Hoby monuments, Bisham Church

This will be my last post for a couple of weeks. I am off with my son Tim to America, a first visit for both of us. A fly-drive, with large scenic holes in the ground for me (Grand Canyon, Death Valley), and Las Vegas and Los Angeles for him.

Yesterday, I visited the Church at Bisham Abbey near Marlow, to take a look at the Hoby monuments: Tudor humanism in stone. Elizabeth Cooke, along with her four sisters, was educated by her father Sir Anthony to the highest standards of the age. She married Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of The Book of the Courtier. He died, as the tomb says, 'at Paris the 13 of May 1566 of the Age of 36 leaving his wife great with child in a strange country, who brought hym honourable home, built this chappell and laid him and his brother here in the tombe together'. Her English verses about him are heart-felt:
Firm in Gods Tryth, gentle and faitheful friend,
Wel lernd and languaged, Nature besyde
Gave comely shape which made ruful his end
Since in his floure in Paris towne he died.
And in her Latin verses, she says he was 'my soul's far dearer part, / Life of my life and solace of my heart ... How happy we then; our wishes, joys the same / one soul inspired our double frame / But ah, how short our pleasures here below'.
The DNB entry on her father describes her as 'formidable'. She became an habitual and angry litigant, while the churchwarden at Bisham repeated to me the local story that she caused the death of one of her children who had raised her ire by (literally) blotting his copy book. There's no record of a missing child, so one has to suspect that her reputation for learning and ill temper caused such posthumous local libels. In her own monument, her will having forsworn 'vain ostentation or pomp', she kneels in a coronet topping an almost Pharonic head-dress of pleated linen, with a full entourage of her children, both living and dead, her elder daughter kneeling before her in her robes as a Countess. A daughter-in-law had the marvellous enamelled glass windows created in 1609, they celebrate the lineage of the families, and were recently restored using a large grant of money from the Glaziers' Company, so precious are they. Margaret Hoby's own monument has the swans, the Hoby's used falcons (or otherwise the 'hobby' hawk) as their heraldic bird. Edward Hoby even named a bastard son he had 'Peregrine Hoby'.
But the main monument is that Elizabeth Hoby made for her husband and his older half brother. It is almost a surprise that the V&A hasn't long ago appropriated something so perfect. In full armour, the two men recline on rush mats, heads on their helms. Sir Thomas' armour is more decorative (if you click on the image to see it enlarged, you can pick up the 'hobby' motifs his suit features), but the modelling (in alabaster) of the faces and hands of both men is very sensitive. Placed together, their being represented at the age they died has obscured the 24 year gap between them, so they have become virtuous Renaissance friends, Protestant champions ('Zealous to God whos Gospel he profest, / When gretest stormes gan dym the sacred light', says Elizabeth's verses, refering to their Marian exile), Pyrocles and Musidorus: the type of male twinning in virtue Jonson praised in his Cary-Morison Ode. There's no sprezzatura here, no 'recklessness' or courtly nonchalance, but rather, a deep Protestant seriousness, and, not suppressed amid the solemnity, the love and bewildered grief of a woman who was clearly not easy to impress.

Early modern cryptozoology

Apart from the animals they knew well, much early modern zoology was suffused with folklore and traditional fantasies. I was reminded of this 'True and Wonderful' discourse of the Sussex dragon by the BBC's notice of the latest investigation of 'Ninki Nanka' in the Gambia - another of those sauropod- survival stories which hinges on tales told by people who knew someone, who knew someone, who definitely saw something one dark night (when he was a boy).


At least nobody is marching off up river in quest this time, the investigation seems to be more into the folklore of the story than conducted with any credulity regarding the creature's existence. See




http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/5180404.stm

The pamphlet about the Horsham beast of 1614 is not quite what it seems to be: I claim it as the first occurence of 'silly season' journalism in English. To elucidate, in my youth, when England was a more parochial country, in the high summer, serious news would run thin. Inveterate murderers would go to the seaside with surviving members of their family, bank managers were too busy out on the links to empty the branch safe and flee abroad, trials went into lengthy recess. There was no news, but news had to be found, and so we had 'silly season' stories. In these days of a global news reach, every day brings its bad news, and trivia to all tastes, then, the journalist made the silly season news.

If you read this pamphlet from the silly season of August 1614, you can sub-read the discussion between the hack ('A.R.') and his boss the publisher. There's nothing stirring. But a large snake has been seen on heathland near Horsham. A. R. is told to write it up, despite his protests that their last outrageous stretcher was exploded. The pamphlet shows some of his feelings. He starts off with a semi-apology, to the effect that some recent stories in print were perhaps a product of 'our forward credulity to but seeming true reports' or 'false copies translated from other languages'. But this one is true, he huffs, before signing off his introduction with an ambiguous protest, 'He that would send better news if he had it'.

A.R. then shows off for a few pages, with a gratuitous account of the matings of serpents, and of serpents in history: he is staking his claim to be a real writer and a learned man, far better than this subject allows him to be. Three or four pages of actually relevant material are sandwiched in the middle: it's a serpent ('some call it' a dragon - A.R. seems to mean, people like my get-penny boss here), about 9 feet long, which preys on a rabbit warren in Sussex. It is 'a quantity of thickness in the middest, and somewhat smaller at both ends' (so making it identifiable as a Monty Python). It might have feet, 'but the eye may be there deceived'. It apparently has lumps like footballs on its back, from which its dragon wings may one day grow. A. R. now fibs like the pro he is: it can project venom so far (with two human casualties and two dead dogs already) that no-one can really witness its horror properly and survive. A.R. opines that 'when it shall please God', the serpent will be destroyed, it is rather something to be afraid of in a metaphorical, not literal sense: it is 'to be feared as an eclipse or fearfull comet'.

And he is away again, happy to leave behind this doubtfully veracious subject, and onto the subject of 'serpentine sinnes that live amongst us'. The serpent is an allegory of the corruption of the legal profession, or of drunkards (as it leaves a nauseous mess in its wake). Finally A.R. 'applies' the serpent to 'the Serpentine sisterhood of Brotherly (sic), the diseased Strumpetrie of the Suburbs'. The serpent has a white band round its neck, while you get only 'a white tiffanie about the necke of one of those tugging Gally-slaves of damnation'. There has to be a significant connection there.

And having somehow covered ten pages, he takes his money and runs, while the printer gets a promising boy artist to do the unabashed woodcut that will really sell the pamphlet. It's so good that he puts it in twice.

Thomas Shipman requests a kiss

Thomas Shipman: 'The Kiss, To Mrs. C.'

Hold not your Lips so close; dispence

Treasures, Perfumes, and Life from thence.

Squeeze not those full-ripe Cherries; this

Becomes a Simper, not a Kiss.

There’s danger to lock up your Breath,

It Cousin-German is to Death.

None bags up wind, the Merchant swears,

Unless some wrinkled Laplanders.

What needs this Guard? It is small sence

Thus to hedge in a double Fence.

Clos’d Lips express but silent Blisses,

And at best are but dumb Kisses.

You are with Cupid little kind

To make him Dumb as well as Blind.

Such Smacks but shew a silent state;

Kisses should be articulate.

An open-mouted Kiss speaks sence,

It is the lover’s eloquence.

Let your speak out then! There’s no Bliss

To the Pronunciation of a Kiss.

~ a fairly standard 17th century lyric, but giving the impression of being personal and 'practical'. Some of Shipman's other poems have dedications after their titles to identifiable women ('Right choice at last, 1662' was his well-meant poem to his wife to be, though it does accidentally flaunt his track record with such as 'Mistress C', who perhaps had her own notions of osculatory decorum. Cavalier poetry featured lots of kiss poems, most graciously in the dialogue on a kiss Lawes set from Herrick. On the specific topic of what the 1930's began to call the 'French Kiss', this is a passage from Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, with Rogero (Harington relishes his bawdy version of 'Ruggiero') getting it together with the sorceress Alcyna:

And look how close the Ivy doth embrace
The tree or branch about the which it grows,
So close the lovers couched in the place,
Each drawing in the breath the other blows:
But how great joys they found that little space,
We well may guess, but none for certain knows:
Their sport was such, so well they leere their couth,
That oft they had two tongues within one mouth.

(Book 7, canto 1, stanza 27).

My image, from the Weg Gallery of Art, is Bartholomeus van der Helst, ' Abraham del Court and Maria de Keersegieter' of 1654: the gentleman courting, the lady in the role of a rose in bud, still attached to its native and thorny bush.

Family Cycling, Burnham Beeches

I bought this photographic print from one of my regular postcard dealers last weekend. There's no date or names, just the stamped 'Herb: Sharp and Sons, Burnham, Bucks' to locate the scene.
I surmise that they are a family group, the mother behind her children; it must be late Edwardian. I like the way that the three women look at the camera, while the young man adopts an 'I have got to here, next I will go to there' gaze, his stance resolute as an explorer's. He is towing his younger sister, a slight figure (perhaps she was considered 'delicate'), using a single speed bicycle with just a front rod brake. The tracks in Burnham Beeches roll up and down, and any kind of descent must have been potentially alarming as her weight started to push him along. His immaculate high collar makes no concession, but he must have to work hard on the flat, up any rise, and in using his fixed wheel to fight the rotation of the pedals on the down slopes.

Cycling in its days of high respectability; while the mixture of dark and white in their clothes, and the sun coming through the trees, makes them seem as if they could blur into an impressionist painting.

I must have a look for bicycles in such paintings.

http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/living_environment/open_spaces/burnham.htm

An Oxford Don Curses his Cat

‘On lute strings cat-eaten’

Are these the strings that poets feign

Have clear’d the Ayre, and calm’d the main?

Charm’d wolves, and from the mountain crests

Made forests dance with all their beasts?

Could these neglected shreds you see

Inspire a Lute of Ivory

And make it speak? Oh! Think then what

Hath been committed by my cat,

Who, in the silence of this night

Hath gnawn these cords, and marr’d them quite; 10

Leaving such reliques as may be

For frets, not for my lute, but me.

Puss, I will curse thee: Mayst thou dwell

With some dry hermit in a cell

Where Rat ne’re peeped, where mouse ne’re fed

And flies go supperless to bed

Or with some close-pared Brother, where

Thou’lt fast each Sabbath in the year,

Or else, prophane, be hang’d on Monday

For butchering a mouse on Sunday 20

Or mays’t thou tumble from some tower

And miss to light upon all four

Taking a fall that may untie

Eight of nine lives, and let them fly.

Or may the midnight embers singe

Thy dainty coat, or Jane beswinge

Thy hide, when she shall take thee biting

Her cheese clouts, or her house beshiting.

What, was there ne’re a rat or mouse

Nor buttery ope? Nought in the house 30

But harmless lutestrings could suffice

Thy paunch, and draw thy glaring eyes?

Did not thy conscious stomach find

Nature prophaned, that kind with kind

Should stanch his hunger? Think on that

Thou cannibal, and Cyclops cat.

For know, thou wretch, that every string

Is a cat-gut, which art did spin

Into a thread; and now suppose

Dunstan, that snuff’d the divel’s nose 40

Should bid these strings revive, as once

He did the calf, from naked bones,

Or I, to plague thee for thy sin

Should draw a circle, and begin

To conjure, for I am, look to’t

An Oxford scholar, and can doo’t:

Then with three sets of mops and mows

Seven of odd words, and motley shows

A thousand tricks, that may be taken

From Faustus, Lamb, or Friar Bacon 50

I should begin to call my strings

(My catlings, and my minikins)

And they, recalled, straight should fall

To mew, to purr, to caterwaul

From Puss’s belly. Sure, as death

Puss should be an Engastranith;

Puss should be sent for to the King

For a strange bird, or some rare thing,

Puss should be sought to far and near

As she some Cunning Woman were, 60

Puss should be carried up and down

From shire to shire, from town to town

Like to the camel, lean as hag,

The elephant, or apish nag

For a strange sight, Puss should be sung

In lousy ballads, midst the throng

At markets, with as good a grace

As Agincourt, or Chevy Chase

The Troy-sprung Briton would forgo

His pedigree he chaunteth so 70

And sing that Merlin – long deceased

Returned is in a nine-liv’d beast.

Thus Puss, thou seest what might betide thee -

But I forbear to hurt or chide thee

For maybe Puss was melancholy

And so to make her blithe and jolly

Finding these strings, she’d have a fit

Of mirth, nay, Puss, if that were it

Thus I revenge me, that as thou

Hast played on them, I’ve played on you 80

And as thy touch was nothing fine

So I’ve but scratched these notes of mine.

Thomas Master or Masters (1603-43), an Oxford scholar associated with the literary circle of William Cartwright.

British Museum, Harley Ms 6917.

~ This playful poem deploys the classical sub-genre of dirae, curses, which had to be wittily apt to the subject of the curse. Donne’s Elegy IV, ‘The Perfume’ is an example. His cat having eaten the lute strings, Masters finally arrives at the idea of using magic to reanimate the cut-gut strings, and so causing his “cannibal, and Cyclops cat” to turn “Engastranith” (56), which is in the OED in the form ‘Engastromith’, an early word for a ventriloquist. After his outburst, Masters charmingly forgives Puss for her misdemeanor.

The Puritan hanging his cat on a Monday (19ff) for having profaned the Sabbath by catching a mouse the day before was a common anti-puritan joke of the time. I can’t find the story about St. Dunstan (40ff) reviving a calf from bones. Prior to his conversion, the Saint was supposed to have been a practitioner of black magic. That he tweaked the devil’s nose with his metal-working pincers when the devil tried to tempt him in the form of a young woman is in the Golden Legend. The Devil Tavern in London was opposite St Dunstan's Church, and was properly 'The Devil and St Dunstan'; http://www.paintedchurch.org/bartduns.htm
gives fragment of a wall painting of this comic and popular legend.

There is a brief mention (61ff) of captive exotic animals then being shown around England: a scrawny camel and an elephant, while the ‘Apish nag’ may well be Banks’ performing horse. ‘Catlings’ and ‘minikins’ (52) are terms for the various thicknesses of lute strings.

(The image is a detail from Evaristo BASCHENIS, 'Still-life with Instruments', on the Web Gallery of Art)

'Deoppilative virtue': A Treatise of Warm Beer

I am not at all a hot weather person. I cycled this morning, and returned so over-heated, thirsty and tired that I set about a large amount of Pepsi Max full of ice cubes, and spent the rest of the afternoon slumped in front of the Tour de France coverage (otherwise, 'Let's try and get excited about the also-rans of previous years') with a mild headache.

In committing this minor folly, I ignored the wisdom of the anonymous author of this unlikely treatise of 1641, which spends 143 pages recommending that you take your drink (taken as virtually synonymous with beer) warm rather than cold.

The medical grounds for doing this seem overwhelming to the author. One F.W., writing a preface, argues that you can see that cold beer hinders the digestion if you inspect what people who overdo it on the cold stuff throw up. The author himself energetically defends a series of major and minor propositions on warm beer preventing the stone, making women more fertile, slowing down the aging process (and many more benefits), and certainly being something we should partake of if we want to follow the ancients, who, in their wisdom, he proves by extensive quotation, took their drink hot.

The argument that swung it for me came on the penultimate page, where he notes "That it [hot drink] is used at this day among whole nations I will prove by Giovani Petro Massei the Jesuite, who in his 6. booke of histories writes that they of China do for the most part drink the strained liquor of a herb called Chia hot". I too felt restored after a cup of cha (in English from 1616, the OED indicates, with an advertisment in Mercurius Politicus, 30 Sept. 1658 throughly informed about "That excellent drink called by the Chineans Tcha, by other nations Tay alias Tee." I shall demand a deoppilative (ie., obstruction-clearing) warm beer in the pub later on this evening. At least I think so.

In bed with Nicotiana

George Daniel, of Beswick (his dates were 1616–1657) vowed that he would never again take razor to his beard after the execution of Charles I. In this self-portrait, he is looking understandably surprised about the immensity of the consequence three years later: he is just 32, but has the beard of a patriarch, which he boldly complements with a balancingly vast furry hat. A friend confronted him with a mirror, and he wrote this poem about his new self:

How am I lost! though some are pleased to say
My mossy Chops estrange
All former Knowledge; and my Brother may,
At distance interchange
Discourse, as to a man he ne’re had known;
It cannot be, persuade
Your Selves; for when you made
Me take a Glass, I knew my Face my own.

The very Same I had three years agoe;
My Eye, my Lip, and nose,
Little, and great, as then; my high-slick't Brow,
Not bald, as you suppose;
For though I have made riddance of that Hair,
Which full enough did grow,
Cropped in a Zealous bow,
Above each Ear; these but small changes are.

For wer't my work, I need not far go seek
The Face I had last year;
The growing Fringe but swept from either Cheek,
And I as fresh appear,
As at nineteen; my Perruke is as neat
An Equipage as might
Become a wooer, light
In thoughts as in his Dress; but I forget;

Or rather I neglect this Trim of Art;
And have a Care so small
To what I am in any outward part,
I scarce know one of All;
'Tis not that Form I look at. Could I find
My inward Man, complete
In his Dimensions! let
Me glory Truth, the better part's behind.

It’s one of Daniel’s better performances. He likes to write about himself, though rather too often about himself as a poet, which he very self-consciously was: I don't know that he is ever really interesting on the topic. He admired George Herbert, but his own verse tends to be chopped-up prose with rhymes. He apparently lost many of his poems in a fire, and probably comforted himself with the assertion that those lost poems were his best ones.

My favourite Daniel piece, though, is his erotic poem about the pleasures of tobacco, which starts:

Come, my Nicotiana; we’ll renew
Our free delights, and Appetite pursue;
Wee fearless will Enjoy those real joys
Lovers would paint, in their fantastic toys…

Normally quite passionless in the relatively few amatory poems he does permit himself, which do conventional 'Platonic'/'Anti-Platonic' topics, in describing his passionate intercourse with the nymph Nicotiana, he really releases the sensualist. Suddenly, our bushy Yorkshire squire sounds like Carew at his fruitiest:

my free hand
No bashful blush shall ever Countermand,
But in a Thousand forms, thy Tresses part
And slide along, with uncontrollèd Art,
Thy dainty Body; not to fear a frown,
For soiling of thy new white Satin Gown;
My willing Lips shall part, to catch thy Breath,
Sweet, as the Honey-dew, which Hybla hath.
There will I hang; and all my veins inspire
With Ardent Wishes, taken from thy fire;
Hard on my Lips, thy wanton tongue shall press,
And by new Chimistrie in Wantonness,
Send the rich Quintessence of all I seek,
In Dalliance through that faire Alimbecke:
There will I suck, with Cunning Industrie,
Thy Spirits Extracted by Love's Alchimie.
When we 'are be-qualm'd, that long embraces has
Made dull Desire, and wee shall only pass
Faint breathings, I will summon a fresh Store
Of Vigour, far more Active, then before;
And with neat Titillations, new provoke
Decayed fire in thee, to the full Stock;
Invent new postures, & out-doe the old
Fictions, to make 'em Story; when with bold
Uncurbèd flames, we grapple; and not part,
But to renew our Action, and our Art.

I find it hard to think that Mrs. Elizabeth Daniel would not have approved: the oral and semi-tactile pleasures George describes all sound a bit unusual. I imagine that Charles I was a convenient pretext for the vast beard: Daniel clearly liked to be in a nimbus, of hair or smoke: the Creator, whose words issue from a bright cloud or burning bush.

Coming on strong, early modern style

I spent an almost spookily quiet Sunday (the England match was on TV) cycling in rural Hampshire.

After two visits to churches, one of which, on the redundant churches list, had cobwebs between the pews, and then traversing the site of the Battle of Cheriton Down (March, 1644) -

- http://www.appledowncentre.co.uk/battle.html gives a reasonable summary based on William Seymour's analysis - I decided that I was communing with the 17th century dead rather too keenly.

So here's a bit of 17th century life, as rendered by Thomas Deloney in Part 2 of The Gentle Craft (1639). Harry Nevell is trying (this is Chapter 9) to woo Mistress Farmer, a London widow just 2o years old:

Faire Mistris quoth Harry, I know it is the custome of women to make their denials unto their louers, & strictly to stand on nice points, because they will not be accounted easily won, or soone entreated: alack deere Dame consider nature did not adorne your face with such incomparable beauty, & framed every other part so full of excellency, to wound men with woe, but to worke their content.

Wherefore now in the Aprill of your yeares, & the sweet summer of your dayes, banish not the pleasures incident to bright beauty, but honour London streets with the faire fruite of your womb & make me blessed by being father to the issue of your delicate body; & though your beauty as the spring doth yet yearely grow, yet in the black winter of old age it will not be so, & we see by daily experience, that flowers not gathered in time rot & consume themselves: wherfore in my opinion you should doe the world intollerable wrong to live like a fruitlesse figtree.

"Honour London streets with the fair fruit of your womb, and make me blessed by being father to the issue of your delicate body." Deloney is praised for the vividity of his dialogue, on which his fiction is highly dependent. He's fond of his shoemakers, who are always depicted as rather lucky fellows, who have a professional access to women's (lower) bodies. My illustration, from a 1678 edition of the first part of the book, captures those erotics. Earlier in the fiction, Long Meg of Westminster is involved in a piece of intense flirtation, and recites as she lifts her clothes (and is encouraged to lift them higher still):
Euery Carter may reach to the garter,
A Shoemaker he may reach to the knee,
But he that creepes higher shall aske leaue of me.

Harry's undeniably forthright pitch fails, for Mistress Farmer turns him down. But I do not think he is represented as foolish, rather that his carpe diem arguments (echoic of Venus and Adonis) are meant to sound eloquent, and his allusion to getting her pregnant - with its odd insinuation of a metropolitan version of patriotism, in which she first honours London, and secondly blesses him - was meant as well said. He rather goes off the rails after her refusal, largely because he is so winning in his ways with his later mistresses and their maids. Mistress Farmer accepts the offer of one of her shop's senior apprentices, after a series of trials of his patience, and his point blank advances on her. She tells him to join the army, he replies that: I had rather have my manhood tried in another place. Yfaith where quoth shee? by my troth said he, in your soft bed, which is far better then the hard field: why thou bold knave quoth she...

Till reading this part of The Gentle Craft, I don't think I'd noticed that it seems to have been customary for the mistress of a middle class house and premises to summon her servants using a whistle. There's an early allusion in the book, as two maids are fantasising about the pleasures of married life and being in charge of a household: 'she sets her siluer whistle to her mouth, and calles her maid to cleare the boord'. Mistress Farmer uses her whistle later in the book.

Surviving 105

On Sunday, as I was coming back from completing the 105 mile 'Circuit of the Cotswolds' Ride (I was rider 396) http://www.circuitofthecotswolds.org/2006/results.php
I called in at Brightwell Baldwin church in Oxfordshire to pay my respects to 105 year old Stephen Rumbold. If you heave aside a vast doormat in the Church porch, and dust a bit, there's his grave slab, with its splendidly confrontational quatrain:

"He liv'd one hundred and five
Sanguine and strong
An hundred to five
You do not live so long."

He lived from February 1582 to March 4th 1687: from before the Armada, almost to the Glorious Revolution, through the reigns of the later Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, the Commonwealth, Charles II, and on into the reign of James II.

There is apparently a Rumbold's Lane and a Rumbold's Copse locally. We are currently living through the last years of those exceptionally long-lived people who fought in World War One. These occasional centenarians really do seem to last into an eighth age of man, and were (and are) made much of, and rightly. Of course, early tombstones, with their regular 'hodie mihi, cras tibi' and 'such as I am, so will you be' mottoes did confront the reader uncompromisingly with mortality. But I have never seen was as cheerfully challenging as this, with old Stephen laying the odds just outside the church door. I do not know, but I'd guess that the gravestone which uses its inscription to remind the reader that he or she must die was a type which disappeared after World War One. Utterly unthinkable now, where prompting such thoughts has become bad taste. I like to think that the unknown verse-writer captured Stephen Rumbold's 'sanguine' character, maybe even one of his own jokes.

Brightwell Baldwin does well for inscriptions. Inside, now safe on the wall, is what might be the earliest recorded memorial brass in English: 1371, for John the Smith:
'Man com & se how schel alle ded li; wen yolk comes bad & bare
Noth have wen we away fare; All ye wermes yt ve for care;
Bot yt we do for god yr luf haue nothyng yare; hundyr
yis grave lys John ye Smith god yif his soule hewn grit.'

('Man come and see how shall all dead lie, when [youth? folk?] comes bad and bare
We have nothing when we go away, only the worms care for us.
Except what we [have done] for God's love, we have nothing ready [provided]; Under
this grave lies John the Smith God give his soul great heaven').

The idea here is that John Smith survived the Black Death, and bought up ownerless lands, became prosperous, and finally wanted a vernacular inscription - Latin had probably died in the parish with the priest. Blogger has put my blurry picture at the top of this post, my camera could not cope any better than that. As a final monument, in you lift the carpet in the aisle, there's one of the Cottesmore brasses, commemorating Chief Justice John Cottesmore, Amice his wife, and their eighteen children, five boys and thirteen girls.

History, human history accumulating in yet another 'accoutred frowsty barn'! (http://www.artofeurope.com/larkin/lar5.htm)

Early Modern Nakedness

I’ve been unable to get on-line, my ISP having problems. I’ve anyway been reasonably busy with the effort to get degree results out after the lifting of the industrial action. My image is taken from a painting by Jordaens, because in this hot weather, I am offering you two passages concerning early modern nakedness.

“The same day sevennight he [Prince Henry] died, there fell out a very ridiculous accident. A very handsome young fellow, much about his age and not altogether unlike him, came stark naked to St. James’s whiles they were at supper, saying he was the Prince’s ghost come from heaven with a message to the King. But by no manner of examination or threatening could they get any more out of him, or who set him to work. Some say he is simple, others mad. He belongs to one of the Chancery. All the penance they gave him was two or three lashes, which he endured as it seemed without sense, and keeping him naked as he was all night and the next day in the Porter’s lodge, where thousands came to see him. The King sent to have him dismissed without more ado or enquiry.”

Diary of John Chamberlain, 19^th November, 1612

“And in the mean while went the Lord Frederick secretly away, and came into the chamber, where she did unclothe her all naked saving a cloth before her members, and then came into the hall before the king and all his lords, and before all the other persons there being present, all naked, save that she had a kercher of silk before her members. And when she was come in, she went to the king and did him reverence. And when the king and his lords saw her, they marvelled greatly, wherefore that that fair woman came in naked before them… and therefore said the king to her, ‘Show you us what ye be and wherefore that ye come in here before us all naked in this manner.’ Then answered the woman to the king and said ‘I am the same person Lord Frederick that you spake on…’ ”

This second passage is from the narrative called Frederyke of Jennen (1518, 1520, 1560). It is the source narrative that you will find in the back of any decent edition of Cymbeline – the tale of the good wife whose partner has wagered on her virtue, who over-trustingly takes a trunk into her bedroom, from which a villain emerges to gather evidence that will win his bet that she can be proved lacking in virtue, the wife who then disguises as a man until the time comes for her dramatic way of revealing her true gender. A pity Shakespeare’s theatre prevented him from having Imogen cease to be ‘Fidele’ in this way (it would have done something for the popularity of the play). The theatrical conventions of the self-regendering moment are interesting – Luce in Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsden stops being Jack the lad with this concise action and question to the bewildered man she is claiming as her husband: ‘She scatters her hair. What say you now?’

The first passage is an incident at the Jacobean court, rather well handled by King James, considering the offence he could have taken at this impersonation of his dead son. I suppose that at an early modern court, you had to do something to fix royal attention on you, and get them to listen to your petition. I like the way word gets out, and thousands go to take a look at the offender, though that he felt punished by this is perhaps open to doubt.

A Recollection of Dame Helen

Posting on the number of the beast reminded me of Dame Helen Gardner - not that the late Merton Professor of English was in any way satanic herself: far from it, in fact. I knew her via an early form of staff-student committee in the Oxford English faculty, which she invited me to join, probably assessing me shrewdly enough as suitably ordinary and from nowhere special (and so credible to the role), but (when it came to any dispute about the degree) deeply compliant. Stories about her were rife in the student body, and we massed in her otherwise not particularly remarkable lectures, hoping to hear one of her fabled candid asides.
She once quenched a potential postgraduate pitching a research project on a Renaissance numerologist called (apparently) Pietro Bongo with the regal and disdainful query: 'And who is Bongo?' (tonally very much in the line of the earlier Oxford joke, 'What I don't know ain't knowledge'). Another Unlucky Jim in a similar position unluckily ad libbed at some point about 'God-botherers', to be told acidly: 'I consider myself something of a God-botherer'.

In 1972 this devout and learned lady edited the New Oxford Book of English Verse, all 884 poems of it, and so had to choose a poem to be number 666. Somehow she slipped into place, without apparent disruption of the chronological run of the book, this sonnet, Lucifer in Starlight, by George Meredith:

ON a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he leaned,

Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,

Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reached a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.

And so, having put the devil in his place, she passed serenely on - if you wanted to carp about her victory, well, Meredith was born in February 1828, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the immediately prior poet in the anthology) not until the May of that year, and so technically he ought to appear in the book after Meredith. So she did cheat a bit. I doubt that anyone would have said as much to her when she was alive.

The Wrong Number of the Beast

The world seems to have survived 6.6.06, despite those ominous words, ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred three-score and six’: Revelation, 13; 18).

With the abrupt ending of the marking boycott, life is full of the business of moderating numbers, so here’s just a brief post based on Richard Franklin’s argument (from 1675) that the number of the beast had always been misunderstood, and should be construed as 42.

Yes, 42, one of the favourite numbers on the internet, with a whole website devoted to sightings of it at http://www.digitalthoughtsw.com/DTS/42/

That site is, of course, created in homage to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the computer Deep Thought calculates ‘the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything’. After seven and a half million years of computation, '42' is the answer Deep Thought comes up with. To the delight of Adams’ fans, 42 was subsequently strongly backed (at least for a spell) as the figure for the ‘Hubble Constant’ (which determines whether the universe expands, or is static, and so whether it will end entropically, or in a ‘Big Crunch’) For which see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_constant

Richard Franklin based his argument about a different kind of end-of-the-world on reading the Greek 'chi xi sigma' not as denoting numbers, but as letters that are then to be decoded as numbers (on a simple scheme with alpha as one, and then onwards through the 24 letter alphabet of Greek to omega, so giving him signs in these three cases equivalent to 22, 14, and 6: the product of those numbers being 42). This he can then prove, at least to his own satisfaction, to be the number of Roman emperors prior to Constantine, the first Christian emperor. He goes on to argue that the Antichrist cannot be identified with the Pope, but has (in the 17^th century way of these things) to be Mohammed.

What really is interesting here is that sense (again) that the press in the mid 17^th century was very much their internet, their way of posting their crazy ideas. Once censorship had lapsed post-1642, and after the burst of urgent controversy in the mid 17^thcentury, it looks as though lots of printing presses were chasing work. It clearly didn’t cost very much to publish a pamphlet, so all sorts of ill-advised stuff appeared, 'Printed for the Author'. Franklin apparently projected a life of Cranmer, but this little work seems to be all that's left from him. Among the class of writings that rave about Gog and Magog, it is relatively lucid, but 42 just didn't catch on - after all, compared to 666, it is such a banal number. How could anyone get excited about 42? Oh, yes, I've already answered the question. I think he must be right.

A not quite early modern footballer

Some years back, we used to run ‘poetry seminars’ for our students. They were more a training for speaking up in class than designed to meet any syllabus. I used to do mine thematically, and would set the class off to find poems to bring to the seminar. One of these themes was heroes (and heroines), and I would produce as my text Alan Ross’s poem about Stanley Matthews (1915-2000), the first footballer ever to be knighted. I transcribe it before the overblown festival of footballing mediocrity that the World Cup will almost certainly prove to be.

A high art poem on a low art subject is a hard act to pull off, and perhaps Ross indulges some anxious cultural name-dropping that doesn’t quite work. Maybe the poem can be seen as ancestral to Karl Miller's notorious prose-poem on Paul Gascoigne. But as a mimesis or verbal opsis of Matthews’ movement on the pitch, the poem is good, and it is clearly (stanza three) the product of someone who has studied his subject intently. The black and white film of Matthews hardly gives any better sense of what he did, and what there was to see, than this poem does. As a highly modified love poem, one man to another (final stanza) it reveals something about the homoerotics of sport. People loved watching Matthews play, and were moved to the poetic by what they saw - his movement, in dribbling past a fullback, was compared to that of a dragonfly, that hovers, then swerves away with flickering rapidity.

Even young women (students), indifferent to football, were beguiled by a poem than can turn ‘Stoke City, Blackpool and England’ into such a powerful mantra.

I used to follow football, prior to the Hillsborough and Heysel stadium disasters, which made me give up. The contact that I had with football of the 50’s was early experience at school with leather caseballs, leftovers from a bygone era, hard and weighty, painful if you kicked them with poor technique, frightening objects if they came at you fast. Matthews was the genius at the kind of game they dictated.

Stanley Matthews

Not often con brio, but andante, andante,

horseless, though jockey-like and jaunty,

Straddling the touchline, live margin

not out of the game, nor quite in,

Made by him green and magnetic, stroller

Indifferent as a cat dissembling, rolling

A little as on deck, till the mouse, the ball,

slides palely to him,

And shyly, almost with deprecatory cough, he is off.

Head of a Perugino, with faint flare

Of the nostrils, as though Lipizzaner-like,

he sniffed at the air,

Finding it good beneath him, he draws

Defenders towards him, the ball a bait

They refuse like a poisoned chocolate,

retreating, till he slows his gait

To a walk, inviting the tackle, inciting it.

At last, unrefusable, dangling the ball at the instep

He is charged – and stiffening so slowly

It is rarely perceptible, he executes with a squirm

Of the hips, a twist more suggestive than apparent,

that lazily disdainful move toreros term

a Veronica – it’s enough.

Only emptiness following him, pursuing some scent

Of his own, he weaves in towards,

not away from, fresh tacklers,

Who, turning about to gain time, are by him

harried, pursued not pursuers.

Now gathers speed, nursing the ball as he cruises,

Eyes judging distance, noting the gaps, the spaces

Vital for colleagues to move to, slowing a trace,

As from Vivaldi to Dibdin, pausing,

and leisurely, leisurely, swings

To the left upright his centre, on hips

His hands, observing the goalkeeper’s spring,

heads rising vainly to the ball’s curve

Just as it’s plucked from them; and dispassionately

Back to his mark he trots, whistling through closed lips.

Trim as a yacht, with similar lightness

- of keel, of reaction to surface – with salt air

Tanned, this incomparable player, in decline fair

to look at, nor in decline either,

Improving like wine with age, has come far –

born to one, a barber, who boxed

Not with such filial magnificence, but well.

‘The greatest of all time,’ meraviglioso, Matthews –

Stoke City, Blackpool and England.

Expressionless enchanter, weaving as on strings

Conceptual patterns to a private music, heard

Only by him, to whose slowly emerging theme

He rehearses steps, soloist in the compulsions of a dream.

Philip Larkin included this poem in his resolutely retro Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973), which is where I came across it.

http://www.netmemorials.co.uk/Sir%20Stanley%20Mathews.htm

http://ftvdb.sigmer.net/show/summary/title/517949/

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73782 (if you have access to the ODNB on-line)

Charlie's Chaplain

Two Royal chaplains are buried at the Parish church in Eversley, in Hampshire,

http://www.stmaryseversley.org.uk/

They are Alexander Ross, chaplain to Charles I, and Charles Kingsley (more famous as the novelist and social reformer), but who was chaplain to Queen Victoria, and sometime tutor to Edward VII.

I do not know if there has ever been a study of the intellectual mentors of the famous (a mixed history that might start with Seneca’s disastrously temporary hold over Nero). It is hard to imagine that Alexander Ross was anything other than a bad influence on King Charles, for Ross was a cantankerous fanatic, who struck out at any new idea that he encountered. A medieval-style Aristotelian, he attacked Thomas Hobbes, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Thomas Browne, William Harvey, and published a late (the last?) refutation of the crazy new (-ish) notion that the earth revolved around the sun, in The New Planet no Planet, Or, the Earth no wandering Star, Except in the wandring heads of Galileans (1646).

Ross also collected and catalogued religious heretics, and this orthodox man’s obsessive interest in what he saw as the heterodox perhaps led him to some involvement in the first English translation of the Koran. He might in fact have been the translator, the work coming into English via a French translation. The prefatory matter that he certainly did contribute (because he signed it) is a characteristic performance. He knows that the project cannot (by his own narrow principles) be justified, but he also cannot quite resist adding this prize example to his manic collection of (as he sees it) departures from the true faith.

His self-conflict is captured in this passage, from amongst his list of justifications for publishing the work:

“We cannot do better service to our Countrymen, nor offer a greater affront to the Mahometans, than to bring out to the open view of all, the blind Sampsons of their Alcoran, which have mastered so many Nations, that we may laugh at it” (sig d4).

This, of course, casts his Christian readers as the Philistines, foolishly jeering at the undaunted captive who will bring down the roof on them all. Ross cannot quite conceal from either himself or from us his unease about what he is doing. Is he, the staunchest defender of things as they are, introducing the potent force that will demolish everything?

Charles Kingsley was perhaps stranger still. His inner heretic was Darwinian, and he had suffered the full 19^th century ‘doubts’, before rallying to settle on his version of manly Christianity. He is buried outside the Church with his somewhat older wife, Fanny, beneath a white cross whose design they had jointly agreed. The inscription reads ‘Amavimus, amamus, amabimus’ (‘We loved, we love, we shall love’). It is more than a piece of Latin declension. When a young woman, Fanny had been drawn to the idea of establishing a Protestant celibate sisterhood. Charles seems to have managed to supersede this with a doctrine in which the orgasm was interpreted as a foretaste of the similar joys of heaven. The immense, almost doctrinal importance he gave to sex as an earthly manifestation of the divine might have made him (in the unlikely case of their consultations ever touching, in some remote fashion, on such matters in a Christian marriage) congenial as a Chaplain to Queen Victoria, who was frisky enough when young. A 20^th century memorial window to Kingsley depicts a couple of water babies (I think, though I cannot see that the external gills the story specifies have been included) at either side of St Elizabeth of Hungary, whose status as a married saint made her extremely important to the writer.

But Eversley church takes us back to the Koran again, in a brass memorial plaque to the remarkable Mary Kingsley (Charles Kingsley’s niece). It is a surprise to see in an Anglican Church an inscription in Arabic, even more of a surprise to find that it translates the Koran saying ‘I seek refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak, / From the evil of that which he has created, /And from the evil of the intense darkness when it comes.’ Theologically tough-minded stuff, this: I think only Isaiah 45, 7 is anywhere near as candid in allowing the Bible’s God to be responsible for the whole shooting match, good and bad. One can only suppose that Mary Kingsley was so far off-the-scale in her unconventionality (West African travels, condemner of missionaries, unflinching defender of local customs up to and including slave trading) that they felt they had to rise to the challenge.

History seems to gel, congeal, and aggregate in certain places. The final surprise in Eversley Church is to lift a trapdoor in the floor and discover a sarsen stone glistening darkly beneath the Christian fabric. Was it accidentally there, a mere freak of geology, or did the church get there because this stone had served in a previous form of worship?

http://www.stmaryseversley.org.uk/Virtual_tour.htm

Well, it smites my lyre anyway

I have been listening, over and over, to Handel’s 1707 ‘Dixit Dominus’: I’ve got a version performed wonderfully by The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra http://www.chandos.net/details05.asp?CNumber=CHAN%200517

Apart from a gruesome ‘midi’ file, I’m afraid that I cannot find an mp3 on the net. Anyway, once it had got under my skin, I wanted to know what it was about. Handel was setting the Latin text (from the Vulgate) of what became Psalm 110 in the English bible. I was aware of other settings of this psalm, notably Monteverdi’s. There’s a list at http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Psalm_110

To see what the text of this glorious music actually says is a shock. In the fifth and sixth sections, Handel is setting ‘confregit in die irae suae reges’ (‘hath broken kings in the day of His wrath’) and ‘conquassabit capita in terra multorum’ (‘He will crush heads in the land of many’ or (AV), ‘he shall wound the heads over many countries’). To ‘confregit’ and, even more markedly, ‘conquassabit’, Handel gives an exultant setting. The sopranos shriek, the tenors shout (all in their highly modified way). Violence was (surely) never celebrated with such beauty. The sentiments are those of a savage tribe, but delivered in such a way that you have to love and admire humanity: the special genius who can score such music, and the men and women who have nurtured their talent till they can perform with such intensity and precision.

Psalm 110 is power-worshipping, the kind of power that smashes enemies abroad. The version in The Book of Common Prayer enthuses: ‘He shall judge among the heathen; he shall fill the places with the dead bodies: and smite in sunder the heads over divers countries.’ It celebrates the inauguration of a king as being, simultaneously, high priest ‘for ever according to the order of Melchisedech’. For this moment of union of temporal and sacred power, Handel again supplies a canon (I think) of astonishing beauty. When Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, he didn’t know it, but this was what he had in mind. And yet, and yet: because Handel sets in a Christian tradition, while there may be a residual sense of power embodied in a here-and-now mortal priest-king, as that priest-king really has to be Christ, the psalm (as set) also expresses, exuberantly, the destruction of all temporal kingship: kings as footstools, broken kings, a new reign in which ruling has been swept away.

Psalm 110 achieved its cultural prominence through a misunderstanding: ‘Dixit Dominus Domino meo’, it starts: and this was inevitably read as ‘The Lord (God) said to my Lord (Jesus)’. With that poorly-evidenced doctrine of the Trinity to shore up, here was a text with God speaking to His Son. What might have begun as a praise-song by a court poet about David, or might have been David’s own song about Solomon (or some future leader), and what was certainly a psalm that acquired a very special personal application in the reign of Simon Maccabeus, then went on to be quoted repeatedly in the New Testament. Heralding a messiah, it was inevitably recruited by Christians as being a messianic text about Jesus. This is Isaac Watts’ 1719 version (opening):

Thus the eternal Father spake
To Christ the Son, ‘Ascend and sit
At my right hand, till I shall make
Thy foes submissive at thy feet.’

Watts’ title for his version of the psalms was candid enough: The Psalms of David, imitated in the language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship. He translated by choosing those interpretations of the text which were to his mind the “most evangelical and most beautiful”. Watts found the psalm so important, that he gave it three iterations, and interpolated into the text as he thought fit: “Thro' the whole earth his reign shall spread, / And crush the powers that dare rebel” – Christ as the conqueror.

Yet as Watts indulges these sanguinary but devout fantasies, he acknowledges the actual gospel narrative. The last verse of the Latin psalm is obscure (‘De torrente in via bibet: propterea shall He lift up the head’ – ‘He shall drink of the torrent in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head’). Mary Sidney (1561-1621) translated expansively, and swings deftly from the bloodily triumphant, to the Messiah being victorious in death:

Thy Realm shall many Realms contain:
Thy slaught’ed foes thick heaped lie,
With crushed head ev'n he shall die,
Who head of many Realms doth raign.
If passing on these ways
Thou taste of troubled streams:
Shall that eclipse thy shining rays?
Nay, light thy glories’ beams!

Isaac Watts pushed that ‘torrent’ still further into metaphoric paraphrase:

Tho' while he treads his glorious way,
He drink the cup of tears and blood,
The sufferings of that dreadful day
Shall but advance him near to God.

There’s a story that the birth of English Literature as a discipline had something to do with World War I: that a generation of classicists forgot their Greek while serving in the army prior to going to ‘Varsity’, and so a new subject was devised to suit their shortcomings. Looking into psalm interpretation made me think that our kind of interpretation took root after people lost faith in 19^th century forms of Bible interpretation (or that form of scholarship just became too difficult/vexed/mad). Just have a gander at Professor Hildebrandt’s footnote density!

http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/Ted_Hildebrandt/OTeSources/19-Psalms/Text/Articles/Bateman-Ps110-BS.pdf

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1573

(My picture is Kind David harping, from a painting by Jan de Bray.)

"I have nothing of new to direct you in"

Imagine scholarship without the OED (if you can). Now that the power of the computer has been integrated so consummately with that dictionary’s vast resource, just what a resource it has become.

A feature of the online OED which I find irresistible is the search facility for ‘first cited author’ and ‘quotation author’. My last posting was a Charles Cotton poem, in which he is amused (I take it, because he knows that ‘chambre’ means bedroom) by the term ‘valet-de-chambre’, which sounds nicely naughty to him.

The first recorded use of ‘valet-de-chambre’ in English is in a letter from Charles I to Henrietta Maria (so it was quite a new term for Cotton). This set me off looking at Charles’ other potential contributions to the language. The readers who compiled quotations for the OED tended to spot rare words, and also to be drawn, Dr. Johnson-like, to striking quotations. But whoever read Charles I, did so attentively (and without any obvious bias towards noble utterances written by or reported from the King).

Charles had a French wife, and so certain words not recorded prior to his usage may well be very early or even actual first usages. There’s that ‘valet-de-chambre’, and his idiom ‘nothing of new’ is one that the editors suggest may stem from French usage. He adds a new usage to the surprisingly early loan word ‘vogue’ with the idiom, ‘in vogue’. ‘Apostil’ (to annotate or write marginal notes to) failed as a loan word, but is a very characteristic type of usage, for of all kings, Charles was involved (to say the least…) in politics. New political applications of words, fresh military ones, and a vocabulary for the scrutiny of documents (and the characterisation of them) all feature prominently:

A ‘cabalist’ (one who cabals), ‘engage’, ‘anti-monarchical’, ‘agitate’, ‘round-dealing’, ‘misunderstanding’, ‘illiberal’, ‘distractions’ are all entries with developed senses not recorded before Charles’s usage. For military words, ‘home-defence’, ‘enquarter’, and ‘forage’, and from Charles studying documents and attempting to characterise positions taken, words like ‘absolute’, ‘demonstrably’, ‘unconfutable’, ‘counsellable’, ‘paraphrase’, and ‘hyperbolic’ have significant quotations, illustrative of the word’s semantic development, from Charles.

The King’s characteristic usages are recorded: ‘malignant’ meaning ‘sympathetic to the Parliamentarian cause’ seems to have been habitual. His complaint about “The malignant Party which have … begot this Misunderstanding between us and our good subjects” has ‘malignant’ in new sense 1 c and ‘misunderstanding’ in new sense 2 together in one utterance. Charles, a man with a developed aesthetic sense seems (probably) to have regularly used ‘unhandsome’ to deplore something he disapproved of (“his unhansom quitting the Castell and forte of Bristol”). That he is first recorded user of ‘picture-drawing’, in a personal reference for Mytens, seems very appropriate (“Wee, having experience of the facultie and Skill of Daniel Mittens in the Art of Picture draweing…” – and doesn’t this sound exactly the note of a kiss-off reference, Charles having found Van Dyke?)

I didn’t really see Shakespearean usages crop up in this great reader of plays, but sensed that you might have a basis for claiming that Charles had spent a lot of time listening to John Donne, from whom he might have picked up ‘pre-pardon’ and ‘refractariness’.

My doctored hagiographic portrait has one of Charles’ locutions, as picked up by the dictionary. But it isn’t ‘periclitation’ that was the new word there (it seems to have had some circulation among these classically-educated men of the 17^th century for ‘nearness to danger’), but ‘necessitate’ as a verb which is the potential new usage.

Rather beguilingly, I had to search for Charles’s quotations as both ‘Charles I’ and ‘Chas I’, for the dictionary was compiled in an earlier age, and without electronically introduced internal consistency (as the search guides point out).

With his tendency to stutter, Charles I is not associated with any great moments of eloquence or outbursts, and his words may well have undergone loyal working-over. But the situation he found himself in seems to have made him a more varied linguistic performer than one might have expected from a king more famous for iconic than verbal self-projection.

http://dictionary.oed.com/

The Mistress-Master of his passion?

Charles Cotton again … I’ve always considered Orsino a character delivered in Shakespeare’s highest style of comedy. But students tend to dismiss him automatically (‘in love with being in love’ is held against him, as if this were the worst of emotional depravities). His final speech in Twelfth Night is his best moment, when he seems to contrive to marry everybody (‘A solemn combination shall be made / Of our dear souls’), moves in with Olivia at last (‘We will not part from hence’), and assigns an undiminished role for Viola, who can continue to play ‘Cesario’.

At the end of Cotton’s ‘Amoret in masquerade’, the poet puts the question that he has pondered throughout this poem to a beguilingly pretty boy who has caught his attention:

… Come, tell truth,

Are you not a cloven youth?

See, he laughs, and has confess’d,

God-a-mercy for the jest:

Monsieur Amoret let me

Your Valet de Chambre be,

I will serve with humble duty

Both your valour and your beauty,

You shall all day Master hight,

But my Mistress, Sir, at night:

Which if you will please to grant

To your humble supplicant,

Since you wear your wig so featly,

And become your clothes so neatly,

He has sworn, who thus beseeches,

You shall always wear the breeches.

Cross-dressing masquerades do not sound plausible social occasions for the 17^th century Peak District: this is a literary piece, from a culture that has had time to assimilate Shakespeare, and all the ‘page-boys’ of Jacobean stage romances. This little fantasy of safe same-sex attraction has its charm: I like the rather unexpected way that a mid 17^th century girl has to put on a wig to make herself masculine. Of course, Cotton was unreconstructed: ‘cloven’ is his usual way of denoting specifically female anatomy, but it’s a word that has rather markedly diabolic associations, while that final line promising that she will ‘always wear the breeches’ gets its point from misogamistic discourse (Cotton has a satirical ‘Joys of Marriage’ poem). She can be, day-time, a boy wearing the breeches, as that turns him on, but she conspicuously isn’t a wife with any potential for wearing (metaphorically) the breeches in the household. Perhaps most betrayingly of all, Cotton uses for this set of verses the same heptasyllabics he deployed for Matty his pine marten. ‘Pretty’ and ‘little’, quite acceptable in a poem about a pet, become leering in a poem which miniaturises and de-genders a woman.

But that goes too far: imagining a girl as a surpassingly beautiful boy excites Cotton to a strong restatement of her hidden gender. This is earlier in the poem:

My heart tells me, to those eyes

There belongs a pair of thighs,

'Twixt whose iv’ry columns is

Th’Ebon folding door to bliss:

And this sprig, all that we see

Strut with such formality,

Huff, and strive to look so big,

Is but Pallas in a wig;

And though his count’nance he doth set

To a good pitch of counterfeit,

Yet he cannot hide the while,

Venus’ dimple in his smile…

(Beresford’s 1923 edition has ‘Ebor’ where I’ve put ‘Ebon’ (‘Ebor’ isn’t in the OED, but ‘ebon’ connotes dark, etc), and reads ‘spring’ where I’ve substituted ‘sprig’ - as a regular term for a young man).

‘Venus’ dimple’ giving the true gender of the boy away reminds me of Donne’s ‘All will spy in thy face / A blushing womanly discovering grace’ (Elegy XVI), that marvellous moment when Donne for once allows a young woman’s beauty into his poetry (before being impelled to efface it: ‘Richly clothed apes, are called apes…’).

Cotton’s more famous poem about a ‘Doubtful Gender Masculine’ is his ‘On Annel-seed Robin, the Hermophrodite’, in which he casts Robin as a henotic being (one flesh, man and wife at once). It’s again faintly Shakespearean, being like ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ this time: ‘in this Chest Entombed are, / The wonder of a single pair’. But why ‘Annel-seed’?: my guess is from ‘anil’, indigo – as purple mixes two colours, Robin mixed two sexes. Could it be something to do with aniseed?

I couldn't find a convenient image of an early modern transvestite girl, so I took the putti with a mask from a bad painting by Everdingen. Maybe someone with more courage at the internet browser can tell me where to find one.