Young Milton

At long last, Oxford University Press today publishes Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42. Edward Jones, the editor of Milton Quarterly and sleuth responsible for dozens of new records related to Milton's life, conceived and edited the volume. Most of the essays come from the "Young Milton" conference at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2009. Although I didn't attend that conference I was fortunately able to contribute an essay on Milton's Mask (which most people know as Comus, although Milton never called it that). The book looks lovely, and it contributes to a major reassessment of Milton's early work and the mode of "authorship" that it represents. Unfortunately it is also $100.00 ... but maybe we can look forward to a paperback or digital version soon?

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The Bard of the Cornfields

This summer I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare with the theme "Study Abroad -- In Iowa." In years past I've taught summer courses in Oxford and Cambridge, always exploring the connections between authors like Milton and Shakespeare and the places in which they lived and worked. For this class I thought we would turn that concept on its head, exploring the meaning of Shakespeare, contemporary and historical, closer to home.  How have Iowans read Shakespeare throughout their history, and how has their reading shaped the state we inhabit today? What resources do we have to study Shakespeare that truly are unique to this place, and how might place figure into our reading of the plays and poems? As universities across the country embrace Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) -- which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing -- it will be important to ask what we can do in our smaller, local classrooms that can't be done anywhere else.

For my class, we'll spend time researching in the university library's special collections (which holds a second folio and much other Shakespeareana). We'll also meet with the actors and director of the local Riverside Shakespeare Festival and take a field trip to Des Moines to visit Salisbury House, a replica Tudor mansion, complete with rare book library, built by Carl Weeks, the eccentric "cosmetics king," who had the materials for his Xanadu shipped over from England during the 1920s.  

Today I spent some time in the Iowa Women's Archives, which we'll also visit. What I found shows in some pretty concrete ways how Shakespeare is built into the material fabric of Iowa and the diverse ways that Iowa's women have responded to his work.

First I called up the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, which was established in 1909, for the purpose of the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens. 

As an etiological poem (pictured above) on the group explains:

“Eight there were of the dear ‘Old Guard’

When the Shakespeare Club was born,

And the Harvest Moon rose full in the East

O’er Iowa’s golden corn.”

 

As the moon rose, the group gathered to discuss a whole series of plays: the first was Romeo and Juliet, followed by The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and As You Like It. 

According to their meeting minutes, the  women memorized passages, analyzed characters, composed original poems, as well as  debating the duties of citizenship and such hot button issues as whether the local school should provide cups for children. 

Although its goal was intellectual improvement, the Marion Shakespeare Club was not open to all comers.  The “Constitution and Bylaws” state, under Article III, section 1, that “The membership of this club shall be limited to fifteen in number.”

It continues:

2. All members shall be elected and selected by the club.

3. All elections must be unanimous.

4. The membership fee shall be One Dollar per year.”

After the first year, a clipping from the local paper in Jan. 3 1910 announced that  “The Shakespeare club is well pleased with the progress that has been made in the study of the beautiful English which the poet employs, and the next regular meeting will be held Jan 6....The club will attend in a body the Merchant of Venice matinee on Tuesday afternoon.”

A handwritten note identifies this as “The Merchant of Venice as produced by the Colburn Players at Greene’s Opera House," a Cedar Rapids staple that was once one of the largest venues between Chicago and Denver. Soon, Greene's began working in collaboration with the Shakespeare Club and the produced Macbeth the next year.

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, complete with a bust of the bard. This still exists, by the way, as does the club. The original entrance, a rustic shelter with a thatched roof, was designed by Grant Wood, but unfortunately no longer remains. The theater, the park, the archive: they all hold a distinctly Iowan Shakespeare.

While contemplating this Shakespeare, what he meant, and what he means, I also called up a box of papers that belonged to the Yiddish writer, Bertha Korn Tucker.  She's the young girl on the left rear of the photo, a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants (Sarah and Samuel Korn, center). She grew up in the Des Moines Ghetto, and from there she went to Drake University, where she penned a paper for one of her classes titled "Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare, or Had She been Me."

“Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare," Bertha begins, "Stratford-on-Avon couldn’t have held any part of me while exciting plays were being created and acted in the theatres of London...”

Bertha-as-Mrs. Shakespeare proceeds to explain to her truculent, dismissive husband the ways that she would rewrite Lear -- in large part by reconfiguring Shakespeare's female characters:  “Your alabaster Cordelia was only fit to sojurn with angels – which is where you eventually felt you must send her. But not in my – we’ll come to that later...”

The monologue is incisive and often hilarious (My favorite transition in the paper:  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the Fool.")  In the end of this version, Cordelia departs for France and Kent, in a gruesome bit of offstage business, stabs Lear and then himself, so that the old man will not be forced to live with his mental powers in decline.  

So what lines can we trace between the ladies of the Marion Shakespeare Club and the young, female Jewish writer who decided to rewrite Shakespeare so that his works adhered more closely, as she explained, to nature as she understood it? Are there connections between the production of the Merchant of Venice at Greene's Opera House and the voice that Bertha Korn Tucker carved out of Shakespeare's works for herself? That will be one of the questions of my class and one that may give us a new perspective on our own work as a kind of "Iowa Shakespeare Club" (perhaps we'll need to make bylaws, too...)

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Class Dismissed: Affirmative Action at Elite Universities

As the Supreme Court considers whether to ditch race-based affirmative action, a growing chorus now calls for creating diversity principles around class rather than race. I've also pitched in my two cents, drawing on my own experiences, as someone who moved from a trailer house in Oklahoma to the University of Oxford, in a current review for The New Republic of Elizabeth Aries's book, Speaking of Race and Class: The Student Experience at an Elite College.  

For me, the most fascinating aspect of Aries's book is the way it complicates the arguments for class-based affirmative action by showing that lower-income students suffer some pretty serious alienation on elite campuses. Unlike their minority peers, who often arrive on campus to an established support network, students who are poor but not minority can find themselves adrift "on another planet," as one of the students in the book relates. As with race-based affirmative action, this doesn't mean the idea should be scrapped -- but it does remind us that any effective diversity program will need to remember that "admissions" really only constitutes a small part of the college experience.

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Ovid in England Syllabus

 

From the University of Iowa's copy of Metamorphoseon, Antonio Tempesta, Amsterdam, 1606

I rarely get comments on the blog, but this week one reader asked if I'd mind posting my syllabus for my course, "Ovid in England." One reason I maintain the blog is to make public various documents that might help others in the field, including fellowship applications and book proposals (coming soon...).

So here's the syllabus, in all its ragged glory (evidently blogger won't actually let me attach files, so please excuse the formatting, which will be a little rough):
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008:122: 16^th and 17^th Century Poetry: Ovid in England

University of Iowa

Time and location: 9.30-10.45 AM T/Th, 207 EPB

Instructor: Dr. Blaine Greteman

blaine-greteman@uiowa.edu

Phone: 319-384-1860

Office Hours: 12.30-1.30 T/TH & 4.00-5.00 M, in 474 EPB, or by appointment

Ovid was the bad boy of classical poetry, and writers in Shakespeare’s England embraced his works with an unprecedented enthusiasm.  This course will ask why these writers were so drawn to Ovid’s erotic elegies, his tales of transformation, and his poetics of exile.  We’ll read Ovid’s poetry in both contemporary translations and in the ones that Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew and produced. We’ll also examine the way these writers used Ovid as the launching pad for their own imaginative efforts in works like Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Venus and Adonis, John Donne’s elegies, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.  What did Ovid offer these writers and why did so many of them respond to his work at this historical moment? Just as importantly, how do these Ovidian poetics speak to us now, during the only historical period that has produced as many translations and adaptations of Ovid as the Renaissance?

Required Texts:

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford, 1986; reissued 2006).

Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Barbara A. Mowat (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) (or equivalent edition).

+ coursepack at Zephyr Copies, 124 E. Washington St.

Grades:

Participation and attendance:                           10%

Group Presentation:                                        10%

Paper 1:                                                           15%

Paper 2:                                                           25%

Midterm:                                                         15%

Final:                                                               25%

I will give “+” and “–“ grades.

A note on readings: readings marked “OM” refer to the Oxford edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis; all others are in the reader unless otherwise noted.

week of august 20: sex, power, and poetry, or why shakespeare and his contemporaries loved ovid

Tuesday:         Course introduction; Midsummer Nights Dream, dir. Adrian Noble, 1996

Thursday:       Midsummer Night’s Dream contd. Read Midsummer Night’s Dream                                         (Mowatt) I-III.

                        Ovid, Pyramus and Thisbe (OM p. 76-79)

week of august 27:  hierarchy and the politics of translation

Tuesday:         Course [re]introduction. Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV-V).

                        Louise Adrian Montrose, “Shaping fantasies” (ICON)

Thursday:       Golding’s “Preface to the Reader” (in reader).

                        Creation and Four ages of Man (OM pg 1-14)

                        (Compare Ted Hughes and Golding on handout)

                        Raphael Lyne, “Ovid in English Translation” (ICON)

week of september 3:  the anti-epic mode and imperial tensions

Tuesday:         Apollo & Daphne; Phaeton (OM pg 14-36)

                        Heather James, “Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England” (in reader)

Metamorphosis Due (ungraded but required)

Thursday:       Arachne (OM 126-125); Spenser Muiopotmos, lines 232-440;

                       

                        Jupiter and Europa, Cadmus (OM 49-54); Hobbes, De Cive (in reader)

Topics for Paper 1 Assigned

week of september 10: sexual politics – unlicensed desire

Tuesday:                     Ovid, Heroides XVIII-XIX, Hero and Leander, trans. Daryl Hine    (in reader)

Thursday:                   Marlowe, Hero and Leander

                        Group 1: Sexual Deviance in Early Modern England

week of september 17:  moral meaning and resistance

Thursday:                   Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Tuesday:                     Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander (in reader)

Paper 1 Thesis Statements Due

week of september 24 : speaking through ovid

Tuesday:                     Henry Petowe’s Second Part of Hero and Leander  

           

Thursday:                  

week of october 1: protestant poetics

Tuesday:                     Ovid, Heroides XV (Sappho to Phaon); John Donne, Sappho to     Philaenis

                                    Group 2: Women Writers

           

Thursday:                   Goodnight Moon (read in class)

                                    Ovid, Metamorphosis bk. 10 (OM pg.225-51)

            Paper 1 Due

week of october 8: gardens of good and evil

Tuesday:         Spenser, Faerie Queene II.XII (Guyon, Knight of Temperance)

Thursday:       Spenser, Faerie Queene, III.vi (Birth of Belphoebe, Garden of Adonis)

                       

week of october 15: venus and adonis

Tuesday:         Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

                        Group 3: The Plague           

Thursday:       Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

                       

week of october 22: politics of anti-petrarchan poetry

Tuesday:         Midterm

Thursday:       Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, Bk I     

                        Group 4: Petrarchan Poetry and Elizabeth’s Court

week of october 29: angry young ovidians

Tuesday:         Donne, Elegy I (Jealosie) [Compare to Amores 1.4, trans. Peter Greene]

                        Donne’s Elegy 3 “Change,”; Elegy XIX  “To His Mistress Going to Bed” /                        [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores I.5]; “The                                                        Indifferent” [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores 2.4]

                       

                        Group 5: Inns of Court Culture

Thursday:       Robert Herrick, “No Loathsomeness in Love”, “the Vine,” “The Night Piece, to Julia”; Thomas Carew, “A Rapture”

                       

week of november 5: deluding and dangerous art

Tuesday:         Ovid, Pygmalion (OM 232-34); John Marston, The Metamorphoses of  Pigmalion’s Image

Thursday:       George Sandys, “Philomela” and commentary, from Ovid’s  Metamorphosis Englished

                        Paper two topics due

week of november 12: uneasy ovidianism

Tuesday:         Milton’s Lycidas; Invocation to Bk. III of Paradise Lost lines 1-55)

                        For refresher, see Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” (224-28) and the conclusion to the Orpheus story248-52)

                       

                        Group 6: Puritans and Poetry

Thursday:       Ovid, Echo and Narcissus (OM 61-66); Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV.410-504 (Eve recounts her creation and first moments in Paradise)

                       

week of november 19: break

Tuesday:         Thanksgiving holiday.

Thursday:       Thanksgiving holiday

week of november 26: eterne in mutability

Tuesday:         Ovid, Book XV (OM 352-79) Doctrines of Pythagoras

                       

                        Paper 2 Due

Thursday:       Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

week of december 3: change and apocalypse

Tuesday:         Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Thursday:       Spenser continued, Final exam review

FINAL EXAM: TUESDAY 8:00-10:00 PM (yes, PM!) in 207 EPB

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The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing

The 2012 MLA saw the advent of special areas set aside for blogging and tweeting, recognizing a basic fact of twenty-first century life in the developed world: we are obsessed with the present and increasingly aware of the way social networks inflect our understanding of it.  When did this happen?  We may find a clue in Harry Berger Jr.’s insight that during the early modern period “changing conceptions of self and experience at some time penetrated the practice of lyric poetry so that the poem was conceived not merely as a report of prior experience but as the unfolding of experience itself” (Revisionary Play, 135).  

I've organized a special session for this year's Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in Boston, with papers that address the social networks, epistolary practices, and lyric structures that drive this development, which they identify across various genres of seventeenth century writing.

The panel, on "The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing," will take place 8.30-9.45 am, Sunday Jan. 6, in Back Bay D, at the Sheraton Hotel.  I'm looking forward to fantastic papers by Barbara K. Lewalski (Harvard), Daniel Shore (Georgetown), Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon), and Rachael Scarborough-King (NYU). 

These three papers expand our concepts of contemporaneity and the ways it was formed and represented in early modern writing.  Together, they both address this issue in a very specific and focused moment, from 1640-1674, and open up larger questions about the way we define literature, influence, and context.

I've posted the abstracts below:

Barbara K. Lewalski, Current Political Events as Literary Subject: Sidney to Milton

After a brief account of the intense interest in, and some vehicles for, conveying news in Early Modern England, I pose the question, could current news be used as a literary subject?  Noting  theoretical statements by Sidney and Tasso discouraging such use. I then consider briefly some literary genres that traditionally deal with contemporary matter if not precisely with news--encomiastic odes, poems celebrating royal events, satire—and some literary kinds (pastoral, allegory, roman a clef) that wererecognized as means to treat contemporary matters seen as liable to censorship or punishment.  Some examples include:Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale,  and the May and July Eclogues in his Shepheard’s Calender, Wroth’s Urania.  Allegory in Spenser’s epic-romance, the Faerie Queene, allowed him to present Queen Elizabeth under several personae and to include real as well as fictional personages and events of her reign and times.

       
But my principal focus is on eight of Milton’s 23 sonnets, those written during the Civil War and Interregnum (1642-1660) that take contemporary events as subject without the cover of pastoral or allegory.  This is new in itself, as well as marking a new and radical transformation of the small sonnet genre, normally concerned to analyze private love or religious devotion.   These eight poems bear titles in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript that point to their specific occasions:  Sonnet VIII deals with the threatened royalist assault on London, Sonnets XI and XII satirize those who attacked Milton’s Divorce tracts, a sonetto caudato denounces  the persecuting Presbyterians, the Sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane urge their attention to securing religious liberty, and the magnificent sonnet on the Waldensian Massacre conjoins imagery from contemporary news accounts with biblical prophecy.  I suggest that Milton’s strategy for turning the usually intimate sonnet genre to these new public purposes was to dramatize his speaker’s very personal response to the particular event or crisis, often  making that event a lens through which to read public danger.   Yet Milton evidently decided not to tie these sonnets permanently to the current events that evoked them   In his published volumes of poetry (1645 abd 1673) he titled them (except for the Waldensian sonnet) by numbers only, thereby allowing them to speak to new circumstances.  Poetry, he seems to signal by this gesture, can give the  “news” much wider application.

 

Rachael Scarborough King ‘I take up my pen to write’: Writing to the Moment in Early Modern Letters

 

This paper explores the development of the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment” as a model for a discourse of contemporaneity in seventeenth-century news periodicals. The new genres of printed news that developed in the seventeenth century were fundamentally epistolary in nature; they used letters and the postal system to obtain news for publication, format texts, and circulate documents to readers. Readers expected to see real and fictional letters constantly appearing in newsbooks and pamphlets, especially during periods of political upheaval. At the same time, “familiar” letter-writing was becoming a widespread social practice. Individual authors and pedagogical texts adopted a less formal style that stressed letters’ “conversational” nature. Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, dating from 1652-54, offer an early example of the convention of writing to the moment, a move in which the writer figures letter-writing as an ongoing part of everyday life. “Just now I was interrupted”; “I have been called away twenty times since I sat down to write”; “my eyes are so heavy that I hardly see what I write”: in these and many other examples, Osborne creates a metadiscourse on her own writing that fuses communication with timeliness. Each letter is precisely located in time and unfolds over time, allowing Osborne to depict her correspondent as a constant presence. In this paper, I will read Osborne’s letters alongside contemporary newsbooks and pamphlets to argue that the conventions of letter-writing—particularly that of writing to the moment—developing in manuscript and print offered ways to depict the contemporaneous unfolding of news events. Writing to the moment allowed printers to figure their news as constituting the “freshest advices”; simultaneously, the epistolary status of printed news affected the style and content of personal, handwritten letters and the ways people represented their everyday activities in writing.

Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, Locality and Contemporaneity in the Early Modern Social Network

Our paper will argue that mapping out the associations that composed the early modern social network forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions. More specifically, it will revise the concepts of “the local” and “the contemporary.” In the early 1980s, New Historicism established the primacy of these concepts as the measures of contextual relevance. We may think here of Clifford Geertz’s “local knowledge,” or Steven Greenblatt’s “particular and local pressures.” The New Historicism did not merely assert the local as the most relevant context of understanding but implicitly defined context as the local and the contemporaneous, such that “to historicize,” or “to contextualize” means to reinsert a work into its most proximate time and place. When more distant contexts become relevant, they do so only through the mediation of local ones. Historicists of all stripes have generally deployed an unreflective notion of “the local” and “the contemporaneous,” such that relevance can be thought of as a rough product of proximity: as a set of progressively larger circles centered on a spatiotemporal point. We contend, by contrast, that the local and contemporaneous are not merely given by mapped space or clock time, but are instead produced by social networks. Information, objects, and persons travel along a network’s edges, generating the local and the contemporary in the process. While this reversal is especially manifest with digital networks like Facebook, it has been true for as long as it has been possible to communicate through signs at a distance. Reconstructing the early modern social network can thus allow us to revisit and revise our understanding of a work’s context. Networks that stretch across epochs, nations, and continents show how relevant context breaks free of an unreflective notion of the local or the contemporary, redefining the terms so as to include, respectively, the trans-epochal and the trans-national.


For the purposes of this paper, our examples will primarily be concerned with John Milton and his associates, and our theory of networks will be primarily drawn from the work of Bruno Latour.

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Ovid in England, Ovid in Iowa

I'm currently teaching a class on "Ovid in England" at the University of Iowa, and after the students got a bit of Ovid under their belts I asked them to do their own, creative, metamorphosis. I got the idea from my esteemed colleague David Hamilton, who has recently retired from the department and from his role editing the Iowa Review, but who still gets far more mail than me (his box is just above mine, and he still ambles in, from time to time, to empty it and pass along his words of wisdom).

by Leonie Sparling, 2012

In recent years, I've been incorporating creative projects into nearly every course I teach, asking students to produce a creative work in any media and to give me a brief analysis that relates it to the subject matter in the course. The approach has major trade offs: the students, especially the better ones, get passionate about it, and I often get some of their most thoughtful and provocative work. On the other hand, I also have to wade through a lot of pretty bad poetry...but I've written a bit of that myself, and I am a firm believer that even bad poetry, when written with a good heart, can serve a useful purpose.

This year, I gave a prize to the best project: my copy of Dave Tomar's The Shadow Scholar, which I recently reviewed in The New Republic. (If you read the review, you'll know this was kind of a booby prize: but I thought perhaps the winner could trade it for something better). Anyway, my winning entry shows why I love these sorts of assignments.

This is a pencil drawing by Leonie Sparling, and it is about 5 feet tall and quite impressive in person. Better yet, she has a wonderful narrative that describes its genesis: it is the aition of a tropical flower that blossoms only when it enters a symbiotic relationship with the taller trees around it, climbing them, from the forest floor, to bloom at the top of the canopy. For Leonie, this is a story of jealosy and pride -- a realization that one must rely on others. What I like about it is that it is difficult to tell if that realization is painful or ecstatic, which is exactly the sort of ambiguity we've been exploring in Ovid and those who adapt him. And (this will make sense in light of The Shadow Scholar): I'm pretty sure you can't order such a work from a custom cheating service....

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At the International Milton Symposium in Tokyo

I'm just back from the 10th International Milton Symposium in Japan, which was an amazing chance to think through and witness Milton's global reach and continuing influence in 2012. Beside all the regular conference stuff -- papers, discussions, various and sundry hobby horses -- we were treated to a fantastic Noh Theatre adaptation of Milton's closet Drama, Samson Agonistes. The picture above is an actor holding the mask used for Samson. Noh actors often belong to families with a long lineage in the art, and this particular masque has been in family of Manjiro Tatsumi, who played Samson, since the 17th century. Perhaps the weight of that tradition helps explain why the mask, after the performance, seemed weirdly sentient to this observer. Or perhaps it was just the effect of a profoundly interesting and powerful play, adapted by one of Japan's leading poets, Mutsuo Takahashi and performed by the National Noh Theatre of Japan. Or maybe it was the jet lag.

A wonderful night and an amazing conference that has already been a major topic of my Fall teaching -- thanks so much, once again, to the Milton Society of Japan and all the good people at Aoyama Gakuin University for making it possible!

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Rough Guide to Early Modern England

I've just arrived in Chapel Hill to begin a seminar on Marvell at the National Humanities Center, but before the seminar begins I've squeezed in a trip to the UNC Chapel Hill Library's Special Collections.  Appropriately enough, the first thing I called up was a 17th century commonplace book that raids various authors, including Bacon and Anglo Welsh Historian, James Howell (c. 1594-1666), to compose a sort of Rough Guide for early modern tourists.  The book opens with a paean to the virtues of travel:

“The world is a Book full of profitable Instructions, and the best study of it, is by Travail: wherein by the observation of New, and unknown objects, a mans head is opened, and his life may receive an Excellent frame & model, by proposing unto himself the diversity of so many other mens Lives, Constitutions, Humours, and Fancies, as he meets withall; whose vertues (by good Election) may proove as so many Commonplaces of Instruction: and their Vices as Rocks to be avoided.

The chief advantages of Travail are: Health, Education, Experience, and Language: which being the benefits, that under a mans life servicable to his Country and Himself comfortable, they are to be persued with the highest resolution, & industry, which the purchase of such felicities justly deserves.”
 After my jog around UNC this morning, and my high hopes for the Marvell seminar, I can only say that Howell seems prescient and it is amazing to me that a rough guide to travel written in the 1600s can still basically describe what we hope to get out of it today.  I'm also very excited to find out what perilous vices I will need to avoid during the rest of my stay...

Other Tips:

Read: "All kind of Books are profitable, except printed Bawdry; and for Pamphlets, & Lying stories they may be read, but presently make use of them" (fol 3)

Be inquisitive: "Because a wise question procures a Satisfactory answer, it will be very pertinent to know how, and what Questions to Ask. For to profit by Company must come from our selves; our Questions being the Fire, which draws out either ye Quintessence, or Dreggs, of things" (fol 4)

Keep moving: "Stay not long in one City or Town; yet more or less as the place deserveth, but not long: and then change your Lodging from one end & part of ye Town to another, which is a great adamant of acquaintance" (this is taken from Bacon).

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Early Modern Craigslist

While I was doing some work on early newsbooks at the Folger Shakespeare Library recently, one of my friends asked when papers first began to run classified and personal ads. As it happened, I had just taken some pictures of the London Gazette, from August 23, 1694, which is one of the first ones I've seen to include such ads.  As you can see in the picture below, the advertisements include a law dictionary, oil to ease the gout and other aches and pains, gunpowder for sale, several offers of rewards for the return of stolen horses, and a lady who lost a "long scarf, lace Tippet, a thin hood, a girdle," and some other items when she left them in a coach driven by a "little man with Pockholes in his face."

As you may be able to see, behind this page of the printed newsletter is another, manuscript newsletter. Interestingly, the two forms persisted together -- the printed version carrying news available to all, the manuscript version containing the most recent news (since it was quicker to write than to set print) as well as items that were considered to politically dangerous to print. Manuscript newsletters never contain classified ads -- presumably, you knew exactly who you were sending them to, or at least wanted to create a sense of intimacy, so it didn't make sense to send a message into the great unknown in the way these classifieds do.  Only in print, where the audience is imagined as truly large and unknown, did these ads emerge.

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Yet once more...the Paradise Lost Movie is Cancelled

I'm VERY late to this -- but hey, I'm on Early Modern Time -- it is with sorrow in my heart that I just saw here that Legendary Pictures pulled the plug on the big-screen adaptation of Paradise Lost, to be directed by Alex Proyas and star that guy from the Hangover as, surely, the worst Satan ever. This is the umpteenth time this has happened: people are always saying they will make PL into a movie, and then at some point I guess a producer says "why, exactly, are we doing this when we could just film another version of Hamlet? Maybe this time set in Columbia?"

As the story says: "Legendary also realized that in order to effectively bring to life Milton’s war between heaven and hell, it was going to need Avatar-like special effects. But Avatar-like effects call for an an Avatar-like budget, and execs realized the technology wasn’t there to make the movie in the budget range in which they were working."

The irony of this, for me, is that I've always thought Milton's war in heaven is something of a farce; as his angels hurl mountains, get punctured, and reinflate like self-repairing tires, I think he's taking the piss out of the epic equivalent of big budget special effects...

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Deceptively Shakeospherean

Disclaimer: Shakeosphere isn't really about Shakespeare: to the extent that it is about anything, it is about all things early modern, and I'll try to post bits and pieces about my research and teaching here on the rare occasions that I do something interesting or newsworthy. But "Shakeosphere" seemed vaguely sexier than "Miltonista," which was my other top choice for a blog title. And as everyone knows, everyone has to have a blog -- because how else would we fill those empty hours? But I'll also link to interesting articles about Milton, Marlowe, and yes, Shakespeare as and when they arise.

In case I'm just writing for myself, I'll keep these brief -- but this should also be a good place to post abstracts, link to conferences and papers of interest, etc, as well as post book porn: by which I mean pictures of old books that I encounter in my research...the kind of stuff that gets the professoriate all atwitter.

"that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day."

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