An amusing claim

Two updates in one day! I make this one largely because it amuses me. I went into university today to use the library and I decided to browse the shelves. I intended to take out another "flavour of the times" book, to read just as I'm reading Locke now, and I ended up holding a copy of The Pilgrim's Progress. I'm also reading a book on the religious dissenters of the seventeenth century and Bunyan's name has come up, hence my interest.

I think what convinced me to borrow it was the first sentence of the introduction to the OWC 1984 edition:

The Pilgrim's Progress holds a unique place in the history of our literature. No other seventeenth-century text save the King James Bible...has enjoyed such an extensive readership. (IX)

What a claim! Of course, some seventeenth-century works, such as those by Aphra Behn, have only risen to mass-popularity in recent years, and other highly influential works, such as Hobbes' Leviathan and Newton's Principia, aren't really widely-read. It's also true that The Pilgrim's Progress has fallen very much out of fashion in these times whereas a cursory glance at its Wikipedia page suggests that it was staple reading during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Still, has Bunyan's work enjoyed a more extensive readership than Paradise Lost? The Book of Common Prayer? Or - dare I say it? - Othello, The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and King Lear?

What a book it must be. Could this serve as a warning to academics everywhere to restrain their enthusiasm for their subject?

Locke / The origins of duelling

My last entry had a very cross tone to it, which can attributed in equal parts to stress and Dryden himself. I wasn't making very good progress with anything he had written so I switched to reading John Locke. I am reading his Essay concerning Human Understanding and it is still challenging yet more enjoyable than Dryden. It's only partly a thesis-related text: it isn't directly related to my subject but his discussion of personal identity may yield some material that can be of use. At the very least, it will provide some perspective on the sort of things that people in the late seventeenth century were thinking about. I haven't read very far into the Essay yet; the abridged version is over four hundred pages long and I started right from the beginning by reading the OWC introduction by Pauline Phemister. I shall report anything of relevance to my research when I come to it.

I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.


If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.

We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.

My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!

Dryden

Allied with Milton eventually but am now hopelessly struggling with Dryden. His Conquest of Granada is impossible, but again, I should read it as it was one of the crucial heroic plays that were so frequently parodied later on. It has a vaguely Achilles-like main character and starred Nell Gwyn and I hate it; that is about all I have to say about it. However, Dryden also provides an introduction on the subject of heroic plays which I've tried to read. He writes of the classical authors:

They made their heroes men of honour; but so, as not to divest them quite of human passions and frailties: they content themselves to shew you, what men of great spirits would certainly do when they were provoked, not what they were obliged to do by the strict rules of moral virtue.

Is he agreeing with Aristotle, that heroes should be flawed but still inherently right? I think he is, although perhaps not as emphatically. Lord, he's exasperating.

Samson Agonistes II

I took a break from Samson Agonistes for a few days as I'd felt discouraged after struggling with the first five hundred lines (it's 1,578 lines altogether). However, I picked it up again today and it came much more easily, in part because I used a basic trick I used to learn poetry when I was younger: I read it aloud. SA is a closet drama, which means that it was written to be read rather than performed: it's for the closet (or as we might say study or private sitting room) rather than the stage. Nevertheless, I think that most poetry and drama becomes much easier to understand when you the words are actually said aloud.

SA was no exception and I'm finding that I'm rather enjoying it now. Samson has an initial scene wherein he bewails his fate to his father: blind, betrayed, and a prisoner of the Philistines. Then in comes Delilah (Dalila in the play) all dolled up and says, rather sassily, "It was your fault you ended up like this; you should know that women love to know secrets but can never keep them." She offers to speak to the Philistine lords on his behalf, provided that Sansom agrees to return to her as her husband and allows her to nurse him; naturally he refuses. She exhibits little regret, and gives him the following speech before leaving:

I will be named among the famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who to save
Her country from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock bands... (982-986)

This is doubly (perhaps even triply) interesting. First, it positions Samson as a "fierce destroyer"; here and elsewhere in the play it is made clear that to the Philistines, Samson is a dishonest thug who quite deserves to be taken down. Second, Dalila's speech (which is a great deal longer than the excerpt I quoted) stands as an unusual example at this time of a woman eloquently defending her controversial actions and, furthermore, describing how she will be treated as a hero. Her actions won't be seen as excusable in her country- they'll be laudable, and the public will treat her as they treat their male heroes.


After she leaves, the Philistine warrior Harapha visits Samson to taunt him (again, he describes Samson as "A murderer, a revolter, and a robber" (1180)) and Samson's response, in spite of his blindness, is to challenge him to a duel. Harapha replies:

With thee a man condemned, a slave enrolled,
Due by the law to capital punishment?
To fight with thee no man of arms will deign. (1224-1226)

This is the principle rule of the seventeenth-century duel in a nutshell. Harapha could have quite easily agreed to fight with Samson, and he certainly believes that he would win if they did fight. However, even though Harapha is officially a man of the Old Testament, he is for all other purposes a thoroughly modern post-Renaissance gentleman whom convention prevents duelling with someone of a lower social status. It is not even that he feels compassion for Samson's impoverished condition; rather, Samson is beneath his notice, and to duel with him would be to indicate to the rest of society that they could interact as equals, thus compromising Harapha's own social standing.


Anyway, I haven't finished reading the play yet but I'm very pleased with what I've got out of it so far. Looking forward to reading the rest tomorrow.

Poetics

I took Aristotle's Poetics to work today, another relic from my time as an undergraduate that I didn't recall very well, and I ended up hitting upon several interesting passages. Poetics is of course a deconstruction of epic and tragedy in classical literature and has exerted a powerful influence over western dramatic criticism that cannot be overstated; I could hardly not read it.

What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:

Since tragedy is an imitation of people better than we are, one should imitate good portrait-painters. In rendering the individual form, they paint people as they are, but make them better-looking. In the same way the poet who is imitating people who are irascible or lazy or who have other traits of character of that sort should portray them as having these characteristics, but also as decent people. (Poetics, 8.1, trans. Malcolm Heath, Penguin 1996, p.25)

It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?

I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.

I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.

But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.

Samson Agonistes

Just a quick one to excuse the gap in entries. In part it's due to a very bad case of 'flu that left me unable to do much in the way of anything. However, I did manage to meet with my supervisor last week and she told me that I'm going to have to read what I've always feared reading: Milton.

I read Samson Agonistes and sections of Paradise Lost during my undergraduate days but it never stuck with me and consequently much of what I'm reading now feels as though I'm reading it with fresh eyes. How does one read Milton for the first time? What's striking me most of all is Milton's devotion to the classical in his discussion of Biblical figures, which nicely reflects contemporary debates about classical vs. Biblical education. After all, could a Christian country rightly heroify classical figures? Even leaving aside issues regarding the non-Christian's soul, classical culture simply, and necessarily, had a different set of morals to seventeenth-century Christan culture.


Bearing this in mind, I think that Milton's framing of the Biblical story of Samson as a Greek tragedy is highly interesting. One is left with a feeling that Samson's life has been wasted, rather than filled with admiration for his defeat of the Philistines. His destruction of the temple is not a glorious victory but rather the last act of a man on the brink of defeat.


Reading Milton has also made me consider the inevitable "fatal flaw" of all heroes, the thing about them that makes them imperfect in some way and often leads to their downfall. Achilles had his heel; Lancelot had his love for Guinevere; Othello had his jealousy; Hamlet had his procrastinationary nature. Leading on from this, I was reminded of Charles I's conviction of the divine right of king's in the following lines from SA:

I might begin Israel's deliverance,
The work to which I was divinely called. (225-6)

I am not sure how intentional this was on Milton's part. Traditionally Samson's Achilles heel has been his inability to see the treachery of Delilah. In SA Samson's physical blindness has a direct parallel with his emotional blindness. However, less obviously, the theme of Samson's pride also runs throughout the play. God gave Samson his strength in his hair, he tells us, to remind him of the "lightness" of his power, and he is punished when he takes it for granted - but perhaps he is still not entirely cured of his vanity.

Katherine Briggs

I immediately broke the resolution in my last entry because no sooner had I mentioned Katherine Briggs, I was left wanting to read my favourite book of hers, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, a thorough, but not over-long, survey of fairy lore, poetry, and literature of the British Isles. It's a book that I'm very fond of, having come across it in a library sale at school when I was sixteen and I realised that it was the book that I'd always wanted to read but didn't realise existed. (My edition has the word "English" in the title before "Tradition", but it seems customary to eliminate it - perhaps because at least three-quarters of the book investigates Scottish, Welsh, and Irish fairies.)

Anyway, it's a wonderful, wonderful book which I usually end up reading about once every ten months (imagine Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without everything except the footnotes; I realise that this is some readers' idea of hell). Although it was first published in 1967, there is still an academic freshness to it, and it makes a wonderful change from the prettified Edwardian fairies, the Disneyesque inventions, the new-age faeries, and the self-consciously grotesque fairies and goblins that have become so popular in recent fantasy literature. Reading it this time, I came across two interesting things in Briggs' chapter "Giants, Hags and Monsters". The first refers directly to the representation of heroes:

Giant-like qualities cling even to the Arthurian heroes. The early Lancelot poem dwells with particularity on the distortion of Lancelot's appearance when he was in a rage. Arthur and Guinevere are supposed to have sat on the two great rocks at Sewing Shields, and Guinevere said something that annoyed her husband so that he threw a stone at her, which she caught on her comb. The stone can still be seen and weighs several tons...In fact, in folk tradition the characters are like those in the Bayeux Tapestry - the important ones are large and the unimportant ones are little. Often monstrous traits are attached to heroes, who sometimes seem to have changed from gods to heroes and from heroes to giants. (Briggs 65-6)

I'm not sure if I will use this in my own thesis as Briggs' research focuses on the popular or folk whereas at this stage mine is primarily on the official literature. It's an interesting point to encounter in her discussion, however, and has made me think about the physical "largeness" of heroes; I will certainly be encountering that idea again in my study of Fielding's Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies. The idea of attaching monstrous traits - one assumes physical traits only - to heroes is particularly intriguing.

Second, in her review of British dragons (or worms - it seems that the cryptozoological difference is slight) in folklore, she retells the story of the Lambton Worm, wherein the Heir of Lambton rides off to fight the dragon "wearing spiked armour, so that it wounded itself when it bit him" (68). Of course, this brings us back to The Dragon of Wantley and Moore's own spiked armour, which I discussed on Sunday. I was fond of my pet theory - that the spikes on Moore's armour, as in the Aphra Behn play, represented the horns of a cuckold - but the occurrence of spiked armour in both stories which otherwise only have the most superficial details in common suggests that it was a standard or recognised characteristic of dragon stories. However, perhaps there is room for both interpretations to exist in the play alongside each other. At times like this, one longs to be able to go back in time and see the play originally performed.