[Middleton] News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody (1604; written with Thomas Dekker)
So on this blog today, first we had torture, now we have plague. It's a really cheerful day today. And, as we'll see, a topical one; you would not think, necessarily, that a 1604 pamphlet about the plague and the government's response to it would be topical to an audience of today, except that nowadays, you probably would. Anyway.
In 1603, London was stricken with an outbreak of the plague, which sort of thing happened about once a decade; this particular outbreak delayed the coronation festivities for King James, and one of its casualties was Ben Jonson's son (as he tells us in Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden). As generally happened during plague outbreaks, those with the resources to do so fled the city (like the people in this engraving are doing, though they do not seem to be doing a very good job), while those who did not were pretty much up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle; there were statutes and provisions made for those left in the city in times of plague, but they seem to have been followed sporadically and inconsistently.
In News from Gravesend, Middleton and Dekker (who are publishing, unsurprisingly, anonymously, under the name of "Somebody") castigate, quite sharply, the ruling classes for leaving the poorer Londoners to die; it is, for the most part, a blistering indictment (erm, no pun intended there, but since there is one possible I'm not changing it) which is nevertheless full of really weird and uncomfortable tensions on account of its conclusion, and its use of the plague to metaphorize a period of political and social transition as well as the cause for commentary on the real and tangible damage it causes.
The pamphlet begins with a lengthy Epistle Dedicatory addressed to "Sir Nicholas Nemo, alias Nobody," celebrated for being the only aristocrat to stick around during the plague. The narrator (who signs himself as "Somebody") describes a meeting of creators of popular texts, "rhymesters, jig-makers, ballad-mongers, and pamphlet-stitchers," at which everyone agreed that the only nobleman whose patronage they'd seek thenceforth would be Nobody; after that, there is a lot of complaining about how people at Winchester (where a lot of courtly functions had moved during the plague) took the opportunity to gouge people (such that beds in Winchester were as crowded as graves in London), and finally says he is going to have all of his "limping prose" made into a ballad. (The Epistle Dedicatory loses something in summary, I have to admit.) After this follows the poem proper, which begins with a lengthy invocation to Physic as its muse. Following the invocation, the speaker meditates on the causes of the plague; he dismisses the theory that it's carried by the air on the grounds that if it were, everyone and everybody would have the plague all the time, and concludes that "'tis some capital offense, / Some high high treason doth incense / Th'eternal king, that thus we are / Arraigned at death's most dreadful bar," after which he enumerates some of the various social sins that lead to the plague, deciding that England is being purified for King James (!) The next section describes the effects of the plague on London (apostrophized here as a "throne of kings" (Shakespeare alert!) and "Europe's jewel, England's gem, / Sister to great Jerusalem," bewailing the departure of the fleeing upper classes and lamenting those left behind to die; there is a lengthy section envisioning the gruesome boil-ridden ends of various sinners. The speaker then declines to talk about the cure for the plague, since that, he says, is outside the jurisdiction of poets (and also, though he doesn't say so, nobody actually knows one, the discovery of antibiotics being three and a half centuries away), but that the best cure is prevention and the best prevention is repentance. The poem concludes with a disquieting section in which the speaker says that, as much as it sucks, the plague is necessary because "a plague's the purge to cleanse a city," and hey, it's still better than famine, since at least it decreases (to coin a phrase) the surplus population. Finally, the speaker asks God for mercy and hopes that it doesn't happen again.
This is an extremely strange text, in the sense that its framework and its conclusions are very much at odds, and that the political context does weird things to the social criticism. For instance, when the speaker is hypothesizing about the causes of the plague (which was, according to the editors, something you could get in a lot of trouble for doing, since it was possible you'd come up with a seditious answer), he suggests that
...it may be, Jehovah looks
But now upon those audit books
Of forty-five years' hushed account
For hours misspent (whose sums surmount
The price of ransomed kings), and there,
Finding out grievous debts, doth clear
And cross them under his own hand,
Being paid with lives through all the land.
For since his maiden-servant's gone
And his new viceroy fills the throne,
Heaven means to give him (as his bride)
A nation new and purified.
At this point, the poem takes a moment to change its tone radically, no doubt causing whiplash in the reader:
Take breath a while our panting muse,
And to the world tell gladder news
Than these of burials; strive awhile
To make thy sullen numbers smile.
Forget the names of graves and ghosts,
The sound of bells, the unknown coasts
Of death's vast kingdom, and sail o'er
With fresher wind to happier shore.
For now the maiden isle hath got
A royal husband (heavenly lot).
Fair Scotland does fair England wed,
And gives her for her maidenhead
A crown of gold, wrought in a ring
With which she's married to a king.
The change of tone underscores the uneasiness of Middleton and Dekker's attempts to connect the outbreak of plague to the new king's accession, as it sits awkwardly in the middle of a text which is otherwise full of horror and anger, and the confusion of tone is reflected in the metaphor: the de facto union of England and Scotland is figured as a royal wedding in which "the maiden isle" surrenders "her maidenhead" to the Scottish king, the newfound permeability of the border a kind of sexual penetration (which, of course, leads us to the inevitable conclusion that Hadrian's Wall is England's hymen. I am not sure how to feel about that). But on the other hand, the "maiden isle" is quite literally diseased -- so what exactly is the metaphor here? And what's the suggestion about Elizabeth and her reign? One might compare the narrative ambivalence towards the old Duke in The Phoenix, as the statement that he has reigned for 45 years reflects the length of Elizabeth's reign, and while he is not presented as a bad person, his realm has gone all to seed nevertheless. The implication in the imagery of the account books is that, since Elizabeth's reign was more or less peaceful, England owes God (to use Prince Hal's pun) a death or three (or lots), hence the plague -- the same plague which is, afterwards, imagined as the result of social sin, particularly that of the ruling classes, but on the other hand, its victims are the sort of people Falstaff describes as "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace," good only to "fill a pit as well as better," and indeed that's also what they do in this poem (quite literally; there is a long and unsettling passage in which the piling up of plague victims in mass graves both reflects and overturns the social order).
However, the crimes the speaker sees as bringing down the plague are largely the provenance of people in power:
Whether they be princes' errors
Or faults of peers, pull down these terrors,
Or (because we may not err
Let's sift it in particular)
The courtier's pride, lust, and excess,
The churchman's painted holiness,
The lawyer's grinding of the poor,
The soldier's starving at the door
(Rag'd, lean, and pale through want of blood,
Sold cheap by him for country's good),
The scholar's envy, farmer's curse --
When heav'n's rich treasurer doth disburse
In bounteous heaps (to thankless men)
His universal blessings, then
This delving mole for madness eats
Even his own lungs, and strange oaths sweats
Because he cannot sell for pence
Dear years in spite of providence.
Add unto these the city-sin
(Brought by seven deadly monsters in)
Which doth all bounds and blushing scorn,
Because 'tis in the freedom born.
What trains of vice (which even hell hates)
But have bold passage through her gates?
And the condemnation of those who have the power to leave the city is stinging:
But you grave patriots, whom fate
Makes rulers of this wallèd state,
We must not lose you in our verse,
Whose acts we one day may rehearse
In marble numbers that shall stand
Above time's all-destroying hand --
Only, methinks, you now do err
In flying from your charge so far.
So coward captains shrink away;
So shepherds do their flocks betray;
So soldiers, and so lambs, do perish;
So you kill those you're bound to cherish.
The memory of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is still, I think, fresh enough that this passage is sharply resonant: then, as now, those without the resources to get out of the path of disaster are left to die. The narrator's sympathy for their plight -- indeed, the following section of the poem imagines what would happen if the rich were subject to getting the plague, and the result is a really creepy fantasia in which various hypothetical well-to-do citizens end up expressing plague symptoms in a way that somaticizes their sin, so that a usurer's plague sores evoke coins, a drunken glutton's resemble grapes (I hope you are not eating while you read this), and a lecher dying of plague gets laughed at by pimps and prostitutes who are all immune to the plague because they have syphilis (this was a common idea; the footnotes assure us it is inaccurate) -- is, however, qualified in an unsettling manner both by the poem's conclusion and setup. If England is being purified for the sins of its powerful, why is it the powerless who are hit hardest by the plague? (The narrator has a few words for the plight of exiled Londoners, though he is much cooler towards them, since that's what they get for wearing ornate fashions and silly hats, and concludes that "this black curse, / Doing ill abroad, at home does worse.")
The last sections of the poem offer the conventional moral that the plague can be avoided by straightening up and flying right (and not consulting crazy people who advise you to tie pigeons to your feet or weird shit like that):
Only this antidote apply:
Cease vexing heaven, and cease to die.
Seek therefore (after you have found
Salve natural for the natural wound
Of this contagion) cure from thence
Where first the evil did commence,
And that's the soul. Each one purge one,
And England's free, the plague is gone.
But then it goes on to say that in the end, some things about the plague are necessary:
We would conclude (still urging pity):
A plague's the purge to cleanse a city.
Who amongst millions can deny
(In rough prose or smooth poesy)
Of evils 'tis the lighter brood --
A dearth of people, than of food!
And who knows not, our land ran o'er
With people, and was only poor
In having too too many living,
And wanting living -- rather giving
Themselves to waste, deface and spoil,
Than to increase (by virtuous toil)
The bankrupt bosom of our realm,
Which naked births did overwhelm.
While Larry Niven (WARNING: link contains potentially unsettling image) might approve of such a sentiment, this conclusion leaves a horribly bitter taste in my mouth. The Oxford editor (Robert Maslen) takes it as a kind of grimly optimistic suggestion that a repentant and hardworking realm run by the shiny new Stuart dynasty will be able to resolve the economic crises that indirectly caused the devastation the plague inflicted on England, but I am not sure if that's what's really going on here, or how we are supposed to take this -- is that it, or is it heavily ironic, or a bit of vaguely-socially-conservative proto-social-Darwinist ass-covering, or what? I haven't talked much about the epistle and its relationship to the poem; I think that its tone probably allows us to qualify and to reconsider some of the statements made in the verse, so, for instance, the ironic remarks in the epistle about how if the plague weren't killing off poor scholars and writers there would be no jobs available for any of them get anticipate the poem's conclusion, except the conclusion isn't presented ironically. At least, not so overtly. I'm not sure what to make of it, honestly. I mean, most of the poem is devoted to condemning the socioeconomic conditions that make the "purgation" the narrator describes necessary, but you get stuff like this, and the part I talked about before where the plague is envisioned as purifying England for James and -- well, it makes one wonder.
Next time: The Nightingale and the Ant/Father Hubburd's Tales. I don't know anything about this text, but the title makes me wonder if Middleton failed to take a lesson from Spenser.
In 1603, London was stricken with an outbreak of the plague, which sort of thing happened about once a decade; this particular outbreak delayed the coronation festivities for King James, and one of its casualties was Ben Jonson's son (as he tells us in Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden). As generally happened during plague outbreaks, those with the resources to do so fled the city (like the people in this engraving are doing, though they do not seem to be doing a very good job), while those who did not were pretty much up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle; there were statutes and provisions made for those left in the city in times of plague, but they seem to have been followed sporadically and inconsistently.
In News from Gravesend, Middleton and Dekker (who are publishing, unsurprisingly, anonymously, under the name of "Somebody") castigate, quite sharply, the ruling classes for leaving the poorer Londoners to die; it is, for the most part, a blistering indictment (erm, no pun intended there, but since there is one possible I'm not changing it) which is nevertheless full of really weird and uncomfortable tensions on account of its conclusion, and its use of the plague to metaphorize a period of political and social transition as well as the cause for commentary on the real and tangible damage it causes.
The pamphlet begins with a lengthy Epistle Dedicatory addressed to "Sir Nicholas Nemo, alias Nobody," celebrated for being the only aristocrat to stick around during the plague. The narrator (who signs himself as "Somebody") describes a meeting of creators of popular texts, "rhymesters, jig-makers, ballad-mongers, and pamphlet-stitchers," at which everyone agreed that the only nobleman whose patronage they'd seek thenceforth would be Nobody; after that, there is a lot of complaining about how people at Winchester (where a lot of courtly functions had moved during the plague) took the opportunity to gouge people (such that beds in Winchester were as crowded as graves in London), and finally says he is going to have all of his "limping prose" made into a ballad. (The Epistle Dedicatory loses something in summary, I have to admit.) After this follows the poem proper, which begins with a lengthy invocation to Physic as its muse. Following the invocation, the speaker meditates on the causes of the plague; he dismisses the theory that it's carried by the air on the grounds that if it were, everyone and everybody would have the plague all the time, and concludes that "'tis some capital offense, / Some high high treason doth incense / Th'eternal king, that thus we are / Arraigned at death's most dreadful bar," after which he enumerates some of the various social sins that lead to the plague, deciding that England is being purified for King James (!) The next section describes the effects of the plague on London (apostrophized here as a "throne of kings" (Shakespeare alert!) and "Europe's jewel, England's gem, / Sister to great Jerusalem," bewailing the departure of the fleeing upper classes and lamenting those left behind to die; there is a lengthy section envisioning the gruesome boil-ridden ends of various sinners. The speaker then declines to talk about the cure for the plague, since that, he says, is outside the jurisdiction of poets (and also, though he doesn't say so, nobody actually knows one, the discovery of antibiotics being three and a half centuries away), but that the best cure is prevention and the best prevention is repentance. The poem concludes with a disquieting section in which the speaker says that, as much as it sucks, the plague is necessary because "a plague's the purge to cleanse a city," and hey, it's still better than famine, since at least it decreases (to coin a phrase) the surplus population. Finally, the speaker asks God for mercy and hopes that it doesn't happen again.
This is an extremely strange text, in the sense that its framework and its conclusions are very much at odds, and that the political context does weird things to the social criticism. For instance, when the speaker is hypothesizing about the causes of the plague (which was, according to the editors, something you could get in a lot of trouble for doing, since it was possible you'd come up with a seditious answer), he suggests that
...it may be, Jehovah looks
But now upon those audit books
Of forty-five years' hushed account
For hours misspent (whose sums surmount
The price of ransomed kings), and there,
Finding out grievous debts, doth clear
And cross them under his own hand,
Being paid with lives through all the land.
For since his maiden-servant's gone
And his new viceroy fills the throne,
Heaven means to give him (as his bride)
A nation new and purified.
At this point, the poem takes a moment to change its tone radically, no doubt causing whiplash in the reader:
Take breath a while our panting muse,
And to the world tell gladder news
Than these of burials; strive awhile
To make thy sullen numbers smile.
Forget the names of graves and ghosts,
The sound of bells, the unknown coasts
Of death's vast kingdom, and sail o'er
With fresher wind to happier shore.
For now the maiden isle hath got
A royal husband (heavenly lot).
Fair Scotland does fair England wed,
And gives her for her maidenhead
A crown of gold, wrought in a ring
With which she's married to a king.
The change of tone underscores the uneasiness of Middleton and Dekker's attempts to connect the outbreak of plague to the new king's accession, as it sits awkwardly in the middle of a text which is otherwise full of horror and anger, and the confusion of tone is reflected in the metaphor: the de facto union of England and Scotland is figured as a royal wedding in which "the maiden isle" surrenders "her maidenhead" to the Scottish king, the newfound permeability of the border a kind of sexual penetration (which, of course, leads us to the inevitable conclusion that Hadrian's Wall is England's hymen. I am not sure how to feel about that). But on the other hand, the "maiden isle" is quite literally diseased -- so what exactly is the metaphor here? And what's the suggestion about Elizabeth and her reign? One might compare the narrative ambivalence towards the old Duke in The Phoenix, as the statement that he has reigned for 45 years reflects the length of Elizabeth's reign, and while he is not presented as a bad person, his realm has gone all to seed nevertheless. The implication in the imagery of the account books is that, since Elizabeth's reign was more or less peaceful, England owes God (to use Prince Hal's pun) a death or three (or lots), hence the plague -- the same plague which is, afterwards, imagined as the result of social sin, particularly that of the ruling classes, but on the other hand, its victims are the sort of people Falstaff describes as "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace," good only to "fill a pit as well as better," and indeed that's also what they do in this poem (quite literally; there is a long and unsettling passage in which the piling up of plague victims in mass graves both reflects and overturns the social order).
However, the crimes the speaker sees as bringing down the plague are largely the provenance of people in power:
Whether they be princes' errors
Or faults of peers, pull down these terrors,
Or (because we may not err
Let's sift it in particular)
The courtier's pride, lust, and excess,
The churchman's painted holiness,
The lawyer's grinding of the poor,
The soldier's starving at the door
(Rag'd, lean, and pale through want of blood,
Sold cheap by him for country's good),
The scholar's envy, farmer's curse --
When heav'n's rich treasurer doth disburse
In bounteous heaps (to thankless men)
His universal blessings, then
This delving mole for madness eats
Even his own lungs, and strange oaths sweats
Because he cannot sell for pence
Dear years in spite of providence.
Add unto these the city-sin
(Brought by seven deadly monsters in)
Which doth all bounds and blushing scorn,
Because 'tis in the freedom born.
What trains of vice (which even hell hates)
But have bold passage through her gates?
And the condemnation of those who have the power to leave the city is stinging:
But you grave patriots, whom fate
Makes rulers of this wallèd state,
We must not lose you in our verse,
Whose acts we one day may rehearse
In marble numbers that shall stand
Above time's all-destroying hand --
Only, methinks, you now do err
In flying from your charge so far.
So coward captains shrink away;
So shepherds do their flocks betray;
So soldiers, and so lambs, do perish;
So you kill those you're bound to cherish.
The memory of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is still, I think, fresh enough that this passage is sharply resonant: then, as now, those without the resources to get out of the path of disaster are left to die. The narrator's sympathy for their plight -- indeed, the following section of the poem imagines what would happen if the rich were subject to getting the plague, and the result is a really creepy fantasia in which various hypothetical well-to-do citizens end up expressing plague symptoms in a way that somaticizes their sin, so that a usurer's plague sores evoke coins, a drunken glutton's resemble grapes (I hope you are not eating while you read this), and a lecher dying of plague gets laughed at by pimps and prostitutes who are all immune to the plague because they have syphilis (this was a common idea; the footnotes assure us it is inaccurate) -- is, however, qualified in an unsettling manner both by the poem's conclusion and setup. If England is being purified for the sins of its powerful, why is it the powerless who are hit hardest by the plague? (The narrator has a few words for the plight of exiled Londoners, though he is much cooler towards them, since that's what they get for wearing ornate fashions and silly hats, and concludes that "this black curse, / Doing ill abroad, at home does worse.")
The last sections of the poem offer the conventional moral that the plague can be avoided by straightening up and flying right (and not consulting crazy people who advise you to tie pigeons to your feet or weird shit like that):
Only this antidote apply:
Cease vexing heaven, and cease to die.
Seek therefore (after you have found
Salve natural for the natural wound
Of this contagion) cure from thence
Where first the evil did commence,
And that's the soul. Each one purge one,
And England's free, the plague is gone.
But then it goes on to say that in the end, some things about the plague are necessary:
We would conclude (still urging pity):
A plague's the purge to cleanse a city.
Who amongst millions can deny
(In rough prose or smooth poesy)
Of evils 'tis the lighter brood --
A dearth of people, than of food!
And who knows not, our land ran o'er
With people, and was only poor
In having too too many living,
And wanting living -- rather giving
Themselves to waste, deface and spoil,
Than to increase (by virtuous toil)
The bankrupt bosom of our realm,
Which naked births did overwhelm.
While Larry Niven (WARNING: link contains potentially unsettling image) might approve of such a sentiment, this conclusion leaves a horribly bitter taste in my mouth. The Oxford editor (Robert Maslen) takes it as a kind of grimly optimistic suggestion that a repentant and hardworking realm run by the shiny new Stuart dynasty will be able to resolve the economic crises that indirectly caused the devastation the plague inflicted on England, but I am not sure if that's what's really going on here, or how we are supposed to take this -- is that it, or is it heavily ironic, or a bit of vaguely-socially-conservative proto-social-Darwinist ass-covering, or what? I haven't talked much about the epistle and its relationship to the poem; I think that its tone probably allows us to qualify and to reconsider some of the statements made in the verse, so, for instance, the ironic remarks in the epistle about how if the plague weren't killing off poor scholars and writers there would be no jobs available for any of them get anticipate the poem's conclusion, except the conclusion isn't presented ironically. At least, not so overtly. I'm not sure what to make of it, honestly. I mean, most of the poem is devoted to condemning the socioeconomic conditions that make the "purgation" the narrator describes necessary, but you get stuff like this, and the part I talked about before where the plague is envisioned as purifying England for James and -- well, it makes one wonder.
Next time: The Nightingale and the Ant/Father Hubburd's Tales. I don't know anything about this text, but the title makes me wonder if Middleton failed to take a lesson from Spenser.