[Middleton] News from Gravesend: Sent to Nobody (1604; written with Thomas Dekker)

[angevin2]

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

Comments

Making up for the ramen post comment

[ladyshrew]

That is called a flight?? The people are just standing there!

I can't comment on the text parts much b/c my head is starting to hurt. But publishing under "Somebody" hee.

YAY PLAGUE!

I'm disturbed that this is the icon I come up with for appropriateness, but there you go.

Re: Making up for the ramen post comment

[angevin2]

But that is an awesome icon. ;)

Re: Making up for the ramen post comment

[ladyshrew]

I am glad you approve!

I could explain how it came to be, but I'm not even sure it would make sense *then*. :-P

[so_lily_briscoe]

Man, this sounds awesome. And yes, the weirdest thing for me about Union politics has always been all the sex (consensual, pleasurable, or otherwise) that Scotland and England are supposed to be having. Some things metonymy just cannot sustain.

Also, love that woodcut. Kind of reminds me of Brighton on a Friday evening, except instead of spear-brandishing skeletons, there are drunk undergraduates. Wonderful.

[angevin2]

And yes, the weirdest thing for me about Union politics has always been all the sex (consensual, pleasurable, or otherwise) that Scotland and England are supposed to be having. Some things metonymy just cannot sustain.

I suppose that means that all those historical romances in which a feisty English maiden has a torrid affair with a braw Scottish laddie wearing a kilt (and probably not much else) and spouting Mel Gibson-inspired rhetoric have a rich cultural history? Which is kind of disturbing, really. Also, I am convinced that this song is a really creepy political allegory.

[so_lily_briscoe]

Uhm, reasons I need to read more awful genre fiction!! (And less Campion, feh.)

[angevin2]

Aw, I rather like Campion, though as a composer (and as a singer, I find his songs much easier to deal with than Dowland's ;) ), not so much as a poet -- and that song is creepy. Ew.

[jonquil]

> (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).

Marry me.

I take the conclusion as literal and intended (although of course I'm lacking the context of the rest of the poem.) Going back to the Katrina analogy, many conservatives are arguing that the black people who left are better off (!) and that the city is better off without a black underclass to drag it down. People do and can say that sort of thing, and sleep soundly. If people unlike me die, then the world can be better.

[angevin2]

See, I have no problem with the supposition that there were people back then who did think that way, because, as you say, people did and still do, fucked up as that is. But in this case, it doesn't feel like it's in keeping with the rest of the poem, which is all about sympathy for the abandoned in a narrative voice that speaks as a (non-vacating) Londoner, and which in the prologue remarks ironically that the plague has "done all men knight's service in working the downfall of our greatest and greediest beggars," which in this context means university-educated professional writers, i.e., people like the authors (the passage it comes from is talking about the impossibility of getting patronage for one's writing, these days, and the fact that the people granting it don't really deserve to be asked for it). So if the conclusion is to be taken literally, it totally comes out of nowhere...

[liseuse]

Oooh, this looks awesome. I'll have to read it and see if I can work it into my Arts essay - which is supposed to be about accession literature and the hooha surrounding James ascending to the throne. So much of what I've looked at focusses upon the idea of the "marriage" between England and Scotland, and this looks useful. Yay! Middleton!

[angevin2]

It may well be, since there is a lot of really-early-Jacobean hope for cleaning up England in there (as in The Phoenix) combined with the marriage rhetoric and it causes a really weird effect. It's a fascinating poem as a whole -- I could probably have gone on a lot longer about it but I got tired of writing ;) -- so I thoroughly endorse your reading of it, so that I have someone to discuss it with!

[liseuse]

I will try and get them both read soon(ish) in order to be able to further discuss it.

[megwolff]

Angevin Deux. My sincere thanks for a riveting and thought provoking post, particularly the proto-social-Darwinist question, which has had me pondering over the events the authors and their target audience had witnessed in their lifetimes and how they interpreted them. Intriguing that God is not mentioned in the last section you quoted. It's posited simply as a cleansing adjustment of an over populated realm. Great find and thanks again.

[angevin2]

Well, he's mentioned directly after it -- the authors ask God to "hide / Th'old rod of plagues" and
Make us the happiest amongst men,
Immortal by our prophes'ing pen,
That this last line may truly reign:
The plague's ceased; heaven is friends again.

And most of the poem is focused on the plague-as-divine-vengeance trope. But it makes the point over and over again that the people who've drawn the vengeance aren't the ones the plague hits the hardest, and its catalogue of sins is very much a critique of the rich and powerful, rather than something that focuses on individual non-class-based morality (even the passages imagining plague-stricken gluttons and lechers point out that people need cash to practice gluttony and most forms of lechery, which seems a typically Middletonian emphasis).