Palladius to the max

Wilson Rare Books Library, Chapel Hill, NC. Click to enlarge.

I'm not going to say this was the sole reason for my choice, but look at it, folks.

Brushes with fame

Long ago at Princeton, Allen Ginsberg stepped on my professor's head.

"How did this happen?" I asked the friend who told me.

"He was lying on the floor, apparently, and Ginsberg just stepped on his head. Ginsberg was like, 'I'm so sorry!' and he was like, 'No, really, don't worry about it.'"

I'd write more, but how could I?

Good or bad 'tis all one, I never heard you commend anything

One of the drawbacks to talking to yourself as you leave your room: The repairman hears you say, "There's no point in writing something if it isn't a fucking act of catharsis."

I don't even think that's true. For that matter, I'm not sure that writers are entitled to any of the catharsis they provide their audience--not according to Aristotle, at least. But my thesis is rather cathartic, despite its dusty topic. And I was talking about my thesis. I just shouldn't have been talking out loud.

March 9 is International Fop Day

SIR FOPLING. An Intrigue now would be but a Temptation to me, to throw away that Vigour on one, which I mean shall shortly make my Court to the whole Sex in a Ballet.
--The Man of Mode

I may ride the elephant if I please, sir

From a friend who studies gangster films:

"There have been very successful types of art in the past which developed such specific and detailed conventions as almost to make individual examples of the type interchangeable. This is true, for example, of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Restoration comedy."
--Robert Warshow, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," 1948.

Then we discussed whether the cinematic gangster could be compared to the rake. Perhaps! Think about it: the desire for singularity, the lust for power, the scorn for social mores...

I'm now trying to write about Etherege's The Man of Mode, one of my two favorite plays in the world (tied with Stoppard's The Invention of Love). Oh, God, it's so good. Not good by the standards of Restoration comedy, but good by the standards of Great Literature. So good I can scarcely bring myself to analyze it. (Last night at dinner, my friend cackled at my announcement that "The Man of Mode is the Übermensch of Restoration comedies.")

Take this exchange between Dorimant, the cynical rake-aesthete, and his friend Young Bellair, the callow romantic. The subject of their gossip is Mrs. Loveit, Dorimant's longtime mistress, whom he is anxious to shake off:

YOUNG BELLAIR. I am confident she loves no man but you.

DORIMANT. The good fortune were enough to make me vain, but that I am in my nature modest.

On hiatus until my ship comes in.

Only in academe

Professor: What's your middle name again? Hope? Joy?

Me: Hope.

Professor: You're getting me used to the idea that hippies should be allowed to procreate.

I should not be awake

I just used the phrase "locus amoenus" in my thesis. Some kind of frontier has been crossed, but I'll have to get back to you on what kind.

From this week's NYRB personals: "POUTING POETESS, 35, seeks philandering philanthropist able to stump up. London, England." You speak for us all, sister.

I need more caffeine and more myrmidons.

Administrivium

I've elected to make this blog a little less RED RED RED, even if that is how the Restoration appears in my head (that, or a tasteful dusty pink). But is pale gray really the best alternative? Do advise.

ETA: Blue? Is it too blue?

Let's take him to the Mulberry-Garden, and see what the ladies can do

My favorite passage in all of Restoration drama:

Estridge. If thou knew'st once the pleasure of such a sprightly Girl as Olivia, the kind quarrels, the fondness, the pretty sullenness after a little absence, which must be charm'd out of it with Kisses, and those thousand other Devises that make a Lovers happiness; thou wou'dst think all this as easie, as lying a bed in the Country in a rainy morning.

Though this one comes close:

Olivia. The only way to oblige most men is to use 'um thus, a little now and then; even to their faces; it gives 'um an Opinion of our wit; and is consequently a Spur to theirs: the great pleasure of Gaming were lost, if we saw one anothers hands; and of Love, if we knew one anothers Hearts.

--Charles Sedley, The Mulberry-Garden, 1668

Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed

There are three main schools of Valentine's Day philosophy. The first line of thought--generally propounded by people in love--holds that love is glorious, and that roses, truffles, diamonds, and Cupids are perfect emblems thereof. The second school dresses in black and mutters about commercialism; the third urges us all to Love Ourselves.

Then there's the historical view of the holiday: take Samuel Pepys's diary entry from Feb. 14, 1661. (Sir William Batten, born in 1600, was Pepys's superior at the Naval Board; "Mrs. Martha" was his spinster daughter; Mingo was his black servant. According to the DNB, "Pepys grew to detest Batten and supposed the feeling to be reciprocated. Batten was certainly infuriated by Pepys telling him his business, not least because the younger man was so often right." But forget that, for now.)

"14. Valentine's Day. Up earely and to Sir W. Battens. But would not go in till I had asked whether they that opened the door was a man or a woman. And Mingo, who was there, answered 'a Woman;' which, with his tone, made me laugh.

"So up I went and took Mrs. Martha for my Valentine (which I do only for complacency), and Sir W. Batten, he goes in the same manner to my wife. And so we were very merry.

"About 10 a-clock we with a great deal of company went down by our barge to Deptford; and there only went to see how forward Mr. Pett's yacht is. And so all into the barge again, and so to Woolwich on board the Rosebush, Captain Brown's ship, that is brother-in-law to Sir W. Batten - where we had a very fine dinner dressed on shoare. And great mirth and all things successefull - the first time I ever carried my wife a-shipboard - as also my boy Waineman, who hath all this day been called 'young Pepys', as Sir W. Pen's boy 'young Pen'.

"So home by barge again; good weather, but pretty cold."

I like this version of the holiday, because it doesn't imply that you must spend the day with your One True Love. The unmarried Martha Batten would have had a worse time of it in 2009 (though Pepys found her unpleasant, and refused to be her Valentine in 1662). And it's nice to see the skirt-chasing Pepys taking part in such an innocent tradition.

(Do you have any idea how hard it is to find Restoration images online? Google always thinks I mean furniture restoration. And, yes, I know that Vien is far too late and Titian is far too early. My long seventeenth century is very long, okay?)

Is it just me, or should there be a rap album called Master of the Revels?

Man differs more from man, than man from beast

In the past few days, I've checked here once in a while, thinking, "Maybe I've updated recently." That sort of thing never works.

Anyway, a happy bicentennial to Charles Darwin, neither a rake nor a fop, but still worthy our praise. The first lines of Rochester's "Satire Against Reason and Mankind" seem especially apt for the occasion:

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose, for my own share,
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal
Who is so proud of being rational.

And, later:

You see how far man's wisdom here extends;
Look next if human nature makes amends:
Whose principles most generous are, and just,
And to whose morals you would sooner trust.
Be judge yourself, I'll bring it to the test:
Which is the basest creature, man or beast?
Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey,
But savage man alone does man betray.
Pressed by necessity, they kill for food;
Man undoes man to do himself no good.
With teeth and claws by nature armed, they hunt
Nature's allowance, to supply their want.
But man, with smiles, embraces, friendship, praise,
Inhumanly his fellow's life betrays;
With voluntary pains works his distress,
Not through necessity, but wantonness.
For hunger or for love they fight or tear,
Whilst wretched man is still in arms for fear.

Queering the Restoration, Part II

Very high on my list of sentences I thought I'd never write:

"Blurring the line between heroism and homoerotics, Lovis recasts the female Britannia as a 'drooping' phallus."

It has the advantage of being true, but the handicap of being painfully silly. Oh, well.

Queering the Restoration (only half-ironically)

Resolved: My life would be better if I had myrmidons.

If I had myrmidons, I wouldn't be roaming the queer-theory section of the stacks on a Saturday night, searching for HQ76.3.E8 Q44 1994. "You," I'd say to the nearest myrmidon. "Yes, you, with the gold lace-up sandals. Please bring me every book you can find on early-modern homoeroticism."

"I don't know," the myrmidon would say. "I think that's a job for a minion."

In other news:

LOVIS. He does his blood for a lost mistress spend;
And shall I not die for so brave a friend?

LOVIS offers to fall on his sword, but is hindered by SIR FREDERICK.

SIR FREDERICK. Forbear, sir; the frolic's not to go round, as I take it.
--George Etherege, The Comical Revenge (1664)

No one on the corner has swagger like us

Am I wrong to detect parallels between rap and Restoration comedy? The flagrant foppery, the sexual one-upmanship, the serious themes swathed in plain silliness?

(Or am I just obsessed with M.I.A.?)

The charmer you disdain

Too busy writing about the Restoration to write about it, or something. Suffice to say that the semester has begun. In the meantime, have a classic Restoration lyric:

Farewell ungrateful traitor,
Farewell my perjured swain,
Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.
The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing,
But 'tis too short a blessing,
And love too long a pain.

'Tis easy to deceive us
In pity of your pain,
But when we love you leave us
To rail at you in vain.
Before we have descried it,
There is no bliss beside it,
But she that once has tried it
Will never love again.

The passion you pretended
Was only to obtain,
But when the charm is ended
The charmer you disdain.
Your love by ours we measure
Till we have lost our treasure,
But dying is a pleasure,
When living is a pain.

--John Dryden (from The Spanish Friar, 1681)

Our friend L. C. Knights describes this song as a masterpiece of "music-hall sentiment," but he was writing at a time when the Metaphysicals were in fashion. I'm very fond of the song, though I confess that the Restoration was a bad time for most poetry, except epigrams, satires, and Paradise Lost.

Attack of the Parliamentary Swamp-Thing

In 1651, an anonymous royalist published an anti-Parliament playlet called The Terrible, Horrible Monster Out of the West. Even better than The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus (1654), or A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (1660).

I wonder if Judith Viorst, author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, had a previous life as a Restorationist. Probably not.

In matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be

On the phone with my thesis adviser this evening:

"Would it be unconscionable if I quoted a 30-page prologue in full at the beginning of my essay?"

"A 30-page--!"

"I mean, I could break it up into smaller pieces, but I don't think my argument would be as clear that way."

"30 pages?"

"Sorry! 30 lines!"

"Oh, that's fine. On the long end of acceptable, but fine. I was thinking, 30 pages--!"

"Oh, God! I'm very tired."

"All right, all right, dear."

This evening is brought to you--well, more properly, to me--by The Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," because every thesis needs a theme song. I would also like to congratulate AD on her expert drawings of the back of my head. Tempus fugit. Back to work.

The life of a thesis drone

The best part of writing an honors thesis on Restoration comedy is being allowed to read 30-page articles about fops. Or is that the worst part? The senior who devotes a year to the genre has more or less declared her allegiance to the absurd. It's hard to persuade anyone that characters called Lord Foppington and Sir Fopling Flutter are to be taken seriously. Frankly, if you told Vanbrugh and Etherege that their work had inspired dozens of scholarly studies, they would laugh until they cried.

Over winter break, two friends and I were working, or "working," on our theses in a coffeehouse. One friend was reading about postcolonialism; another was studying theories of consciousness. I was giggling my way through Etherege's She Would if She Could. My friends glanced up from their articles, and I tried to explain the joke: "So there's this knight, Sir Oliver Cockwood--"

I'm afraid I got no further before we dissolved into hysterics.

More by Sedley

To Gaurus
That thou dost shorten thy long Nights with Wine,
We all forgive thee, for so Cato did;
That thou writ'st Poems without one good Line,
Tully's Example may that Weakness hide;
Thou art a Cuckold, so great Caesar was;
Eat'st till thou spew'st, Antonius did the same;
That thou lovst Whores, Jove loves a bucksom Lass;
But that th'art whipt, is thy peculiar Shame.

To Sergius
Thou'lt fight, if any Man call Thebe Whore;
That she is thine, what can proclaim it more.


Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701) was one of Charles II's infamous "court wits," as renowned for his obscenity as for his epigrams. In 1663, he was arrested for appearing naked on a balcony and throwing bottles of his own urine onto the crowd gathered below, a gimmick that didn't take a Voltaire to contrive (or perform, for that matter). Five years later, Sedley hired thugs to beat up the actor Edward Kynaston for impersonating him in a play. This episode appears in Richard Eyre's hilarious Stage Beauty (2004), though Richard Griffiths, inexplicably, plays Sedley as a dirty old man.

So far as we know, he never became a dirty old man. In fact, he reformed with age. In 1687, he inspired the best description of impotence ever written, in a letter from Etherege to Dryden:

"I am apt to think that you have 'bated something of your mettle since you and I were Rivalls in other matters, tho' I hope you have not yet attain'd the perfection I have heard Sir Charles Sydlie brag of, which is that when a short youth runs quick through every veine and puts him in minde of his ancient prowesse, he thinks it not worth while to bestow motion on his et cetera muscle."

To Scilla

Storm not, brave Friend, that thou hadst never yet
Mistress nor Wife that others did not swive,
But, like a Christian, pardon and forget,
For thy own Pox will thy Revenge contrive.

--Sir Charles Sedley

A friend suggests that this epigram should be inscribed on every free condom at our Health Center.

Put a roasted Orange slasht smoking hot in it

If you want a bottomless fount of obscenity and hilarity, look no further than the Restoration slang lexicon. Restoration readers were obsessed with the lingo of thieves and gypsies, and this craze generated a series of seventeenth-century Urban Dictionaries. I have EEBO to thank for bringing me The New Dictionary of the Canting Crew, a 1699 lexicon plagiarized, appropriately enough, from a similar book published 20 years before. (From the earlier version, Joyce took the slang song in Ulysses: "White thy fambles, red thy gan,/And thy quarrons dainty is.")

It seems almost criminal not to transcribe the whole thing, but I must restrain myself. Some of my favorites, A through C (plus one necessary D):

Abram-men,
the seventeenth Order of the Canting-crew. Beggers antickly trick'd up with Ribbands, Red Tape, Foxtails, Rags, &c. pretending Madness to palliate their Thefts of Poultrey, Linnen, &c.

Academy,
a Bawdyhouse, also an University, or School to learn Genteleman like Exercises.

Alabaster,
mixt by all the knavish Perfumers with the Hair-Powder they sell, to make it weigh heavy, being of it self very cheap, that their Gain may be the greater, found destructive to the Hair and Health.

Arsworm,
a little diminutive Fellow.

Auxiliary-beauty,
Dress, Paint, Patches, setting of Eye-brows, and licking the Lipps with red.

Banter,
a pleasant way of prating, which seems in earnest, but is in jest, a sort of ridicule, What do you banter me? i. e. do you pretend to impose upon me, or to expose me to the Company, and I not know your meaning.

Bear-garden-discourse,
common, filthy, nasty Talk. If it had been a Bear it would have bit you, of him that makes a close search after what just lies under his Nose. As good take a Bear by the Tooth, of a bold desperate Undertaking. Go like the Bear to the Stake, or hang an Arse. As many tricks as a dancing Bear· or more than are good.

Beard splitter,
an enjoyer of Women.

Cabob,
a Loin of Mutton Roasted with an Onyon betwixt each joint; a Turkish and Persian Dish but now used in England.

Click,
to Snatch. I have Clickt the Nab from the Cull, c. I whipt the Hat from the Man's Head. Click the rum Topping, c. Snatch that Woman's fine Commode.

Conger,
a Set or Knot of Popping Book-sellers of London, who agree among themselves, that whoever of them Buys a good Copy, the rest are to take off such a particular number, as (it may be) Fifty, in Quires, on easy Terms. Also they that joyn together to Buy either a Considerable, or Dangerous Copy. And a great over-grown Sea-Eel.

Cracker,
an Arse; also Crust.

Crusty-beau,
one that lies with a Cover over his Face all Night, and uses Washes, Paint, &c.

Damask the Claret,
Put a roasted Orange slasht smoking hot in it.

Every woman is at heart a rake

Because I am an incurable fop, and because no blog is complete without a healthy dose of vanity. Taken last March, in Venice, of course.

(Note for future Grand Tours: Only Americans wear khakis and white button-downs.)

Visited the library today for a collection of essays by L. C. Knights, twentieth-century critic-at-large, who died 12 years ago at the age of 91 (these long-lived Englishmen!). He helped found the take-no-prisoners literary journal Scrutiny, and, according to the DNB, "enjoyed pronouncing the title ‘Scrrrutiny’, with its suitably rasping sound." Back in 1934, in an essay called "Shakespeare and the Shakespeareans," he outlined precisely what I despise about modern literary criticism:

"Mr. [T. S.] Eliot is the only contributor to the book [A Companion to Shakespeare Studies] to ask, or imply, the important question, 'Why should we read what has been written about Shakespeare?' And this, of course, in a world of obvious and urgent duties and distractions, involves some further questions: 'Why should we read Shakespeare? Why should we read poetry at all?' If a centralizing conception of poetry and its function is lacking in this book, this is not because it is by fourteen different writers, but because Shakespeare studies, in common with other intellectual pursuits, have suffered from the decay of a unifying tradition - have, in consequence, lost their life in becoming a specialism, or a collection of specialisms, with their own codes and standards. Whilst the tradition was alive, the answers to our questions were implicit within it. Some of the eighteenth-century critics were unimportant enough, but almost any paragraph of their work implies a social and moral world; and their appeal is to this world, not to 'workers in the same field.'"

This was 75 years ago; one can only imagine what Knights would say about today's academy. How odd that so many scholars agree with him, and not one can figure out how to alter the status quo.

(Knights also dismissed Restoration comedy as "trivial, gross, and dull," but no critic is perfect.)

Ask me not of love, for every man hates every man perfectly and women are still the same bitches.

--John Dryden to George Etherege, 1687

Sic incipio

I am not a Restorationist; I am too young, callow, and frivolous to be an -ist of any sort. I am merely a college senior with a healthy crush on the English Restoration, the span of time between Charles II's coronation in 1660 and his death in 1685. (For the benefit of faulty memories everywhere, Charles was kind enough to live and die in multiples of five.) After a decade of civil war, and another of Puritan rule (Cromwell closed the theaters and banned Christmas), England saw a cultural explosion: plays, poems, periwigs, perversion. Public morality relaxed. Women acted on the stage for the first time. Courtiers danced naked in gardens. Scientists like Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren founded the Royal Society (though they kept their clothes on). And Samuel Pepys wrote it all down.

The 1660s were a bit like the 1960s (hence my nod to The Who), and the Restoration produced the same cultural backlash: by 1700, it was no longer fashionable to smash windows and write poems about impotence. The aging rake, like the aging hippie three centuries later, became a common trope in fiction: feeble and syphilitic, nostalgic for the debauches of his youth. Restoration literature fared even worse at the hands of the Victorians, and suffered from scholastic prudery well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1920s, the editors of Etherege and Wycherley hinted that these dramatists had longed to write about daisies and rainbows, but alas! fashion had compelled them to be lewd.

Tastes have changed since then, but Restoration literature was so underrated for so many decades that almost no one reads it today. The average English major will be lucky to encounter one Restoration comedy in four years. In the unlikely event that she takes the GRE Lit, she'll have to memorize a few dull catchphrases: "war between the sexes," "comedy of manners," "social mobility." This can't go on.

But why should I care? you ask. My job is to give you an answer.

So what can you expect from this blog? I'd class my offerings under the humble label of stuff: poems, epigrams, letters, images, scraps of plays, self-indulgent screeds. It might be fun. We'll see.