'What God Will', born 12th Night

A most straunge, and true discourse, of the wonderfull iudgement of God. Of a monstrous, deformed infant, begotten by incestuous copulation, betweene the brothers sonne and the sisters daughter, being both vnmarried persons. Which childe was borne at Colwall, in the country and diocesse of Hereford, vpon the sixt day of Ianuary last, being the feast of the Epiphany, commonly called Twelfth day. A notable and most terrible example against incest and whoredome (1600)

Most early modernists will have read, at some time or other, one of these monstrous birth pamphlets. This example, attributed to ‘I. R’, comes from a man who believes in the moral efficacy of certain books: the Bible (obviously), but after that, Phillip Stubbs’ Anatomie of Abuses, William Hergest’s The Right Rule of Christian Chastity and the Theatre of Gods Judgments (which he seems to think was by Stephen Batman, rather than Thomas Beard). And he has one further book recommendation: “Reade I pray you Thomas Nashes booke, entituled, The Teares of Christ over Jerusalem: which books, if you have any grace in you, will make you shed teares for your sinnes: I thinke it is the only best booke that ever hee made.”

Interesting to see Nashe amongst this devout company - when Nashe wrote Christs Tears, he too was slipping into the vein of Puritan hysteria that marks Stubbs’ book, denunciation that seems fascinated by the vices under condemnation. R. J. has the same tonal uneasiness, as when he says late in his pamphlet that “every young man after sixteen or seaventeen yeares oulde, and everie mayden of fourteene or fifteene (say what they will to the contrarie) hath motion to lust and fleshy delights”.

R. J. was alert enough to be troubled: “It might be doubted, as master Latymer said once in a sermon, that sin is good merchandise”. He spells out his misgivings at the very opening: “Good Reader, when this matter was brought to me, to consider of, that it might be drawne into some forme for the Printers presse, I was partly unwilling to meddle with it, that the sinnes of Incest, Onanisme, Whoredome, Adulterie & Fornication, with other Sodomiticall sinnes of uncleanesse & pollutions, do so outrageously raign, and are in these dayes used in many places…”

If he had qualms about writing, R. J. ends his pamphlet by “Wishing, that one or two of these bookes (as they are) might be given into ye hands of the wicked Father and Mother of this monster; to terrifie them withal.”

The story he had to tell is grim, and it is hard to imagine that the wretched parents needed any more horror than they had already undergone. A Hereford yeoman’s daughter (she isn’t named) was betroathed to a man who was “None of the bravest nor jolliest, yet a man of competent wealth, and of good name and fame in the place.” The banns were heard three times in church, “But Sathan, the enemie of all goodness, by his instigations and instruments, wrought so in the minde of the maiden; that shortly after this, she fell into a mislike with the man, to shunne his honest company, and in the ende wholly to breake off the match.”

J.R. disapproves mightily: this was an action “Whereof any maid indewed with modesty, would have beene greatly ashamed, and unwilling unto” and he stresses that “no just cause” had been given her by the young man. His account then slips into Nashe-like raciness: “But such is the lightnesse and inconstancy of a great number of this sexe, that true meaning men cannot tell where to finde them”. The maiden turns into a “slipperie Eele” that “had made a shift to winde away from this man”.

She then took residence as a servant in the Worcestershire house of her uncle, on her mother’s side. We can imagine that there had been trouble back at home after the broken-off marriage, and that this was the best solution they could find. But the uncle has three sons ‘at mans estate’, and worse, far worse, followed: “One of these yong men, her cousins, and she fell a lusting …They lay together, & she was gotten with child by him; and God in his judgment… made this proud, this scornfull & unconstant wench, the mother of a monster, and not of an orderly birth…” Even after the incest, R. J. still finds the inconstancy to her first vows worth mentioning again as the originatory sin.

The poor creature born to the cousins had catastrophic genetic problems: no hard palate, its facial features all hideously deformed, “the hands had no thumbs at all, nor any outward partition of fingers; yet it had fingers covered all over with one only skinne, as with a mitten”; it was hermaphroditic, and its tucked up legs were fastened by webs of skin to its body.

The three midwives attending had set it aside ‘on a few bents’, thinking it was a still birth, but after half an hour, it cried, so they clothed it, and “thinking it would not live to be brought to the Church to bee baptized, they sent for the Minister and Pastour of Colwall (within whose charge it was borne) to Christen it: who being a zealous man, and a learned Preacher, repaired thither with all speede: and finding by his owne inspection, and due examination of the persons present at the birth of the saide childe, that it was straungely formed and fingured, and being accompanied with competent witnesses, he baptised the said child; naming it, What god will”

What God Will lived for two days.

What God Will, born on twelfth night, 1600, and Twelfth Night, Or, What You Will, composed 1600-1 make an ironic coincidence: transgression as catastrophic in its consequences, with inconstancy as the prelude to sin, as against playful transgressiveness and inconstancy as a source of delight and wonder.

“Once Nurse, sev’n year the worse” – the married life of 'The Cotswold Muse'

To the Cotswolds this last weekend to see my sister and her family, and so my posting will be on Clement Barksdale (1609–1687), he of ‘The Cotswold Muse’ (“When I am weary of prose, and Grotius / His Gravity is to my stomach nauseous / Then call I up my Cotswold Muse…”).

Not that Barksdale wrote anything about the Cotswolds as a landscape. As chaplain, preacher or schoolmaster (according to Royalist and Anglican fortunes), he lived his life through books; much of his time was dedicated to translating and promoting the teachings of Grotius.

Antony à Wood half disdainfully described him as ‘a good Disputant, a great admirer of Hugo Grotius, a frequent Preacher, but very conceited and vain, a great pretender to Poetry, and a Writer and Translator of several little Tracts, most of which are mere Scribbles’.

Barksdale may have had his officious side, and he can produce strange things in verse. A Grateful MENTION of Deceased BISHOPS consists of a series of eulogistic couplets on high-ranking clergymen whose works he approved of (“May Primate Bramhall, with prime Authors go; / His Divine Works we have in Folio”), and only Barksdale could write a rhyming set of book recommendations (‘An English Library’: I might transcribe it in a future post!). But from some of the poems there emerges a devoted father, and a poet who writes best on his own itch to write.

Here he is writing about his wife’s determination to manage to breast feed, finally, one of their children, the seventh:

To his Wife at last a Nurse

After six nours’d by others, youl’d ne’r rest

Untill the seventh Child drew out your own Brest.

The seventh some secret virtue has, they say:

Tis then, I hope will prove a fortunat Boy.

And as in this (your Brest being often sore)

Your labours were; so will your Joyes be more.

Children would all be obedient sure

Knew they what pains their Mothers did endure.

The Proverbs false: Once Nurse, sev’n year the worse

Best Nurse is Mother; and best Mother’s Nurse.

I don’t recall seeing elsewhere that harsh proverbial lore against breast-feeding Barksdale cites here. He records their almost inevitably mixed fortunes with all these babies in poems like ‘Upon the Decease of my Infant-Lady’, or

Upon his seven Children: two Girls dead, one alive, and four Boyes

The divine Goodnesse! Which I have often try’d!

A pair to seven is quickly multiply’d.

Two that were wisest, quickly made return,

(Pardon me this one tear, faln on their urn:)

The female remanent, with observant eye,

I’d have to learn her Mothers huswifry.

To the four boyes, I’d leave this legacy

(God giving) my Arts and Theologie….

Because he likes children, Barksdale often ends up writing some kind of consolation after any local or family case of an infant dying. One of his lady cousins actually seems to have given birth during the funeral of her first child. This was exactly the kind of thing that would attract him, showing offspring as source of sorrow and joy. Barksdale’s poem would seem to us rather abrupt, not really very sensitive in expressing its Christian convictions, but I suppose it was accepted in his day (children are always going off to assume their thrones in heaven in his infant elegies)

To Mris Jane Commelin, upon the birth of her second Daughter, at the burial of the first

Cosin, See what reward from Heav’n you have!

So soon as your lov’d Daughter was in the Grave

Whom God took from you, for Correction

Of your excessive love; a resurrection,

To recompense your patience, from the Tombe

Is granted her, thorough your fruitfull wombe.

You may conceive, that as she languisht here,

She, by degree, did take a new growth there.

Nor need you call this child another name;

But fancy it to be the very same…

As I say, the other topic that seems humanly alive to me is verse about his own writing of poetry. In this poem, he combines small children and his writing (there may be a misprint here; the third couplet doesn’t make sense to me):

As I in bed, fore day, did verses make,

My Bedfellow, my little Boy, did wake.

Father, you write on everything, said He,

Let me intreat you, make one Verse for me.

I presently reply’d (He cannot say black:)

Thou’rt my white boy, although thy eyes be clack.

Thou bringst my Book; my Candle thou dost light;

I love thee next unto thy Sister bright.

If thou wilt learn thy Book, I’ll leave to thee,

Not one verse, but all my Poetry.

We also see his children learning to flatter the interests of their book loving father. One poem celebrates a better typeface that’s been found for his latest publication, and we glimpse in passing his children humouring him as best they can:

This Print’s so fair and bright, in th’others stead,

The Letter now invites and crys, Come, read.

My little Boys are so tane with’t, that They

Printers will be and Stationers, they say…

Barksdale is rather good, I think, on trying hard, but one way or other missing good poems (as I’m afraid he did):

Upon Verses made in his sleep

Me thought, I said, They are very well, and so!

They shall continue. Then I wak’t, and O!

I cry’d They vanish! Where d’ye take your flight?

Stay! Now I have them. Now they are out of sight.

A while they doe thus on my Fancy wave:

A piece or two, but now; now, none I have.

Waking, I never shall recover them. Once more

I’ll sleep: They’ll come, as they did come before.

In his ‘Upon the losse of some Copies’, he admonishes himself for being anxious about misplacing some papers: “Unless the Reader take all to the Best, / You may complain, you did not lose the Rest”. He worries about writing poems after the age of 40, about how it could be that Fletcher, Davenant and the rest can so obsess him. But the ‘great pretender to poetry’ was modest about what he actually did manage to write:

To the Printer

I pray, take care; Th’Erratas are enow

I’th’Book it self, although you Print it true.

My photograph shows one glimpse of what Barksdale didn't write about, the landscapes of the Cotswolds.

1000000000000000000000000000000

"How long shall God and his Saints reigne? How long shall the damned burn in Hell? For ever. How long is that? Imagine an hundred thousand yeares. Alas! That is nothing in respect of Eternitie. Imagine ten hundred thousand yeares, yea so many ages? Yet that is nothing: Eternitie is still as long as it was. Imagine a thousand millions of yeares. And yet that is nothing. Eternitie is not a whit shortened. Imagine yet more, 1000000000000000000000000000000, a thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand, thousand Millions of yeares. Imagine, I say, the damned should burn in Hell so many yeares, and yet thou hast not found the very beginning of Eternitie. Imagine once more so many millions of millions of yeares as there are drops in the sea, and yet thou art not come to the beginning of Eternitie."

After my last post, I have been reading a few 17^th century writers on hell. This present post is about one of the good guys, Samuel Richardson (no, another one of the same name), who denied the existence of hell, and I have read about others of his persuasion in D. P. Walker. But, as a trial of a technology unavailable to the learned Walker, I put ‘millions of years’ into the EEBO keyword search, and out tumbled all the grisly enthusiasts for eternal torment inflicted by a just and angry God. My two images here are a page from The considerations of Drexelius upon eternitie translated by Ralph Winterton (1636), one of many attempts to frighten and dismay with a diatribe on the length of eternity, and the handsome title page of Robert Bolton’s treatise affirming hell’s existence. Highly decorative for teachings so rebarbative, I liked Bolton’s portrait too: bluff, apparently kindly, but everlasting fire and brimstone all round, ye sinners!

I have read Steve Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow/Time’s Cycle, but till one looks at these primary texts, you don’t realize how odd a view of time they had: One day in Eden, 6,000 years, after that, the millennium adding another thousand, then eternity. We have since almost turned time round imaginatively: something like eternity first in geological time, homo sapiens sapiens with 7,000 years of civilization, and no confidence in the future.

But before I start on Richardson, here’s the awful idea put into poetry, by the Wesley’s in the 18^th century. It's a cheery ditty indeed:

‘The smoke of their torment ascendeth up, &c’. Revelations xiv. 11.

The smoke alas, must still ascend,

And never will their torment end,

No respite can the damn'd obtain,

No interval of rest from pain:

Millions of years shall pass away,

Nor shorten the eternal day,

While still in blasphemies they own

Their punishment but just begun.

~~~

Vain, wretched man, whose fond desire

Would quench the everlasting fire,

Or teach it will not always last

After a course of æons past;

O mayst thou never, never know

The dark abyss of endless woe,

Or in its literal strictness feel

The truth of an eternal hell.

I was recently reading a set of student essays on Milton, many of them about Hell and Pandemonium. Though one or two had succumbed (creditably enough) to the interest of the intellectual background, but everyone treated Milton’s hell with the same serene composure, merely as a literary idea, no more perturbing than (say) ‘Comus’ being set near Ludlow. But presumably some of Milton’s contemporary readers might have thought that, unless they could experience grace, they would finally get to compare the poet’s version with the real thing.

But hell as in Milton’s poem was under open attack (rather than discreet Socinian denial) in England even before Paradise Lost (and blogging last week about Mount Etna also reminded me of this book): Samuel Richardson’s A discourse of the torments of hell The foundation and pillars thereof discovered, searched, shaken and removed. With many infallible proofs, that there is not to be a punishment after this life for any to endure that shall never end. This was printed anonymously in 1658, but over his own name in the 1660 text.

Richardson has a brief ODNB entry to his name, and gets three brief mentions in D. P. Walker’s The Decline of Hell. I think he deserves a bit more attention than Walker gave him. Anyone who wrote and published both a denial of hell and a plea for religious tolerance (as Richardson also did) was mustering a humanity and tolerance unusual in his time. Richardson was not an atheist, but to explain his position, writes simply: “Must we suffer the torments of Hell? I believe Christ hath born the whole punishment of sinne; in it I am satisfied, and desire no more.”

Richardson was up against a difficult problem. Central texts in the New Testament relating to hell rather dismayingly indicate that the redeeming Christ, the God of Love, was actually quite keen on the idea. Richardson scatters allusions to bits of the texts in Matthew’s Gospel rather than engage in a direct contradiction of Christ’s words. Unable to attack here, Richardson puts a general emphasis on the unreliable nature of Bible translations: “The testimony of the learned, of the proper signification of shheol, Hades and Gehenna caused a further search, and my descent herein; I alledge not the sayings of men for proof, but for a witnesse against themselves…” Walker expounds how normal this angle of approach was for critics of the idea of eternal damnation (was that word really ‘eternal’ in the Hebrew?).

Richardson was quite prepared to be direct: he says he ‘detests’ the notion of hell (“as M. Beza did detest the Papists Limbus and purgatory, so do I their dreams of hell, it being a device of man without scripture, with all their uncertain brain-sick fancies, for the imaginations of men have no end”).

Regular attacks on the credibility of the witnesses for hell serve Richardson well – where do they get their evidence from? “When you write again, I pray tell us how you know that in Hell they do so, for the word of God saith not so, nor have you been there to hear it, nor they that told you so; to affirm things in Religion not revealed in the word of God, is to presume above that which is written, and contrary to 2 Cor. 4. 8. Rom. 15. 4. Socrates an Heathen, was more wise and modest in not affirming things he knew not, being asked what was done in Hell, said, he never went thither, nor communed with any that came from thence: yet you and others affirm with great boldness and confidence things you know not; some say in Hell the eye is afflicted with darkness, whereas darkness is no affliction to the eye; also they say their eares are afflicted with horrible and hideous outcries, their noses with poysonous and stinking smells, (of what I pray?) their tongues with gally bitternesse, the whole body with intollerable fire; the damned shall prize a drop of water worth ten thousand worlds; cursing shall be their tunes, blasphemies their ditties, lamentation their songs, and shrieking their straines, they shall lye shrieking and screaming continually. Ye see how men set their braines awork to invent lyes; for all they say is without warrant from the word of God."

Richardson at least writes without fear for his own personal safety, but he does expect the persecution of his book. In his pertinacious way, if the book must suffer, he puts it in the best possible company: “some have burned the Bible; and Doctor Crisps book of salvation by Christ alone, Mr. Archers, late of All-hallowes London, his Treatise of comfort to believers, against their sinnes and sorrow, was burnt by the Hang-man; the same spirit is alive to burn this also; I expect no better from such as are not taught of God.”

He does that characteristic scrutiny of what the originatory text doesn’t say: “We doe not finde the place of Hell mentioned in any of the Six dayes work of God; if it be a place, it is a created place, and so a part of the Creation of God; the Whale is mentioned in Scripture; if there be a place of Hell, it is a greater thing, and in that it is not found in the Creation of God, it is a ground to judge that it is of the creation of man, a vain imagination of man; for their reasons prove it not, nor do they agree amongst themselves of the proof of it, neither where it is nor what it is.” Milton has quite a bit about God separating off a bit of chaos to make room for hell (and Chaos and old Night being miffed about the encroachment). Chaos has (I suppose) the potential to be briefly pleasant, God doesn’t want any of that.

I was also reminded of Milton and that famous passage on Mulciber’s long fall from heaven when Richardson repeats some unnamed astronomers’ mathematics for the duration of falling from the fixed stars of the firmament to earth: “Astronomers say that there are three Heavens above the Firmament, where the fixed stars are is a hundred and sixteen millions of miles above the earth, which is so high, that if a stone or weight should fall from thence, and continue falling an hundred and fifty miles an houre, it would be eighty eight yeares, two weeks four dayes five houres and twenty minutes a falling down to the earth. "

Richardson mentions Robert Bolton and, of course, deplores his doctrine:

“After man had sinned, God expounded the punishment of the breach of his Law, Gen. 3. 14. to verse 20. it is evident that the punishment of the old Serpent the Devill, and of the woman and of the man for their sin, are onely punishments of this life; there is not the least word of any punishment after this life, much lesse of a punishment never to end; so that by that which is said we may judge of that Mr. Bolton and others say, of being everlastingly in a red hot scorching fire, depriv’d of al possibility of dying, or of being ever consumed in torment eternally; they say the fire of hell burneth far hotter then ten thousand rivers of brimstone; how know they it, seeing they never felt it, nor they that told you so? three drops of brimstone will make one so full of torment that one cannot forbear roaring out for pain, yet it must be born so long as God is God.”