More research for the Promethean Age books, yes. I enjoyed this greatly. Although I think the author might be a little naive in maintaining that, really, neither Edward II nor Sejanus were originally pointed at Scottish James.
No, not even a little. *cough*
Then again, I was the only person in the entire theatre who laughed at the joke in The Libertine that Wilmot made regarding Etherege's satire featuring same (Wilmot, that is.) "Oh. You made me engaging, George, didn't you?"
It functions nicely as a brief political history of James VI/I and Charles I, and it has a certain level of delightful snark, such as the wry observation that Thomas Scott, notorious opponent of James' resistance to embroiling England in the Thirty Years' War, was murdered by a soldier... and that the world will have its little ironies.
Those ironies pile up and make historical fantasies in my head. And I'm sort of looking forward to finally executing Sir Walter, when I get around to writing Posthumous Jonson. Also, I thought of a very pleasing bit of business when I was walking to the CVS to buy Dayquil earlier. Because, you know, any work but the work we should be doing.
Also,m I get all that lovely screwed up Jacobean gender stuff, which builds on some of the games I'm playing in The Stratford Man and The Journeyman Devil. That, and I get the Essexes back, and the Overbury murder. Le yay. Kill them all; the Lord will know his own.
In email conversation,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
truepenny and I were talking about why I prefer the Elizabethans and she prefers the Jacobeans, and she mentioned that the Jacobeans were more Gothic. Claustrophobic, a tight and drowning world. Whereas, the Elizabethans, I mentioned, are reaching. Claws out and wings wide, and their huge tragedy is that they didn't quite pull it off. It proved, at best a holding action.And I think that sums up something about the difference in our writing and reading styles. She loves ghost stories, and I can't stand them. Her preference is arabesque horror, and mine is tragedy.
*g* She should really be the one writing this book, shouldn't she? Ah, well; you're just going to have to content yourselves with me.
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More research for the Promethean Age books, yes. I enjoyed this greatly. Although I think the author might be a little naive in maintaining that, really, neither Edward II nor Sejanus were originally pointed at Scottish James.
Library?
I ask because I went to Amazon to check it out and saw the price.
I did fork over forty bucks for the Riggs Jonson biography, though.
At least it's tax-deductible. *wince*
Maybe this summer...
There is ONE copy of the book now available for sale for $38.50 from a San Francisco bookseller.
Details
I will be blogging this on
[Do let me know if you get it.]
Which is good, because my library copy is, ahem, overdue. Haven't finished it yet, either. No notes even taken, and I needed more time.
But, will soon be mine. Thanks muchly.
I will confess that there seemed to be a lot of dancing all about the point. Is that just the nature of academic books, or was the conclusion that James was homosexual and had sex with men that big of a leap? I found myself muttering 'get to the point' a few times.
But it did provide me a few very valuable bits of info for the fantasy that I hope to write sometime.
Unless there's a razored-out page I haven't yet noticed--that's happened to me before--this copy is in beautiful shape. It is complete with slipcover (a b/w repro of a portrait of Buckingham). The pages are white, not faded yellow, and there's none of that olde booke smell. It looks like a new volume. I was concerned that for 38.50, I'd wind up with something that had spent 10 years at the bottom of a laundry hamper.
Very pleased.
Otherwise, you can try OCLC's Find in a Library to see if there's anything near you, or anything close enough you can interlibrary loan.
If those won't work, you can create notifications in Abebooks that will automatically email you when a participating used book store has a copy for sale. It happens once a blue moon or so, and is how I finally got my copy.
BTW, I've checked with the publisher and author. No remainders left in their warehouse; he's sold/given away all his personal copies. I've tried to talk the author into making it available as an eBook, because I think it's too valuable a work to be out-of-print, but he hasn't responded to my requests. Maybe if enough people pester him, he'll reconsider...
I'm in northern Illinois.
...sorry. Reflex.
Young's book is an interesting read, definitely, though I too occasionally bristle at some of his literary comments. The one that gets up my nose, actually, is the one where he says that the central issue in Marlowe's Edward II is sex, not power, and if you think otherwise you've read too much Foucault, because, really, false dichotomy much?
Not that I haven't read too much Foucault. But nevertheless!
....and I'm sorry. ~1592/3ish, how can that play not be seen as a commentary on James and Lennox? ON WHAT PLANET?
I've also, btw, seen readings of Edward II that have the same problem in reverse -- Stephen Orgel, for instance, argues that Edward's homosexuality is basically a red herring, something to throw off the censors in giving them a "cause" of Edward's deposition and murder that isn't pertinent to Elizabeth's court, while getting into a lot of political issues that are pertinent but that pass under the radar because the whole sodomy thing is so...noticeable.1 I don't entirely buy it: certainly the visibility of Edward's sexuality does tend to elide the rest of what's going on in the play (in terms of its reception, probably, both in its own day and ours -- it doesn't seem to have had a history of trouble with censorship), but it's certainly not just emphasized to distract the censors!
For that reason too, I'm not sure I'd call the play a commentary on James and Lennox exactly, mostly on the grounds that phrasing it that way I think has implications that are a bit strong for me. Certainly, though, I think it's fair to say that Scottish as well as English politics went into the mix in this play.
1. Orgel's analogy is interesting, and, for me personally, illuminating; he asks, "If Shakespeare had presented Richard II as a sodomite, would the authorities have found it necessary to censor the deposition scene?" An intriguing question: Richard II wouldn't be the same play if Shakespeare had done that, because so much of that play's political concern comes through basically unknowable things that are introduced in an unresolved or dodgy fashion, and then exploited by various characters. Edward II on the other hand doesn't work that way.
This is also, of course, setting aside the point that, sodomite or not, Shakespeare's Richard II is totally queer. Which isn't precisely the same thing, at least in academicspeak...
Excuse me.
I am constitutionally incapable of not going on at length about deposed gay English kings, you see. ;)
You should have heard me going on at length to my agent as to why one particular sex scene in The Stratford Man had to stay in, because one of the characters involved is relentlessly feminized in all his other relationships, and the book needs something to demonstrate that that is something that the world is doing to him, not the narrative....
*g*
The blank look. If I had a camera....
Oh dear. Are you allergic to the Essex rebellion?
sorryaboutthat.
Also, iconloff. *g*
Thanks for the iconloff! :D
Ahem.
Sorry, forgot to use my indoors voice.
I had to figure out a way around it in my book, too, and it was a goddamned nightmare. My solution? Brainwashing. *g*
Hear, hear! Everybody involved in it was clearly criminally stupid. Or, as you suggest, brainwashed. ;)
Also they were terrible interpreters of drama, or at least Gilly Meyrick and friends were. Assuming the play they commissioned was Shakespeare's. I always have to add that disclaimer and it makes the thing a mess to write about even just from a prosaic standpoint. But I do think it probably is a safe assumption -- at least, based on the evidence we have and the likelihood that the LC's Men would probably only have the one play on this topic -- which leads back to the criminally stupid thing, again.
You do know
Man, if you weren't neck deep in a dissertation, I would so be twisting your arm to read this manuscript for me. *g*
BTW, Bear, if you do end up having to learn more about James & his boys, there's another book out there by Bergeron, titled King James & letters of homoerotic desire which reprints the letters between James and his favorites.
That's beautifully expressed. You didn't ask, but I can't resist telling you that there's a similar thing with French classical drama (classical rather than gothic, but tight and claustrophobic). Which is why it took the French so long to get Shakespeare.