The ‘wits’ who beset Sir Richard Blackmore (original) (raw)
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The Literary Culture of Early Stuart Libeling
Modern Philology, 2000
The death in 1612 of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, prompted a cultural phenomenon that few observers of state affairs could have failed to notice. As the days passed, libelous verses on Cecil began to proliferate and circulate in unprecedented numbers. 1 The anxiety surrounding this wave of textual production is evident in the letters of John Chamberlain, who wrote that "the memorie of the late Lord Treasurer growes dayly worse and worse and more libells come as yt were continually."2 Writing just three weeks later, however, John Donne provided a different view. He suggested, perhaps with a touch of irony, that many of the libels were so bad that they might have been written by Cecil's friends:
Treasonous Criticisms of Henry IV: The Loyal Poet of Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger
Quidditas, 1989
Arizo na Hum a nitie ouncil The merit of the Middle English alliterative poem Richard the R edeless and Mum and the othsegger can be judged accurately only if they are approached as individual compo iti ns. Ever since the Early English Text ociety published the label Da and Robert teele edition of Mum and the oth egger in 1936, most schola r have uncritically accepted the ingle-poem theory the e editor posited, regard less of how this adveJ"Se ly affected their analy e of the work. ' The argument for regarding Richa,•d and Mum as fragments of one comp ition, begun in 1399 and fini hed sometime between 1403 and 1406, is, however, far less conclusive than the evide nce agains t thi theory.• Indeed, the compulsion to regard these distinct po m a one actually impedes the process of assess ing their pos ible contribution to Middle English literature, especiall the contribution of the more arti ticall y sophisti ated Mum.]. P. Oakden' admonition over fifty years ago that the e poems merited mor h lar hip than yet had been awarded them remains true today.' One step toward remedying this •ituation i to examine Richard and Mum a eparate omposition by the same author. Examinations of the use of Piers Plowman, dialect, meter, and vocabular poim to the poems' composition b y the ame author:' The, ork a l o hare the common goal of advi ing a king, and the poet's fundamental theories and hi view of life remain constant. But important changes reinforce the theory that Mum is a la t.er composition, not a continuation. Differences in intended aud ience, obje ts of criticism, and style strongly indicate they were conceived a ' separate poems.> Furthermore, the author has become a more poli hed arti t in Mum than he was in Richard, possibly because Henr IV's trengt.h required a ubtlety of expre ion that Richard's dire predicament in the earlier book of poetic advice rendered unnecessary.• Another
2015
This is the first part of an edition of The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyn preserved in London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 491. Its purpose is the presentation of the text, and therefore glossary and notes to the text will follow respectively. Collation of all the extant manuscripts or analyses of any linguistic features are not intended here because both of them have been exhaustively discussed by predecessors such as Robert J. Gates and Ralph Hanna in their editions. The Lambeth manuscript is “a large miscellaneous collection in paper and vellum” with 329 folios measuring approximately 22.0 × 13.5 cm. Its contents are both secular and religious writings. (3)
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 1985
frarures of Chau cer's Canterbury Tales is its penchant for what can perhaps best be called textual harassment. The Canterbury pilgrims-and indeed the characters within their tales-harass texts almost as frequently, and enthusiastically, as they harass each other. That is, they misquote, quote out of context, misinterpret, vulgarize, and generally abuse textual "auctoritee." Various hypotheses can be advanced to explain this constant mistreatment of established wisdom. For example, Stewart Justman has argued persuasively that Chaucer's habitual abuse of authority in his poetry accurately reflects a basic tension in medieval intellectual culture between an impulse to take absolutist, monistic positions (buttressed by inherited "auctoritees") and a need to restrain absolutism (by invoking the same, or equivalent, au thoritative texts) in the face of complex reality. Because Chaucer under stood this tension, Justman claims, "authority [ in the CT] is there for the abusing, and received materials are ... abundantly liable to abuse." 1 Or we can assume that the pilgrims' infidelities to the letter and spirit of textual authority dramatize Chaucer's recognition of the inevitable distortion that befalls written texts in a pre-print, only partly literate culture. (We recall the poet's evocation, in book 5 of Trozlus and Criseyde and in the verses to Adam Scriveyn, of the hazards his own works face in the process of scribal transmission.) 2
New Light on George Catcott’s ‘Obstinate Arguments’: Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Rowley Poems’ Revisited.
This essay examines a ‘unique copy’, passed down through the author’s family, of the Rowley Poems (1777), ‘Supposed to have been written at Bristol…by Thomas Rowley’ in the fifteenth-century; in reality forged (in both senses) by Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), whom Wordsworth would accordingly dub ‘the marvellous boy’. It is discovered that there are at least three such ‘unique’ copies, all written in by, and casting new light on, Chatterton’s publicity-hungry friend George Symes Catcott (1729-1802), as part of his perverse and indefatigable campaign to ‘prove’ that the phantom medieval priest Rowley truly existed and wrote the poems.