Mooning the moon in early modern Brazil

Because I have a postgraduate student working in this area, I have been reading a racy piece of serio-comic writing, the undeniably learned wit of George Rogers’ The horn exalted or Roome for cuckolds. Being a treatise concerning the reason and original of the word cuckold, and why such are said to wear horns. Very proper for these times, when men are butting, and pushing, and goring, and horning one another. Also an appendix concerning women and jealousie, [1660].

George Rogers was a 17^th century medical man ambitious enough to have trained in Padua. He then went into practice in London, and eventually became the president of the College of Physicians. To celebrate the restoration of the monarchy (and in an act of remarkable prescience about what would notoriously prove to be one of the major preoccupations of that new anti-puritan era, he sent to the press this disquisition on a horny issue, seeing ‘the general verge of the people to merryment’, and expressing the hope that ‘this piece of drollery’ might therefore prove ‘acceptable’

The account of the mysterious origins of the ‘cuckold’ and of his imaginary horns is appropriately gamey: Rogers writes with an amused tolerance about erring wives, and urges any offended husbands to keep quiet - they should never blow their own horn and so draw attention to it. Rogers delivers a staggering range of arcane lore, much of it collected from (it seems) an array of Italian sources theorizing about cuckoldry and horns (‘these pleasant Seignieurs’, he calls them).

He outlines all the relevant cuckoo lore, and then gets onto the cuckold’s imputed horns, and their possible origins: Seignieur Trifone (apparently) alleged that it was because, of all male animals, only the billy-goat never shows signs of jealousy (an opinion conclusively refuted with a garish anecdote about a he-goat with a very particular reason for fatally attacking a man). Seignieur Cesario, Rogers tells us, derived Beccho from the horned Bacchus (and drunkards do get to be cuckolds), Seignieur Raineri argued the relevance of the horns of the moon, while Signieur Marmitta referred the fabulous horns of the cuckold to a story that, among Indian women, custom held that ‘when any lover presented their Mistress with an Elephant, she might permit him the joyes of her beauty’. There’s a pleasant side argument touched upon on whether an elephant has horns or just big teeth.

Other sources help Rogers range over the cornucopia, ‘the horn of plenty and abundance, which kind dames bring their husbands’, and an astronomical reason for the cuckold’s horns, obscurely based on which side of their wife a husband ought to lie when they are in bed together. The constellation of the Ram is on the right side of the sun, while women ‘would have their husbands still to lie on the left side, as being more dextrous for embraces’. So those that sullenly insist on lying on the right of their wives, making themselves less available for their marital embraces by doing so, ‘they call rams’.

All this is agreeably knock-about: Laurence Sterne would have loved it. Or rather, Laurence Sterne would have plundered it. To the latterday pedant, Rogers offers the stuff of a hundred footnotes. Here, in a single sentence, we get a possible light on the proper costuming of Edgar when he impersonates ‘Poor Tom’ in King Lear, and a splendid menstruation-ritual from Brazil which involved mooning the Moon:

“Lunacy for certain comes and goes with the Syzigy

[syzygy, that perfect word for the game of Scrabble, means coupling or conjunction]

of the star; from the Moon sure enough we become horn-mad, and hence our Tom-a-bedlams wear horns about them, perhaps by way of jeer and reproach to her, just as the women in Braseile at Monomatopa go up to the mountains at a new moon, and turn up their half-moons or backsides in defiance of her, because the causer of their monethly tribute.”

In this next extract, he skitters from consideration of the meaning present in the precise ordering of the Ten Commandments, into a consideration whether it ought to be the adulterer that gets the horns, and then leaps on to considering the devil’s horns:

“Adultery is both murder and theft, and therefore 'tis placed in the Ten Commandements twixt both: for as that steals the pleasures of another mans property, so (as Chaucer speaks) it Kerves in two and breaks asunder those that were one flesh. Well do then adulterers deserve horns: for since like pampered horses they run neighing after others wives and lye at rack and manger with them, 'tis fit they should have the bitter cup, and be drenched with the horn. The devil too is pictured with horns. He was the old serpent 'tis true, but whether Cerastes or the horn-snake, 'tis unknown. The Women they’l say he is horned, because he beats his dame when rain and sunshine meet together; so in revenge she turns succuba to others, just as he uses to lye with Witches and impure persons in dreams by creeping into their bodie.”

‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’, is Macbeth’s enigmatic first line: I have now seen two 17^th century sources that indicate a belief existed that if the sun was shining while it rained, the devil and his dam were falling out. Diabolic marital disputes! Now, who has written on the weather in Shakespeare?

Set my fancy on a fire!

I always welcome (I suppose) all Hollywood revisits to the 16th century, in the faint hope that things Elizabethan might suddenly seem modish to my students. I am told by those same students that The Golden Age opens here today. So here is Cate Blanchett in a publicity still giving it her maximum Gloriana, while Clive Owen is her 'Sweet Sir Walter'. Ratings over on the IMDB are good:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414055/
I suppose I am looking forward, with temperate expectation, to seeing it.

The same kind of conversation led me to mentioning a piece of Elizabethan Petrarchising to a student who knows the originals far, far better than I ever will, and who is (astonishing though it may seem that such people exist) a latterday member of the Petrarchisti, keen to keep Petrarch's wreath of laurel, bay and myrtle in a suitably flourishing state.

The poem I had in mind was a sonnet published in The Phoenix Nest, 1593. Here it is:

Those eyes which set my fancy on a fire,
Those crisped hairs which hold my heart in chains,
Those dainty hands which conquered my desire,
That wit which of my thoughts doth hold the reins!
Those eyes, for clearness do the stars surpass,
Those hairs obscure the brightness of the sun,
Those hands, more white than ever ivory was,
That wit, even to the skies hath glory won!
O eyes that pierce our hearts without remorse,
O hairs of right that wear a royal crown,
O hands that conquer more than Caesar's force,
O wit that turns huge kingdoms upside down!
Then Love be judge, what heart may thee withstand,
Such eyes, such hair, such wit, and such a hand.

The thing that has always struck me about this sonnet is way we react as we read through it. The octave grinds through the conventional rota of compliments in a way that triggers instant impatience. ('Oh, good grief, not another one.') And, as we drag our weary eyes down into the sestet, we stir back awake, even though that tiresome correlative structure is still unfolding. It is addressed to someone that wears a royal crown by right, whose wit 'turns huge kingdoms upside down'. There's only one person fits the bill, and there's Cate Blanchett above impersonating her.

Agnes Latham, editing Ralegh, saw this as a Ralegh-circle poem. He might have had it ghosted, for it is more mechanical than Ralegh's usual wavering line. But more likely, he wrote it himself. Emrys Jones doesn't discount the possibility in his brief note on the poem in his Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse.

Suddenly the cardboard petrarchisms shift aside, and we half glimpse no less a man than Ralegh addressing Elizabeth I. The conventional lover's deference in the poem is the court favourite to the woman whose favour lifted him from being an obscure gentleman-swordsman, hardened in vicious campaigning in Ireland, to what he became ('the best-hated man in England', and other attendant benefits).

So the amusement of it all is, can we possibly imagine a more fantastically boring poem being transacted between two more fantastically interesting people?

Plague prediction from the behaviour of children, and coffee as a remedy, 1665

In sprucing up a lecture I came across the little pamphlet The prophecie of one of His Maiesties chaplains, concerning the plague and black-patches with Mr. Gadburies happy and joyful predictions, for the decrease of the plague both in the city and suburbs; the time when; the manner how; by God's permission, and according to natural causes; the effects and motion of the planets, and what every week may produce for the thrice-happy and welcome abatement of this sad and dismal pestilence; and the city of London to be wholly acquit thereof about (or before) Christmas (1665).

This ill-founded announcement of hopeful news ( the pamphlet gives both the astrological reasons for the outbreak, and repeats the hopes Gadbury had raised for an amelioration in August when ‘the fortunate Planet Venus … may so happily contemper the fury of it’ by entering into ‘a Trine of the Sun’ – no such luck, of course) brings together several oddities. Taking me back to some of my earliest postings on the fashion for black face patches, the pamphlet mentions a royal chaplain denouncing them as connected to, and in some sense responsible for, outbreaks of plague:

“And 'tis worthy of serious consideration, that about 20 years ago, one of the Chaplains of his late Majesty King Charles the First of ever blessed memory, did preach at Bristol upon this Text out of Gen 4.15 (‘And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him’) And in his Sermon did speak often against black patches and beauty-spots; and, among other things, said they were Fore runners of other Spots, and Marks of the Plague; and presently, within a very little while after, the Plague broke out among them, and all those persons that did wear them, fled the Town.”

If fashion can be connected to the plague, so can all kinds of behaviours. Arguing rather unconvincingly that God in His infinite mercy (!) sends warning signs (but the plague nevertheless tends to arrive ‘unawares’), the author runs through a few of the bad signs to look out for:

“Though the Plague cometh unawares, and seizeth upon a man on a suddain, yet such is the infinite mercy of God, and the providence of Nature, that it giveth always warning enough to any one that will diligently observe it …

… First the Reader may be pleased to observe, the Signs immanent and approaching of great Mortality; Mr Kelway in the third Chapter of his Treatise of the Plague printed at London 1593 hath these words: When we see young Children flocke them selues together in companyes, and then will faine some one of their company to be dead amongst them and so will solemnize the buriall in a mournefull sorte, this is a token which hath bene well obserued in our age, to foreshew great mortallitie at hand.

The allusion is to Simon Kellwaye’s A defensatiue against the plague contayning two partes or treatises: the first, shewing the meanes how to preserue vs from the dangerous contagion thereof: the second, how to cure those that are infected therewith. I in fact had to fill out the faintly-inked quotation in the 1665 text from the 1593 source.

So, it’s a bad sign if you see the children out playing at funerals. I find this interesting, and, I must confess, to have a faint possibility of plausibility, like those stories of animals predicting disasters. William Lilly, in his manuscript ‘History of his Life and Times’ (I read the 1822 printing of this fascinating work) firmly believed in this indication of bad times ahead. (I concede that Lilly firmly believed in all kinds of indications of bad times ahead – that was his stock-in-trade.) But here he is on the 1625 outbreak (and, at first, on what has to be a smaller outbreak from his earlier London years, 1620 onwards):

“I will relate what I observed the spring before it broke forth. Against our house every night there would come down, about five or six of the Clock, some hundred or more boys, some playing, others as if in serious discourse, and just as it grew dark would all be gone home; many succeeding years there was no such, or any concourse, usually no more than four or five in a company. In the spring of 1625, the boys and youths of several parishes in like number appeared again, which I beheld, called Thomas Sanders, my landlord, and told him, that the youth and young boys of several parishes did in that nature assemble and play, in the beginning of the year 1625 ‘God bless us’, quoth I, ‘from a plague this year’.

Was there some unrecorded lore among 17^th century children, some observation they had made? Boys were perhaps close observers of the behaviour of rats, as a source of sport. Had they noticed (as used to be the case with local tribes when the plague was still confined to the steppes) that the population of rodents was diminishing? Before the plague got out of central Asia, the people there knew that if the marmots were sick, you stayed well away. I read somewhere that the Chagatai horde led by Timur-i-Leng (Tamburlaine) swept through, knowing nothing of this, and freed the bacillus into circulation across the hemisphere.

The 1665 pamphlet offers the usual desperate remedies – wood fires, dosing yourself with vinegar, and coffee. Yes, coffee.

“Kindle a wood-fire in the Chimney, to consume and destroy all the infectious vapours… Venice-Treacle, Vinegar is a most excellent Antidote against the Plague, and to drink 2 or 3 Spoonfuls in a Morning is very good … Coffee is commended against the Contagion.”

What a pitiable life they led!

Thomas Campion's Secret Love

I suppose I’ve always given Thomas Campion short shrift (mainly for not being John Dowland). But I’ve just been looking back at his words, and enjoying their directness when it comes to amatory subject matter. His Two bookes of ayres The first contayning diuine and morall songs: the second, light conceites of louers of 1613 clearly made Campion feel defensive at having put devout and undeniably naughty songs between the same book covers:

‘To the READER.’

That holy Hymns with Lovers’ cares are knit
Both in one Quire here, thou maist think’t unfit;
Why do’st not blame the Stationer as well,
Who in the same Shop sets all sorts to sell?
Divine with stiles profane, grave shelv’d with vain;
And some matcht worse, yet none of him complain.

The ‘light conceits of lovers’ show Campion writing out of classical models, particularly Catullus and Ovid. These were liberating influences: there’s a fine lyric requesting sex before marriage (‘Sweet, exclude me not…’), and asking (in same way that Ovid’s male lovers get absurdly aggrieved about things) why it was the doors were ever invented ‘in love’s despite’ (he’s asking his fiancée not to ‘bar not the door’, but she is doing so, and laughing at him). The lover who just daren’t speak is here, analyzing whether keeping painfully silent doesn’t in fact preserve the hope that will vanish if he speaks:

Fain would I my love disclose,
Ask what honour might deny;
But both love and her I lose,
From my motion if she fly.

Campion goes quite deep, psychologically: ‘Though your strangeness frets my heart’ is a lover’s complaint to a Lady who insists on such secrecy, and requires such arbitrary postponements of meetings that he just has to suspect her of being up to something (– it’s a good tune too).

But I’d forgotten about this set of verses for a very candid woman speaker/singer:

A secret love or two, I must confess,
I kindly welcome for change in close playing:
Yet my dear husband I love ne’ertheless,
His desires, whole or half, quickly allaying,
At all times ready to offer redress.
His own he never wants, but hath it duly,
Yet twits me, I keep not touch with him truly.

The more a spring is drawn, the more it flows;
No Lampe less light retains by lighting others:
Is he a loser his loss that ne’re knows?
Or is he wealthy that waste treasure smothers?
My churl vows no man shall scent his sweet Rose:
His own enough and more I give him duly,
Yet still he twits me, I keep not touch truly.

Wise Archers bear more then one shaft to field,
The Venturer loads not with one ware his shipping:
Should Warriors learn but one weapon to wield?
Or thrive faire plants ere the worse for the slipping?
One dish cloys, many fresh appetite yield:
Mine own I’le use, and his he shall have duly,
Judge then what debtor can keep touch more truly.

The wife loves her ‘dear husband’ well enough, but she also needs her ‘secret love or two’ (how many, though, really?) for variety’s sake. Her husband, who is given everything he wants sexually (it seems he could have plenty more if he could deal with it) is not in her view the loser by her extra-marital adventures. To justify her in all this there flows a stream of semi-proverbial instances and analogies. How unreasonable of him to want to keep all to himself all of something that he can’t in practice use all of!

Campion, writing such a splendidly uninhibited lyric voiced for a woman speaker, surely offered a very risqué piece for amateur and domestic performance. Could a man, his wife, and their friends, really ever have sat round a table singing their parts in this song-setting? Or would it always have been ‘performers’, distanced by profession from the unblushing sentiments they were voicing? She sounds, in her commonsense and socially aspirant euphemisms (‘close playing … scent his sweet rose’), a bit like one of the citizen’s wives in the comedies of Middleton, and in this way, the song is lightly ‘in character’. In my next post I will look at how one in particular of Campion’s songs was a great success with the broadside ballad audience. This poem is like one of the more outspoken state-of-a-marriage ballads.

The verb ‘twit’ is a characteristic Elizabethan usage: the OED, bless it, explains that it began with a long ‘i’ (‘twite’), and that was itself an aphetic form of ‘atwite’, which is the word in Beowulf for ‘reproach’ – if you in the later centuries were ‘twitting’ somebody, you were reproaching, as the OED sagely defines it, in a light or annoying manner. Perhaps it's still used only in English Departments? Even we no longer 'twit' one another 'in the teeth', as they did in the 16th century.

Joseph Swetnam, the Master of Defence

I have been reading, with interest and approval, Joseph Swetnam. There goes what professional reputation I have! But no, I do not mean the misogynist Swetnam, of The Arraigment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women, but the same Swetnam as the author of The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence. Being the first of any English-mans invention, which professed the sayd science; so plainly described, that any man may quickly come to the true knowledge of their weapons, with small paines and little practice (1617).

In this, his other work (which I suspect not many Renaissance specialists will have read, in comparison to those who have looked at The Arraignment), Swetnam is completely in the male world. Apart from this complete masculinism of subject, there is no sign here of Swetnam’s anti-feminism. He is calmly, and authoritatively amongst his own, and makes a very considerable instructor.

Swetnam’s anti-woman polemic caused, of course, a lasting stir. It has always seemed to me that he managed to provoke women so much (those who took up pen to answer his book) because of a very particular aspect of his style: Swetnam wrote with a flow of cliches, truisms, proverbs, and reach-me-down phrases. To a woman reading his diatribe, it would not have seemed like an individual was attacking her sex, but that here, horribly, were all the things a whole society seemed to say and hold against women: every old joke, jeer, and cynical adage, with Swetnam as merely the channel of a universal bile.

In this other book for men, Swetnam’s manner is just the same: but here, it renders him the good, untaxing companion, whose opinions make sense because they sound so universal – the ‘old saying going thus’ backing for what he says. Makes sense to me, it will make sense to you: that’s his pitch. Swetnam was clearly a tough cookie, a twenty minute hard-boiled egg. He says in passing that he has fought with rapier and dagger twenty times, and has never himself lost a drop of blood (these would not be duels, but prize fights and challenges between ‘masters of defence’ – but they would have been very hazardous, I am sure).

But Swetnam does not swagger: he addresses with understanding and latitude the kinds of hazards that early modern English men would undoubtedly have faced:

“if you meet with thine enemie in the night, and he charge upon thee, the best means for thy defence, is presently to chop up into this high guard, except thy staffe be of a sufficient length to keep him off, with charging the point upon him, or else the third means is to trust to thy heeles” (p. 139). Fight or flight: Swetnam sensibly admits either option: here’s the best guard if a man is coming at you with a big stick, he says, or run for it (“Run, and tell you old lady to run too”, as Richard Pryor might have added).

Swetnam had been Prince Henry’s “tutor in the skill of weapons”. With his patron, who had (he claims) asked him to put his instructions into print, dying so young, Swetnam dedicated his work to the less promisingly bellicose Prince Charles. He intended a second, expanded edition, with even more woodcuts showing the correct stances, and says he has that work in hand.

But ‘bellicose’ maligns the book: after he has discussed the best managing of all the hand weapons that are likely to be used if actual fighting has to be done, Swetnam produces one last weapon, one he guarantees will get you out of danger: it is “a fair tongue”. Talking your way out of trouble, avoiding the provocations of someone looking for a fight – Swetnam is absolutely sensible.

As for combat, Swetnam really does seem to know what he is talking about. If it comes to man against man combat, his instructions are completely cogent. Fight only in the morning when you are sober. If there is sunshine, maneuver round so it is your opponent’s eyes. If the ground slopes, you want to be on the lower side, for that is the more advantageous ground. If you let your rapier slip, take your dagger’s point in your hand, and shape up as though you are about to throw it: your opponent will hesitate, if you can, recover your rapier in the time you buy.

“Againe, and againe I say” (for that’s Swetnam’s tone), speed is the thing: you watch your opponent’s eyes, as the point of his rapier (if he is fighting correctly, with wrist movements only) will be moving to fast to follow if you try to do that intently. You do not try to use ‘strong blowes’: too much upper arm in it, and so it is too slow, you expose yourself to risk: “therefore strike an easie blow, and doe it quicke” (p.121).

The illustration shows the weapon Swetnam swears by: those are four foot rapiers, and two foot daggers; and you keep your twelve foot distance as an imperative. Swetnam speaks very ill of the modish ‘short sword’ – fight just as well with a tobacco pipe, he says, it's an “idle weapon”. In his measured account of the facts, ever inch counts: if your rapier has an inch on your opponent’s, that inch may be enough to save your life (and end his). Characteristically down to earth, he also notes that anyway a short sword (with its edge) will wear through your clothes three times faster than the rapier.

The choreographed Hollywood duel does not get any support: never give a weapon back, and if you are up against multiple opponents (and not in some narrow way), you are doomed, if your opponents are willing to kill you. (Swetnam is always realistic: men often don’t want to fight, and ofetn will not want to kill even when they can. But if two men really set out to kill one man, he is finished, as he just cannot be quick enough to guard against two purposeful assailants). Left-handers are always at an advantage: they get more practice fighting right-handed men than right-handed men get fighting the left-handed. It’s as simple as that.

What Swetnam lets us through to is the world of the early modern tough: the drinkers and fighters, those careless of their lives. He tells us what became of many of the best masters of defence he has known:

“Henry Adlington for killing his Maister Iohn Deevell, was hanged: Furlong he drank a pinte of Aqua vitae at one draught, and he fell downe and died presently: Westcoat, for some unkindnesse received of his owne daughter, he went into a wood neare Perine in Cornewall, and there hanged himselfe: Richard Caro, hee died most miserably of the French disease in an olde house neare Plimouth, although he had a new suite of clothes from toppe to toe, yet hee was so loathsome a creature, that no bodie would let him harbour in his house.” [Sig C4]

In instructing you to look after yourself, Swetnam will also expound, in the way that is so typical of his age, of how providence will doom those who murder. But, a man’s man if ever there was one, something in him still warms to these hacksters and bravos, with their flamboyant recklessness. “Rufus the Ruffian” (he recalls) was a sword and buckler man: he had “God pictured on the in side of his Target, and the divel on the out-side, with this poesie on the in-side, If thou wilt not have me, the other shall” (p.192).

So, alongside his book in contempt of women, he wrote a book which is (in a very odd way, considering the subject) full of compassion for men. Here’s their other anxiety (he knows) – the thought that some boozed-up thug carrying lethal weapons is going to pick a fight. He will tell you how to get safely home to that little woman… (And as for her…)

Not a happy early modern bunny?

My image here is a composite from part of the title page, the final page, and a portion of the recto of signature H2 (rotated) from the rapier and dagger manual, Vincentio Saviolo his practice, of 1594-5. I thought to look back at it, remembering its images of duellists, and thinking about my post about the challenge to a display of arms at the Red Bull theatre between Mr Gravener and Mr Blunne.

What caught my eye instead was the annotations made by the 17th century owner of the EEBO copy, one Henry Chaytor (possibly 'Chayton'). He puts his name into the book, 'Henry Chaytor his booke' on the title page. Inside the back cover, he writes a list of names: 'Thomas Thorpe, An Killinghall, Henry Chaytor, An Chaytor'. I don't know how Thomas Thorpe gets in, perhaps it's just a name that crops up in contexts of bibliographic enigma, but I surmise that 'Ann Killinghall' was in Henry's mind for alteration by marriage into 'Ann Chaytor'. Amid the usual pen-testings and doodles, he tries out the new name she will have, to see how it looks.

But in the middle of the book, running down the right hand margin, 'M An burke was wed the thirtieth day of april 1657' - the bad news that Mistress Ann Burke was wed the thirtieth day of April 1657. Now, if this were not an annotation in a rapier and dagger manual, I'd think this was a different Ann, but I suspect from the context that young Miss Killinghall opted to become Mistress Burke rather than Mistress Chaytor. And Henry is thinking of taking his honorable revenge on the over-felicitous Mr Burke...

Saviolo is still good reading if you can skip the technical details of imbroccatas, mandritas, stoccatas, punta reversas and stramazones. (I assume that the modern reader would take a merely scholarly interest, rather than be revising for tips on improving the lethality of your caricado.) He seems to know what he is talking about, and his advice can only be described as to the point. Keep striking at the face, is his basic line, as you have to intimidate your opponent, and if you can succeed in striking there, good, for 'every little blow in the face staieth the furie of a man more than anie other place of his body, for being through the bodie, it happeneth often times that the same man killeth his enemie notwithstanding in the furie of his resolution: but the blood that runneth about the face, dismaieth a man'. What do you do if the rapier twists or slips from the hand of your opponent? Kill him while you have the chance, whatever you do, don't give it back! Suppose you find yourself fighting an old friend after a quarrel, and you end up with him at your mercy, what should you do? Spare him for old time's sake? No, kill him while you can, for you never know what's in a man's mind, don't give him the opportunity to make you regret being merciful.

He has several interesting pages about giving the lie - it's like Touchstone, but deadly serious, and a marvellously addled assertion that if you are out to kill someone, you have to do this as the instrument of God's wrath, rather than for private reasons. Just take revenge in the right frame of mind, with suitable piety of purpose, and that's OK.

I doubt Mr Chaytor called out his man: he looks a bit of a dreamer to me, and the book he was swotting up on technique in is enough to unnerve anyone.

Flights of fancy

Whee!

I am in the current EMLS, writing at considerable length about transvection, the purported flight of witches, and how it got represented on the early modern stage:

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-1/13-1toc.htm

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-1/bootwitc.htm

A challenge at Long Picke and Half Picke

The Guardian ran a piece about the exhibition being put on by the Society of Antiquaries for the 330^th birthday of the institution. Here’s the link, and another link to the accompanying slide show of some of the treasures that will be on display.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/sep/11/art?picture=330717412

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2167486,00.html

This reminded me faintly of how printed materials owned by the Society crop up on EEBO, and here’s one of them, A Challenge, From Richard Grauener, Gentleman and Souldier, Scholler to Thomas Musgrove, & Seruant to Robert Battell, Prouis Masters of the Noble Sience of defence, against Thomas Blunne, Shoo-maker, and Scholler to Thomas Turpin, Master of the Noble Science of Defence this to be performed at the Red Bull in St. Iohns street, on Tuesday next, being the 20. of October, 1629. If God permit.

The black letter text says:

“Judicious Gentlemen and others, I being a Souldier, from me expect no complementall phrases, for in my opinion that more stuffes the eare, then please the eye; then to leave off this empty outside of verball threatenings, I in plaine termes challenge the said Thomas Blunne at these eight severall weapons hereunder named, wishing him to bring his best skill and resolution with him. This to be performed at the time and place above named, desiring from the spectators stage-room, and from him his uttermost of his malice, while then I rest.

The names of the Weapons.

Long Picke, Half Picke, Backe Sword, Sword and Buckler, Single Rapier, Rapier and Dagger, Sword and Dagger, Holberd.

And I the said Thomas Blunne will be ready at the time and place appointed, to answer this Challenge, If God permit. Vivat Rex.”

In this promotional handbill, we see the kind of thing that might have been distributed to advertise new plays by Shakespeare, and stuck up on posts in the city. A humble black letter sheet (it is about six inches high) - something very like this might have announced King Lear. Here, the amphitheatre (the Red Bull) will be showing a display of martial prowess rather than a play, with the bill assuring those who read it that both men are going to appear, and hack away at each other in some controlled and semi-safe manner through a full repertoire of weapons. I suppose that, with breaks for a breather and a small beer, it might have gone on for a couple of hours if all digits and eyes survived the early rounds. There would have been side-betting, I imagine. In Davenant's play, The Unfortunate Lovers, there's an allusion to the customary costumes worn when two men 'played a prize', which lets us see how Gravener and Blunne might wel have turned out:

"Why, dost thou thinke they goe to play a Prize?
Is't of necessity they must appeare
In scarlet Breeches, and cleane lac'd shirts?"

The two participants represent two different schools in the ‘Science of Defence’. Interesting that the gentleman and soldier Gravener will be fighting a shoemaker. Perhaps Blunne was doing the whole socially mobile ‘a shoemaker a gentleman’ thing by means of mastering methods of fighting. Maybe this is part of the commercial appeal of the bout – to get the journeyman shoemakers along to cheer on their man.

Ephemera at its most priceless.

Prince Charles visits a bullfight, 1623

This Scene again withdrawing brings
A new and empty Face of things;
A levell'd space, as smooth and plain,
As Clothes for Lilly strecht to stain.
The World when first created sure
Was such a Table rase and pure.
Or rather such is the Toril
Ere the Bulls enter at Madril…

- a stanza from Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ of course. I’ve been reading James Salgado’s An impartial and brief description of the plaza, or sumptuous market-place of Madrid, and the bull-baiting there (1683). Salgado was some kind of exile in England (“Most Noble, Puissant, Ancient and Generous English … these five years, and above, I have enjoyed Life and Sanctuary by your Protection and Benigne Generosity"), and, fallen on hard times (he writes of himself as “A Poor Distressed man past shame”), tried to make a bit of money from a publication which is sets off as a description, though he resorts to spinning out the pamphlet with an unconnected novella.

I was interested first in the picture of the plaza and its accommodation for spectators. The spaces of early modern performances are so thinly documented, that the woodcut might be considered ancillary to one of Andrew Gurr’s books, sharing some elements with the Inn stages of early modern London, public amphitheatres, and masquing houses – though doing it all sumptuously:

“Lincolns-Inn-Fields are neither so large, nor spacious, as this place of publick resort at Madrid, which is exactly Square, being surrounded with Houses Uniform all along in all their Dimensions, erected to the Altitude of five pair of Stairs, with a great many most Curious Windows, and balconies over laid with the purest Gold. Moreover the Square is Level, to the end that the Foming Bulls, and Prancing Horses may run their Courses with the greater easiness and celerity. From the ground to the first pair of Stairs are reared up Theaters made of Timber for the People: The Thirty Balconies set apart for King and Court, are sumptuously Furnish’d with the Richest Tapestry and choicest Velvet that Money or Art can purchase

None can purchase a Room in the first pair of Stairs, at a lower rate than 200. Crowns, yea, and those places which are not exposed to the Scorching Heat of the Sun after four a Clock, must be supposed to amount to a greater sum of Money.”

Salgado describes the various stages of what evolved finally into a highly ritualized performance. As he knew the bull fighting in Madrid, the night before, there was guitar and harp music in the plaza, “because generally the Spaniards can Dextrously Play on those Instruments”. On the day of the fighting, the seating would be full by 8 in the morning (apart from the balconies for the court), for the “Encierro, or the bringing forth of the Bull”. At 2pm, a general melee between twelve, “Gladiators” seems to have taken place. At Sunset, the King and court arrived, and the arena was watered with 24 hogsheads of perfumed water, then the preliminary part of the main event began.

Interestingly, this part is most like our modern notion of Spanish bullfighting: a solitary man, on foot, confronting the animal:

“The person, whose undaunted Courage or Boldness sets him a work to Encounter with this raging Creature, stands to his posture at the Door of the said House with a long and sharp-pointed Launce in his Hand, having one of his Knees set to the ground: Immediately after the Sound of a Trumpet, a Constable runs with all possible speed, and sets the Door of the Room, where the Furious Animal is enclosed, wide open. Way being thus made, and all persons Attentively looking on, the man is by and by Assaulted with great Violence, which on-set, if by Dexterity or good luck, he can evade; there is a fair occasion presented him for Killing or Wounding the Bull to purpose, which if he miss to do his life and Members are in Jeopardy.”

The early modern Spanish bullfight worked, in general, up a social scale, with some hideous extras (“Sometimes a very despicable Peasant is set upon a Lean Deformed Horse, and exposed very often to a Violent Death”). The unmounted bullfighter has a dagger and ‘Rexones’, darts six or seven inches long, garlanded with sharp points. He fights the bull as best he can, but there was usually no ‘estocada’. Rather, at the end of the bout, trumpets sounded, and then “Butchers-Dogs and men Armed with broad-Swords quickly dispatch the Strength and Violence of those formidable Animals” – the killing was done by these auxiliaries. Salgado recollects as remarkable a bout when the young man fighting sprang on the bull’s back, wounding the animal with the Rexones, and just as the trumpet was about to sound, killed the bull with his dagger. This memorable outright killing seems to be depicted in the engraving.

The bullfight proper followed, when young noblemen, on horseback, and armed with lances, set about the bulls, and were usually able to “accomplish their Noble purposes very often by Killing or Wounding the Foaming Animals”. Should the bull unhorse one of these gentlemen, he was supposed to fight on, on foot. But he was well armed for the purpose, to “encounter the Bulls a Foot, Lashing them with Broad Swords”

This was the bullfight. That “very despicable Peasant is set upon a Lean Deformed Horse, and exposed very often to a Violent Death” was a comic version of the gentlemanly role, on horseback.

The article in Wikipedia explains the general development of the modern version, with a swapping round of priorities: the matador fights on foot, his ancillaries, the two picadores ("lancers") and banderilleros ("flagmen"), are a diminished version of the once aristocratic role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_fighting

Salgado tells a story which captures this social shift, a tale in which a beautiful girl wooed by three brave noblemen astounds them by demanding that they lower themselves to fighting the bull on foot. But they desire her so much that they undertake it.

Slagado’s other, and more plausible story is about Charles I, when he was Prince of Wales, in Spain with Buckingham on his ill-fated quest to win the hand of the Infanta. He saw a bullfight, in which three bulls were killed. Then, “not long after a Brisk Lady in most gorgeous Apparel” emerged onto the plaza: “Astonishment Seized upon the Beholders that one of the Female Sex could assume the unheard of Boldness of exposing her self to the violence of the most Furious Beast yet seen, which had overcome, yea almost killed two men of great Strength, Courage and Dexterity. Incontinently the Bull rushed towards the corner where the Lady and her Attendants stood, she (after all had fled) drew forth her Dagger very unconcernedly, and thrust it most dexterously into the Bulls neck, having catched hold of his Horn … after which, turning about towards the King’s Balcony, she made her Obeysance, and withdrew herself in suitable state and Gravity.”

But no, it wasn’t what it seemed to be, as “This person was a man, though in the Habit of a Woman… whom they appointed to be disguised so much the rather, that the Prince of Wales might be the more taken with the thing”. This was actually quite astute by the Spanish hosts: the goggling Charles was very impressionable, and a stunning demonstration of the courage and cruel precision that a young Spanish woman could summon up was exactly calibrated to put him in his place.

After the aristocrats has slaughtered a suitable number of bulls, it would have been quite dark, so the show ended with taurine fireworks: “Thus three or four persons of Quality continue until it be pretty late, at which time they drive out a Bull covered all over with Artificial Fire, by which he is rendered most Furious and hurtful: For Curiosity and want of further order, induces the Rable to approach so near unto him, that by his most dreadful pushings many sustain Mutilation, yea, and Death it self”.

“You may easily object that it is a Cruel and Barbarous Recreation … Nevertheless, an uncontroull’d Custom of long continuance has given it the force and validity of a Law”, says Salgado about the obvious issue. Here's the older form of bull fighting still going on, and in trouble:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2167714,00.html#article_continue

What is startling about the 17th century form is the way the deaths of "a very despicable peasant" or members of the "Rable" make up part of the show.

It was cold that year!

Following on rather unseasonably from my last post about pack ice in the Channel off Plymouth, I thought to have a look at what else went on, and now liberate from 'EEBO' this image of the London Frost Fair of that winter.

It was published by Joseph Moxon, a globe maker, type founder, and the first tradesman to be elected to the Royal Society.

The view (click on the image to get it at a more readable scale) is orientated south, with London Bridge at the left. Moxon has done a rough map of the iced-over Thames, with its temporary roads, shopping mall, and diversions. Ignoring the land topography, he has transferred from the Thames a series of vignettes of the typical activities of the frost fair. Just to the right of the dedicatory cartouche is 'Futtball Play', vividly depicted. Bottom right just above the hat of the figure holding the scale bar is 'Cock Throwing' (which clearly involved throwing items at a live bird).

To the right of the central thoroughfare 'Temple Street' is a 'Whirl Sledg', which apparently involved a gang of operators spinning a sledge in circles on a rope. Hard to tell from the picture, but a fixed point perhaps drilled into the ice might have helped. 'Skate sliding' is taking place on the river, mere 'sliding' for the unequipped, and an ice yacht is bottom left.

'Webb's bull' is being baited amid a circle of spectators, with no evident fencing off of the action from the crowd watching, and there is 'Fox Trialing' with dogs below the cartouche.I also spy a muster of soldiers, games of nine pins and pigeon holes, and a whole lot of catering going on: I wonder about the solitary strolling ladies too, whether they were just sight-seers, or looking for clients.

The surprising amount of attention to printing presses (top right) and 'Letter Founding' (to the right of the central way across the ice) is, I suppose, Moxon giving prominence to his own profession operating out there.

Moxon addresses the Lord Mayor of London: 'My Lord, that so remarkable a Frost as this Winter has produced may as much as may be known to Posterity; I have taken the pains to survey the appearance of the Frozen river of Thames from London Bridge to Fox Hall...'


A Map of the river Thames. Merrily cald Blanket Fair as it was frozen in the memorable-year 1683/4. : Describing the booths, foot-paths, coachs, sledges, bull baitings and other remarks upon that famous river.

Walking ashore through pack ice: Plymouth, 1684

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/05/climatechange.sciencenews

This link is the Guardian reporting the likely disappearance of the polar icecap in the next three decades, while in this pamphlet of 1684, two survivors of a hideous series of ship-board calamities walk six hours across the frozen waters of the Channel to make landfall near Plymouth, leaving their ship, “the De Ruyter of Rotterdam”, icebound: “which we see at a distance, but as yet the Frost is so hard we cannot get to her”.

The author of the little pamphlet is one J.G., who is housing the survivors at his home in Plymouth. In August 1683, Heer van Essell, a prosperous Dutch Merchant, hired a ship to take him and his family (his “exceedingly Beautiful wife” and their two children) home to Holland from the West Indies. For the first two months, the voyage went well, but they then were becalmed for several weeks. Besides this family of four, there were sixteen seamen and the ship’s master on board the ship. Several of the crew die of disease, the rationed food runs out, the rest go for four days go without any food. They are unable to make land. The two children of the Van Essels die, and their corpses are eaten.

It is then resolved that they must draw lots for the next to be killed and eaten, with a second draw in the same lottery, to settle the executioner. The draw falls to the wife to be eaten, and her husband to kill her. Van Essel is reported to have said words to this effect: “ ‘I am resolved never to be her Executioner, who hath been so loving a just a Wife to me, but in her stead am resolved my self the Sacrifice.’ He drew a Pistol from his Pocket, which he so unexpectedly discharged, they had not time to prevent it, shot himself in the Head, of which Wound he Immediately died”. His body is divided up, but “No entreaties could perswade her to Feed on that dear Corps she had so often cherished, but what share thereof the hardship of her Fate allowed her for her Food, she Embalmed with her Tears.” An English seaman on board manages to catch two rats, which she eats instead. There follows another lottery to be killed and eaten: once again, the lot falls to the luckless and by now suicidal woman to be eaten, but the Englishman on board is committed to saving her: “Carpinger with two more he hired, steps in and resolutely withstood the Execution; Upon which Quarrel they drew their Falchions, and four Persons were Slain, amongst whom the Faithful Servant was one. This was sufficient Morsel for the present, and staid the Bloody Hunger of the Survivors.”

J.G. does not indicate quite how the heroic Carpinger and Mistress Van Essell were keeping themselves alive. The purgatorial voyage is almost over in terms of distance, “But such was the Rigour of their Fate, that by the unused Dyet most of the Men were Dead, just as they got sight of the Lands end of England, and having but very few hands to work their Vessel, they found that from the danger they had been so long in, a second threatned them from the Severity of the late Season, for the Ice being there in very great Flakes, they found themselves drove amidst the same towards the Shore.”

The ship is, rather astonishingly, fast in pack ice in the western English channel for six more days, leaving all dead but Carpinger, the woman, and two others, ‘and these so Miserably weak they could not leave their Cabbins, so that being Froze in, that they could not stir, Carpinger with the Lady resolved to venture on the Ice, and set towards the Shore…’ Equipped with a long pole and a plank (I assume to get from floe to floe), Carpinger and the Lady walk for six hours, and reach shore near Plymouth.

J.G.’s novelistic brief account, with its well-defined English hero, beautiful heroine in extreme distress, invented speeches and abundant sentiment, manages a kind of happy ending to all these woes: “Where at my own House the said Parties do now remain, in reasonable Health. And considering the care and kindness of Carpinger, the Lady seems much to Favour him, and when the time of Mournings over, will undoubtedly make him happy in her Embraces.”

The work is signed and dated, and witnesses to its truth appended, 'J.G., Plymouth, Feb. 3d. 1683'.

There’s currently a whole genre of books documenting disasters at sea (Nathaniel Philbrick, Edward Leslie, Stephen Taylor, John Rousmaniere, Tami Ashcraft, Douglas Robertson). I don’t know if any of these authors has picked up on the sad voyage of the de Ruyter. We jump on a plane, travel the world, and think it worth anecdote if there’s a scrum at Heathrow. Here are the awful hazards of travel, early modern style.

Well, Blogger allows video posts

Nothing to do with early modern literature, or whales, but Blogger now lets users post videos, so here is a bit of the geothermal activity north of Hveragerthi, one of the hot springs that contribute to the warm stream that runs down the valley. I liked this one, so busy, and making its steam-engine noise. Blogger will have to work on transmitting the rotten eggs smell.
Iceland as a place (you might say) would have required mythology of its first settlers - how else but by dragons and trolls could you account for so inexplicable a landscape?
But from the start, Icelanders seem to have been the cleanest people in dark age, medieval and early modern Europe (there, I got it in). You can still visit Snorri Sturluson's bathing pool at Reykholt
http://islandsmyndir.is/html_skjol/vesturland/reykholt/forsida_reykholt2.htm

Jacobean Memento, Scilly Isles Museum

When Sir Cloudesley Shovell's 'Association' went down on the Gilstone in 1707, it took with it what was possibly his (or the ship's captain's) private possession, this ornate bronze two-pounder cannon, decorated with Jacobean strap-work and the Prince of Wales' feathers. One might guess that it was mounted in the rear cabin as a talking-point, an antique that could conceivably be called into use.
It had been the lethal toy of that bellicose prince, Henry, Prince of Wales, and, after his early death, might have found its way into Navy stores, or sold off during the Commonwealth as essentially useless in naval combat. Now mute, but still telling its story of continued joy in finely made weaponry, loss and that 'what might have been' if its original owner had survived to lead the nation into battle abroad, rather than his younger sibling's Civil War at home.
http://roy25booth.blogspot.com/2007/08/from-shovells-pocket.html

But I am still mentally half in Iceland. I was delighted to discover this evocative film of Iceland's most evocative musicians, Sigur Ros performing 'at home':
http://emichrysalis.co.uk/sigurros/heima/film/heima_trailer.html

It's a 'What I did on my holidays type of post'

Here I am at the top of Valahnukur, a minor peak in the Thorsmork ('Thor's Forest', no less) area.
Booth Junior is playing a Nintendo DS on a ridge below. He did me a cartoon, in which I am pointing up a crag and saying, 'Not much higher, Tim', while he is prone on the floor behind me with his legs on fire and his little soul departing from his body.

I was stirred by Iceland, a place of sublime scenery and sublime prices. Most of all, I liked the geothermal and volcanic stuff: the sheer randomness of a purely volcanic landscape, in which a cone or a crater will appear anywhere, lava flows will spread or stop with no other principle than chance; or collosal explosions will broadcast boulders. We stayed near Hveragerthi, where a stream warm as bath water flows down the valley north of the town ('Hot spring gardens').

A glacier close-up is a confrontation with one of Nature's great forces, somewhere utterly inimical to life. On August 3rd, two Germans went on to a dangerous part of Vatnajokull, and have never been seen again. The Icelandic daily press (Premier league results, obituaries on apparently every native citizen who has died, and weather forecasts) reported faithfully on the unceasing search for their bodies.

But the swimming pools! A community of delight, each one of them. Scrupulous rules of cleanliness before you enter that water, all that endless free heat going off into the sky.

England seems to have such dirty air and such a muddy colour palette, while Iceland is brilliant clarity, looming black cliffs of Pelagonite, then tumbling white water.

These people did it properly:

http://www.union.edu/PUBLIC/GEODEPT/COURSES/petrology/labs/iceland/iceland.htm

I read this very good entry about geysers - we visited Stokkur, 'the kettle', of course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geysers

The 1,000 foot geyser Waimangu Geyser, active near Rotura in New Zealand at the start of the 20th century, must have been astonishing.

Early Modern Proof Reading: a case study

Off very soon for another holiday, this time, a week in Iceland. I thought this might give me a topic for a post, but the country itself is not much written about in 16th and 17th century English literature - allusions to 'Iceland dogs' are quite common, and the occasional mention of an 'Iceland hawk', but geographical knowledge seems scanty. 'Geyser' doesn't get recorded in English till 1763, and when the British talked of 'vulcanos', as they did from 1613 onwards, they were thinking of 'Fogo' or 'Aetna' rather than Heckla.

But in the 1621 edition of Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas ('Fourth Day of the First Week'), I found what seemed to be an allusion:

Those that, in Norway and in Finland, chase
The soft-skinned Martens, for their precious Caces
Those that in Ivory Sleads on Ireland Seas
(Congeal'd to Crystall) slide about with ease
Were witness all of his strange grief; and ghest
That God, or Nature was then deep distrest...

The subject is an eclipse, with the Sun out of view over a large part of the northern hemisphere. Du Bartas imagines the locals doing their northerly things - hunting for furs, and travelling around in sledges with runners of ivory: in Norway, Finland, and Ireland. While waiting for my brother-in-law to appear on Robbie Coltrane's 'B-Road Britain' last night (which he duly did - he was the stonemason at Woodchester Mansion) I idly traced the appearance and duration of this ancient misprint (ah, Notes and Queries, I have missed you too long!). The first two English editions got it right: sledging in 'Izeland'. But the error crept into the 1611 text, and stayed there uncorrected through 1613, 1621, 1633 and 1641.

Not that this proves much, beyond the way that typesetters do not (and in general should not) think about what they are setting, also the absence of editing work even on a text the 17th century loved. There must be other allusions in early modern literature lurking under the spelling 'Island', but this was a pleasingly fanciful one. My other image is an early engraving of the original 'Geyser'. It seems to have lumps in it. Since then people have messed about with it so much as to turn its eruptions into an intermittent thing, but here it goes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy6sF_92cRI

How different my life would have been had I been called 'Uno von Troil'.

Richard Brathwaite makes an excuse and stays, 1615.

One of those 17^th century names you know of (learned allusions to The English Gentlewoman, that kind of thing) but don’t read … well, there’s such a lot of it. I came across his ‘The Civil Devil’, which is a poem about him visiting a prostitute.

It presents itself first of all as a ‘chanson d’adventure’, in which our hero just happens to come upon a brothel:
It chanc’d one evening as I went abroad,
To cheer my cares, and take away my load,
Of disagreeing passions, which were bred
By the distemper of a troubled head,
Midst of my walk, spying an Alley door,
(Which I protest I never spied before)
I entered in, and being entered in,
I found the entry was to th’ house of sin…

What is interesting is that, next, Brathwaite represents himself as disorientated and particularly seduced by the modest demeanour of the ‘civil matron’ who meets him (hence the title). By this stage he is more candid about the actual knowledge that has brought him to this particular alley door, but she lets him know that she is the wife of a respectable man: “ ‘therefore pray forbear, / You doe mistake yourself, there’s none such here /As you make suit for.’ I as one dismayed, / That durst not justify what I had said, / Began to slink away”.

But she is too experienced to lose her client: she detains him with much talk about her good reputation, but winds up by professing to love him:

She would, forsooth, remain entirely mine,
This alteration made me strangely doubt,
And though my feet were in, my mind was out.
Yet so was I enthrall’d by tempting sin,
Though Virtue forc’d me out, Vice kept me in.
Thus did my tempting Genius, swear, protest,
That of all creatures she did love me best …

Rather surprisingly, at this point he does not ‘make an excuse and leave’, but succumbs completely. I keep hearing Shakespeare in this transaction, the way that he manages to assent to the pretence while knowing how false it all is:

Reason did tell me, and suggest her name,
Whisp’ring me in the ear, it was a shame
To gage my reputation to a whore:
But 'las who knows it not, sense hath more power
Then reason in these acts: I gave consent
To her inducements, thought her Innocent,
And a right modest matron…

What he represents himself as being, is incapable of resisting a seduction that’s artfully wound up in modest language and demeanor, to the extent that he can hide the real transaction from himself. “My lascivious Matron” is the oxymoronic term he comes up with to describe how he’s completely hooked. At this point in the poem, a fantasy sequence starts. Of course, we are in a 17^th century published poem, so it will not be a description of what went on, but transfers all that to a rather implausible décor. He addresses the reader:

see wantons see,
How many motives now environ me?
Here my lascivious Matron woos with tears,
There a repose for lust’s retreat appears.
Here a protesting whore (see whoredom’s shelf)
Rather then loose me, she will damn her self.
There Adon’s picture, clipping Venus round,
Here Jove Europa lying on the ground …
Here Danâe stood (admiring divine power)
Which did descend like to a golden shower

What Brathwaite was seduced by surely wasn’t a room of mythological paintings: they are all in his head – he is being seduced by literature. The echoes of those morally dangerous Elizabethan epyllia start to thicken (later, “faire / Alcinous daughter, courted for her hair / By great Apollo” recollects the start of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: “Hero the fair / Whom young Apollo courted for her hair”). His lady companion hits his mood by pulling the major cultural trigger – she lets him admire the pictures for a while (on the wall, in his head), and then segues into the allusion or recital she has to make, to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis:

Leave me the shadow, to the substance go,
What thou now seest, let lovers’ action know,
I’le be thy Venus, pretty Duck I will,
And though less faire, yet I have far more skill,
In Love’s affaires: for if I Adon had,
As Venus had: I could have taught the lad.
To have been far more forward then he was,
And not have dallied with so apt a lass.
Come, come (my youngling) though I ne’re could be
Immodest yet, I’le show my self to thee,
A lass of mettle…

This is what he needed to hear: after the modest preliminaries, Venus speaking to him, and casting him in the role that exonerates him, as an Adonis – younger, reluctant, overwhelmed, and, implicitly, the boy who will die if he refuses the goddess.

In his The English Gentlewoman, 1631, Brathwaite makes one of the famous allusions to Shakespeare’s narrative poems: “Books treating of light subjects are nurseries of wantonness: they instruct the loose reader to become naught. Remove them timely from you. Venus and Adonis are unfitting consorts for a Lady’s bosom”. This earlier poem (it is in A Strappado for the Devil of 1615) shows far more completely how Shakespeare’s poem conditioned his erotic imagination: after all the necessary virtuous pretences, he finally surrenders when she starts her recitation.

As I say, there is no blow-by-blow account of what they do. Brathwaite plunges on with ‘The Author’s Moral to his Civil Devil’. In this post-coital moralisation of experience, the prostitute is no longer a disconcertingly modest looking matron, found by chance through a doorway up an alley, but is all overtness: on show in her horse-drawn limousine, her eyes everywhere, heavily made up, with her entourage, pet monkey, and her phasers set to stun:

See my coach’t Lady hurried long the street,
Casting her lust’s-eyes on who so’ere she meet,
See, see her ceruse cheek, made to delight
Her apple-squire, or wanton Marmosite.
See, see her braided hair, her paps laid out,
Which witness how she’le do when she’s put to’t …

Brathwaite writes often about courtesans. Such a voluminous and verbose author could be represented as obsessed with any of his topics. But poems like this, and his ‘A Satyre called the Coniborrowe’ seem very symptomatic of his particular fever, and it is a topic on which he writes very revealingly for a man of his time.

My image is from one of his more famous publications, the collection of jests and tales about men and women, Art Asleep, Husband? Brathwaite has some good titles.

Fornication, eating black pudding, and jesting

“For though we should not say that eating of Blood were as great a sin, as Fornication, in every respect, yet we may say, that by virtue of this Decree we are as much bound to abstain from Blood, as from Fornication, as long as they are thus connexed and joined together in one Law, till the equalitie be taken away by a countermand. Thus, Gal. 5. 9,20. Ephes. 5.4. different sins are forbidden, adulterie, fornication, theft, jesting, &c. Now though jesting be not so great a sin as Adultery, yet we must abstain from one as well as the other, because he that hath said, Thou shalt not commit Adultery, hath also said, Thou shalt not jest.”

I have been reading the conscientious pages of The triall of a black-pudding. Or, The unlawfulness of eating blood proved by Scriptures, before the law, under the law, and after the law. By a well wisher to ancient truth (1652). Here the learned author weighs up the relative gravity of the offences of fornication, eating black pudding, and telling jokes. Thomas Barlow doesn’t offer many concessions – though at one point he does seem to allow that the Hebrews did consider the eating of the blood of fish and locusts to be acceptable, provided it were clean.

As the title makes plain, Barlow takes pains to show that the absolute prohibition and threat from God in Leviticus is not rescinded in later scripture. The Leviticus passage is here:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=3&chapter=17&version=9

(“And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood…)

Black puddings are inherently populist, mirthful foods. They crop up in early modern texts as a cheap dietary item, and are mentioned by Vices like Nicholas Newfangle and Ambidexter in Tudor Interludes. In the prose pamphlet of Friar Bacon (c. 1627?), the learned mage suspects Miles his manservant of covertly breaking his Friday fast with flesh, and when he duly discovers Miles half way through a black pudding, causes it to stick in his mouth, leads him to the hall of Brasenose College, and ties him up to a window, using the protruding and immovable sausage as a tie.

But the Puritan Barlow retains a severe restraint: he will not acknowledge that his topic might be funny: “Neither do we deny, but that it was a great offence to believing Jews, to see men eat Blood, as to see men continue fornication”

His ending is modest and conscientious: “It is no sin in us if we abstain from Blood: It may be sin to us, if we eat Blood. The safest way, the best way: He that maketh no conscience in little things, will hardly do it in greater. The Lord give us grace to practice the Apostles rule … Abstain from all appearance of evill.”

Maybe with my new found learning I should supplement the purely gastronomic article in the Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Sausage

Here’s a complete slip-up by a famous (and very devoutly Jewish) diva’s researchers, as they tried to tune her in to the bizarre customs of the locals in Manchester:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23403947-details/Does+Barbra+Streisand+really+like+black+pudding+and+chips/article.do

My image is a butcher's stall, River Island Cottage style, by Aertsen. Below and to the right of the spiralling black pudding hung on the post, a prostitute meets a client in a tavern.

He wanted to believe: Elias Ashmole edits poems of alchemy

When the virtuoso Elias Ashmole got married for the second time, to the older but wealthier Lady Mainwaring, it was so as to “be enabled to live to my selfe & Studies, without being forced to take paines for a livelyhood in the world”. Thus tenured, and without any teaching or examining to interrupt, he devoted himself to abstruse research. He was a student of alchemy, astrologer, collector, student of heraldry, and was the first known Englishman known inducted into the Masons.

I am lost in the wondrous lumber contained in his Theatrum chemicum Britannicum· Containing severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the hermetique mysteries in their owne ancient language. / Faithfully collected into one volume, with annotations thereon (1652).

As the title indicates, it is an anthology of poems about alchemy, including Chaucer’s ‘The Canon Yeoman’s Tale’, generously included by the all-believing editor for its exposure of fraudulence. Ashmole contributes a rhapsodic introduction. In this first extract, he is talking about the variety of philosopher’s stones. I didn’t know there were quite many varieties, all of which increase perfection in value or knowledge:

“And first, of the Minerall Stone, the which is wrought up to the degree onely that hath the power of Transmuting and Imperfect Earthy Matter into its utmost degree of Perfection; that is, to convert the basest of Metalls into perfect Gold and Silver; Flints into all manner of Precious Stones…

…Next, to come to the Vegitable, magicall, and Angelicall Stones …

By the Vegitable may be perfectly known the Nature of Man, Beasts, Foules, Fishes, together with all kinds of Trees, Plants, Flowers &c, and how to make them Grow, Flourish & bear Fruit; how to encrease them in Colour and Smell, and when and where we please …

By the Magicall or Prospective Stone it is possible to discover any Person in what part of the World soever, although never so secretly conealed or hid; in Chambers, Closets, or Cavernes of the Earth: For there it makes a strict Inquisition … Nay more, It enables Man to understand the Language of the Creatures, as the Chirping of Birds, Lowing of Beasts &c

Lastly, as touching the Angelicall Stone, it is so subtill… that it can neither be seene, felt, or weighed; but Tasted only … It hath a Divine Power, Celestiall, and Invisible, above the rest; and endowes the possessor with Divine Gifts. It affords the Apparition of Angells, and gives the power of conversing with them, by Dreams and Revelations: nor dare any Evill Spirit approach the Place where it lodgeth.”

Besides his Prolegomena to the alchemical texts, Ashmole provides a set of explanatory notes, which also allow him to expatiate on his enthusiasms. He had some of John Dee’s manuscripts, delivered to him after being found in a secret compartment in a piece of furniture that had once belonged to Dee. The following is a very famous anecdote about a reputed projection of precious from base metal. I have seen it strangely transmuted into an account of Kelly turning part of a shovel into gold. But here it is in an authentic 17^th century form, with suitably mystical provenance for the ‘Elixir’:

“ 'Tis generally reported that Doctor Dee, and Sir Edward Kelly were so strangely fortunate, as to find a very large quantity of the Elixir in some part of the Ruines of Glastenbury-Abbey, which was so incredibly Rich in virtue (being one upon 272330) that they lost much in making Projection, by way of Trialls; before they found out the true height of the Medicine.

And no sooner were they Masters of this Treasure, then they resolved to Travell into Forraigne Parts … And whether they found it at Glastenbury (as is aforesaid) or howsoever else they came by it, 'tis certain they had it: for at Trebona in Bohemia (whither they were come to dwell) Sir Edward Kelley made Projection with one small graine thereof (in proportion no bigger then the least graine of sand) upon one Ounce and a Quarter of Common Mercury, and it produced almost an ounce of most pure Gold … for a nearer and later Testimony, I have received it from a credible Person, that one Broomfield and Alexander Roberts, told him they had often seen Sir Ed: Kelly make Projection, and in particular upon a piece of Metall cut out of a Warming pan, and without Sir Edwards touching or handling it, or melting the Metall (onely warming it in the Fire) the Elixir being put thereon, it was Transmuted into pure Silver: The Warming-pan and this piece of it, was sent to Queen Elizabeth by her Embassador who then lay at Prague, that by fitting the Piece whence it was cut out, it might exactly appear to be once part of that Warming-pan. The aforesaid Person hath likewise seen in the hands of one Master Frye and Scroope, Ringes of Sir Edward Kellyes Gold, the fashion of which was onely Gold Wyre, twisted thrice about the Finger: and of these fashioned Rings, he gave away, to the value of 4000l. at the Marriage of one of his Servant Maides. This was highly Generous, but to say truth he was openly Profuse, beyond the modest Limits of a Sober Philosopher.”

My illustration comes from the anthology, which Ashmole had richly illustrated. In one of his notes he reports his engraver begging everyone's pardon "for giving the Gryphons hinder feete, those cloven ones of a hogge, instead of the ungued pawes of a Lion" during Ashmole's absence from the press, for our author cared deeply about getting all these imaginary things exactly right.

From Shovell's pocket

So that my family can access it, a couple of images from my trip to the Scilly Isles. The first, way out at sea near the Bishop's Rock lighthouse, is of the Gilstone, with the Gilstone ledge beyond it. This is where Sir Cloudesley Shovell's 'Association' struck in October 1707. He just about fetched up on the first possible rock, but there was no escape. Had his ship missed this, in a few hundred yards, it would have hit the Rosevear Ledges or the Western Rocks. The other image is of a rather battered half crown, a William III of 1696-7, and a ducaton of 1734 from the 'Hollandia' wreck of 1743, both retrieved by divers from the wreck sites. I was surprised to find them available, and reasonably priced (the English coin was £35). I suppose that for the coin collectors, the cleaning process such coins must undergo after such a long immersion detracts from their value as collectable pieces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_of_the_Isles_of_Scilly

The Scilly Islands made a good week. St. Mary's, the largest, is unpretentious, the 'off-islands' are varied and engaging both for sea-scapes and up-close island flora. You spend a lot of time in boats going from shore to shore, and the boatmen are all cheerful and good value. In our trip out to the Western Rocks and Bishop's Rock lighthouse, to enable everyone a good view of seals at their haul-out rocks, the boatman, in a heaving sea, was willing to take his boat very close in, almost to the point when you thought, 'OK, we can see them, now get us away from these rocks right now'. A seasonally belated puffin appeared, circled three times, dived for fish, and went off to its island after exhausting its full puffin repertoire.

Coming from multi-racial Reading, it struck me that there might have been an invisible colour bar just off Cornwall. Everyone is Caucasian, locals and visitors (odd that one should notice). The line from literature that kept coming to my mind during the boat trips was that of Dorigen in 'The Franklin's Tale', about the 'grislie rockes blacke'. Even on a good day, the Western Rocks are frightening, lethal boat-rippers. It must have been hard to believe in a benign creation if you were an early mariner. When the Schiller wrecked in 1875, drifting past the Bishop's Rock lighthouse in a fog, with the passengers lined up on the rails on the wrong side of the boat trying to get a glimpse of its light, the Scillonians were so kind to the German bereaved that (it is said), Scilly was out-of-bounds for all military action by German forces in World War I - they also say WW2, though it is hard to imagine that the Nazis would have scrupled if there were military advantage to be had.