In The Beginning There Was Terror

Machiavelli's return to the beginning means return to the primeval or original terror which precedes every man-made terror, which explains why the founder must use terror and which enables him to use terror. Machiavelli's return to the beginning means return to the terror inherent in man's situation, to man's essential unprotectedness. In the beginning there was terror. In the beginning men were good, i.e. they were willing to obey because they were afraid and easily frightened. The primacy of Love must be replaced by the primacy of Terror if republics are to be established in accordance with nature and on the basis of knowledge of nature.

Leo Straus, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 167

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net

Leo Strauss On The Heart Of The Surface Of Things

I have been reading Leo Strauss' Thoughts On Machiavelli.

Strauss reminds us that Marlowe had Machiavelli say on stage that,

"I hold there is no sin but ignorance".

Here is Strauss' own deep insight into the surface of things that must have left him free of all stain of ignorance:

"There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for granted or otherwise despising the obvious and surface. The problem inherent in the surface of things, is the heart of things."

David Hurley
http://english-renaissance.net

Who Will Rid Me Of This Turbulent Step-Son?

The word "turbulent" occurs only three times in Shakespeare, once in Timon of Athens, once in Pericles, and once in Hamlet, when Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,

And can you by no drift of circumstance
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

Claudius is, of course, referring to Hamlet, on whom he has commissioned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy - to no effect as it transpires.

When Claudius refers to hamlet's apparent condition as a "turbulent and dangerous lunacy," we are inevitably put in mind of Henry the Second's alleged description of Thomas Becket as a "turbulent" priest when he is said to have cried out:

Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?

Henry II, or the Tragedy of Thomas Becket is one of the great plays that Shakespeare never wrote, perhaps because the subject would have been too much of an ideological and confessional hot potato, but the use of the word "turbulent" in Act III Scene i of Hamlet is surely no accident when we consider that Claudius, like Henry, wants to neutralize a subject who is near him by blood or affection, and yet who is resisting the royal will and therefore becoming unreadable, unpredictable, willful and "dangerous".

David Hurley
http://english-renaissance.com

Montaigne Used Pyrrhonian Scepticism To Undermine Ficino's Doctrine Of Melancholic Inspiration

"Madness, good, bad, or merely medical, underlies a great deal of Renaissance thought, worship, morals, literature and humour... Aristotle believed that many madmen, and all geniuses, were melancholic, an assertion he explained with the help of Plato: he took the inspiration of the true genius to be one of the good 'manias' which Socrates praised in the Phaedrus - a form of extatic madness closely allied to the raptures experienced by seers, prophets, poets and lovers." M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy.

The Greek word for mania was translated as "furor" by the Romans and its range includes both the mad fury of Hercules, who slaughtered his children, and the mad fury of Ajax, convenient in combat and battle but disastrous elsewhere.

The doctrine of melancholic inspiration was introduced into Italy by Gemistus Pletho and transmitted by Marsiglio Ficino (1433-1499) in the court of Cosimo de' Medici.

The most famous and admired examples of melancholic inspiration were Socrates and Plato, who were held by many a scholar to be enlightened pagans on a par with the saints or even, in the case of Socrates, according to Erasmus (no less), prefigurations of Christ.

Montaigne (1533-1592), however, was able to take advantage of the discovery and translation into Latin of the Hypotyposes of Pyrrho, an outline of the doctrines of the sceptical philosophy of the Greek philosopher, Pyrrho, which was published by Henricus Stephanus in Geneva in 1562, in order to undermine the Ficinian doctrine that claimed an equal status for the inspirations of the enlightened pagans with the extacies of the Christian mystics.

The influence of both Ficino and Montaigne were felt in England during the period we know as the English Renaissance, and themes of scepticism and melancholy reoccur in the plays of Shakespeare. Hamlet is the prime example.

David Hurley
http://english-renaissance.net

A Rat Behind An Arras - No Pun Intended?

I was giving a short talk on the Bayeux Tapestry to a class the other day and mentioned that another word for "tapestry" is "arras". It was then that, while one part of my mind looked after the waffle about the Bayeux Tapestry, the other went wandering off to Denmark... It reasoned with itself thus:

"Wasn't it an arras behind which Polonius hid when Hamlet entered his mother's boudoir? And when Hamlet heard him didn't he cry "A rat!", and couldn't it be that Shakespeare was deliberately punning?"

Later, when I looked up the passage, this is what I found:

POLONIUS [behind the arras]. What, ho! help, help, help!

HAMLET [draws]. How now, a rat? dead, for a ducat, dead.

He makes a pass through the arras

POLONIUS [falls]. O, I am slain!

QUEEN. Oh me,what hast thou done?

HAMLET. Nay, I know not,

Is it the king?

He lifts up the arras and discovers Polonius, dead

QUEEN. O what a rash and bloody deed is this!

HAMLET. A bloody deed - almost as bad, good mother,

As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

QUEEN. As kill a king!

HAMLET. Ay, lady, it was my word....

[to Polonius] Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!

The word "arras" is never spoken, it is simply a stage direction. If the direction was written by Shakespeare perhaps the word "arras" made an impression on him that found its expression in the choice of words later on in the passage. Happily, the pun, if it is a pun, is not made explicit for the audience by having Hamlet or his mother make mention of the arras itself.

David Hurley

English-Renaissance.net

Ficino's Theory of Love in The Pheonix & the Turtle

In the ninth verse of The Pheonix and the Turtle, Shakespeare wrote:

So betweene them Love did shine,
That the Turtle saw his right,
Flaming in the Pheonix sight;
Either was the other's mine

In his Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Ficino had written on the effect of love, about a century before Shakespeare:

When you love me, you contemplate me, and as I love you, I find myself in your contemplation of me; I recover myself, lost in the first place by [my] own neglect of myself, in you, who preserve me. You do exactly the same in me. And then this, too, is remarkable: that after I have lost myself, if I recover myself through you, I have myself through you, and if I have myself through you, I have you sooner and to a greater degree than I have myself. - translated by S. R. Jayne, 1944.

Pico Della Mirandola wrote in A Platonick Discourse Upon Love:

"Thus the Heart dyes in the flames of Intellectual Love, yet consumes not, but by death "grows greater", receives a new and more sublime life. - translated by E. G. Gardner, 1914.

Source: John Arthos, Shakespeare's Use of Dream and Vision, London, 1977.

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net

The Tension Between A Magical And An Empirical View Of Man

This afternoon, I finished the eighth chapter of C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, titled "Rule and Misrule in Henry IV". The chapter is polished off with a splended paragraph which crackles with insights that both sum up and point beyond the discussion just concluded.

"Historically, Shakespeare's drama can be seen as part of the process by which our culture has moved from absolutist modes of thought towards a historical and psychological view of man. But though the Renaissance moment made the tension between a magical and an empirical view of man particularly acute, this pull is of course always present: it is the tension between the heart and the world. By incarnating ritual as plot and character, the dramatist finds an embodiment for the heart's drastic gestures while recognizing how the world keeps comically and tragically giving them the lie."

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net

Each Man Was His Name And The Role His Name Implied

I have nearly finished C. L. Barber's, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. I came across a remarkable passage today, on the 210th page which refers to the way in which the Elizabethans thought about the relation between a man and the name of the role he performed in the "divinely ordained pageant" of this world.

The Elizabethans, explains Barber, tended to see no division between the man and the name, so that

"each man was his name and the role his name implied."

This point of view immediately put me in mind of a passage in the Analects where Confucius expresses his horror that something which has more than three corners might be called a "three cornered box":

"He said, 'The three cornered box does not have three corners! What sort of a three-cornered box is that?'"

Confucius taught that there should be a universal concord between things and names, signifieds and signifiers, and that people should fulfil the roles that their names implied. He believed the times he lived in had degenerated from that ideal and called for "cheng ming", or "the rectification of names".

Immediately before that passage, Barber wrote something which put me in mind of a very different school of thought from that of Confucius, namely recent and contemporary advocates of PMA (positive mental attitude), such as W. Clement Stone, Jim Rohn, or Jerry Clark:

"...when you have to act, to be somebody or become somebody, there is a moment when you have to have faith that the unknown world will respond to the names you commit yourself to as right names."

Then, immediately after having me flip between ancient Chinese and modern American wisdom, Barber throws in an arresting apercu about what social dynamic it was that Elizabethan drama was developed to express nearly 450 years ago. Elizabethan drama was,

"an art form developed to express the shock and exhilaration of the discovery that life is not pageantry."

Who but the dull would say that reading literary criticism is dull?

Here is the whole admirable passage for your further edification:

When we analyze the magical substitution of words for things... [in Richard II], it seems scarcely plausible that a drama should be built around the impulse to adopt such an assumption. It seems especially implausible in our own age, when we are so conscious, on an abstract level, of the dependence of verbal efficiency on the social group. The analytical situation involves a misleading perspective, however; for, whatever your assumptions about semantics, when you have to act, to be somebody or become somebody, there is a moment when you have to have faith that the unknown world will respond to the names you commit yourself to as right names.* The Elizabethan mind, moreover, generally assumed that one played one's part in a divinely ordained pageant where each man was his name and the role his name implied. The expression of this faith, and the outrage of it, is particularly drastic in the Elizabethan drama, which can be regarded, from this vantage, as an art form developed to express the shock and exhilaration of the discovery that life is not pageantry.

* Professors Theodore Baird and G. Armour Craig are credited "for this way of seeing the relation of names to developing situations."

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net

Shakespeare's Comic And Tragic "Amen Amen"

In the brief sixth scene of the second act of Romeo and Juliet, while Romeo and Friar Laurence await the arrival of Juliet, Friar Laurence offers offers up this orison, expressive of a certain anxiety about the clandestine nature of the marriage ceremony:

"So smile the heavens upon this holy act,
That after hours with sorrow chide us not!"

Romeo responds with an emphatic double "Amen":

Amen, amen! but come what sorrow can,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight:
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare;
It is enough I may but call her mine.

In Act Two Scene Two of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia says to Lysander:

Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end!

Lysander replies with the emphatic doubled "amen", but how different the tone from that of Romeo:

Amen, amen, to that fair prayer, say I;
And then end life when I end loyalty!
Here is my bed: sleep give thee all his rest!

Lysander's "Amen, amen" is expressive of an emphatic agreement; he entirely concurs with Hermia's "fair prayer" and goes on to complement it with a thought that commences with "And...".

Romeo's "Amen, amen", is of an entirely different order. It is expressive of his impulsive spirit, of an impatience for the friar's more cautious hopes and fears. "Amen, amen" is not followed by any further expression of concord, as with Lysander's "sweet prayer", and instead of a soft "and..." we are brought up sharply by a hard "but..."

Lysander offers a pledge of loyalty with all personal irony and the foolish bravado of the absolute lover; but it is essentially a life-affirming bravado that loyalty and life shall end together, since there is no doubt in Lysander's mind that he shall always be loyal, as indeed, when he is in his own mind, he is.

Romeo's bravado is darker in tone. Whereas Lysander speaks gaily of ending his "life" without any expectation of such an circumstance arising. Romeo sets up a connection between "love" and "death" that reoccurs throughout the play and leads him headlong to disaster.

Whatever critics might write about how the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is flawed because it depends on a contrivance of the plot (the mislaid letter), it is Romeo's tragic flaw of character which undoes him; his precipitous folly, his courtship of death, death which fascinates his "misgiving" mind as much as the dream of Queen Mab captivates Mercutio's.

The two plays are connected, of course. In both plays a pair of lovers struggle against parental authority. "The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby" may be seen as a farcical version of Romeo and Juliet. C. L. Barber comments in his penetrating study, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy,

"A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play in the spirit of Mercutio: the dreaming in it includes the knowledge "that dreamers often lie." The comedy and tragedy are companion pieces: the one moves away from sadness as the other moves away from mirth."

The doubled "amen" occurs six times in Shakespeare's plays. Apart from Coriolanus, in which it appears twice, "Amen amen" occurs once in each of the following plays:

Two Gentlemen of Verona
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Romeo and Juliet
King John
Coriolanus

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net

Extracts from Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, by C. L. Barber

Here are some extracts from my current reading of C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy that I found of particular interest, either because of what was written or how it was written, or, best of all, both together.

"No figure in the carpet is the carpet. There is in the pointing out of patterns something that is opposed to life and art, an ungraciousness which artists in particular feel and resent." (p. 4)

"In a self-conscious culture, the heritage of cult is kept alive by art which makes it relevant as a mode of perception and expression. The artist gives the ritual pattern aesthetic actuality by discovering expressions of it in the fragmentary and incomplete gestures of daily life. He fulfills these gestures by making them moments in the complete action which is the art form. The form finds meaning in life.

"This process of translation from social into artistic form has great historical as well as literary interest. Shakespeare's theatre was taking over on a professional and everyday basis functions which until his time had largely been performed by amateurs on holiday. And he wrote at a moment when the educated part of society was modifying a ceremonial, ritualistic conception of human life to create a historical, psychological conception. His drama, indeed, was an important agency in this transformation: it provided a "theatre" where the failures of ceremony could be looked at in a place apart and understood as history; it provided new ways of representing relations between language and action so as to express personality. In making drama out of rituals of state, Shakespeare makes clear their meaning as social and psychological conflict, as history. So too, with the rituals of pleasure, of misrule, as against rule: his comedy presents holiday magic as imagination, games as expressive gestures. At high moments it brings into focus, as part of the play, the significance of the saturnalian form itself as a paradoxical human need, problem and resource." (p. 15)

"Shakespeare, coming up to London from a rich market town, growing up in the relatively unselfconscious 1570's and 1580's and writing his festive plays in the decade of the 90's, when most of the major elements in English society enjoyed a moment of reconcilement, was perfectly situated to express both a countryman's participation in holiday and a city man's consciousness of it." (p. 17)

"Separation of feeling from function is at the root of perversity and lust." (p. 24)

"...the golden age of English literature - that brief moment when, as C. S. Lewis observes, the obvious was entirely satisfying." (p. 83)

"When the forms for serious meaning are inevitable, received from accepted tradition, the comic reapplication of them need not be threatening. People so situated can afford to turn sanctities upside-down, since they will surely come back rightside up. It is when traditions are in dispute, when individuals or groups are creating new forms and maintaining them against the world, that it becomes necessary for those who "build the lofty rhyme" to be on guard against the "low"." (p. 83)

David Hurley
English-Renaissance.net