Richard Strier

George Herbert and Ironic Ekphrasis

hadi Bartsch has demonstrated the complexity of Seneca’s relation to vivid description;1 the essay that follows aims to do the same for another, much later writer. Bartsch shows that in Seneca’s one extended ekphrasis, he leads his reader to distrust his (the reader’s) initial response to the description, and she shows that Seneca repeatedly used vivid description of one kind of experience (bodily torture) as a way to defuse rather than, as in the rhetorical tradition, to incite an emotional response. She also shows that the Stoics can be seen on both sides of the controversy over enargeia, but it is clear from the analysis, and from the key passages in Cicero, that the enargeia that the Stoics praise is a matter of perspicuousness to the mind, and not to the eye or even the inner eye.2 Descartes’ distinction between what can be mentally imaged and what can be conceptually understood clarifies this matter,3 but it is of great interest that the key term, enargeia, functions, to put it crudely, in both the pro-image and the anti-image traditions. The relations among the eye, the inner eye, and the mind (or other terms for the purely nonphysical internal, such as “soul”) are entirely up for grabs, and can be coherently presented and understood in ways that make the terms completely harmonious or completely disharmonious among themselves. The Renaissance, as one might expect, inherited the full complexity of the ancient traditions on these matters. There was certainly plenty of reveling in description, and in the power of verbal description—of beautiful things, and of painful things—and plenty of insistence that the visual is to lead beyond itself, with this latter often serving as rationalization for the former (that luscious nude that I am painting or describing is an allegory or a goddess). And there was, of course, plenty of distrust of the visual (and the visualizable) even as a means toward its own transcendence. Even the most enthusiastic— and I use the term advisedly—proponent (in England and perhaps in all of Europe) of vividness as the key power and property of poetry, Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry (composed in the early 1580s), propounds a rather complex position. Sidney seems untroubled by the power of mental

Sanctifying the Bourgeoisie: The Cultural Work of The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s most wholehearted evocation and celebration of bourgeois life. The Merry Wives of Windsor might reasonably be seen as a competitor, but that play is not, like Errors, thoroughly committed to the evocation of a commercial and urban context. Closer in time and spirit to Errors, The Taming of the Shrew evokes a bourgeois context, but does not seem especially interested in it, and Shrew, of course, evokes other contexts as well (a very grand aristocratic household in the ‘induction’; a mid-level gentry country household after the wedding). There is no representation whatever of aristocratic life in Errors; the duke in the play is, as we shall see, a figure conceived in terms of juridical rather than social status, and his initial presentation in the play is as participating in (something like) a trade-war. Errors gives us, uniquely, a world of merchants — every one of whom is honest, generous, and admirable. There is not a single lie, deception, crooked or devious business dealing in the play. Contracts are honored, and it is a matter of shame not to do so. Money in the play is neither filthy nor corrupting. No one is self-conscious about it and no one is greedy. It is taken as perfectly normal not to cheat and to expect not be cheated. If there is a play by Shakespeare that shows us people fully and happily at home in an urban, commercial world, it is The Comedy of Errors.

Self-revelation And Self-satisfaction In Montaigne And Descartes

Both Montaigne and Descartes produced works in which an individualized and historical first person is the focus, and both of them have vexed relations to the self-abnegation that their religious tradition demanded. They are both self-revealing and self-satisfied writers. This essay will explore the rationales that each of these writers developed for defending both self-revelation and self-satisfaction. The textual foci are Montaignes essay on repentance, and Descartess Discourse on the Method.

Shakespeare's Promises (review)

are broad insights and judgments that result from a lifetime of scholarship, regarding, among other things, the different conceptions of time by Greek philosophers and Greek historians, and by Aristotle and St. Augustine; the latest discoveries in biblical scholarship; and the implications for poetry of Enlightenment thought. Perhaps the very best section of the book is the last, in which Fisch slips free of the fetters of his book’s topic to engage passionately with the erotics of Blake and Shelley. Although Fisch disapproves of the freedom from authority that turns Blake’s God first into Christ and then into the merely human imagination, that freedom liberates critic as well as poet. The readings of “Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau,” “The Tyger,” the epic poem Milton, and best of all the illustrations for the Book of Job are the most powerful in the book. One of Fisch’s central ideas about Blake is that he hated the law of the Hebrew Bible both in itself and as it affected Milton, but he was in thrall to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and to Milton’s biblical poetry, both of which he identified with the sublime. This split between doctrine and poetry applies to Fisch’s final sections on Blake. He points out the harm of Blake’s thought, which ecstatically fuses self-knowledge, eros, and death; but he responds passionately to the beauty of his poetry. To conclude, it is a sign of the book’s value that one can unself-consciously compare its author with these three great poets. This book, like the poems it illuminates, should be not only read but reread.

The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649.

Preface List of contributors List of illustrations Introduction 1. John Stows Survey of London Ian Archer and Lawrence Manley 2. Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream Penry Williams and Louis A. Montrose 3. Thomas Dekkers The Shoemakers Holiday Paul S. Seaver and David Bevington 4. John Marstons The Fawn Linda Levy Peck and Frank Whigham 5. Ben Jonsons Bartholomew Fair Patrick Collinson and Leah S. Marcus 6. Philip Massingers A New Way to Pay Old Debts Keith Lindley and Martin Butler 7. The Root and Branch Petition and the Grand Remonstrance David L. Smith and Richard Strier 8. John Miltons Eikonoklastes Derek Hirst and Marshall Grossman.

Recent studies in the English Renaissance

E L R bibliographical articles are intended to combine a topical review of research with a reasonably complete bibliography. Scholarship is organized by authors or titles of anonymous works. Items included represent combined entries listed in the annual bibliographies published by PMLA, YWES, and MHRA from 1945 through, in the present instance, 1989 with additional items. The format used here is a modified version of that used in Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Terence P . Logan and Denzel S. Smith, 4 vols. (Univ. of Nebraska Press,