Paper 3 - Critics

W.B Yeats - Spenser and the state (1906)

‘the first poet who gave his heart to the State’

Stephen Greenblatt - Ireland and The Faerie Queene

Ireland ‘pervades’ the poem - a new historicist reading which sees aesthetics and imperial ideology as inseparable, a dialogic relationship between England and Ireland where exercising violence fashions the English identity

Stephen Greenblatt - Spenser ‘to fashion a gentleman’

Spenser is a poor boy (at school and Cambridge) until Ireland where he becomes a gentleman by acquiring land

Stephen Greenblatt - Spenser and empire

‘he is our originating and preeminent poet of empire’

Richard McCabe - St George in Ireland (Redcross knight)

President of Munster ordered all English or Irish horsement to wear red cross on breast and back

Steven Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage - central argument

the physical marginalisation of theatre in early modern London allowed popular drama to exist outside the strict confines of the social order

Patrick Collinson - Puritan backlash to theatre

first permanent public playhouses built 1576, Puritan backlash 1577 - mimetic representation of the word of God as mockery

Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction - simple Christian reading

pride is straightforwardly punished - an orthodox study of sin and punishment

Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction - A-text Calvinist struggle

the outcome (heaven/hell) is predetermined, hell is an eternal absence from God

Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction - B-text adaptations, Pope

practical joking about the Pope = more overtly Protestant and anti-Catholic

Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction - B-text adaptations, spectacle

more slapstick, more fireworks, more spectacular - iconographic idolatry in presentation of hell

Christopher Highely - Duchess of Malfi site-specific writing

‘evoke the history of the playing space and its surroundings to open up questions about the origins and results of England’s reformations’

Kim Hall, Things of Darkness - theories of blackness

‘climactic theory of sunburn’ working alongside literary theory of the fall of Phaeton (thunderbolt, lands in Ethiopia, scorched black) - she doesn’t mention biblical account of sons of Ham

Aebisher and Sparey - Inigo Jones and multiple colours of The Masque of Blackness

13 characters in ‘blue-face’, Aethiopia in ‘white-face contrasting with Jonson’s script where Ethiopia is ‘the blackest nation of the world’

Aebisher and Sparey - cosmetic skin tones undermine black/white binary opposition

blackness becomes ‘but one colour in a spectrum of cosmetic skin tones that are remarkable not for their binary opposition, but, ultimately, for their lack of distinction and fixity.’

David Norbrook, Cromwell and national emancipation

‘disturbing to find a poem that celebrates national emancipation simultaneously endorsing Cromwell’s brutal repression of Irish resistance’

Michael Wilding - misleading Cromwell vs King binary opposition

‘bleeding head’ vs ‘active star’ consciously excludes and deflects from living opponents the Levellers

William Walwyn, Leveller leader on Cromwell’s Irish campaign

an unlawful War, a cruel and bloody work to go to destroy the Irish Natives for their Consciences … and to drive them from their proper natural and native Rights’

Michael Wilding, ‘like the three-forked lightning’ interpretation

refers to the surprise night attack led by Fairfax and Cromwell on the Levellers at Burford in 1649

James Turner, description of ‘Upon Appleton House’

‘the longest and most complicated topographical poem in English’

Thomas Healy, Marvell’s introduction of the Levellers

‘especial significance for Fairfax’ - little sympathy for St George’s Hill experiment, despite pamphlets directly addressed to him from Winstanley