Literatura y crítica

Ezra Pound

martes, 18 de octubre de 2016

Ezra Pound

(from American Literature: A History—by Hans Bertens and Theo d'Haen; Routledge, 2014)

The driving force behind the renewal of English-language poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century was Ezra Pound (1885-1972). As of 1908 Pound spent most of his life in Europe, first in London (until 1920), then in Paris (until 1925) and finally in Italy.

For Pound the writer was the guardian of language: his task was to keep it sharply honed. Great liteature to Pound was 'simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.' Pound was resolutely international in orientation, and for him all of the world's literature(s) formed one organic body. What was important to him, then, was to distinguish between what from this enormous mass was worth preserving, studying and teaching, especially to other, younger writers, and what was not. This explains why Pound spent so much of his time and energy on didactical and theoretical essays, as well as on composing anthologies. It also explains why his entire life he continued to be an avid and prodigious translator—or 're-creator', as some of his critics prefer to call him because of his very idiosyncratic views on translation—from Italian, French, Greek and Chinese. In the end, these very same principles also underpin Pound's magnum opus The Cantos.

 Pound started his poetic career around 1905 as a rather traditionalist epigone of the English decadent poets and the earlier Pre-Raphaelites, Robert Browning and the medieval troubdours. In a dramatic monologue, Pound has an Italian or Provençal troubadour open a window upon his era. However, via these 'personae' he also voices his own opinions. A brilliant example of this technique, as well as of Pound's translation and re-creation methods, is the long multi-part 'Hommage to Sextus Propertius' (1917), in which he uses the Roman poet to lambast the England of World War I.

In London Pound got to know the English writers Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme. From them he borrowed the idea that a poem should be a dry, hard language object, and that the language of poetry should depart 'in no way from speech, save by a heightened intensity'. For Pound this meant that a poem should dispense with all unnecessary elements. The result was a movement that Pound himself in 1912 baptized 'Imagism', and which saw a poem as 'planes in relation', as the juxtaposition of images. The meaning of an Imagist poem results from the relationship that the reader discerns as obtaining between these images. The classical illustration of this theory is Pound's own 'In a Station of the Metro':

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

(1913, 1916)

Pound uses a semicolon at the end of the first line, thus leaving the two images unrelated in the work itself. It is left to the reader to discover, or to posit himself, a relation between the two, or not. With a colon the poem would have amounted to a simple affirmation: these faces are like petals, etc. With a full stop, the images would necessarily have remained separate. A simple comma would have made the second line a non-restrictive appositive to the faces in the first line, and would thus again have enforced a specific relationship betwen the two lines. Early in his carreer Pound became acquainted with the theories of the American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), positing that Chinese characters were ideograms, stylized reproductions of the objects they represented. For Pound this meant that in Chinese writing characters were linked to one another through association and not, as in Western languages, through grammatical constructions indicating the precise relationships obtaining. Most of these ideas have since been discredited by scholars of Chinese, but for Pound they furnished the basis for his own associative poetic technique of juxtaposition and of planes in relation. For instance, the two lines that make up 'In a Station of the Metro' contain no verb, which reinforces the effect also invited by the use of the semicolon we pointed out before: because there is no clear grammatical relation between the two lines it is left to the reader to forge his own interpretation.

Pound's investment in Imagism as a movement was short-lived, as he quickly moved on to what he called 'Vorticism', a loose avant-garde circle around the Magazine Blast (1914-15). In many ways, though, Pound's idea of Vorticism simply entailed a further development of Imagism, as we can gather from his own definition that the image is 'a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can and must perforce, call a VORTEX, form which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing'.

As of 1915 Pound started looking for ways to apply his Imagist principles to the writing of longer poems. In techniques that were also becoming very popular in other arts—collage and montage, the juxtaposition of fragments, often consisting of truncated quotations from other earlier works, sudden temporal and perspectival shifts—Pound saw possibilities to extend his principle of 'planes in relation' to larger units. The first work in which he successfully applied a number of these techniques was 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' (1920). At the same time he also again made use of a persona. The result was an ironic and bitter reflection on Pound's own literary career until then, and on the London literary scene upon which he was at the verge of turning his back at that very moment. Pound's most ambitious, and most voluminous work is The Cantos, an epic of 116 cantos, upon which he started work on 1915, and which remained unfinished at his death in 1972. In his ambition to encompass all of human history, culture, and literature he roamed across languages, literatures, continents and ages. Mixing original lines with quotations and translations from the most diverse sources, The Cantos creatively practiced what Pound also advocated in his didactic and theoretical writings, and his anthologies. Although clearly meant as an epic in the line of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Divine Comedy, and frequently directly quoting or alluding to these predecessors, Pound's Cantos lack the overall consistency and unity of plot of Homer's and Dante's works. Needless to say, this is deliberate on Pound's part. Just as Eliot would do in The Waste Land, so Pound too in his Cantos wants to stress the fragmentation, the brokenness of his contemporary world, the ruin of a civilization instead of, as he and Eliot saw it, the unity and triumph embodied in these earlier epics. 

In The Cantos, as in all of his poetry, Pound aimed at the simultaneity of all passages, all quotations, rather than the linearity of the classical narrative poem. By thus giving his epic a 'spatial form' Pound shows himself an exemplary modernist. Another modernist organizational principle Pound consistently adhered to is the recurring use of terms, characters and settings as 'leitmotifs', the associative resonance of words and contexts via what Pound himself called 'logopeia'. Notwithstanding his exemplary application of what have come to be considered as mainstays of modernist technique, or perhaps because of the extremes to which he pushed them, critical opinion as to the final success of The Cantos varies widely. Whichever position one assumes, the fact remains that with The Cantos, as with his other, earlier work, Pound contributed significantly to the liberation of English—and especially American—poetry from the formalist straitjacket it largely found itself in at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. He also did so by serving as mentor to younger poets, as indefatigable editor of (little) magazines, as coiner of avant-garde theories such as Imagism and Vorticism, and in the case of the older Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) as his part-time secretary while at the same time bringing him into contact with for instance Japanese poetry and theater, thus aiding him to change from the poet of the Celtic Twilight and the Irish Renaissance into the High Modernist poet we now know Yeats as.

One particularly famous part of The Cantos consists of The Pisan Cantos (1948). These cantos refer to the period when Pound, whose ideas on economics and politics were as idiosyncratic as they were in literature, and who was a staunch supporter of the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini, at the end of the war was imprisoned for treason. These cantos strike a strongly personal and even confessional note, signaling a break with the Eliotian doctrine of 'impersonalism' in which the poet hid behind a persona or a mask, and as such are often considered as a prelude to the Confessional poetry that in the 1950s and 1960s, with the poetry of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, would become the dominant mode of American poetry along with Beat poetry.

Semblanza de T. S. Eliot

—oOo—

Marlowe and Kyd

Marlowe and Kyd

(From The Short Cambridge History of English Literature, by George Sampson, 1972 ed.)

Whether The Spanish Tragedy  is earlier than Tamburlaine, as some suppose, does not greatly matter, for, historically, Kyd and marlowe are not easily separable; they both attained great popularity at the same time and both fell together.

The sentimentalists can no longer make a pathetic story out of Christopher Marlowe's life (1564-93). Additions to our knowledge have left us few illusions. Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker, passed from the King's School in his native city to Cambridge, where he absorbed the music and the legends of Latin poetry and indulged in some unusual reading and speculation. Though he lived as wildly as Greene and Nashe, he was never one of their fellowship. He was, in fact, a "university wit" who had made himself common, and appears to be pointed at with Nashe's finger of scorn. The facts about his life and works are as obscure as the circumstances of his death. He had become notorious for "atheism", and he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford tavern at the end of a long day spent with three men of very dubious repute. Some time before, Kyd had been arrested for "mutinous sedition", but was released after Marlowe's death, having shown that heretical papers found in his room belonged to Marlowe, whom he accused of blasphemy. There is no profit in speculating on what was behind Marlowe's death. He had lived dangerously and was such a man as could have written his plays. (The most reliable biography is The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 1942, by the American scholar John Bakeless). His literary life begins with an undated translation of Ovid's Amores, called Elegies by the publishers. This has more merits than is usually allowed. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe set forth on his way as a poet of classical amorism, but, unlike Shakespeare, he did not immediately find his natural magic and music. Marlowe's first original work was Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, played in 1587 or 1588 and printed anonymously in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the powerful acting of Alleyn and the superiority of the piece to the plays which had so far held the popular stage gave Tamburlaine great popularity. Yet, save in one obscure and hostile allusion by Greene, the author is nowhere named. Even Heywood, who mentions both Marlowe and Tamburlaine in his Apology for Actors, does not clearly associate them. The dramatic excesses of the play were disliked by some, but, of course, the real offence was that Marlowe succeeded. Like Swinburne he carried the young men away by the irresistible force of his style. The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, of which the first known edition is the quarto of 1604, is assumed to be his next play and is dated c. 1588; but there is good reason for refusing it a date earlier than 1592. Faustus, however, is not so complete a thing as Tamburlaine. The comic scenes are almost abjectly bad, and prove either that Marlowe's excesses of humour are worse than his excesses of tragedy, or that his play has suffered from foolish theatrical additions. Nevertheless the greatest parts of Faustus show him at the height of his poetic and dramatic magnificence. The same difficulty is presented in another play, The Jew of Malta. It is mentioned as early as 1592; but as there is no evidence that it was printed before 1633, we have a reasonable excuse for disclaiming the poorer passages as playhouse alterations. In The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (printed 1593-4), Marlowe gave us the first historical play of the type which Shakespeare followed in Richard II. The Massacre at Paris and The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage complete the list of Marlowe's accepted dramas. The first known edition of the former is undated; it was acted in 1593; the earliest text of the latter belongs to the year 1594. The Massacre, badly transmitted, has fitful power. Dido, usually dismissed with undeserved contempt, bears the name of Nashe on its title as co-author; but of Nashe's hand there is little trace.

The supposed association of Marlowe with works attributed to Shakespeare or used by Shakespeare must be barely mentioned in a survey such as this. Assertions about composite authorship are easy to make and hard to establish or refute. Still, composite authorship and revision by several hands are known facts of the time. Readers should trust their own convictions and not accept attributions too readily. In Titus Andronicus and in Henry VI there is some show of argument for Marlowe's hand. The full-bodied verse of Titus and the soaring, defiant character of Aaron might be the work of the author of Tamburlaine, but might equally be the work of a young admirer. Marlowe may have had a share in Henry VI, but the nature and extent of that share (if any) cannog be discussed briefly. At this time of day it is impossible to distinguish between the verse of Marlowe and the verse of a young poet writing with Marlowe's infectious tune in his head. Arden of Feversham is one of the pseudo-Shakespearean plays in which some students have detected Marlowe's hand. The whole question is discussed in F. P. Wilson's Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (1953).

Two other works, non-dramatic, remain for mention: Hero and Leander and Lucan's First Booke Translated Line for Line, both entered for printing in 1593. The first, unfinished, was published in 1598, afterwards with a completion by Chapman; the second appeared in 1600. The famous short poem "Come live with me and be my love" appeared first in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and next, in a fuller form, in Englands Helicon (1600). The nearly simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet's work unprinted. We gather, from various allusions, that Marlowe had friends and admirers in spite of his ill-repute.

The first duty of a historian is to dwell, not upon Marlowe's faults, but upon his achievements; and the fact to be recorded is that Marlowe is a prime creative force in English literature, and a creative force of a new kind. Till Marlowe's time no one had made possible and credible such daemonic figures as Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas, whose tragic doom is compelled by forves within themselves and not by mischances from without. Marlowe's heroes confront the fates; they are not the sport of destiny. Marlowe himself has the self-possession of the strong man, and could use his sources creatively. His violence is native, and the inequalities in his art are the effect of his strength, not the signs of undeveloped power. His work was finished at an age at which few poets have really begun. Edward II stands by itself among his plays. There is a temptation to overpraise it. because it is the first complete historical play of the stricter type without lapses into foolery, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. But it merely seems the best because it never sinks to the worst depths of Tamburlaine and Faustus. Just as certainly it never touches their greatest heights. In passion and word-music the play is inferior to the greater pieces; it lacks, too, the touch of caricature that gives them convincing vitality. Still, it is the first successful attempt we have at the interpretation of history on the stage; for a successful history-play must interpret history, it must not merely label figures with historical names. The earlier historical plays were only another form of the cautionary historical poems in A Mirror for Magistrates. After Marlowe's Edward II, Shakespeare's Richard II and its great successors became possible; but Marlowe could never have attained the all-embracing versatility of Shakespeare. Edward II showes his limitations as clearly as his powers. No one remembers its characters and scenes as one remembers the characters and scenes of Richard II.

Marlowe gave his age true tragedy. He also gave it tragedy's true instrument, great verse. Gorboduc had taught blank verse how to speak on the stage; Tamburlaine taught it how to sing. Indeed, it might be said that Marlowe's genius is operatic, and he obviously learned something of his music from Spenser. His famous passages are like great solos, superbly lyrical and appropriate, but not integrally woven into the texture of the drama. His dramatic blank verse unites the formal dignity of Gorboduc with the musical fluency of The Faerie Queene; and so it is rhythmically free and inventive, capable alike of magic and of majesty, always the master and never the slave of its metrical pattern. And though his daemonic figures may seem excessive in deed or aspiration, their poetic speech, however "mighty", is spontaneous, natural, and even simple.

Thomas Kyd (1558-94) appears to be the person held up to contempt by Nashe in his preface to Menaphon as an example of those who "could scarcelie latinize their necke-verse if they should have need". Kyd's great offence was that he had made an immense theatrical success with The Spanish Tragedy. The extent of Kyd's Latinity may not have been great; but though he "never ware gowne in the Universitie" he was a fellow pupil with Spenser at Merchant Taylors.' His translations from the Italian and French, which seem to have annoyed Nashe specially, are quite unimportant. The Italian work is a pamphlet, and the French a version of Robert Garnier's Cornélie under the title Pompey the Great, his fair Corneliaes Tragedie (printed 1594—there is no record of its being acted). Other works attributed to him raise too many bibliographical problems to be accepted readily. The First Part of Jeronimo, extant in a quarto of 1605, is possibly a "first part" to The Spanish Tragedie, but not very probably written by Kyd himself. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda (published 1592) may perhaps be his, for that is the subject of the play within the play in The Spanish Tragedie; but it is quite definitively inferior to that piece. Even the Tragedie itself is a problem. Its date is unknown. It may have been written just before 1588. By 1592 it was enjoying great popularity. Its first known quarto is dateless; but even that is described as "Newly corrected and amended of such grosse faults as passed in the first impression", so it may not be the first; the second known quarto appeared in 1594, and the third in 1599. None of them gives the least clue as to the author's name; and it is not till 1612 that "M. Kid" is named casually by Heywood, as the author, in his Apology for Actors. The play out-Senecas Seneca in its wild horrors and in the excesses of its style. But there van be observed a faint resemblance to Hamlet, not merely in details of the story, but in the halting, suffering, distracvted, self-communing character of Hieronimo, who was an entirely new kind of tragic hero. The Spanish Tragedy is the first example we possess of the Hamlet type of play.

Kyd can be easily underrated. His contribution to drama is intrinsically as well as historically important. He was the first English dramatist to discover the bearing of episode and of dramatic "movement" upon character, and the first to give the audience a hint of the development that follows from this interaction. In other words, he is the first English dramatist who writes dramatically. We have parted company with the older declamatory tragedy of the English Senecans, with the "operatic" tragedy of Marlowe, and we are nearer the manner of Shakespeare. That the young Shakespeare knew The Spanish Tragedy is evident. Was there a closer association? What are the "whole Hamlets" of "tragicall speaches" referred to by Nashe in 1589 and apparently associated with Kyd? Did Kyd write a play upon the well-known story of Hamlet? Dide Shakespeare make that play the basis of his own? Does the First Quarto of Hamlet (1603) carry over some sections of an older, non-Shakespearean play? There is no certain answer to any of these questions. Perhaps in some obscure library there lies unrecognized the lost Hamlet of Kyd, or another, as the lost Fulgens and Lucres lay unrecognized till 1919. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was such a play.

The Spanish Tragedie

 

La frase que lanzó mil barcos al mar

 

—oOo—

Dercir y mostrar (Telling and Showing)

domingo, 9 de octubre de 2016

Decir y mostrar (Telling and Showing)

4 Telling and Showing. García Landa by JAGL- uploaded by francisca ignacia on Scribd

William Shakespeare's Grave

Eduardo Segura - Tolkien y la filología

Samuel Daniel

miércoles, 5 de octubre de 2016

Samuel Daniel

(by Émile Legouis, from Legouis and Cazamian, A History of English Literature, Dent, 1937 ed. Notes are renumbered).






Poetry from 1590 to 1625

I. Elizabethan Poetry from 1590 to 1603. (NOTE 1).—Outside the theatre, almost all the literature of the Elizabethan period properly so called, that is down to 1603, derived from Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser. Romances bore the imprint of Euphues and Arcadia in turn or simultaneously. Pastorals imitated from Spenser or Sidney abounded. Astrophel and Stella, from the moment of its publication, provoked a whole flowering season of sonnets. The successive appeareance, about 1590, of Sidney's sonnets and Arcadia, and of the first books of The Faerie Queene, was the signal for an intense literary activity. It was then that a whole generation born some ten years after Spenser entered the arena of letters. The poetry alone shows such a literary ferment as makes very difficult the task of presenting the new works methodically. Doubtless drama attracted the writers who were most vital and energetic, but the majority of them turned from time to time to pure poetry as a relaxation, and wrote verses in the fashionable poetic genres. We are thus led to follow genres rather than individuals. First, however, we must deal with the voluminous works of two poets whose contribution to the drama was slight and unimportant. Their production continued into the next century, but the date of their birth and the atmosphere in which their talent was formed make them true Elizabethans. They are Daniel and Drayton.

Each of them produced one of the longest poems of the period, The Faerie Queene excepted. The American critic Lowell could call Daniel's Civil Wars and Drayton's Poly-olbion the megalosaurus and plesiosaurus of the Renascence. These poets express, more directly than Spenser, their patriotic feeling, which is less troubled than his by the dream of a golden age or by hostility to the present. They survive only ina a few pages of verse and a few short poems, but their figures are distinct and can be traced in every part of the considerable body of their works.

NOTE 1. F. E. Schelling, English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare (1910).

(a) SAMUEL DANIEL.—  (1562-1619)

 Samuel Daniel (NOTE 2) was born in Somerset, the son of a music master. After having passed through Oxford and visited Italy, he was tutor first to William Herbert, son of the earl of Pembroke and of Sidney's sister, and then to a daughter of the virtuous Countess of Cumberland. After Spenser's death he became a sort of voluntary poet laureate. Under James I he was dramatic censor and groom of the chamber to the queen. His tastes were sober and moderate: he lived quietly in his London house cultivating the Muses; then retired to a Somersetshire farm. By the even march of his existence he contrasted with most of his contemporary poets. His poetry, well behaved as he, is the most tranquil and classical of the period. Nearly everything in the English Renascence which shocked French taste when this had been purified by the seventeenth century is missing from Daniel's work, and so is the 'fine frenzy' beloved of the Elizabethans. He was a moralist and historian first of all; he wrote the poetry of reflection, not of passion. His calm voice could, in that tumultuous time, hardly make itself heard. A correct and pure writer, he brought the qualities of prose into verse. Imagination is rare in his subjects and never disturbs his style.

NOTE 2. Complete poetical works in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iii; complete works in prose and verse published by Grosart, 5 vols. (1885). His Delia reprinted by Arber in An English Garner, vol. iii.

He made trial of the theatre, but since he lacked the impetuous vigour of his dramatic rivals, since he was in love with nobility and serenity, he turned from the popular stage and wrote tragedies, classical in form, modelled on Seneca and the French poet Garnier—Cleopatra in 1594 and Philotas in 1611. These academic dramas could have no more than a succès d'estime. He succeeded better with his masques, which contain very attractive passages: The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), The Queen's Arcadia, a Pastoral Tragi-comedy (1606), and Hymen's Triumph.

Round about his chief work, The Civil Wars, are grouped a fair number of miscellaneous poems, sonnets to Delia, epistles, dedications, panegyrics, funeral eulogies, pastoral songs. The even quality of his verses is surprising for his day.

He translates with charm the suave elegy of the golden age in Tasso's Aminta. There is real feeling in his Letter from Octavia to Antony (1599), and even more in his Complaint of Rosamond (1592), in which the unhappy mistress of Henry II mingles her regret for her transgressions and her sighs for her lost beauty. She draws the moral from her story herself, and it is softened as it passes through her lips.

But a mood of serious reflection was more habitual to Daniel than Fancy or tenderness. It is not only by accident that the lines from his work which are most often quoted are the lyrical dialogue between Ulysses and the Siren, standing for honour and pleasure, labour and rest, and the Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland, in which he defines, in fine, strong, and calm stanzas, the sage who inhabits the serene temples of wisdom and is raised above private passion or political agitation.

 Apt as he is to discourse and discuss in verse, his talent is happily displayed in a didactic poem in the form of a dialogue, Musophilus (1599), which contains a general defence of letters. Musophilus constitutes himself champion of letters against Philocosmus, who recommends an active life and rules out all poetry which does not impel to heroic action. Like Spenser in The Teares of the Muses, but with less vehement rhetoric, Musophilus deplores that so little patronage should be given to literature. He sees poetry and eloquence as the guardians of lofty morals and the forces which cleanse a nation. He has a deep faith in the strength and destiny of his mother tongue. What a great thing it would be if England, first of the nations in worth, became first in poetry also! Daniel has a vision of an English literature which should be read over the whole world. It should supplant Italian literature, now decadent:

When all that ever hotter spir'ts express'd,
Comes better'd by the patience of the north.

Patriotism was Daniel's dominant feeling and it led him to devote his capital effort to the history of his country. He recounts no such dream of the past as Spenser, nor such a long, mainly legendary chronicle as William Warner, in rude and awkward fourteen-syllabled lines, told in Albion's England (1586), a miscellany of ill-arranged stories which was so successful that it was republished in successive and enlarged editions until the author's death in 1609. Daniel did not share Warner's desire to begin his book at the Flood and bring it down to the execution of Mary Stuart. He was impressed by the effects of civil war and uneasy lest, since the succession to Elizabeth was entirely uncertain, it should be renewed.

He therefore chose no period of glory for his theme, but told in narrative the story which was at this moment being dramatized, which Shakespeare was taking for the subject of plays, the story of the bloodthirsty struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York. The eight cantos of Daniel's Civil Wars, published from 1595 to 1609, treat of the misfortunes of England from the reing of Richard II until the break between Warwick and Edward IV, and, in spite of their seven to eight thousand lines, they leave the tale unfinished. It corresponds exactly to the Shakespearian 'histories,' Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and the two first parts of Henry VI, sometimes following them and sometimes going ahead of them. Daniel's exposition is more accurate, cool, and dignified than the plays, which bring on to the stage a succession of animated pictures by turns chivalrous and comic, arbitrary alike in their omissions and additions. It is strange to read Daniel's calm stanzas, and to remember the tumultuous dramas in which the same stories are told, or Spenser's romantic transfiguration of the national annals. Daniel's clear and expressed intention is to transfigure nothing:

I versify the truth, not poetize.

Unfortunately he poetizes all too little. Conscientiously he keeps pace with facts, adding fictions only very rarely. It is remarkable that his fictions have the same turn as in the pseudo-classical epics. They are inserted deliberately as ornaments, intellectual relaxations, for instance the mythological origin he fabricates for printing and artillery, two ill-omened inventions which Nemesis orders Pandora to supply.

This element of the marvellous is exceptional in Daniel's work. If his facts are dull, so much the worse; if dramatic, so much the better. Nor does he seek to interest by penetrating or lively portrayal of character. His calm narrative does scant justice to such outstanding personalities as the wild Margaret of Anjou, or to scenes of violence like Jack Cade's rebellion. If there is fairly lifelike psychology in his story of the first interviews between Edward IV and Lady Elizabeth Grey, it probably is that the author is inpired by the staging of this incident in Henry VI. The best part of his poem, apart from a few vigorous stories, consists of the moral reflections arising out of his patriotism as it is wounded by his own story of atrocious intestine conflict.

On the whole this long poem is a mistake. The careful and correct Daniel, treating the most tragic of subjects, is tedious. It is his misfortune to have misused his gifts. It would have taken a d'Aubigné to do justice to material as sombre and as bloodstained.

Whith his qualities and defects, Daniel was the writer of that day whose work was most justly estimated when it appeared. Spenser, who knew him at the outset of his career, praised his harmony and the pathos of his Complaint of Rosamond, but blamed him for flying too timidly and near the ground, exhorting him:

Then rouse thy feathers quickly, Daniell.

Ben Jonson more bluntly says that he was 'a good honest man, but no poet.' Drayton considered that he was 'too much historian in verse' and that 'his manner better fitteth prose.' He was indeed, as will be seen, one of the best prose-writers of his time. William Browne, on the other hand, admired the purity of this poetic style and called him 'well-languaged.'

This purity, then so rare, won him a recrudescence of favour in the nineteenth century. Wirters like Wordsworth and Coleridge who were working for the simplification of the language praise Daniel for having banished eccentricities and arbitrary inventions from his style. Southey is struck by his discreet use of the pathetic and says that he writers 'always in a strain of tender feeling, and in language as easy and natural as it is pure.'

His contemporaries, who loved ardour, missed in his work the passionate qualities and the movement, brilliancy, and variety which they prized more than aught else. For us, the very absence of the merits which the Elizabethans often carried to excess makes pleasantly restful reading of his verses. It is as though we sailed for a day on smooth waters after passing through a storm. Moreover, if his reflections are not strikingly new, they are, as a rule, full of good sense and reason and are lit by a serene philosophy: he is dignified and proud as well as wise. He is, moreover, never harsh and constantly self-controlled.

(...)

from ch. 8, Prose from 1578 to 1625

(...) In addition to their controversy on the morality of poetry and their consideration of dramatic art,the men of the English Renascence gave a fair share of attention to a discussion on the comparative merits of measured, or reformed, and rhymed verse. The dispute arose in Italy and France, but it was the occasion in England of a long series of attacks and counter-attacks which prove it to have been waged in this country with more heat than elsewhere. It is remarkable that the first antagonists of rhyme were so carried away by their cult of antiquity that they disregarded the existence of blank verse, which seemed to them a bastard and inadequate compomise. They wished, at the same time, to abolish rhyme, which they held to be Gothic and barbarous, and they claimed to make English syllables quantitative, long or short as in Latin. Some of them, like Sir John Cheke and Ascham, vaunted the iambic line, and Gabriel Harvey even championed the hexameter. It can serve no purpose to speak of the unreadable poems which Harvey, Stanyhurst, Abraham Fraunce, Campion, and others—even, passingly, Sidney and Spenser—produced in accordance with these rules. The metricians of the day were exercised by the question. William Webbe, in A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), shows himself the determined partisan of measured verse. George Puttentham, in The Arte of English Poetrie (1586), the most voluminous of the technical treatises of the period, is less willing to commit himself and holds the balance between the contesting parties. The poet Thomas Campion, author of so many charming rhymed songs, was in the enemy camp in 1602. In his Observations on the Art of English Poesie he condemns rhyme as improper to poetry. The only good effect of his attack was that it induced the poet Samuel Daniel to write his Defence of Rhyme (1603), which closed this controversy of more than thirty years' standing and was the first example in England of sane aesthetic criticism applied to a special subject. Hitherto all the blows had been aimed wide. On either side there had been pedantry, abuse of authorities, ignorance of essential facts, disregard of blank verse, even confusion between the meanings of the wods rhythm and rhyme. Daniel evinced a reasonableness, exactness, and perspicacity unknown to the others. Even to-day it is worth while to meditate on his words. He bases himself on uses. While he denies that the admission of rhyme, which exists and please many nations, is a matter for discussion, he does not shirk the task of founding rhyme on reason. He does not bow before the ancients. That rhyme makes rhythm of a kind unknown to them is, he says, their loss, who knew not this 'Echo of a delightful report.' Nor does rhyme exclude measure from English verse, which is based on tonic accent. To complain of the shackles of rhyme is to ignore the nature of the pleasure of poetryand of its creation. The poet finds that 'Rhyme is no impediment to his conceit, but rather gives him wings to mount, and carries him not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a far happier flight.' Rhyme is a means of imparting form, outline, and limits to imaginative conceptions. It organizes chaos. Its terminal cadence gives 'a certainty' as well as measure.

Daniel has a secret preference for the stanza over the couplet, and he would reserve feminine rhymes for songs. But these are personal tastes, as he himself knows and says, and modestly refuses to erect them into law. It was doubtlessly his fondness for the stanza rather than the coupulet which prevented the classical school from acknowledging him as one of the best of their forerunners.

His own moderation impels him to condemn the intransigence of those who would, at one stroke, rule out all the past. But in him this moderation is accompanied by frank independence. He throws off the yoke of antiquity:

All our understanding are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italie. We are the children of Nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgement, but that the same Sunne of Discretion shineth upon us ... Wee must not looke upon the immense course of times past, as men overlooke spacious and wide countreys, from off high mountaines, and are never the neerer to judge of the true nature of the soile.

From end to end of his short treatise Daniel unfolds his argument in the same wise and reasonable spirit. His pleading, often directed against the superstition of the humanists, is finely classical in form. It is oratory, less poetic and nervous than the language of Sidney's Defence, at times a little redundant, but exceptional in this period by its sequence, its logic, and its urbanity. More than any one of his contemporaries, Daniel possessed the qualities of the perfect writer of prose.

¿Son sombras lo que aquí vemos?

—oOo—

Retropost (2006): A Malignant and a Turband Turke

Retropost #1167 (5 de octubre de 2006): A Malignant and a Turband Turke

 La revista Shakespeare, publicada por Routledge, pide contribuciones para un número especial sobre Shakespeare y el Islam... No es que piense contribuir, porque bien habrá que exprimir las meninges para decir algo que valga la pena decir sobre el tema. Shakespeare, desde luego, no se caracteriza por su pensamiento profundo o refinado sobre el Islam. (Ni yo). Hay pocos musulmanes en Shakespeare en realidad, y pocas más alusiones a ellos. Sí hay bastantes Moros—whatever that means. Empezando por el moro de Venecia, claro, un moro atípico donde los haya. Ya hubo un ciclo especial de Shakespeare and Islam en 2004, en el cuatricentenario de Othello. (También está Aaron el Moro, en Tito Andrónico; éste ateo y ubicado en época prerromana... hay una morita a quien un criado deja preñada en El Mercader de Venecia... Y en la misma obra está el Príncipe de Marruecos, negro y moro como Otelo pero seguramente musulmán... y ridiculizado y rechazado por su Desdémona... como el Príncipe de Aragón, por otra parte).

El Moro de Venecia no puede ser musulmán (ver aquí una discusión en la lista Shakspere). Es, por tanto, un converso; seguramente convertido al ser rescatado de sus penalidades, aquellas que narraba de modo tan conmovedor a Desdémona para seducirla. Poco sabemos en realidad de su historia anterior: aunque vuelve a aludir a un episodio retrospectivo en su penúltimo parlamento, en el que resume su historia y su error, y pide ser recordado no sólo por su crimen, sino también por su arrepentimiento:

one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum; set you down this,
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian, and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
and smote him thus. [Stabs himself.

 
 Otelo es el mayor clásico sobre "compañeros sentimentales" en el mal sentido del término; modelo para recientes viudos parricidas, se suicida tras su crimen. Pero sus palabras son reveladoras. Se maldice a sí mismo, pero elige hacerlo en tanto que musulmán. Otelo no tiene en común la "raza" con el turco: un "Moro", ya sea en sentido propio o ya sea un africano negro, no es en absoluto lo mismo que un arquetípico y enturbantado turco; su parecido más obvio es que ambos son musulmanes. Para David Basch, Othello

is characterized as a Moslem convert, another factor of his "otherness" within his society.     

In Othello’s last speech, he alludes to his own circumcision as a former Muslim as he notes his seizing of "the circumcised dog" in Aleppo and smiting him "thus." In the play, he in fact smites himself at that moment, being rescuer and evil perpetrator at one and the same time. As Florence Amit observed, even Othello’s name, when parsed into syllables and understood as Hebrew, declares literally, "his sign of God," which in a Jewish-Hebrew context refers to his circumcision, which is "the sign of God."   

Of course, there is no judgmental statement by Shakespeare here about Muslims, just the words of a particular man, Othello, responding to his
unique situation marvelously in character. 

El segundo párrafo es muy acertado: el tercero es sólo políticamente correcto. Otelo revive lo que fue al parecer un momento decisivo en su historia: cuando eligió de modo heroico el bando adecuado (para Shakespeare) defendiendo al débil y cristiano, frente a un turco opresor, quizás todavía de su misma religión, prepotente, insultante, es más, ofensivamente enturbantado, un turco con turbante. En el memorable parlamento de Otelo, convergen la autoabyección suicida del asesino "de género" con la autoabyección del converso que se castiga a sí mismo al descubrir que todavía sigue siendo aquello que era, aquello que ha aprendido a odiar. No es sorprendente que ni negros ni musulmanes estén satisfechos con la imagen que Shakespeare proyecta de ellos en la figura de Otelo (¡aunque no sepamos si éste es negro o musulmán!). En las palabras de Otelo queda maravillosamente expresada, de modo certero y dramático, la ira justiciera e hiperpapista del converso, el odio a sí mismo del criminal arrepentido, y la victimización internalizada del chivo expiatorio perteneciente a una minoría étnica. Otelo por fin confiesa su indignidad (que todos habían predicho y él ha demostrado), y también la expresa con una imagen de exotismo y eurocentrismo paternalista, comparándose a "the base Indian" (con lo cual pueden sumarse los indios al coro de abucheos a un tembloroso y acorralado Shake-Speare). Las palabras de Otelo son indecidibles: no puede saberse si se castiga a sí mismo sabiendo que es circunciso o si tal es el grado de autoabyección a que ha llegado, que utiliza el término "circumcised dog" sin siquiera ser consciente de que lo está castigando en sí mismo, convirtiéndose en el turco que esta vez mata al turco (o al cristiano, una vez más). Es un juego de palabras y de acciones que nos lleva a un indecidible regressus in infinitum, y expresa, y hace, el carácter y destino de Otelo. Ni siquiera el suicidio súbito, también traumático, de Caché, crea un momento de intensidad teatral semejante, con este paso súbito de la narración y el pasado a la teatralidad y el presente, superpuestos violentamente. ¿Regresa Otelo a su pasado, o nunca ha salido de él? A malignant, and a Turbond-Turke... También la relación entre la malignidad y el turbante es indecidible, ambivalente, y puramente shakespeareana en ese sentido. El turbante, signo del Islam, ¿necesita la "malignidad" del adjetivo para modificar o aclarar su significado? ¿O es "Turbond" (always already) un sinónimo de "Malignant"? Las dos cosas, en Shakespeare.

Pero no nos deja aquí Otelo. Aún tiene tiempo de arrastrarse a la cama de la que fue Julieta en esta Verona del Mediterráneo, habitada por cristianos capuletos y montescos enturbantados... y muere con un beso, como Romeo. Y también aquí tenemos una escena ambivalente, indecidible (o decidible en una representación concreta, poniendo algún tipo de énfasis). Es un homenaje a lo que pudo haber sido, Otelo como Romeo—utilizando ecos visuales y verbales, intertextualizándose el autor o el personaje; pero es a la vez una parodia grotesca en la que Shakespeare dirige la energía intertextual de su propia obra anterior en otra dirección: pues a Julieta no la mató Romeo, ni Romeo era un oscuro musulmán. Otelo, o el musulmán como arquetipo del patriarcado violento, que sale como un Mister Hyde de dentro de sí para darse muerte, a sí mismo y a su breve idilio con Occidente.

Claro que ahí esta Yago para cuidar de que salga a la luz el Lado Oscuro...

Otelo siempre en Alepo

Retroposts

—oOo—

Simon Schama's John Donne