Christopher Marlowe – Hero and Leander (the end), The Passionate Shepherd

I could not update the blog yesterday because I ran into some problems with the computer, so I am doing two posts in one. As Neptune keeps on hitting on Leander, Leander rather naively tells him that he must be mistaken because he is not a woman. Neptune, amused, tells him a story about a shepherd loving young shepherd who was so beautiful that he could not drink out of a river for the fear the water nymphs would drag him in. But before he manages to get to the punchline, Leander notices the sun is about to rise and starts to swim with increased speed. Neptune is angry that Leander does not pay attention to him (why? a moment ago he seemed very happy to help him get to his lover) and throws his trident at him. But he repents and turns it back midway, so that it hurts his own hand. Leander gets pale, seeing that, and Neptune mistaking compassion for love (“Love is too full of faith, too credulous”) goes back to the bottom of the sea to look for treasures for him.

Leander reaches the shore, and knocks at Hero’s door. Hero runs to the door and opens it just in her shift, but seeing Leander naked she screams and runs away (“Such sights as this to tender maids are rare”). Leander begs her to let him at least rest in her bed and she acquiesces. What follows is a highly problematic – from the 21st century point of view – description of seduction, where Leander uses both persuasion and force, and Hero resists, but not quite (“In such wars women use but half their strength”). In the end they spend the night making sweet love. At dawn the ashamed Hero wants to slip away, but Leander catches her in time, and her blushing face is like the dawn in her chamber before the actual dawn. And here the poem ends, left unfinished by Marlowe. After his death, a minor poet called George Chapman completed it, but the editors of the NAEL decided not to include it.

“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” makes a more interesting reading after Hero and Leander. It has the same overheated atmosphere and like in Hero and Leander Marlowe pays much attention to the woman’s clothes. The shepherd is trying to woo his beloved, presenting her with highly idealized image of pastoral lfe. Of course Marlowe knows and his readers know it is nothing like real country life. He mingles the “rustic” elements, listing the shepherd’s gifts – “a belt of straw and ivy buds/with coral clasps and amber studs”) The poem has a deceptively simple quality – the sing-song iambic rhythm of the relatively short 8-syllables lines stands in contrast with all the jewellery the shepherd (somewhat unespectedly) has to offer. The poem provoked many responses many Elizabethan poets, including the one by Sir Walter Ralegh I read a few weeks ago.

I am breaking the regular order of reading in order to jump forward nad read King Lear, since I am going to discuss it with my students and I haven’t read it for a long time.

 

Thomas Hariot – Report on Virginia (the end)

Hariot claims that the Indians believe in the immortal soul and that after death it goes either to heaven or to hell. Their proofs are the stories of two men, one of which allegedly happened 10 years ago, and the other not so long ago before Hariot’s arrival, but in a distant part of the country. Both men died, but after their funerals people noticed the earth moving and they dug them out. The first man, who was wicked, went to hell and was saved by one of the gods on the condition that he should come back to earth and tell all the people what happens to bad people after death. The second man, as you can easily guess, went to heaven, but was turned back at the gates of paradise by his own father, on the similar conditions. This double promise and threat keeps the Indians in order, although they also have a kind of penal code with penalties depending on the gravity of the crime. All this gives Hariot hope that they could be easily converted to Christianity. Hariot told them stories from the Bible as far as his knowledge of their language allowed and they admired the Bible so much they loved to touch it or even rub it all over their bodies, even though Hariot tried to tell them it’s the contents that matters, not the book itself.

The Indians admire the Europeans and their inventions, Hariot writes, and they consider them gods, or at least on very good terms with gods. One of the proofs for that – and here comes the most disturbing part – is that sometimes the English “had … subtle device practised against us” but they didn’t attempt any revenge because they tried to win the Indians through kindness. But when they left such a town, a number of inhabitants, sometimes very significant, fell ill and died. The Indians attribute it to revengeful gods protecting the whites. Some connect it with the sun eclipse that happened the year before the arrival of the English, or the comet that appeared soon after. Now it’s quite obvious what happened – the English were carriers of a disease or various diseases, to which they had immunity, since they were present in Europe for centuries, but the Indians had none. But that would mean that actually, though Hariot doesn’t want to say it, being in Ralegh’s pay and all, it must have happened in every Indian village, which means in turn that in every village they met with some sort of enmity. Because if the locals fell ill indiscriminately in friendly and antagonistic villages, then what would be the point of “revenge”? Unless by some strange coincidence the Indians from friendly villages just happened to be healthier.

Thomas Hariot – Report on Virginia

Thomas Hariot was a brilliant multidisciplinary scholar in Sir Walter Ralegh’s service who, among others, studied the Algonquin language on the basis of conversations with Wanchese and Manteo. He also accompanied them on the way back with Sir Richard Grenville. The report he wrote was mainly aimed at the potential settlers to calm them down and convince them that America is really a safe place to live, because some gossips started to circulate in England at that time. So he focuses on how harmless Indians are, because all their weapons and shields are made of wood and bark, and similarly their towns are surrounded by walls made of nothing more than wood. The Indians do not have many of the technologies or devices that Europeans have, but they are smart and make the best use of what they’ve got. When they see how clever Europeans are, Hariot argues, they are bound to love and respect them.

The next part is about religion, Hariot piously hoping that Indians can be converted to true religion. They believe in one main eternal God the Creator, who created many lesser deities to help him with various tasks and also created the universe. He created first the woman, whom then the gods made pregnant and she gave birth to many children, populating the world. The gods have human shapes and their statues are worshipped in the temples.

Arthur Barlowe – Amadas and Barlowe’s Voyage to Virginia

The English do not have a chance to see the king himself, because he has received some wounds in a recent battle with the neighbouring tribe and is recovering in their capital which is six days of travel away. They present the king’s brother with various gifts, and they also try to give something to his four servants, but he takes everything away from them, indicating that the should be the only recipient. After that they start trading, with the English selling mostly various metal objects like tins and kettles, for which the Indians are willing to pay many skins. They give the approximate prices these skins fetched in London, and I’m not sure how much kettles and tins were worth in England at the time, but I guess the general drift is that the Indians grossly overpay. The thing king’s brother likes best is a tin, which he hangs on his chest, indicating it should protect him from the arrows. The Indians would like also to buy weapons, but the English aren’t selling.

In the next excerpt the narrator describes the feast thrown for them by the king’s brother and his wife. When three local hunters return from the hunt with their bows and arrows, the English start to look for their weapons. When the king’s brother’s wife (I’ll call her the vice-queen) notices that, she breaks the hunters’ bows and arrows and pushes the hapless men outside. She is also very sorry that they don’t want to spend the night and she gives them all the half-prepared food that was ready for the rest of the night’s celebrations. The English spend the night in their boat at some distance from the shore, and when the vice-queen notices that, she is very sad. She sends them mats to cover them and messengers to entreat them to come back. Barlowe here bends over backwards, I think, to tell both the truth and encourage the future settlers to come: he repeats that the Indians are the sweetest and kindest people in the world, they live like in the Golden Age and they had no doubts they meant no harm – but still, they didn’t want to risk the success of their voyage. In the last sentence, Barlowe mentions also two Indians the English took back to England, Wanchese and Manteo, whose stories are fascinating and at least if Wiki is to be believed, they weren’t kidnapped to be exhibited like the poor Eskimos but spent some time in Ralegh’s castle and then went back to America.

Arthur Barlowe – Amadas and Barlowe’s Voyage to Virginia

Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe were two captains who sailed to North America sent there by Sir Walter Ralegh. In the excerpt, the ships after travelling along the shore and looking for a place to land, finally find one and cast their anchor there. After they go on land, they perform the ceremony of taking the land officially into the possession of Queen Elizabeth under the administration of Ralegh and name it Virginia in honour of the Queen. The land seems very rich – it is full of grapes, precious trees, and animals. When the sailors climb the top of a hill they find that the land is in fact a small island near the continent’s shore. (It’s Roanoke Island, of the later “lost colony” fame). The next day the locals appear – three of them come in boats, two stay on the shore, while one visits the ship, where he receives gifts and shares the meal with the sailors. He then sets off to fish in his boat, fills his boat with so much fish it almost sinks and then leaves it on the shore, indicating it is for the sailors.

The next day they are visited by the king’s brother. His name is Granganimeo and the name of the king is Wingina. He arrives with his entourage of forty or fifty men. When they reach the point on the shore closest to the ship, the men spread a mat for him to sit on the ground, and four of them sit on the corners. When the English approach him, he makes a long speech, striking alternately his head and breast and theirs, which the narrator interprets as a sign of friendship. Then he receives gracefully presents. Nobody from his entourage speaks during this meeting, apart from the four men sitting on the corners, who sometimes whisper to one another. The author emphasizes the good manners and civility of the man, as civil as you could meet with at any European court.

Sir Walter Ralegh – “The Discovery of Guiana

Sir Walter Ralegh, after his imprisonment for seducing and marrying the queen’s lady-in-waiting, decided to get back in Elizabeth’s good graces by discovering a colony rich in gold, similar to the ones Spanish had. So in 1595 he sailed off to South America, from this comes this report (the original title is much too long to put it in the headline). His “Guiana” is not the present-day state of Guyana but the Venezulean region on the river Oronoco. I don’t know much about Venezuela, but I can tell Ralegh grossly exaggerates, for instance when he writes that every stone his soldiers picked up promised to be a piece of golden or silver ore. Well, maybe he does not exaggerate – it may have promised that, but I doubt it turned out to be really such on closer inspection. The same goes for all other Ralegh’s claims – Guiana is the most beautiful, healthiest, the easiest to conquer and the easiest to defend region in the world. As you can see, sometimes his claims are mutually exclusive, for instance when he writes about Guiana being the healthiest place in the world because none of his one hundred soldiers ever got ill, despite of the alternating periods of melting heat and sudden showers of rain. Doesn’t sound like the best climate in the world, does it? And it may have been lost in the editing of the excerpt, but I doubt Ralegh pays much attention to the actual human inhabitants of the place, although he writes much about beautiful birds.

One fascinating tidbit – Ralegh mentions something I didn’t know before, that is that Bartolomeo Columbus petitioned king Henry VII on behalf of his brother Christopher for the support of his expedition to what they believed would be India. Henry VII, being notoriously tight-fisted, refused and as we all know, Christopher found support elsewhere, while Henry VII must have been kicking himself at least until the end of 1493. Ralegh elegantly rephrases it: instead of writing “your grandfather was a fool” he writes “of course he was right not to trust a foreigner, but I’m your most loyal subject, and could I ever repay you for all the favours I’ve received from Your Majesty with lies? Could I? Could I?”

At this point, as I mentioned in my earlier post, the narrative is interrupted by a printing error. So that’s that.

Sir Walter Ralegh – a few poems

The poems I read today are similarly to the previous ones quite bitter. “Farewell, false love” is a long list of all the bad things that love is – a poisoned serpent covered all with flowers, a maze, a raging cloud etc. Now the poet is older, presumably wiser and can bid adieu to all this, because in what I guess is potentially a lewd pun “dead is the root whence all these fancies grew”.

“Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay” is an elaborate sonnet in praise of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. The poet has a vision in which he sees the grave of Laura, Petrarch’s beloved, guarded by Fatih and Virtue. But when the Faerie Queene comes by to pay a visit, they leave the grave to serve her, presumably because she is superior to her. Petrarch weeps as he is laid by Oblivion on Laura’s grave. The groans of buried ghosts pierce heavens where Homer trembles and curses the day when “that celestial thief” (i.e. Spenser) appeared.

“Nature, that washed her hands in milk” is an elaborate “carpe diem” allegory. Nature washes her hands in milk and does not dry them afterwards, but takes snow and silk and makes out of them the perfect mistress for Love. The beauty has “a violet breath”, eyes made of light, hair neither too dark nor too bright, and her insides are full of wantonness (i.e. playfulness) and wit. But unfortunately her heart is made out of stone and so Love must die. But then comes Time, who does not wash his hands at all, but “being made of steel and rust/Turns snow and silk and milk to dust”, and the playfulness and wit are not preserved either.

“The Author’s Epitaph, Made by Himself” is according to a legend a poem written down in the Bible on the night before Ralegh’s execution. It is a subtle reworking of the last stanza of the previous poem, with two lines added, While the last stanza of the original poem is the lament on the cruelty of Time, who takes everything from us and drives us to the grave, the last two lines express the hope about the resurrection.

The poems of Ralegh, at least in this selection give me the impression of a rather melancholy and embittered man. Even when he wants to pay a compliment to his friend Spenser, he cannot imagine doing it any other way but by dissing other poets. I know that biographical criticism is a dangerous game, but the image these poems project is of a very frustrated person, even though for a big part of his life Ralegh was a very successful self-made man, rising from provincial gentry to a member of the Queen’s closest circles.

Sir Walter Ralegh – “The Lie”

I’ve just discovered a printing error in my copy of the NAEL – page 919 is printed twice, once in its proper place and once instead of page 926, which means I have a fragment of “The Lie” printed twice, but “The Discover of El Dorado” is cut short. Well, I guess I’ll just have to make do with what I have. In this poem the poet addresses his soul, asking her to go around the world and address various people, institutions and ideas, accusing them essentially of their falseness and triviality, and if they reply, give them the lie (i.e. accuse them of lying) – this final couplet in its various permutations ends each stanza. The poet can afford to be so brave because he is about to die, although the poem probably was written long before his actual death – it’s just an imaginary situation. So he’s not afraid to tell the church that though it shows what’s good, it does not do what it teaches, the monarchs that they are loved only when they give and their power is based on a faction, or the members of the government that their only motivation is ambition and so on. But in this rather bitter poem (similar in this note to the poems I read yesterday) there is a tiny note of hope at the end. Of course all those people you gave the lie will want to stab you at least, but “stab at thee he that will/No stab thy soul can kill.” The world is completely rotten from bottom to the top, but the eternity is above the sordid life on this earth.

Sir Walter Ralegh – “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”, “What is our life?” “Sir Walter Ralegh to His Son”

Sir Walter Ralegh (not Raleigh, although this spelling, which he himself never used, proved to be oddly popular) already appeared here in the poetic exchange between himself and Elizabeth I. He was a colourful figure – a poet, soldier, explorer, on-and-off favourite of Elizabeth I (although the legend about him throwing his expensive cloak to cover the puddle in front of her is probably not true). James I imprisoned him on his coming to throne for attempted plotting against him. He let him out on an expedition to Guyana, which was a chance for Ralegh to rehabilitate himself. Unfortunately, the expedition failed – Ralegh lost his own son in the battle, El Dorado was not found and his soldiers got out of control and ransacked a Spanish outpost, for which Ralegh was beheaded after his return to England.

“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” is difficult to discuss, because it is the answer to Christopher Marlowe’s famous poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”. But since the NAEL chose to put the authors in birth order and Marlowe was two years younger than Ralegh (although Ralegh’s year of birth is also disputed), it means I won’t read Marlowe’s poem until about 100 pages later. Sure, I could skip ahead, but I didn’t feel like messing with the order. So, to put it briefly: Marlowe’s poem is a pastoral poem, mixing the promises of coral clasps and amber studs with the more rural gifts of flowers. Ralegh adopts the rhythmic pattern of Marlowe’s poem, giving voice to the girl being wooed. She considers all his promises false – not necessarily because the shepherd himself is a particularly bad specimen of mankind, but because everything in this world is subject to decay and death, even love. The fact that the shepherd’s garlands are going to wither is a symptom of the general transience of human life. William Carlos Williams followed the poetic discussion many centuries later with his “Raleigh was right”.

“What is our life?” is a short poem, written in couplets and exploiting the conceit of “life as theatre”. Our life is a “play of passion”, our mirth “music of division” (meaning the music that was played during the intermission), our mothers’ wombs the “tiring house” (the dressing room), our graves the final curtain. Heaven is the spectator, judging us for our acting, but only death is for real.

“Sir Walter Ralegh to His Son” is a title given to this sonnet in one of the manuscripts. Ralegh, as most gentlemen of the day, scorned print publication, which means that not only the chronology of his poetical writings is uncertain, but we also can’t be sure whether he really meant to give this poem this title, whether it was really addressed to his son and when. One could assume, taking into account the poet’s structure – that of a riddle – that it is indeed addressed to a child, although the subject is rather gloomy. There are three things which are fine when they grow separately, but unpleasant when they come together. These things are the wood, the weed and the wag. The wood is the material for the gallows, the weed is hemp, but not in the sense you may think – it’s hemp as the material for the hangman’s hood as well as the rope, and the wag is the addressee of the poem, the young boy. When the three things meet, it means inevitable death. The couplet ends with the moral – beware and “let us pray we part not with thee in this meeting day”. This is a dire warning and one could wonder why being a “wag”, or somebody fond of joking, should carry with it such consequences. But life in the court, as Ralegh had many occasions to learn, was full of intrigues and dangers and could result in an execution (although I think beheading was the privilege of the well-born, while hanging was for low-life criminals). So the encrypted moral might be “bite your tongue”.

via luminarium.org

Elizabeth I – Verse Exchange between Elizabeth and Sir Walter Ralegh, Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

The first two texts are an example of elaborate flirtation game between Elizabeth and her courtiers. Walter Ralegh, a famous sailor and a poet of some note (we are going to get a bigger selection of his texts soon), concerned that he was being replaced by the young earl of Essex (Leicester’s stepson) in Queen’s favour, wrote a poem complaining about how Fortune stole his lover. From then on there is nothing left to him but sighs and sorrow. His only consolation is that it happened through no fault of its own because Fortune is blind and it brought down kings and heroes. Elizabeth answers, in similar couplets, calling Ralegh tenderly “silly Pug” and “Wat”, assuring him that though Fortune may have caused the downfall of many a mighty man, it could never change Elizabeth’s feelings towards him, because her heart is true and could never be swayed by her.

The speech was delivered to the troops awaiting the arrival of the Great Armada. As it is well known, the Great Armada actually never arrived, being dispersed by a storm and finished off by the English fleet. The speech exists in slightly differing versions, because again it was written down from memory by one of its listeners. Elizabeth says she’s been warned not to come to see the troops for fear of treachery, but she’d rather not live than believe that her people, whom she loves, are capable of treachery. This is the speech with the famous line “I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king”, where Elizabeth alludes to the political theory about king’s two bodies – her physical body may be that of a lady in her fifties, but her body politic is immune to the ravages of time, because it represents the state. Which brings me to the previous two texts, as the courtship game played at the Elizabethan court was often portrayed derogatively, as a kind of con played by all the young men on the ageing foolish lady. “Ewww, all these guys pretending to be in love with a woman who could be their mother or grandmother, gross!”. But first of all, isn’t power the ultimate aphrodisiac? And what these men saw was not the actual old lady, but the splendor of England, represented by her wonderful dresses and jewels. And secondly, Elizabeth despite all the money and privileges she lavished on her favourites, always put the interest of the country first (unlike many male monarchs, or Catherine II, for that matter).

The Armada Portrait