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‘The Wiser Sort’: The Distinction of Politics and Gabriel Harvey’s Machiavellian Hamlet

András Kiséry

in Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England

The marginalia of Gabriel Harvey, a humanist famously eager for a political career, allow us to insert Hamlet in the contexts of late sixteenth-century political education, the discussion about the ... More

The marginalia of Gabriel Harvey, a humanist famously eager for a political career, allow us to insert Hamlet in the contexts of late sixteenth-century political education, the discussion about the reason of state, and the culture of extracting sententiae from literary texts. This culture provides a formal link between tragedies and the focus on aphoristic formulations in Machiavelli’s sixteenth-century reception. To Harvey, reading tragedies meant making distinctions between moral or philosophical considerations and the principles of political action. A note in Harvey’s Chaucer implies a similarity between the utility of Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Hamlet, but it is in tragic drama that the tensions between religious–ethical and political norms and arguments become visible in the conflicting claims they make on dramatic characters and on readers.Less

How Readers Read Their Augustines

Arnoud S. Q. Visser

in Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500-1620

This chapter examines book ownership and reading practices of individual readers of Augustine in sixteenth-century Europe. Case studies of private libraries in England and monastic collections in ... More

This chapter examines book ownership and reading practices of individual readers of Augustine in sixteenth-century Europe. Case studies of private libraries in England and monastic collections in Italy reveal the reality of Augustine's dissemination to be far messier than a chronological account of the printing history would suggest. Manuscript reading marks in individual copies confirm the lively variety of ways in which Augustine was read, ranging from pragmatic underlining to emotional responses. These individual reading styles enabled readers to use the same texts for different ends, as is shown in a case study of three formative English theologians, Thomas Cranmer, Peter Martyr Vermigli and William Laud. Their techniques of classifying or historicizing quotations illuminate how readers, regardless of the aims of authors and editors, often pursued their own approach to Augustine in search of confirmation of their religious perspective.Less

Nashe and Harvey in Illyria

Steve Sohmer

in Reading Shakespeare's mind

Gabriel Harvey has long been recognized as the inspiration for Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This chapter explains how Shakespeare turned his late friend Thom Nashe into Feste, and continued Nashe’s ... More

Gabriel Harvey has long been recognized as the inspiration for Malvolio in Twelfth Night. This chapter explains how Shakespeare turned his late friend Thom Nashe into Feste, and continued Nashe’s torment of Harvey from beyond the grave.Less

Spenser, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Decline of the Preacher’s Plough

Stewart Mottram

in Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell

This chapter focuses on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1598), showing how both use the language of medieval rural complaint to attack greed among ... More

This chapter focuses on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) and View of the Present State of Ireland (c.1598), showing how both use the language of medieval rural complaint to attack greed among the protestant owners of former monastic lands. Beginning with the Calender’s September eclogue, the chapter brings new evidence to bear on previous identifications of the shepherd, Diggon Davie, with the Elizabethan bishop of St David’s, Richard Davies, tracing the influence of Davies’s Funeral Sermon (1577) for Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, into Diggon’s language in ‘September’. The language of medieval complaint had blamed unscrupulous abbots for enclosing ploughlands, but in his own writing, Richard Davies argues that post-dissolution landowners were having an even more detrimental impact on the religious life of rural Wales, not only refusing to free up former monastic lands for ploughing but also hindering the work of the ‘church-ploughing’ preacher, because refusing to pay preaching ministers a proper wage. The chapter shows how Spenser uses the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale to turn Davies’s local response to the situation in St David’s diocese into a general complaint against unscrupulous farmers of church livings across England and Wales. It concludes by exploring Spenser’s similar attitude in A View towards Adam Loftus and other protestant farmers of church livings in late Elizabethan Ireland, arguing that Spenser here evokes the ruins of churches and monasteries in order to return to his comments in The Shepheardes Calender on the greed of post-dissolution landowners and their neglect of the preacher’s plough.Less

Humanism and Law in Elizabethan England: The Annotations of Gabriel Harvey

David Ibbetson

in Reassessing Legal Humanism and its Claims: Petere Fontes?

There was no such thing as English Legal humanism, but there were humanists with an interest in law. One such person was Gabriel Harvey, whose practice of underling and annotating his books enables ... More

There was no such thing as English Legal humanism, but there were humanists with an interest in law. One such person was Gabriel Harvey, whose practice of underling and annotating his books enables us to see his responses to legal texts. He owned books of the civil law, with an especial interest in legal dialectic, as well as works of English common law. His annotations and marginalia do not allow us to reconstruct any coherent theory of law, but do show that even highly technical subjects, like the English law of real property, did not fall outside the range of interests of a polymath who described himself as a humanist.Less

Rehearsing the Plebeians: Coriolanus and the Reading of Roman History

David Norbrook

in Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History

This chapter pursues across a wide span of intellectual history reflections on the kind of plebeian political agency so graphic in the opening of Coriolanus. Examining presentations of popular tumult ... More

This chapter pursues across a wide span of intellectual history reflections on the kind of plebeian political agency so graphic in the opening of Coriolanus. Examining presentations of popular tumult in Shakespeare’s source, Livy, it tracks both Machiavelli’s republican reading of Livy and the interest in Livy’s narrative displayed by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Gabriel Harvey. The broadening of parameters recovers a line of thinkers open to relatively radical ideas about the constitution of a mixed polity, sharply contrasting the repressive anti-populism doctrinal in Elyot’s Boke Named the Governour and official Tudor discourse. Shakespeare’s play unfolds a distinctive doubleness of tone, dramatizing conflicting political perspectives rather as Livy had done, but with a prevailing darkness to its caustic and destabilizing vision. Shakespeare incorporates into this Roman yet contemporary drama a charged, emergent lexicon, deploying such relative novelties as ‘depopulate’ and ‘plebs’, and coining the term ‘Weales men’.Less

Inventing Custom: Meter, Etymology, and Conquest in the Spenser–Harvey Letters and Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland

Stephanie Elsky

in Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature

This chapter considers custom’s function in colonial conquest, juxtaposing England’s conquest-filled history, which emerges in Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey’s debate about the imposition of ... More

This chapter considers custom’s function in colonial conquest, juxtaposing England’s conquest-filled history, which emerges in Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey’s debate about the imposition of classical meter, or quantitative verse, on English verse, with English attempts at expansion in Ireland, the subject of Spenser’s A View. I argue that their debate reveals the method by which the foreign becomes native via custom, a process that Spenser draws upon in order to justify his violent approach to conquering Ireland and imposing common law. At the same time, however, by exploring the history of Ireland’s equally customary Brehon law, Spenser reveals the difficulty of establishing linguistic—and therefore political—chronologies within a global history that stretches beyond the vexed borders of Ireland and England.Less

‘Secrets and Lies’: The Life of Edmund Spenser

Andrew Hadfield

in Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England

This chapter discusses the difficulty of writing a biography of English poet Edmund Spenser due to the lack of surviving evidence, such as letters or literary manuscripts, as well as the absence of ... More

This chapter discusses the difficulty of writing a biography of English poet Edmund Spenser due to the lack of surviving evidence, such as letters or literary manuscripts, as well as the absence of his opinions, comments, or even many details of his life outside his writings. It considers Spenser’s tendency to represent himself in a variety of ways in his poetry, citing The Faerie Queene as an example. It also examines some important unanswered questions about Spenser, such as whether he and Gabriel Harvey had a homosexual relationship, and the connection between the personal and the political in his poetry. Finally, it argues that we should be wary of not reading Spenser’s poetry in terms of his life and opinions.Less

A Passing Singular Odd Man

in Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

This chapter considers Gabriel Harvey's satirical portrayal of Oxford in English verse in 1580. Under the title of Speculum Tuscanismi, that is, ‘Mirror of Tuscanism’ or ‘Italian Mirrour’, Harvey's ... More

This chapter considers Gabriel Harvey's satirical portrayal of Oxford in English verse in 1580. Under the title of Speculum Tuscanismi, that is, ‘Mirror of Tuscanism’ or ‘Italian Mirrour’, Harvey's poem appeared without his permission in Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters. The target of the satire was openly recognizable — and recognized — as Oxford. The poem also points to foppishness as Oxford's most characteristic trait.Less

The Unpremeditated and Accidental Philosopher

Warren Boutcher

in The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe: Volume One: The Patron Author

Chapter 5 shows in detail how the material and social process of collecting and using verbal artefacts indexed—for early modern participant-observers—both internal discourse (the cognitive operations ... More

Chapter 5 shows in detail how the material and social process of collecting and using verbal artefacts indexed—for early modern participant-observers—both internal discourse (the cognitive operations of human consciousness in inventing and judging sensibilia in the rational mind) and external discourse and conversation. It starts with Pierre de Lancre’s and others’ judgements of the Essai, then provides examples of textual loci in Tacitus, Livy, and Virgil that are read with different emphases by Montaigne and by professional intellectuals such as Piero Vettori and Gabriel Harvey. It goes on to follow the trail from Lancre to intellectuals and magistrates in the Low Countries (Delrio and Dheure) who are dealing theoretically and practically with early modern witchcraft cases. The result is a view of Montaigne’s entrance into late sixteenth-century learned conversation as a nobly virtuoso, freestyle registrar, and comptroller of verbal artefacts from classical citations to anecdotal experiences.Less