November
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.384 Friday, 18 November 2016
From: Arnie Perlstein <
Date: November 17, 2016 at 11:57:20 PM EST
Subject: Milton’s Eve & Shakespeare’s Cressida (and Juliet)
Jim Carroll responded to me as follows:
“I’m not convinced that Milton was influenced by the particular speech in Troilus, not only because the words “heaven” and “eyes” appear so frequently together in Shakespeare, but other similarly elaborate praises including those words also appear in Shakespeare.”
Arnie quoted Book 8 of Paradise Lost: Grace was in all her steps, HEAVEN IN HER EYE, and compares it to THE LUSTRE IN YOUR EYE, HEAVEN IN YOUR CHEEK, and THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP, from T&C.
Finding something “in” someone’s “eye” or “eyes” is a habitual manner of thought in Shakespeare, including:
BEING PRISON'D IN HER EYE, like pearls in glass, V&A I-I:980
And IN HER EYE there hath appear'd a FIRE MAAN IV-i:162
I do, my lord, and IN HER EYE I find
A WONDER, or a WONDROUS MIRACLE,
The SHADOW OF MYSELF form'd IN HER EYE, KJ II-i:496–498
The HONOR, sir, that flames IN YOUR FAIR EYES, AWEW II-iii:80
For there is none of you so mean and base
That hath not NOBLE LUSTRE IN YOUR EYES. H5 III-i:29–30
There lives MORE LIFE IN ONE OF YOUR FAIR EYES Sonnet 83
The APRIL'S IN HER EYES, it is love's spring, A&C III-ii:43
This next example doesn’t use “in”, but it uses a word related to “language” (“rhetoric”) with “eye”:
"Did not the HEAVENLY RHETORIC OF THINE EYE,
'Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury? LLL IV-iii:58–60
I don’t doubt that Milton was influenced by Shakespeare’s diction, but I don’t think you can limit it to Troilus.” END QUOTE FROM JIM’S REPLY
Jim, thank you very much for your excellent reply. Although the V&A, AWEW, and H5 usages seem clearly distinct from Milton’s in that they’re not used in a romantic context, it does appear to me from a quick review that those other 5 Shakespearean usages of the “eye” metaphor, from one end of his career to the other, were used in a romantic context similar to that with Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.
However, you’ll note from my post that I had other reasons to connect T&C to PL besides that verbal echoing, in particular the substantial parallels between Romeo &Juliet, on the one hand, and both Troilus & Cressida and Paradise Lost, on the other. So that leads me to stick with that interpretation, but to be interested in looking more closely at those other Shakespeare usages you’ve brought forward, to see whether they, too, might have been part of more global allusions by Milton.
Cheers,
ARNIE
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.383 Friday, 18 November 2016
[1] From: Larry Weiss <
Date: November 17, 2016 at 2:16:52 PM EST
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Clown Politician
[2] From: Brian Bixley <
Date: November 17, 2016 at 7:59:00 PM EST
Subj: Re: SHAKSPER: Clown Politician
[1]--------------------------------------------------------
From: Larry Weiss <
Date: November 17, 2016 at 2:16:52 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Clown Politician
I agree with Paul Hamilton that Julius Caesar and Coriolanus both deal with demagoguery, and I read his post as correctly characterizing Antony as the principal demagogue in the former play. But I wonder if he means us to regard Caius Martius as a demagogue in Coriolanus. Surely he is the opposite of a demagogue; he fails because he refuses to pander to the mob. The tribunes, on the other hand, are quintessential demagogues; they achieve personal power by riling up the masses by attacking the elite class and promising free grain. Whatever Trump is, he is not that sort of politician. Unfortunately, though, we still have some of that ilk.
[2]--------------------------------------------------------
From: Brian Bixley <
Date: November 17, 2016 at 7:59:00 PM EST
Subject: Re: SHAKSPER: Clown Politician
Paul Hamilton writes,
‘Iago is an “ensign”, a standard-bearer, whose resentment at being passed up for promotion by his Moorish general, Othello, leads him to plot...’,
a proposition widely shared by commentators on the play. Yet we know Iago to be a formidable liar; why should we believe him when he says this? It is some time since I read the play, but I do not remember any corroboration of his claim. Is there any? If there is, ‘motiveless malignity’ flies out the window
Brian Bixley
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.382 Friday, 18 November 2016
From: Neema Parvini <
Date: November 18, 2016 at 7:38:26 AM EST
Subject: Podcast: Interview with Michael D. Bristol
Neema interviews Michael D. Bristol (McGill) about a wide range of topics including: Mikhail Bakunin, LC Knights’s famous attack on A.C. Bradley “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, the importance of character to Shakespeare criticism, is Shakespeare a philosopher?, moral agency and much more.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.381 Thursday, 17 November 2016
From: Jim Carroll <
Date: November 16, 2016 at 9:09:46 PM EST
Subject: Re: Milton’s Eve & Shakespeare’s Cressida (and Juliet)
I’m not convinced that Milton was influenced by the particular speech in Troilus, not only because the words “heaven” and “eyes” appear so frequently together in Shakespeare, but other similarly elaborate praises including those words also appear in Shakespeare.
Arnie quoted Book 8 of Paradise Lost:
Grace was in all her steps, HEAVEN IN HER EYE,
and compares it to
THE LUSTRE IN YOUR EYE, HEAVEN IN YOUR CHEEK,
and
THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP,
from T&C. Finding something “in” someone’s “eye” or “eyes” is a habitual manner of thought in Shakespeare, including:
BEING PRISON'D IN HER EYE, like pearls in glass,
V&A I-I:980
And IN HER EYE there hath appear'd a FIRE
MAAN IV-i:162
I do, my lord, and IN HER EYE I find
A WONDER, or a WONDROUS MIRACLE,
The SHADOW OF MYSELF form'd IN HER EYE,
KJ II-i:496–498
The HONOR, sir, that flames IN YOUR FAIR EYES,
AWEW II-iii:80
For there is none of you so mean and base
That hath not NOBLE LUSTRE IN YOUR EYES.
H5 III-i:29–30
There lives MORE LIFE IN ONE OF YOUR FAIR EYES
Sonnet 83
The APRIL'S IN HER EYES, it is love's spring,
A&C III-ii:43
This next example doesn’t use “in”, but it uses a word related to “language”
(“rhetoric”) with “eye”:
"Did not the HEAVENLY RHETORIC OF THINE EYE,
'Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
LLL IV-iii:58–60
I don’t doubt that Milton was influenced by Shakespeare’s diction, but I don’t think you can limit it to Troilus.
Jim Carroll
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.380 Thursday, 17 November 2016
From: Paul Hamilton <
Date: November 12, 2016 at 12:06:48 AM EST
Subject: Trumping Shakespeare: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and the Rise of the Clown Politician
Trumping Shakespeare: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and the Rise of the Clown Politician
Posted on July 11, 2016 by Paul Hamilton
In a May 26, 2016 Los Angeles Times article, entitled “The theater of Trump: What Shakespeare can teach us about the Donald”, theater critic Charles McNulty undergoes what he calls a “fool’s errand”, a meticulous search in the Bard’s plays to find precedent for Trump’s now-famous political strategy: his use of lies, bigotry, and transparently racist policy proposals to suck up media oxygen and achieve dominance over the American political debate. McNulty’s quest to understand the Trump phenomenon brings him, logically, to the plays in which Shakespeare treats demagogues explicitly: Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. McNulty admits that Shakespeare “may have no equivalent” for the businessman and reality TV star turned presidential candidate, but he focuses on the Bard’s insight into “just how easy it is” for a demagogue “to transform anxious citizens into mobs.” Fair enough. But, it seems to me that McNulty fails to give Shakespeare enough credit for anticipating the mechanism of Trump’s rise and the advent of a new kind of political figure: the “clown politician”.
To understand this, we need to forget the grand figures of Coriolanus, Mark Antony, and Julius Caesar; in fact, we need to depart from the world of politics entirely, and, instead, zero in on the secretive, debased, and repugnant figure of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago is an “ensign”, a standard-bearer, whose resentment at being passed up for promotion by his Moorish general, Othello, leads him to plot to get his rival, Cassio, fired from his position as lieutenant and to bring about the ruin of his general by persuading him that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. Now, this is Trump territory: the stuff of reality TV and tabloid newspapers!
Though the central action in Othello is domestic, Iago possesses a media mogul’s mastery of what the British press has called “dead-cat” politics: the trick is to “throw a dead cat on the table” in front of reporters, and then dominate the news cycle. Iago describes this method quite explicitly, when he berates his rival, Cassio, for supposedly having the same fault:
A slipper and subtle knave, a finder of occasions that has an eye, can stamp and counterfeit advantages, though true advantage never present itself. (Oth II. i. 235)
What makes Iago and Trump’s strategy especially effective is that both incite racial conflict. In Iago’s case, that conflict is intended to draw attention to the Moorish general’s racial and geographical difference among the prejudiced denizens of Venice, so that he becomes convinced of the perverse notion that his wife is, somehow, suspect because she has chosen to marry a black man. In Trump’s case, the point is to displace economic anxiety onto issues of race and religion so that white American males are provoked to murderous hatred of the outsider in their midst: Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, etc. In a country of immigrants, such rhetoric amounts to turning the country against itself.
[ . . .]