Early modern english literature PARTE 1, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Early modern english literature PARTE 1 e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE, Scott-Warren INTRODUCTION 1 Technologies of the word At the root of ‘technology’, in ancient Greek, there’re ‘art’ and ‘craft’. Before the industrial revolution, the primary meaning of Art was skill, technical proficiency. Since antiquity, Western thought has striven to separate the mind from the body, the intellectual from the mechanical. On focusing on ‘technologies of the word’ we attempt to understand a situation that renders all the encounters with early modern literature at once problematic and fascinating. We try to reconcile the art and the craft of early modern writing by considering some of the most important technologies through which it was generated, circulated and controlled. The craft od speech: Sir Thomas Moore in his first audience would have recognized the meteoric rise as a victory not for the play’s here but for the rhetoric, the art of speech. The speech was persuasive when it appealed to the passions, and the passions were at their height in crowds. Since its invention in antiquity, rhetoric would have become a highly codified science, with myriad categories that were fodder for lengthy treaties. Three different kinds of rhetoric: ‘demonstrative’, ‘judicial’, ‘deliberative’. More’s speech fits more in the ‘deliberative’ category. Five stages to building an oration: inventio (invent your arguments), dispositio (arrange them in effective order), elocutio (chose the fittest words for presentation), memoria (memorize the speech), pronuntiatio (deliver it winningly with appropriate grace and gestures). In everyday usage, we still have rhetorical question or erotema (speaking indeed by interrogation, which we might as well say by affirmation). Rhetoric, political engagement and More’s “Utopia”: the complex relationship between rhetoric, literary production and political engagement in the early modern period. Thomas Wilson and “the Arte of Rhetorique” (1553) outlines a key Renaissance aesthetic principle: the ‘decorum’ or ‘fittingness’. The rhetoric here must be an art of decorum, shunning abstraction and striving for the fullest engagement with worldly contexts. The importance of the final element of rhetorical composition, pronuntiatio, the delivery of oration: rhetoric isn’t about the text, it’s embodied, physical speech. As embodied speech, rhetoric makes demands on the orator’s theatrical skills, the expressiveness of the body. An apt synonym of oratory must be ‘passionating’, which renders the internal play of emotion external through gesture as much as through words. Rhetoric insists on presence: one person speaking to an audience face to face. This intimacy must be shifted even to books, with occasional interjections. ‘Civil philosophy’ is rhetorical philosophy, decorously adapted to circumstances, and self-conscious about its own theatricality. More explains the difference between the rhetorical adaptability and philosophical inflexibility (‘’better to stay silent than mix tragedy and comedy’’). More’s metaphor reveals the rhetorician as an actor, playing the part with due attention to the decorum of ‘time’ and ‘place’, shaping his wisdom to the capacities and desires of his hearers. the debate between rhetoric and philosophy. Humanism, purity and danger: the published writings of early modern sixteenth-century Humanism were far from being a triumph of style over substance, however, they set medium and message in harmony. The message was polemical one that would be subsumed into the word ‘Renaissance’: this was a new age; whose mission was to close the crack/rift that had opened between the modern world and classical antiquity. The corruption of the Roman Empire would be purged, revealing the wisdom of the ancients in all its purity and beauty. And this purgation would open the way for a renovation of learning, allowing modern people to compete with the giants of classical Rome and Athens. For the humanists, to spout logic in Latin, the theologians have had to bastardize the language. So the humanists were committed to bringing about just such a rebirth of Cicero and Virgil. ‘Barbarous’ is a keyword in the humanist - scholastic debate. Linguistic barbarity functioned for early modern thinkers as shorthand for everything that seemed outlandish and uncivilized. The humanists’ obsession with purity and cleanliness is legible in the physical form of their books, margins and characters. believing that good speech and good behaviours go hand in hand (censorship). The weakness link between eloquence and Christian virtue was a problem. C. More demonstrated that rhetoric was a morally impure art for a morally impure world. For T. More, rather than speaking the plain truth, you must make things as good as they can be in the circumstances. However, humanism had a huge impact on early modern culture. Bold sharp sophistry: Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”: the many grammar schools that sprang up across England during the early 16 century were the midwives who allowed humanism to give birth to a golden age of literature. A renewed interest in the humane learning of classical antiquity had, as consequence, a rich vernacular literature. The Marlowe’s brief epic poem is a tissue of rhetorical set-pieces. Eloquence rises to its highest pitch. Humanism has now come full circle: instead of producing glorious statement and worthy magistrates, it’s turning out dissatisfied insurgents, traitors and terrorists. Into these conflicted circumstances the vernacular literature of early modern England was born. PART 1 – PLACES OF WRITING 2 The court House becomes the word with which the play’s places are repeatedly described. ‘Lear’ is a play which has been seen as dramatizing the birth of the modern era ( the transition from an old world with fixed hierarchies and feudal loyalties to an unfixed, capitalistic world of Machiavellian self- interest and rampant social mobility. It’s a representation of a vital early modern institution: the court. this is not only an object of representation and a place of writing, it’s also one of the most powerful motors of cultural production in early modern England. The geography of intimacy: what is a court? it’s not a fixed demarcate place, it’s something more like a household. it was the body of men and women that attended on the prince, but by the later 15th century, the court as chiefly tied to London and in particular, to the place of Whitehall. Henry VIII’s design for Whitehall made a distinction between the monarch’s private and public apartments, a distinction that is vital to an understanding of the culture of the early modern court. The Privy Chamber was the centre of the powerhouse: an apartment staffed by the monarch’s personal servants, to which access could be gained only by favourites. The geography of the court reflected and reinforced important aspects of its cultural function. first, it rendered favour at once highly visible and easily withdrawn (appartato). A job in these apartments become highly desirable because it gave great prestige and administrative responsibilities. he court was a charmed circle. Folio, in which each sheet of paper was folded only once, resulting in a large volume, was the format of choice for deluxe editions of the Bible and other classical authors. 4 The theatres An occupation of idleness: across the course of the e.m.p., it became possible for the 1st time since antiquity to talk of ‘going to the theatre’. Not until the quarter of the 16th century, the drama begin to find itself a permanent and fixed unity. The year 1576 has been a changing-point for theatrical history. James Burbage, an actor, built the Theatre, the first of the permanent amphitheatre playhouse. Ten years later, the centre of gravity shifted away from the northeast of the city, when the Rose was built. The third one was the Globe, a bankside theatre. In all, at least 23 professional theatres were built in London between the accession of Elizabeth and Carles 1. There was also an established playhouse in St Paul’s Cathedral. 1576 has been the ‘annus mirabilis’ of dramas. The number of theatres grows the desire to separate paying from non-paying customers, and to gathering a sense of marketability of dramatic spectacle. → the playhouse, like the printer house, became stationary. However, the companies continued to tour between them, to royal performances or special occasions. Also, even when it was centralized and domesticated, the theatre continued to be characterized by its extraordinary and threatening mobility. That unfixity was embodied in the figure of the actor, which became central focus attention for legislators and moralists. An actor was a social outcast, with no recognized place in the early modern tapestry of trades and callings. The new kind of actor, who takes money for his pains, makes his playing work into an occupation of idleness, living a contradiction in term > it was hard to find their place in the social map. Early modern monarch and nobles may have had more pressing ideological motives for their apparently perverse desire to take drama into their own hands.--> Queen’s Men: a company of players for her Majesty. The status of the patron could also affect the treatment that a company received from local authorities when it went on tour. There was also a perceived overlap between Puritans and theatre-hater, so probably the desire of monarchs was to control theatre might be seen as an expression of their desire to snub the ‘extremists’ (puritans and papist). and to cultivate an inclusive middle-ground. On this view, Elizabethan theatrical patronage anticipates King Jame’s policies of 1618, which promoted holiday recreations. → a paradoxical association between rowdiness and royalism. The anomalous social position of theatrical practitioners could be read from the physical situation of the 1st London theatres, all under the jurisdiction of the major and alder-men. Theatres staged the delights and dangers of urban life. All the world’s stage: the actor’s skills of self-transformation put him in danger, none can trust someone who lacks both a stable essence and fixed morality. Is the actor corrupted as the person he impersonated ? has he got social status? The ‘acting profession’ became an evident argument for four centuries. In early modern England, the discrediting of the player made cultural sense, because a range of factors conspired to make the distinction between world and stage. These factors are meta-theatricality, personation, transvestism and performative language. Metatheatricality: it means to effects that simultaneously make the spectator aware of the play as a play and which, blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. For this, prologues and epilogues in which the play is discussed were commonplace long before the birth of playhouses. Even without these parts, dramatical texts were often richly of metathreaticality and they use many local blurring techniques. Personation: the expectation that plays might contain more or less portraits of living individuals seems to have mushroomed across the course of 1580s. > ambiguous references. Transvestism: the practice of hiding references to contemporaries in plays set in ancient Rome or in modern Venice must, like metatheatrical effects, have conditioned the early modern audience to play constantly between theatrical illusion and stage reality, between the ‘far away’ and the ‘here and now’. Another problem was the total absence of female actors in the professional stages before the Restoration → the cross-dressed boy player and the idea of ‘effemination’. Anyway, it’s not only a theatrical convention because dramatists seem to put attention to the gap between illusion and reality. Performative language: the early modern stages were bare and unadorned, so the accent was on the extraordinarily vigorous dramatic language, which relied heavingly on performatives. some actors were successfully prosecuted for onstage profanity. No scene in the period’s drama is more calculated to frighten the audience with precisely that possibility than is the conjuration scene in Marlowe’s ‘’Doctor Faustus’’ (the invocation of the devil). Acting was stylized, a matter more of cyphers than characters and the spectacle of the body was as important as it was on those alternative stages → Restoration is seen as an epochal moment in theatre history. Burgeois illusionism was born, perspectival scenery had its place and the introduction of the proscenium arch (between the action and the audience) didn’t immediately spell a new regime: restoration theatre remained richly metatheatrical. Audience becomes more confused about where reality ends and fiction begins. Shakespeare systematically, unexpectedly and violently breaks each of the Aristotele’s unities in turn: BEFORE the play looked like a tragedy, the events are set in Sicily, the characters are all high- born, and the time is weeks max. NOW tragedy turns into a comedy, various figures/animals and characters, the time is years, the place is imaginary. → his new house, called ‘Ne Place’, tells of the increasing entrenchment of theatre in the social panorama of early modern England, but also of the precariousness of that situation (in retrospection, its greatest asset). The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Coleridge considered it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play's clever fulfilment of the classical unities and vivid depiction of human folly have made it one of the few Renaissance plays (except the works of Shakespeare) with a continuing life on stage.