structure and ornament,
To all inuentions, graue and permanent,
And your cleare eyes the Spheres where REASON moues;
This Artizan, this God of RATIONALL loues
Blind Homer;
(snip)
TRUE learning hath a body absolute,
That in apparant sence it selfe can suite,
Not hid in ayrie termes as if it were
Like spirits fantastike that put men in feare,
And are but bugs form'd in their fowle conceites,
Nor made forsale glas'd with sophistique sleights;
But wrought for all times proofe, strong to bide prease,
And shiuer ignorants like Hercules,
ON THEIR OWN DUNGHILS; (...)

AN EMPTY PEN with their owne OWNE STUFF applied
CAN BLOT THEM OUT: so shall their wealth-burst wombes
Be made with emptie Penne their honours tombes.

*******************************************
Milton, _Paradise Lost Book V_

But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
REASON as chief; among these FANSIE next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence MIMIC FANSIE wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
WILDE WORK produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Eevnings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:

*************************************
Milton, Comus (Lady to Comus)

871: Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
872: That hath so well been taught her DAZZLING FENCE;
873: Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced.
874: Yet, should I try, the uncontrolled worth
875: Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
876: To such a flame of sacred vehemence
877: That dumb things would be moved to sympathise,
878: And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and SHAKE,
879: Till all thy MAGIC STRUCTURES, reared so high,
880: Were SHATTERED into HEAPS o'er thy FALSE HEAD.

*************************************

...Sidney, like Seneca, belonged to a noble (although impoverished) line and lived the life of a courtier depending on the support of a monarch whose favors were fickle. The image that his contemporaries created of Sidney is in important ways like the

one that Seneca had tried to create for himself, that of a man who sought “to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great” (Dedication 12.7-7). Sidney appears to have had for the curriculum at Oxford the
same scorn that Seneca had expressed for its essentially Roman model: It teaches words rather than things. In a letter to his brother Robert, Sidney wrote: “So yow can speake and write Latine not barbarously I never require great study in
Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford, Qui dum verba sectantur, res ipsas negligunt”* (Works, 3). Seneca likewise had condemned both the philological (Ep.88.3-4) and rhetorical (Ep.100.10) focus on words at the expense of subject: Sic ista
ediscamus, ut quae fuerint verba, sint opera (Ep. 108.35). [Let us learn those things so that what have been words might become works].

* where, while they eagerly pursue words, they neglect things themselves. (note matter vs. Manner debate which had broken out among the Humanists.)
**********************************
Cynthia’s Revels, Jonson
P R O L O G U E.

F gracious silence, sweet attention,
Quick sight, and quicker apprehension,
(The lights of Judgments throne) shine any where;
Our doubtful Author hopes this is their Sphere.
And therefore opens he himself to those;
To other weaker Beams his labours close:
As loth to prostitute their Virgin strain,
To ev'ry vulgar and adult'rate Brain,

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, January 22, 2022 at 7:02:16 PM UTC-5, Dennis wrote:

Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s Ruin

In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the

authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):

THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which

are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)

The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how

disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...

(second of three postings)
***************************

Jonson’s Textual Monument
Brian Patrick Chalk

On 15 March 1604, James Stuart passed through London’s streets for the first time as James 1 of England. Modeled after a triumphal Roman procession, the event was overtly theatrical and thus presented a unique opportunity for working playwrights to

endear themselves to the new Monarch. No one appreciated this opportunity more than Ben Jonson, who played an integral role in producing the entertainments surrounding the occasion. The procession was, in Jonathan Goldberg’s words, “a self-conscious
recreation of classical art, adapting classical style to current meaning,” and Jonson wisely identified it as an opportunity to showcase his classical knowledge, and thereby distinguish himself from his competitors. James’s route through the city
featured seven ARCHES constructed specifically for the event by the architect and joiner Stephen Harrison Several included stages where brief entertainments were performed. To emphasize the Roman theme, the streets were decorated with statues intermixed
with actors who came to life to recite verses of poetry when the king rode by. Responsible for the first and last of these entertainments, Jonson was in an ideal position to make a lasting IMPRESSION. In his second ARCH at Temple Bar, the playwright’s
agenda registers clearly through Electra’s speech in The King’s Entertainment in Passing to His Coronation:

This from the loud, blest oracle I sing.
Who here and first, pronounc’d, thee Brittaines King
Long maist thou live, and see me thus appeard,
As omenous [as] a comet, from my spheare,
Unto thy raigne: as that [did] auspicate
So lasting glory to AUGUSTUS state.

Jonson shrewdly conflates James’s providential claims with his own classicizing aspirations, representing himself as a “comet” or omen that signifies the beginning of James’s reign. By proclaiming James a new “Augustus,” Jonson’s ARCHES

reflect an image that flatters the new king while also calling attention to the role that poetry plays in confirming his power. A new Augustus, of course, implies a new Virgil or a new Horace, a parallel that makes Jonson heir to the Roman poets,
confirming their posterity even as it projects his own works toward a comparable one. Poetry grounded in civil virtue, he insists, will endure. As is often the case with Jonson, even at his most panegyric, he seeks to instruct as he praises: the arches
make clear the relationship that Jonson believes should exist between a monarch and the poets of his realm.

(snip)

Jonson’s interest in Roman modes of memorialization, particularly their connection to his poetic legacy, did not begin with the triumphal arches In the two years leading up to the procession, he completed the Roman tragedy _Sejanus, HIS FALL_. Rather

than a poetic precursor such as Virgil or Horace, Jonson’s literary role model for the play as well as his primary source was the historian Cornelius Tacitus. History’s highest function in Tacitus’s works is “to let no worthy action be
uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity to evil words and deeds.” This philosophy aligned perfectly with both Jonson’s approach to composition and the criteria by which he felt his works should be judged.

********************************
*Idolatrous Italianate Ciceronians*

Homosociality, Imitation, and Gendered Reading in Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor

Kevin L Gustafson. Philological Quarterly

Gabriel Harvey provides a particularly illuminating example of this argument because he was a contemporary (though hardly a friend) of Greene, and because his Ciceronianus (1577) offers a brief history of Ciceronian debates up to the middle of the

sixteenth century, even while presenting the author as a repentant idolater.47 Harvey follows Jerome's letter in confessing to a prodigality in which he "virtually preferred to be elected to the company of the Ciceronians rather than to that of the
saints."48 But now, having digested the arguments of the anti-Ciceronians Erasmus and Peter RAMUS, he claims to have a more balanced view. Cicero is still "the eldest son and indeed heir of Eloquence," and thus most worthy of imitation, but one who also
has faults and is best imitated when exceeded.49 For Harvey, as for Ramus, true imitation like true friendship is an exercise dedicated to appreciating and cultivating "all of his virtues and conduct and character [virtutisfundamentuni], rather than
merely mimicking affect or style.50 Here again rhetorical imitation bears a striking resemblance to the appreciation and cultivation of virtue in theories of friendship, and the Elizabethan scholar casts this transformation in language directly
reminiscent of Quintilian's characterization of imitation as a kind of desire: "To me Cicero was always Cicero, and eloquence, eloquence; but now more than ever my mind, fired with unprecedented ardor and love, not merely expects but promises something
greater than Cicero in Cicero himself."51 The reformed Harvey will take what is best from a variety of sources and, following Erasmus and Ramus, redefine "Ciceronian" so that it refers not exclusively to the orator but instead to any writing that is "
excellent and in conformity with the most careful usage of speech and thought."52 Harvey's journey of rhetorical reformation traverses a gap between what he elsewhere calls "CURIOUS universall scholars" and "superficial humanists,"53 or the broadly
educated orator versus the less-desirable rhetor, who is "highly trained and polished in the single faculty of eloquent speech."54 There is throughout Harvey's work a tension between SCHOLARSHIP and COURTIERSHIP, and in a quite telling move he
characterizes the singular concern with style as a KIND OF EFFEMINACY, derisively saying, "Let the little ladies hold sway in the classroom."55 Harvey's ability to police imitation through gender categories only underscores the pervasive and largely
tacit homosociality of the work. The Ciceronianus, like the Rhetor that immediately followed it, began as a university lecture in Latin addressed to students as well as fellow scholars, and both treatises were dedicated to academic friends.

Ciceronis Amor initially may seem far removed from Harvey's academic polemics. Yet Greene's fiction is equally concerned with the twin discourses of friendship and imitation-equally concerned to mark proper and improper ways of loving Ciceronian

eloquence.

(snip)

The letter that Cicero writes on behalf of Lentulus (57-58), and that Greene subsequently translates for his English readers, is the central document in this drama of rhetorical desire. Relihan adduces this episode of women reading as singular evidence

that Ciceronis Amor advocates the antimisogynist position that women are just as capable as men of participating in humanist culture. On closer inspection, the scene appears much more ambivalent in its attitude towards women readers. The letter is of
course a common feature of amatory writing, and Greene here no doubt expected his audience to have Ovid in mind. Nor is there anything particularly unusual about two Roman ladies reading Latin, which is of course their native tongue. What is striking is
that, much like the Ciceronian derided by Harvey, they respond foremost, even exclusively, to its style, the pleasing surface that may lead to but does not necessarily correspond to Ciceronian virtue. Flavia first correctly attributes the letter to
Cicero based on its style. Terentia, however, goes no further, as she becomes enflamed with desire for a man she has never met: "Ah Tullie, sweete Tullie, from whose mouth flows mélodie more enchaunting then the sirens" (66). Greene has already referred
to the Sirens to suggest the dangers of other-sex desire, sensuality that Parker associates with not only woman's body but also woman's speech. Here the reference indicates a particularly sensual way of reading, and as such highlights a disjunction-
between Cicero's motives for eloquence and Terentia's reception of it-that is even more noticeable later in the story, when he tries to persuade Terentia to accept Lentulus: "This discourse of Tully did but sette Terentias herte more on fire. For hearing
the pleasant harmony of hir Cicero, shee likt of the musicke as of the Syrens melody, and so entangled her selfe with many newe conceived fancies" (102). Rhetoric here is in a profound sense at cross-purposes for the two characters. Cicero's act of
writing the letter exemplifies the ideal that true eloquence is subordinated to virtue, in this case the devotion and self-sacrifice that, in De amicitia, characterize true friendship. Her emotional reception of it, by contrast, resembles the stylistic
infatuation of the *idolatrous Italianate Ciceronian* and looks forward to the stereotype of the mad and oversexed woman reader of Jacobean city comedy.62

****************************

Jonson, _Discoveries_

Periodi.—Obscuritas offundit tenebras.—Superlatio.—Periods are beautiful when they are not too long; for so they have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin. As we must take the care that our words and sense be clear, so if the obscurity

happen through the hearer’s or reader’s want of understanding, I am not to answer for them, no more than for their not listening or marking; I must neither find them ears nor mind. But a man cannot put a word so in sense but something about it will
illustrate it, if the writer understand himself; for order helps much to perspicuity, as confusion hurts. (Rectitudo lucem adfert; obliquitas et circumductio offuscat. [116a]) We should therefore speak what we can the nearest way, so as we keep our gait,
not leap; for too short may as well be not let into the memory, as too long not kept in. Whatsoever loseth the grace and clearness, converts into a riddle; the obscurity is marked, but not the value. That perisheth, and is passed by, like the pearl in
the fable. Our style should be like a skein of silk, to be carried and found by the right thread, not ravelled and perplexed; then all is a knot, a heap. There are words that do as much raise a style as others can depress it. Superlation and over-
muchness amplifies; it may be above faith, but never above a mean. It was ridiculous in Cestius, when he said of Alexander:

“Fremit oceanus, quasi indignetur, quòd terras relinquas.” [117a]

But propitiously from Virgil:

“Credas innare revulsas
Cycladas.” [117b]

He doth not say it was so, but seemed to be so. Although it be somewhat incredible, that is excused before it be spoken. But there are hyperboles which will become one language, that will by no means admit another. As Eos esse P. R. exercitus, qui cæ

lum possint perrumpere, [118a] who would say with us, but a madman? Therefore we must consider in every tongue what is used, what received. Quintilian warns us, that in no kind of translation, or metaphor, or allegory, we make a turn from what we began;
as if we fetch the original of our metaphor from sea and billows, we end not in flames and ashes: it is a most foul inconsequence. Neither must we draw out our allegory too long, lest either we make ourselves obscure, or fall into affectation, which is
childish. But why do men depart at all from the right and natural ways of speaking? sometimes for necessity, when we are driven, or think it fitter, to speak that in obscure words, or by circumstance, which uttered plainly would offend the hearers. Or to
avoid obsceneness, or sometimes for pleasure, and variety, as travellers turn out of the highway, drawn either by the commodity of a footpath, or the delicacy or freshness of the fields. And all this is called εσχηματισμενη or figured
language.

Oratio imago animi.—Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech.

Nay, it is likened to a man; and as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound structure, and harmony of it.

Jonson
Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; And is a swelling, and the last affection a high mind can put off; being both a rebel unto the soul and reason, and enforceth all laws, all conscience, treads upon religion, *and offereth violence to **Nature'

s** self*.

*************************************

note - in his translation of Horace's 'Art of Poetry', Jonson translates 'Minerva' as 'Nature'.

He is loth to make Nature afraid in his Plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries, to mix his Head with other Mens Heels; let the concupiscence of Jigs and Dances reign as strong as it will amongst you: yet if the Puppets

will please any body, they shall be entreated to come in. (Jonson, _Bartholomew Fair_)

*************************************

All action is of the MIND and the mirror of the mind is the FACE, its index the eyes.-- Cicero

Act II Scene iii
I can refell that Paradox of those, which hold the face to be the Index of the minde, which (I assure you) is not so, in any politique creature:[1601 , Jonson Cynthia's Revels - Amorphus the Deformed]

Cf. [Cicero Orator lx.] ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi, *the face is a picture of the mind* as the eyes are its interpreter; L. vultus est index animi (also oculus animi index), the face (also, eye) is the index of the mind. [my note –

disproportionate Droeshout]

**************************
CURIOUS UNIVERSAL SCHOLARS:

Amorphus/Oxford

For, let your Soul be as- sur'd of this (in any rank, or profession whatever) the
more general, or major part of Opinion goes with the
Face, and (simply) respects nothing else. Therefore
if that can be made exactly, CURIOUSLY, EXQUISITELY,
thorowly, it is enough. (Jonson, Cynthia's Revels)

*****************************
Gendered Style:

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.

************************************

"Style is the man":
The Virility of Conversation

What is the relationship between the classical proposition that a man's literary style must be like his life and the early modern investment in table talk, or conversation, as an arena for social advancement? The topic of stylistic manliness,

disparaging by contrast an effeminate decay in modern oratory, is pervasive in classical literature; examples that elaborate upon it are Persius' first satire, the preface to the first book of the elder Seneca's declamations, and the younger Seneca's
114th epistle to Lucilius. The topic was revived, in relation to both Latin and vernacular prose, by Renaissance humanists. In a brilliant recent essay, Patricia Parker has analyzed the literature of this revival and the way in which it expresses "a
desire for a more 'masculine' or virile style," a style "linked to the metaphorics of the male body in its prime." Parker deftly unpacks the key opposing terms in this debate over style: the first term is*nervus*, a word that, as well as meaning "sinewy"
or muscular, also connoted the male sexual member; and the second is *mollis*, "soft," a word associated in Roman culture both with women and with the male "pathic," the man who desired to be penetrated by other men. One of her objectives in discussing
this "massively influential Latin tradition" is to engage with the gender politics of what has been the central contention of prose studies of the English Renaissance - that is, the argument that a seventeenth-century reaction against the Ciceronian
excesses of sixteenth-century English prose pave the way for the rise of a scientific "plain style." If the concept of stylistic virility is above all marked by a certain conflation of body and language, however, a rather different historical development
might come to mind as its more probable outcome. I am thinking of the well-attested emergence, in the early modern period, of the phenomenon known as "CIVIL CONVERSATION," according to which the arts of polite discourse become newly central to the
acquisition and expression of Social status. And yet the problem for any examination of the relationship between "virile style" and "civil conversation" is, of course, that conversation (in our modern sense of informal exchanges of speech) simply cannot
be recovered as a practice. Even the social historians whose work provides compelling evidence of conversation's new centrality necessarily derive their evidence from the period's theoretical literature - from conversation manuals. More perplexing, it
would seem that, if there were a relationship between the prescriptive literature of early modern CIVIL CONVERSATION and a classically derived discourse of "VIRILE STYLE" in literary prose, such a relationship could only be one of OPPOSITION. How else
could the discourse Parker describes as privileging deeds over words, and disparaging linguistic excess as effeminate, coexist with a conduct literature that makes manliness (for Renaissance conversation manuals are, primarily, addressed to men) depend
on the ability to converse with ease, fluency, and confidence?

*******************************

Languet to Sidney, Nov 14, 1579

...Now I will treat you frankly, as I am accustomed to do, for I am sure our friendship has reached a mark at which neither of us can be offended at any freedom of the other. It was a delight to me last winter to see you high in favour and enjoying the

esteem of all your countrymen; but to speak plainly, the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek for a reputation more by a kind of affected courtesy than by those
virtues which are wholesome to the state and which are most becoming to generous spirits and to men of high birth. I was sorry therefore, and so were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life on such things, and I feared lest
that noble nature of yours should be dulled, and lest from habit you should be brought to take pleasure in pursuits which only ENERVATE the mind.

If the arrogance and insolence of Oxford has roused you from your trance, he has done you less wrong than they who have hitherto been more indulgent to you. But I return to my subject...

********************************
Effeminate/Distaff Hercules:

Reviewed work(s): Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship. Patrick Cheney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxv+296.

Douglas Bruster

Cheney extends the significance of this biographical episode by reading it alongside the curious “Achilles” stanza in 1594’s The Rape of Lucrece (lines 1422–28).1 In this stanza, part of a larger sequence in which Shakespeare portrays Lucrece

looking at a painting of Troy, Achilles is represented by “his spear, / Grip’d in an armed hand, himself behind / Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind” (lines 1424–26). Exploring Shakespeare’s fairly idiosyncratic attention to the spear of
Achilles and its reputation for being able to both “kill and cure” (2 Henry VI  5.1.101), Cheney argues that this stanza in Lucrece is a particularly good example of a “signature” moment in Shakespeare’s works, a passage in which “
Shakespeare signs his name to Achilles” (53) and in which—owing to its emphasis on an uncannily present-yet-absent figure—we can sense an emblem of Shakespearean authorship itself. To Cheney’s persuasive gathering of intertextual references for
this interpretation one might add a line that his study overlooks, from John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe (1584)  : “Wil you handle the SPINDLE with Hercules, when you shuld SHAKE the SPEARE with Achilles?”2 If Shakespeare pushed the elements of
his last name to their most playful extremes, then, he found the terms already in the Elizabethan air.

*************************************
Idle Hours/Graver Labour

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 toidleness 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 Sindey 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)

***************************************

Return from Parnassus

Ingenioso My pen is your bounden vassal to command;
but what vein would it please you to have them in?

Gullio Not in a VAIN vein (titters at own joke; Ingenioso
feebly joins in) Pretty, i'faith! - make me them in two or
three diverse veins,(Ingenioso scribbles notes frantically) in
Chaucer's, Gower's and Spencer's, and - (Ingenioso
shudders, knowing what's coming) Mr Shakespeare's.
Marry, I think I shall entertain those verses which run like
these:

Euen as the sun with purple-coloured face
Had ta'en his last leave on the weeping morn, etc.

Ingenioso (mocking) Sweet Mr. Shakespeare!

Gullio: Oh sweet Mr. Shakespeare, I’ll have his picture in my study at the Courte

Gullio: Let the duncified worlde esteeme Spenser and Chaucer, I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare.

*************************************
Harvey, Speculum Tuscanismi

Since Galatea came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,

In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.

*************************************
Sidney as the picture of 'True Nobility":
From 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)

*********************************
Author: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. ]
Title: Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent
Date: 1640
Achilles his concealement of his Sex in the Court of Lycomedes.

NOw from another World doth saile with joy,
A welcome daughter to the King of Troy,
The whilst the Gr[...]cians are already come,
(Mov'd with that generall wrong 'gainst Islium:)
Achilles in a Smocke, his Sex doth smother,
And laies the blame upon his carefull mother,
What mak'st thou great Achilles, teazing Wooll·
When Pallas in a Helme should claspe thy Scul[...]?
What doth these fingers with fine threds of gold?
Which were more fit a Warlike Shield to hold.
Why should that right hand, Rocke or Tow containe,
By which the Trojan Hector must be slaine?
Cast off thy loose vailes, and thy Armour take,
And in thy hand the *Speare of Pellas shake*.
Thus Lady-like he with a Lady lay,
Till what he was, must her belly bewray,
Yet was she forc't (so should we all beleeve)
Not to be forc't so· now her heart would grieve:
When he should rise from her, still would she crie·
(For he had arm'd him, and his Rocke laid by)
And with a [...]ft voyce spake: Achilles stay,
It is too soone to rise, lie downe I pray,
And then the man that forc't her, she would kisse,
What force (Delade[...]a) call you this?

Pelias hasta – spear of Achilles (shaft grown on mount Pelion)

*****************************************
Mocking Oxford’s “Sublime/Admirable” Ciceronian Style:

Gabriel Harvey and Oxford

http://www.elizabethanauthors.org/harvey101.htm
In 1578 the Queen visited Cambridge, accompanied by the whole Court. Harvey met the procession at Audley End, presented verses written in their honor.

The following address, in Latin, was presented to Lord Oxford (trans. by Ward).

An heroic address to [Oxford], concerning the combined utility and dignity of military affairs and of warlike exercises.

This is my welcome; this is how I have decided to bid All Hail!
to thee and to the other Nobles.
Thy splendid fame, great Earl, demands even more than in the case of others the services of a poet possessing LOFTY ELOQUENCE.
Thy merit doth not creep along the ground,
nor can it be confined within the limits of a song.
It is a WONDER which reaches as far as the heavenly orbs.
O great-hearted one, strong in thy mind and thy fiery will,
thou wilt conquer thyself, thou wilt conquer others;
thy glory will spread out in all directions beyond the Arctic Ocean;
and England will put thee to the test and prove thee to be native-born ACHILLES.
Do thou but go forward boldly and without hesitation.
Mars will obey thee, Hermes will be thy messenger,
Pallas striking her shield with her spear shaft will attend thee,
thine own breast and courageous heart will instruct thee.
For long time past Phoebus Apollo has cultivated thy mind in the arts. English poetical measures have been sung by thee long enough.
Let that Courtly Epistle —
more POLISHED even than the writings of Castiglione himself —
witness how greatly thou dost excel in letters.
I have seen many Latin verses of thine, yea,
even more English verses are extant;
thou hast drunk deep draughts not only of the Muses of France and Italy,
but hast learned the manners of many men, and the arts of foreign countries. It was not for nothing that STURMIUS himself was visited by thee;
neither in France, Italy, nor Germany are any such cultivated and POLISHED men.
O thou hero worthy of renown, throw away the insignificant pen, throw away bloodless books,
and writings that serve no useful purpose; now must the sword be brought into play,
now is the time for thee to sharpen the spear and to handle great engines of war.
On all sides men are talking of camps and of deadly weapons; war and the Furies are everywhere,
and Bellona reigns supreme.

Now may all martial influences support thy eager mind, driving out the cares of Peace.
Pull Hannibal up short at the gates of Britain. Defended though he be by a mighty host,
let Don John of Austria come on only to be driven home again. Fate is unknown to man,
nor are the counsels of the Thunderer fully determined.
And what if suddenly a most powerful enemy should invade our borders?
If the Turk should be arming his savage hosts against us?
What though the terrible war trumpet is even now sounding its blast?
Thou wilt see it all; even at this very moment thou art fiercely longing for the fray.
I feel it. Our whole country knows it.
In thy breast is noble blood, Courage animates thy brow, Mars lives in thy tongue,
Minerva strengthen thy right hand, Bellona reigns in thy body, within thee burns the fire of Mars.
Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes a spear;
who would not swear that ACHILLES had come to life again?

[continued in next message]

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Saturday, January 22, 2022 at 7:22:43 PM UTC-5, Dennis wrote:

Hollow Praise: Raising an Empty Monument from Oxford’s Ruin

In 1605 Francis Bacon published his “Advancement of Learning”, and it is from his discussion of the three ‘distempers’ of learning that I take much of the matter of the following posting in an effort to establish that at the heart of the

authorship problem lies the ‘age old’ dichotomy of style and substance, or words and matter/things (verba and res):

THERE be therefore chiefly three vanities in studies, whereby learning hath been most traduced. For those things we do esteem vain, which are either false or frivolous, those which either have no truth or no use: and those persons we esteem vain, which

are either credulous or curious; and curiosity is either in matter or words: so that in reason as well as in experience, there fall out to be these three distempers (as I may term them) of learning; the first, fantastical learning; the second,
contentious learning; and the last, delicate learning; vain imaginations, vain altercations, and vain affectations; and with the last I will begin. (Bacon)

The key word in this passage that I would like to highlight and develop in terms of the authorship dispute is the word ‘VANITY’. In particular the purported ‘vanity’ of the Earl of Oxford in both his person and his rhetorical practices, and how

disparagement of the Earl corresponds to the ‘vain’ monument of hollow praise that Jonson constructs at the front of the First Folio as an empty figuration of the ‘vain’ author ‘Shake-speare’...

*****************************

Idolatrous Italianate Ciceronians - Crows and Apes of Cicero:

Gabriel Harvey, Rhetor
On Art.

Can anyone be an artist without art? Or have you ever seen a bird flying without wings, or a horse running without feet? Or if you have seen such things, which no one else has ever seen, come, tell me please, do you hope to become a goldsmith, or a

painter, or a sculptor, or a musician, or an architect, or a weaver, or any sort of artist at all without a teacher? But how much easier are all these things, than that you develop into a supreme and perfect orator without the art of public speaking.
There is need of a teacher, and indeed even an excellent teacher, who might point out the springs with his finger, as it were, and carefully pass on to you the art of speaking colorfully, brilliantly, copiously. But what sort of art shall we choose? Not
an art entangled in countless difficulties, or packed with meaningless arguments; not one sullied by useless [31] precepts, or disfigured by strange and foreign ones; not an art polluted by any filth, or fashioned to accord with our own will and judgment;
not a single art joined and sewn together from many, like a quilt from many rags and skins (way too many rhetoricians have given this sort of art to us, if indeed one may call art that which conforms to no artistic principles). We want rather an art
that is concise, precise, appropriate, lucid, accessible; one that is decorated and illuminated by precise definitions, accurate divisions, and striking illustrations, as if by flashing gems and stars; one that emerges, and in a way bursts into flower,
from the speech of the most eloquent men and the best orators. Why so? Not only because brevity is pleasant, and clarity delightful, but also so that eloquence might be learned in a shorter time, and with less labor and richer results, and so that it
might stand more firmly grounded, secured by deeper roots. For thus said the gifted poet in his Ars Poetica: "Whatever instruction you give, let it be brief." Why? [32] He gives two reasons: "So that receptive minds might swiftly grasp your words and
accurately retain them." And indeed, as the same poet elegantly adds: "Everything superfluous spills from a mind that's full."

(snip)
But those annual whistles and shouts I hear indicate that almost all, or at least the greater part of my auditors are newcomers, who do not understand what they should do or whom they should imitate, but who nonetheless are captivated by the splendor

of rhetoric, and seek to be orators. Therefore I will now, if I am able, reveal those things and place them all in their view, in such a way that they might seem to see them with their eyes, and almost hold them in their hands. In the meantime I pray you,
most eloquent and refined gentlemen, either withdraw, if you like, or with the kindness that you've shown so far hear me as I recite some precepts so common as to be almost elementary. And from those whose tongues and ears Cicero alone inhabits, I beg
forgiveness, if by chance I let drop in my haste a word that is un-Ciceronian. We cannot all be Longeuils and Cortesis: [9] some of us don't want to be. As for those who study more Latin authors, but only the best and choicest, and who to accompany
Cicero, the foremost of all, add Caesar, Varro, Sallust, Livy, Seneca, Terence too, and Plautus and Vergil and Horace, I am sure they will be sympathetic to me. For reading as I do many works by many authors, sometimes even the poets, as Crassus bids in
Cicero, I cannot guarantee that in so impromptu an oration I will not use a word not found in a Ciceronian phrase book.

But those little CROWS and APES of CICERO were long ago driven from the stage by the hissing and laughter of the learned, as they so well deserved, and at last have almost vanished; and I now hope to find not only eager and attentive auditors, but

friendly spectators as well, not the sort who scrupulously weigh every individual detail on the scales of their own refined tastes, but who interpret everything in a fair and good-natured way. I too in fact wanted, if I was able--but perhaps I was not--
to speak in as Ciceronian a style as the Ciceronianest of them all. [10] Forgive me, illustrious Ciceronians, if I ought not use that word in the superlative.

***************************************

Greene's Groatsworth:

With thee I ioyne yong Iuuenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastlie with mee together writ a Comedie. Sweete boy, might I aduise thee, be aduisde, and get not many enemies by bitter wordes: inueigh against VAINE men, for thou canst do it, no man better,

no man so wel: thou hast a libertie to reprooue all, and none more; for one being spoken to, all are offended, none being blamed no man is iniured. Stop shallow water still running, it will rage, or tread on a worme and it will turne: then blame not
Schollers vexed with sharpe lines, if they reproue thy too much libertie of reproofe.

And thou no lesse deseruing than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferiour; driuen (as my selfe) to extreme shifts, a little haue I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oth, I would sweare by sweet S. George, thou art vnworthy

better hap, sith thou dependest on so meane a stay. Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned: for vnto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleaue: those Puppets (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks
garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case that I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not:
for there is an vpstart CROW, BEAUTIFIED with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to BOMBAST out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit
the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: & let those APES imitate your past excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions. I know the best husband of
you all will neuer proue an Usurer, and the kindest of them all will neuer seeke you a kind nurse: yet whilest you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subiect to the pleasure of such rude groomes.

In this I might insert two more, that both haue writ against these buckram Gentlemen: but let their owne works serue to witnesse against their owne wickednesse, if they perseuere to mainteine any more such peasants. For other new-commers, I leaue them

to the mercie of these PAINTED MONSTERS, who (I doubt not) will driue the best minded to despise them: for the rest, it skils not though they make a ieast at them.

****************************************

Sidney , Defense

...But let this be a sufficient, though short note, that we misse the right use of the material point of Poesie. Now for the outside of it, which is words, or (as I may tearme it) Diction, it is even well worse: so is it that HONY-FLOWING Matrone

Eloquence, apparrelled, or rather disguised, in a Courtisanlike PAINTED AFFECTATION. One time with so farre fet(ched) words, that many seeme monsters, but must seeme Straungers to anie poore Englishman: an other time with coursing of a letter, as if they
were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary: an other time with figures and flowers, extreemely winter-starved. But I would this fault were onely peculiar to Versefiers, and had not as large possession among Prose- Printers: and which is to be
mervailed among many Schollers, & which is to be pitied among some Preachers. Truly I could wish, if at I might be so bold to wish, in a thing beyond the reach of my capacity, the diligent Imitators of TULLY and DEMOSTHENES (note - Tully/Cicero);
Demosthenes, most worthie to be imitated, did not so much keepe Nizolian paper bookes, of their figures and phrase, as by attentive translation, as it were, devoure them whole, and make them wholly theirs. For now they cast SUGAR and SPICE uppon everie
dish that is served to the table: like those Indians, not content to weare eare-rings at the fit and naturall place of the eares, but they will thrust Jewels through their nose and lippes, because they will be sure to be fine.

******************************
Sidney Sonnet II

Let DAINTY wits crie on the Sisters nine,
That, BRAVELY MASKT, their fancies may be told;
Or, Pindars APES , flaunt they in PHRASES FINE,
Enam'ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold;
Or else let them in statlier glorie shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problemes old;
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbes or beasts which Inde or Affrick hold.
For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know,
Phrases and problems from my reach do grow;
And strange things cost too deare for my poor sprites.
How then? euen thus: in Stellaes face I reed
What Loue and Beautie be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

***************************************
Erasmus, “Apes of Cicero,” and Conceptual Blending
Kenneth Gouwens
(snip)

...the portrayals of apes even in the Adages of 1508 [note – Erasmus] could have done little positive for the animals’ image. In explaining the proverb “An ape is an ape, though clad in gold,” Erasmus retells Lucian’s story about an Egyptian

king who taught some monkeys to dance, MASKED AND ATTIRED IN SCARLET. Initially compelling, the performance fell apart when a spectator scattered nuts before the apes, who ceased dancing and fought over them. (...) Another adage, “Hercules and an ape,�
� highlights a more insidious aspect of simian nature, the capacity to hoodwink: whereas “Hercules excels in strength,” the “ape’s power lies in sneaky tricks.” But if monkeys are ridiculous and tricky in and of themselves, in the 1508 edition
they more often serve the purpose of holding the mirror up to human folly. Thus the proverb “A donkey among apes” is taken to describe how someone dull-witted falls in among “satirical and insolent people” who mock their hapless victim with
impunity. More seriously, as one sees in the adage “An ape in purple,” the deception may consist in a veneer of cultured elegance that camouflages, albeit incompletely, a foulness beneath. The phrase can be applied, says Erasmus, to those “whose
true nature, though they may be wearing very fine clothes, is obvious from their expression and character,” as well as “to those who have some inappropriate dignity thrust upon them, or when something nasty in itself is unsuitably decked out with
ornament from some unconnected or external source.

.....Already in 1508, Erasmus occasionally likens apes to pseudo-intellectuals. Thus the adage “No [aged] monkey was ever caught in a trap” is “often applied to clever and slippery talkers who cannot be caught out.” Similarly, “a painted

monkey,” which refers directly to an ugly old woman made up like a prostitute, can also illustrate and idea: for example, “if someone dresses up an immoral argument with rhetorical trappings so that it seems honest.” The two remaining images from
1508 point to the simian as unable even to approach the boundary that separates it from the human. Erasmus glosses “the prettiest ape is hideous” as referring to “things which are intrinsically defective, and by no means to be compared with even
the lowest specimens of the class of things that possess any merit...” And “The tragical ape” appears to be practically a simulacrum of the human: “Ape, like manikin, is the word for what is scarcely a man and more like a pale copy of one...”

.....In subsequent expansions, Erasmus adds further shading to some of these adages, directing their thrust at scholars of the type lampooned in the _Ciceronianus_. Whereas in 1508 the gloss of “An ape in purple” ended with the observations “What

could be more ridiculous?” the 1515 edition continues: “And yet this is a thing we quite often see in a household where they keep monkeys as pets: they dress them up with plenty of finery to look as much like human beings as possible, sometimes even
in purple, so as to deceive people who do not look carefully or have seen nothing like it before...” Erasmus now ends the gloss by turning around the comparison: “How many apes of this kind one can see in princes’ courts, whom you will find, if you
strip them of their purple, their collars and their jewels, to be no better than any cobbler!” Importantly, in this addendum Erasmus refers to apelike courtiers with the rare masculine form (simios), which he would use consistently when ridiculing “
apes of Cicero” in the Ciceronianus.

****************************
Poetaster, Jonson

Caesar. We have, indeed, you worthiest friends of Caesar.
It is the bane and torment of our ears,
To hear the discords of those jangling rhymers,
That with their bad and scandalous practices
Bring all true arts and learning in contempt.
But let not your high thoughts descend so low
As these despised objects; LET THEM FALL,
With their flat grovelling souls: be you yourselves;
And as with our best favours you stand crown'd,
So let your mutual loves be still renown'd.
Envy will dwell where there is want of merit,
Though the deserving man should crack his spirit.
Blush, folly, blush; here's none that fears
The wagging of an ass's ears,
Although a WOLFISH CASE he wears.
Detraction is but baseness' varlet;
And APES are APES, though clothed in SCARLET. [Exeunt].

Rumpatur, quisquis rumpitur invidi! [MARTIAL – LET ENVIOUS POETS BURST] *****************************

On Poet Ape – only Shakespearean sonnet in Jonson’s 1616 Epigrams

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 in 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 after-times
⁠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!

****************************************
Amorphus/Oxford:

English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime – Patrick Cheney

In Cynthia’s Revels [or The Fountain of Self-Love], near the beginning of his career (first printed 1600), Jonson uses the word twice, both surrounding the figure of Amorphus, described by Mercury in Act 2, scene 3 as ‘a traveller, one so made out

of the mixture and shreds of forms that himself is truly deformed’ (66-7). In other words, Amorphus is a figure of transport, and his composition, made up of ‘forms’ that are ‘deformed’, takes us into what we have previously described as
Kantian territory. Amorphus is that sublime figure of form that has none (curiously akin to Marlowe’s Helen of Troy), accommodated to the Jonsonian public sphere, where Amorphus’ ‘adaptability and social versatility is a form of shapelessness which
links the literal metamorphoses of Echo, Narcissus, and Acteaon, and the cultural ones of Asotus and others’ in the action of the play. (Rassmussen and Steggle).

In using the word ‘sublimated’, Amorphus stands before the Fountain of Self-Love, having just conversed with Narcissus’o ne-time beloved, the beautiful nymph Echo – who has just abandoned Amorphus – when Jonson’s figure of formless form

steps forth to take the plunge: ‘Liberal and divine fount, suffer my profane hand to take of they bounties’. Intoxicated by ‘most ambrosiac water’, he broods why the beguiling feminine potency of the well should accept him but Echo turn her heel:

Knowing myself an essence so sublimated and refined by travel, of so studied and well-exercised a gesture, so alone in fashion, able to make the face of any statesman living, and to speak the mere extraction of language…; to conclude, in all so happy

as even admiration herself does seem to fasten her kisses upon me; certes I do neither see, nor feel, nor taste, nor savour the least steam or fume of a reason that should invite this foolish fastidious nymph so peevishly to abandon me. (1.3.24-35;
emphasis added)

Amorphus speaks the alchemical language of sublimity but adapts it to his personal identity – his ability to transport himself into a heightened state of ‘language’ that attracts the erotic ‘admiration’ of others – in an appropriately

comical language of hyperbolic elevation.

Specifically, Amorphus engages in narcissism by vaunting his self-knowledge: ‘travel’ refines and ‘sublimate[s]’ his ‘essence’ into a quintessence of gold, and such sublimity underwrites his social and political theatre, during which he can

‘make the face of any statesman living’, as Jeremy Face will do to London citizens in the Alchemist. Sublime transport here is not transcendent but political and social, the Protean self enlivened, capable of adapting to exigency, endlessly. Self-
consciously, Jonson makes comically sublime theatre out of a comically sublime theatrical character. We might even see here an impressive staging of the kind of comical hyperbole discussed by Longinus in On Sublimity, which is one form that the sublime
can take: ‘acts and emotion which approach ecstasy provide a justification for, and an antidote to, any linguistic audacity. This is why comic hyperboles, for all their incredulity, are convincing because we laugh at them so much…Laughter is emotion
in amusement’.

(snip)
Jonson’s linking of sublimity with a character named ‘Amorphus’ merits pause, because this agile figure looks like a photographic negative of Jonson himself. Without question, the author-figure in Cynthia’s Revels is Criticus (called Crites in

the Folio edition), ‘the poet-scholar’ of “Judgement’ who ‘represents Jonson’s literary, philosophical, and ethical ideals’ (Bednarz, Shakespeare & The Poets’ War 159-60), and who becomes the play’s arch-enemy to Amorphus and the motley
crew of corrupt courtiers, Hedon, Anaides, ad Asotus. According to James Bednarz, Amorphus is a figure who represents ‘Deformity’ and the ‘lack of true conviction’, and who becomes enamoured of a nymph who happens to be named Phantaste or ‘
fantasy’ (159-600. In these terms, the project of the play is to ‘replac[e]…the rhetoric of “nature’ and “instinct” staged in Marston’s Jack Drum with the sterner interdictions of “art” and “judgement” in a larger “allegory of
self-knowlledge’ (160). According to Bednarz, Marston had rejected Jonson’s rational, judgemental poetics in favour of one based on imaginative instinct, which Jonson then shows to be purged of cultural authority.

Nonetheless, as Rasmussen and Steggle write, Amorphus ‘prefigures Jonson’s later tricksters’ in being ‘at the centre of the play’s action due to his energy and inventiveness, both verbal and physical’. Rasmussen and Steggle go so far as to

see Amorphus as akin to Jonson himself: ‘biographically Jonson is more like Amorphus than Criticus’, citing Jonson’s ‘experiences in foreign travel’ and his ‘natural charisma and drive’. Even ‘Amorphus’s weaknesses (lack of money and
tendency to exaggerate) are close to those of Jonson;. Wisely, Rasmussen and Steggle caution against ‘claim[ing] that Amorphus “is” Jonson, or even to over-allegorize the tension between Amorphus and his nemesis Criticus’ (eds. 1:435); but they
do help us see that the figure of Amorphus qualifies as a *sublime counter-Jonsonian author-figure*. (pp. 220-1)

*****************************

Jonson, _Cynthia's Revels_.

AMORPHUS. And there's her minion, Crites: why his advice more than Amorphus? Have I not invention afore him? Learning to better
that INVENTION above him? and INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVEL --

*****************************
Southern, Pandora (1584)

SUMMARY: Ode to Oxford in John Southern’s Pandora, The Music of the Beauty of his Mistress Diana. The title page gives the publication date as 20 June 1584. The language of the ode was criticized by George Puttenham in Book III, Chapter 22 of his Art

of English Poesy, published in 1589. Puttenham also accused Southern of plagiarism, saying: ‘Another of reasonable good facility in translation, finding certain of the hymns of Pindarus and of Anacreon’s odes and other lyrics among the Greeks very
well translated by Ronsard, the French poet, & applied to the honour of a great prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a great nobleman in England (wherein I commend his
reverent mind and duty), but doth so impudently rob the French poet both of his praise and also of his French terms that I cannot so much pity him as be angry with him for his injurious dealing’.

To the right honourable the Earl of Oxenford etc.

(snip)

Epode

No, no, the high singer is he
Alone that in the end must be
Made proud with a garland like this,
And not every riming novice
That writes with small wit and much pain,
And the (God’s know) idiot in vain,
For it’s not the way to Parnasse,
Nor it will neither come to pass
If it be not in some wise fiction
And of an ingenious INVENTION,
And INFANTED with PLEASANT TRAVAIL,
For it alone must win the laurel,
And only the poet WELL BORN
Must be he that goes to Parnassus,
And not these companies of asses
That have brought verse almost to scorn.

*************************************

Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie (1589)

CHAP. XXII.

Some vices in speaches and {w}riting are alwayes intollerable, some others now and then borne {w}ithall by licence of approued authors and custome. (snip)

Another of your intollerable vices is that which the Greekes call Soraismus, & we may call the [mingle mangle] as when we make our speach or writinges of sundry languages vsing some Italian word, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Scottish, not for

the nonce or for any purpose (which were in part excusable) but ignorantly and affectedly as one that said vsing this French word Roy, to make ryme with another verse, thus.

O mightie Lord or ioue, dame Venus onely ioy,

Whose Princely power exceedes ech other heauenly roy.

The verse is good but the terme peeuishly affected Another of reasonable good facilitie in translation finding certaine of the hymnes of Pyndarus and of Anacreons odes, and other Lirickes among the Greekes very well translated by Rounsard the French

Poet,

&
applied to the honour of a great Prince in France, comes our minion and translates the same out of French into English, and applieth them to the honour of a GREAT NOBLE MAN in ENGLAND (wherein I commend his reuerent minde and duetie) but doth so

impudently robbe the French Poet both of his prayse and also of his French termes, that I cannot so much pitie him as be angry with him for his iniurious dealing (our sayd maker not being ashamed to vse these French wordes freddon, egar, superbous,
filanding, celest, calabrois, thebanois and a number of others, for English wordes, which haue no maner of conformitie with our language either by custome or deriuation which may make them tollerable. And in the end (which is worst of all) makes his
vaunt that neuer English finger but his hath toucht Pindars string which was neuerthelesse word by word as Rounsard had said before by like braggery. These be his verses.

And of an ingenious INVENTION, INFANTED WITH PLEASANT TRAVAILE.

¶3.22.7 Whereas the French word is enfante as much to say borne as a child, in another verse he saith.

I {w}ill freddon in thine honour.

***********************************

1601 Quarto - Cynthia's Revels Or The Fountain of Selfe Love, Jonson

Act IV, Sc. V

Amorphus

And there’s her Minion Criticus; why his advise more then Amorphus? Have I not Invention, afore him? Learning, to better that Invention, above him? And Travaile.

*************************************

1616 Folio, Jonson

Act IV, Sc V

Amorphus

And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention, afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----

*************************************

1640 Folio, 'Works' Jonson

Amorphus

And there’s her minion Crites! Why his advice more then Amorphus? Have not I invention afore him? Learning, to better that invention, above him? And infanted, with pleasant travaile ----

************************************

ULYSSES-POLITROPUS-AMORPHUS - Cynthia's Revels

Politropus/Polytropus

Polytropos means much-turned or much-traveled, much-wandering. It is the defining quality of Odysseus, used in the first line of the Odyssey and at 10.330. As used by Hippias with respect to Odysseus (365b) it includes being false or lying and carries

the connotations of wily and shifty. Antisthenes, a follower of Socrates who wrote Socratic dialogues, also argued against the claim that Homer meant to blame Odysseus by calling him polytropos; Antisthenes claims that it is praise for being "good at
dealing with men...being wise, he knows how to associate with men in many ways." See Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.121-24.

**************************************

Oxford and the Fountain of Self-Love:

Mario DiGangi, Male Deformities’: NARCISSUS and the Reformation of Courtly Manners in Cynthia’s Revels in Ovid and the Renaissance Body

...Narcissus himself [...] never even appears during the course of the play. however, the corrupting Fountain of Self-love, the emblematic source of narcissism introduced at the very beginning of the play, seems to be a permanent fixture at Cynthia's

court, for no mention is made of its ultimate destruction or purification. for Jonson's audience, the survival of the symbolically cominant fountain of Self-love might well have presaged that narcissistic manners would continue to deform the individual
bodies of courtiers as well as the collective body of the court. With the benefit of historical hindsight, we can regard the Fountain's endurance as a sign of the ideological conflict over elite male comportment that would continue to be waged, in early
modern England, as the legacy of Narcissus.

(snip)
By the time Jonson wrote Cynthia's Revels, the Narcissus myth had developed an extended, complex, cultural legacy. Traditional medieval and Renaissance moral commentaries on Ovid generally explained Narcissus's error as the 'folly of loving an IMAGE.'

Arthur Golding's influential 1567 translation of The Metamorposes, for instance, moralizes the myth as a 'mirror' of VANITY and pride: 'Narcissus is of scornfulnesse and pryde a myrror cleere,/ Where beawties fading VANITIE most playnly may appeere.'

************************************
Alciato's Book of Emblems

Emblem 69

Self-love

Because your figure pleased you too much, Narcissus, it was changed into a flower, a plant of known senselessness. Self-love is the withering and destruction of natural power which brings and has brought ruin to many learned men, who having thrown away

the method of the ancients seek new doctrines and pass on nothing but their own fantasies.

***********************************

The Arrogance and Insolence of Oxford – Hubert Languet to Sidney:

Publique Ill Example: Oxford appears UNNAMED as Sidney's proud and intemperate ADVERSARY in Greville’s _A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney_(originally published as _Life of Sidney_)

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