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English Baroque Literature

 

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• From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Baroque (pronounced /bəˈroʊk/ bə-rohk in American English or /bəˈrɒk/ in British English) is an artistic style prevalent from the late 16th century to the early 18th century in Europe.

It is most often defined as "the dominant style of art in Europe between the Mannerist and Rococo eras, a style characterized by dynamic movement, overt emotion and self-confident rhetoric".

The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church, which had decided at the time of the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement.[3] The aristocracy also saw the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of impressing visitors and expressing triumphant power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence.

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

The "Metaphysicals": English Baroque Literature in Context

 

 

In the still predominantly British study of English literature, the term "Baroque" is hardly ever used to describe the era between the Renaissance and the age of Neoclassicism, and it seems that only scholars of comparative literature who have dared look across the Channel, such as René Wellek, as well as cultural scholars use it in their approach. In British studies of English literature, the term "Metaphysical" is still given preference. Originally, "Metaphysical" was used as a derogatory term by the Neoclassicists in order to differentiate their aesthetics, which was based on reason and clearly defined rules, from the Baroque aesthetics of the "last age". From their point of view the Baroque poets had offended against the eternally valid norms of reason and nature and so, in this diphemistic sense, "Metaphysical" was meant to describe something "unnatural" or "adverse to nature" rather than the "supernatural". After John Dryden's and Samuel Johnson's derogatory use of the term "Metaphysical", it became a neutral technical term -- a frequent semantic change when the immediate historical context sinks into oblivion. In his influential Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) Dryden described how, during his aberration from reason as a youth, he was dazzled by Abraham Cowley's "points of wit, and quirks of epigram" and other "puerilities", and looked upon him as a pupil of the Baroque poet John Donne:

 

He [Donne] affects the metaphysics, where nature only should reign. [...] In this Mr Cowley has copied him to a fault.

 

In 1779, Samuel Johnson wrote a short biography of Abraham Cowley. This was the first of a series of biographical and critical prefaces to his anthology of Works of the English Poets (1779-1781), a book firmly based on Neoclassical principles. His judgement and terminology followed Dryden's:

 

About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the Metaphysical poets [...].

 

In a rather haphazard enumeration Samuel Johnson accused these 'unnatural' poets of a great many offences against reason and nature: exhibiting artificiality instead of concealing art, the desire for originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature, unpolished stylistic carelessness, abstruse conceits arbitrarily yoked together in a kind of discordia concors, enormous hyperboles, gross absurdities, and horrible obscenities often conveyed in puns and quibbles. The Rationalistic and Neoclassical purification of the language, as propagated by the Académie Française after 1634 and by the Royal Society after 1668, tolerated no multiple meanings of words that would confuse the understanding, and thus radically inverted the dynamic expansion of the Renaissance and (even more so) of the Baroque vocabulary prominent in Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Donne. Shakespearean and Metaphysical puns and quibbles offended against the most basic Neoclassical rules of reason, the rule of clarity and the rule of decorum.

Apart from being distorted by Neoclassical prejudices, Samuel Johnson's catalogue of the characteristics of English Baroque literature is also rather incomplete. Ever since Grierson's edition (1912) and Eliot's essay (1921), research into Baroque poetry has not only led to a revision of Neoclassical prejudices but has also looked at the Baroque period unhampered by the distortions of a different aesthetic approach. It has, moreover, led to a substantial expansion and modification of Johnson's catalogue. On the basis of recent research studies, the characteristics of English Baroque literature can be summarized in nine points:

 

· CONCEIT AND EMBLEM. In the literary comparison or image the distance between vehicle and tenor was widened in an artificial and affected way to such an extreme or even contrariness that any logical or natural relationship between the two was no longer immediately recognizable. Comparing the body, in which the soul lives confined until its liberation by death, to a prison or to a coffin had been a natural conventional illustration of Plato's soma-sema-doctrine; but comparing the body to a rusty gun barrel which the bullet of the soul breaks in order to fly upward to heaven, as John Donne did in his Second Anniversary (1612), was an instance of Baroque wit, originality, and eccentricity:

            But thinke that Death hath now enfranchis'd thee,

            Thinke that a rusty Peece, discharg'd, is flowne

            In peeces, and the bullet is his owne,

            And freely flies: This to thy Soule allow,

Thinke thy shell broke [...]

 

The 'eccentric' world picture spreading through Europe after Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) produced equally 'eccentric' art forms, which were later labelled with epoch-terms denoting just this eccentricity: 'baroque', 'il seicento eccentrico'. A remarkable manifestation of this loss of the centre or Verlust der Mitte can be seen in Baroque church architecture. Here, the circle as the typical feature of Renaissance groundplan design was replaced by the Baroque oval. Thus the church-goer's traditional experience of the centre below the cupola was clearly distorted. Typical examples are Bernini's Jesuit Sant' Andrea al Quirinale in Rome or the Jesuit Loreto Church near the Hradčany (Castle) in Prague. In Baroque rhetoric, the conceit replaced the Renaissance image just as the oval replaced the Renaissance circle in Baroque architecture, giving the reader an equal sense of distortion. A typical example is the famous divine poem on the repentant sinner Mary Magdalene, 'The Weeper', and its strong-line coda, 'The Tear' (MSS ca 1640), by the Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformatory poet Richard Crashaw. The poem disrupts the well-proportioned and by now time-worn Petrarchan comparison of eyes with fountains or orbs and tears with springs or stars in the most extravagant and illogically mixed ways. In rapid and broken succession, the eyes are no longer fountains but become extended to "portable and compendious oceans" faithfully and paradoxically following their beloved Christ, and the tears are drops weeping for their own loss, or, more paradoxically, moist sparks, watery diamonds, maiden gems worn by a wanton woman blushing at Christ, her very masculine and beautiful lover, pearls of dew carried on pillows stuffed with the down of angels from the sinner's lowly dust to heaven, to be metamorphosed into stars and singers in the heavenly choir of angels. Besides concrete physical objects such as eyes and tears, abstracts such as moderation, repentance, grace, wisdom, and love could also be illustrated by such far-fetched and original vehicles. Thus, the obvious and harmonious comparison of love with fire in Petrarch was replaced by the artificial and eccentric comparison of love with a flea in Donne. This concettismo was closely related to the originally anti-Calvinist and Counter-Reformatory mixed genre of the emblem. Complementing a Baroque history painting, the emblem was chiefly meant to convey abstract doctrines of faith and philosophy to the human senses, in a tripartite combination of word and picture. This task would almost necessarily put a strain on the emblem writer's inventiveness in finding eccentric vehicles and tertia comparationis, as when he illustrated the universal indispensability of divine and human love by depicting the world as a cask and Amor-Christ as a cooper binding together that cask's loose planks. It is typical of this Baroque ut pictura poesis that, for instance, the conceptistic comparison of divine grace with a magnet, which alone can draw the iron human heart up to God, was used both in a holy sonnet of John Donne's and in an emblem in Georgette de Montenay's Monumenta Emblematorum Christianorum (1540).

 

· THEATRICALITY. Much has been written about the theatricality and dramatic quality of Metaphysical poetry, especially in its earlier phase. In their radical opposition to Calvinistic theology, Metaphysical poems are intensely picturesque, displaying all the pictorial splendour usually associated with the flashy illusory stage-designs of the Stuart court-masque. Calvin's rabbinistic, anti-Catholic, (and allegedly early Christian) interpretation of the first commandment of the decalogue (Exodus 20. 4), forbidding not only idols but all pictures, had entailed his ban on plays and playhouses in general. No theatres were allowed in Calvin's Genevan theocracy, and the early English Calvinists' ("Puritans'") antagonism to the theatre and its consequences has been well investigated. Small wonder that the Counter-Reformation reacted by stressing both the practice of the theatre (Jesuitendrama) and the literary and artistic commonplaces of the theatre. "Totus mundus agit histrionen", "el gran theatro del mundo", "das große Welttheater", became a favourite theme and motif of Baroque literature. Moreover, against the background of the sister arts ut pictura poesis, attention should be paid to the theatricality both of Baroque church architecture and of Baroque painting. Baroque churches were splendidly designed as theatrum sacrum, and theatrical illusion (as in trompe l'oeil ceilings) was consciously made use of in order to involve the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam. The heavens opening and revealing God surrounded by his hierarchies of angels in all their glory was portrayed as a theatrical pageant comparable to (and exceeding) that of the most splendid court-masques, giving observers a sensual foretaste of the delights to come in the world beyond. Baroque paintings, too, are full of theatre motifs and heavy drapery, with curtains allowing glimpses of what seemingly was not meant to be seen. This, of course, had the contrary effect: disclosing rather than concealing, arousing curiosity and guiding the eye directly to what was only half-heartedly hidden. Christ in the manger or Christ on the cross no longer carries a napkin or loincloth hiding his shame, but rather a theatre curtain revealing it and conveying Christ's erotic potency and soteriological fertility to the astounded spectator.

 

· ANTITHESIS AND PARADOX. Not only in literary comparisons but also in the context of the two conflicting world pictures and two conflicting religions -- even the most remote elements were connected in contentio or composition (now called antithesis) or synoeciosis or opposition (now called paradox). We find heaven and hell, life and death, fire and water almost automatically linked, just as Baroque literature reflected the increasing awareness of a world out of joint on all levels. In their massive accumulation and complex clusters, antithesis and paradox became distinctive characteristics of Baroque rhetoric. Thus, in his two earliest verse letters referring to his participation in the Islands Expedition (1597), John Donne opposed the descriptions of two contrary experiences in extremis, a sea storm and a sea calm. Both not only threatened the sailors' lives, the second even more than the first, but confronted them with two versions of pristine, pre-Creationist, Godless chaos. In the storm

Darkness, lights elder brother, his birth-right

            Claims o'er this world, and to heaven hath chas'd light.

            All things are one, and that none can be,

            Since all formes, uniforme deformity

            Doth cover, so that wee, except God say

            Another Fiat, shall have no more day.

 

And in the calm

            He that at sea prayes for more winde, as well

            Under the poles may begge cold, heat in hell.

 

All aim is lost in disorientation, all coherence (of the fleet) is gone. All order, distinctions, and laws of causality are annihilated in a hell of shrieking noises or baking heat. The speaker can no longer distinguish directions and seasons, day and light, sleep and death, health and disease. And every thing and act planned for the sake of survival either fails or turns to its very contrary. The accumulated paradoxes underline the obliteration of all created relationship between cause and effect, as of all rational order. Another of Donne's eschatological poems either composing or opposing extremes is The First Anniversary (1611). Here the old world, shaken by a severe fever with hot and cold flushes, doubts whether the end of this crisis signifies the world's survival or its death, only to learn that its inevitable decay due to sin is the (certainly very Utopian) precondition of its rebirth into a virtuous and prelapsarian state. In Cyril Tourneur's play The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), the hero Vindice wavers between extreme love and extreme disgust, libido and contemptus mundi, at the sight of the skull of his murdered mistress, which is wrapped in beautiful clothes. Arthur Hübscher talks of "Baroque as a means of forming an antithetical awareness of life".

Situative as well as rhetorical paradoxes can be found in all epochs of literature, and have been aptly classified in three types: the serious and unresolvable paradox, the comical and satirical paradox, and the playful or semi-jocular paradox. The distinctively Baroque paradox belonged to the first type. Like the conventional serious paradox, it opposed extreme opposites in seeming logicality; but it aimed at eccentric surprise. It exceeded the conventionality of Tertullian's maxim of "credo quia absurdum" in its witty originality and offence against conventional decorum. In John Donne's Holy Sonnets, each speaker tries to overcome the broken state of the world and the church in a privatissime illogical communion between two lovers, himself and his desired God. The speaker will never be free unless God chains him, and will never be chaste unless God rapes him. God has to overthrow him in order that he may firmly stand. In Richard Crashaw's 'Hymn to Saint Teresa', penetration is the precondition of virginity as well as ignorance the precondition of knowledge, bankruptcy the precondition of trade, weakness the precondition of strength, martyrdom and death the precondition of life, and fall and sin the precondition of resurrection and salvation. In their theological and philosophical unresolvability, such serious paradoxes, homiletically conventional or sensationally shocking, were radically different from the traditional comical and satirical type of paradox on the one hand, and from the traditional playful or semi-jocular type of paradox on the other hand. And they also differed from the paradoxy that modern literary theory postulates for all poetry (Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism) or even prose (Paul de Man and Deconstructivism). The distinctive feature of Baroque paradoxes is their shocking choice of joined opposites as well as the sheer quantity of obsessive paradox cumulation, which sets them apart from the serious paradoxes that survived in the Augustan age, with its self-imposed obligation to a return to harmony and to the restrictive rule of decorum. The typically Baroque use of paradoxes must be understood as the literary expression of an age that did not only have to face new contradictory theologies, philosophies, and views of history. The age had, above all, been taken by surprise in having to face a totally new, non-geocentric world picture. Where the centre is lost, excess and eccentricity are the new norm itself. Thus, an aesthetics of excess, eccentricity, disproportion, non-balance, monstrosity, and stupendousness became the hallmark of the Baroque: "la estetica di stupare". And so the Baroque sought to bridge by an excessive and eccentric, original and innovative wit and art what faith found increasingly difficult to believe. It was here that the replacement of religion by art began, and it is here that we find Matthew Arnold's and Friedrich Nietzsche's predecessors in doubt. Baroque man lived torn between two logically irreconcilable world pictures: on the one hand, the old Ptolemaic, geocentric one which had for centuries given man a sense of order and dignity, which was now increasingly called in doubt; and, on the other hand, the new Copernican, heliocentric one which, though it proved empirically convincing, resulted in a deep sense of physical and moral displacement and ontological disorientation. Tycho Brahe's typically Renaissance attempt at reconciling the two world pictures shows the whole extent of the dilemma. From an early seventeenth-century rational and erudite man's point of view, Anthony Munday spoke of "opposed truth" , and Baltasar Gracián of "monstruos de la verdad". This antithetical awareness explains Crashaw's desperate call to return to Saint Teresa's childish, pre-logical, and mystical acceptance of contraries beyond man's rational comprehension. But the lost firmness of faith was irretrievable, and Baroque mysticism differed from medieval mysticism in its strong element of doubt. In this, Baroque love of paradox and Baroque mysticism were closely connected.

 

 

· QUIDDITY. As shown above, Baroque literature's characteristic feature of replacing logical lines of argumentation by paradoxes, syllogisms, barocones and other kinds of witty and spurious argumentation reflects the feeling of an original community and continuity increasingly torn apart. George Herbert's broken altar (fragmented in violation of biblical law) symbolizes the broken church, and is wittily associated with the psalmist's broken heart as well as the speaker's broken poem. The speaker's poetic sacrifice, like all sacrifice, aims at an 'at-one-ment' with God, though (paradoxically) to the exclusion of both the church and the community. Donne's First Anniversary, his above-mentioned poetic anatomy of the dead old world, provides another type of such unexpected disruptions of the train of thoughts. It teems with sudden changes of argument and truncated thoughts, marked by aposiopeses or interruptions of the type of "But no!" and underlined by numerous antitheses and unresolvable paradoxes. Another splendid instance is Donne's poem 'A Noctural upon St Lucy's Day', with its wittily paradoxical and surprising treatment of alchemy. The speaker, tout seul by the death of his beloved lady and in his isolation from "all others", feels more than ordinarily depressed on St Lucy's day, being the shortest, darkest, and most sapless day of the year. All others stand in expectation of the next spring, which will renew their erotic vitality. The speaker, however, feels his own death multiplied into utter nothingness. Alchemy, the ultimate goal of which was the transformation of lower into higher matter, is replaced by a "new alchemy", transforming nothingness into a higher form of nothingness. Then this utter bodilessness will exalt him far above the mere fleshly and goatlike regeneration of "all others" and effect his regeneration into an infinitely higher love. Thus, nothingness distilled to its "quintessence" and "elixir" becomes a higher life, the nadir turns zenith. A dense erotic imagery (alchemy and alembics, the tropic of capricorn, sap and balm, lust, goat, bed) is inseparably interwoven with an equally dense religious number symbolism (3, 5, 7, 9, 12) and imagery (sun, vigil, eve). Such a definitely unprudish sensuality as appears in these paradoxes refers to still another source of the logically broken dispositio of the classical literary rhetorical discourse: the trompe l'oeil argumentation of the Jesuits, i.e. the deliberate satisfaction of the senses, condemned by Calvin, by deceiving the senses (as well as in the above-mentioned trompe l'oeil perspective of Baroque church ceiling paintings) ad majorem Dei gloriam following Ignatius of Loyola and the Council of Trent (1545-63).

 

· PRIVATE MODE AND LYRIC EGO: AMOR DIVINUS - AMOR EROTICUS. With the growing post-Copernican sense of macrocosmic chaos and the post-Machiavellian (and pre-Hobbesian) threat of political chaos, especially civil war, man tended to withdraw and in some cases even to create his own ordered microcosm: alone with his paramour in his love chamber, alone with his God in his prayer-room, or, in the most extreme case, entirely alone (as the speaker of Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden'). This self-imposed separation of microcosmic privacy from macrocosm and state, in the hope of finding a last refuge of cosmic harmony in this privacy, dissolved the time-honoured doctrine of the three integrally corresponding planes of the Creation. Calvinistic Protestantism had destroyed the old holistic Roman Catholic ceremony of the Eucharist (and with it the kath'holon unity of sensuality and spirituality, man and God, as well as high and low members of one church community). This had significantly contributed towards an irreversible development still in progress today, the individualization and isolation (Vereinzelung) of man, which modern sociologists have called "the tyranny of privacy". Cast back upon himself in his private prayers for forgiveness and peace, the Protestant had begun to leave the traditional communio and to become tout seul. Efforts during the Counter-Reformation to re-establish the old kath'holon feeling of a communio ecclesiastica et eucharistica were doomed to fail. In court culture, too, this by now irreversible development became apparent in the increasing isolation of the monarch and nobility. Whereas King Henry VIII and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, had still visited the country and personally responded to entertainments and pageants presented to them by the citizens, the succeeding Stuarts more and more withdrew into the privacy of their courts. King James I (1603-25) ostensibly reduced contact with the people, and King Charles I (1625-40) tried to abolish such public relations altogether, with disastrous political consequences which cost him both his throne (1642) and his life (30 January 1649). The cult of the Stuart court-masque may be regarded as another symptom of that isolation, as the royals and their courtiers staged plays in which they themselves were both actors and spectators, to the exclusion of the public. The admission of representatives of 'the world' to royal audiences became an intimidating ritual set in equally intimidating surroundings of architectural designs, which almost signalled unwelcome intrusion.

Driven into a similar isolation, quite contrary to his nostalgic Catholicism, the Baroque poet of the early Stuart period (1603-40) shunned the community of a world which he felt to be in the agonies of death and decay--vaguely comparable to the later Romantic poets' cult of loneliness, and then again to the self-withdrawal of the Decadent poets of the Fin de Siècle. It has been convincingly shown that the individual speaker and lyric ego of the Baroque period assumed a solipsistic poetic dignity and dramatic complexity which was not regained until the lyrical revival in the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth century. The speaker or ego of a Baroque lyric equally scolded the celestial bodies, the king, the nobility, the clergy as well as secular wealth and public morality as intruders, and banished them from the place of his poetic privacy. Thus John Donne about himself and his mistress:

 

She is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is,

 

and about himself and his God:

 

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:

To see God only, I goe out of sight,

 

and the speaker of Andrew Marvell about himself and his garden:

 

Society is all but rude,

To this delicious Solitude.

 

In a study of Baroque religious poetry in France, Helmut Hatzfeld referred to a particular expression of this private mode, which he called the "tout-seul formula". In the context of this vehemently defended private mode of the Baroque poets it is noteworthy that amor eroticus and amor divinus, i.e. love-chamber and prayer-room, could be freely exchanged in a most sensuous and unprudish manner (just as, in Baroque art, Christ appears as a potent and tender lover with all erotic connotations). Thus, consciously following the Old Testament Song of Solomon and the contemporary emblem books, John Donne could not only be the great solitary lover and the great solitary divine, but was also able to convey divine love to the senses of his readers through erotic images of the private practice of physical love. One of his most notorious poems in this respect is his 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany' (MS 1619). The speaker addresses Christ as an intimate lover, paradoxically demanding freedom and protection in an unfree and tyrannous relationship dominated by jealousy and zeal, "divorcing" the speaker from all his former friends and desires, and demanding an amorous tryst with Christ in the darkness of a church where they can hide and make love out of sight of the community. With the saving ship or ark of the church "torne" in times of the religious conflicts of the Reformation, the Baroque poet, now tout seul, moves closer to his God to be saved from Noah's flood:

 

IN what torne ship soever I embarke,

That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;

What sea soever swallow mee, that flood

Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise

Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,

Which, though they turne away sometimes,

They never will despise.

 

The reader of the Baroque poet's lyrics, like the hearer of the Baroque divine's sermons, is almost excluded, progressively so from Donne via Herbert and Crashaw to Vaughan and Traherne. In Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the lovers' bodies have become so thin (like precious beaten gold) and so translucent and transcendent as almost to leave the material world behind (as in death) and to be sacred in their remoteness:

            T'were prophanation of our joyes

                        To tell the layetie our love.

 

Individual love, be it amor divinus or amor eroticus, is indispensable for salvation where the community is breaking up, the ring or circle of perfection only being attainable by the refined lovers' "stiffe twin compasses". In Donne's 'The Ecstasy', the reader is assigned the role of a hypothetical third person, selected on strictest conditions and only temporarily admitted to observe the alchemically refined lovers (and the primacy of their newly mixed mind directing the new union of their bodies) from a "convenient distance":

            If any, so by love refin'd,

                        That he soules language understood,

            And by good love were growen all minde,

                        Within convenient distance stood,

            [...]

            And if some lover, such as wee,

                        Have heard this dialogue of one,

            [...]

 

· RELIGIOUS MEDITATION. The justification of and appeal to the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam, in conscious opposition to Calvin's reductionist spiritual theology, led the Baroque poets to adopt the Aristotelian enargeia or evidentia -- the ideal of "ante oculos ponere" as it is used in Ignatius of Loyola's Exercitia Spiritualia. Calvin's destruction of the Eucharist had bedevilled the sensuous enjoyment of God, and Protestantism's recourse to the printed text had interrupted the lively and sensuous exchange between the speaker and hearer, the face-to-face interaction as between the giver and taker in the Eucharist. The Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish that old sensuous interchange, and the need to bridge extreme poles which were drifting more and more apart accounts for the strained artificiality of the Baroque artist's creative effort. The truth conveyed by a work of art was not only to be understood, but to be received with ecstatic sensuality. It was meant to be heard with the ears, seen with the eyes, smelt with the nose, tasted with the tongue and felt by the sense of touch. This led to the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation. In the first but indispensable step of meditation, compositio loci, the meditant had to conceive a vivid image of a particular scene of salvation, Christ's Crucifixion or Heaven or even Hell, if necessary with the aid of a Baroque painting. He had to feel Christ's pains, to see his blood flow, hear his words on the cross, taste and smell the sweetness of heaven and the sulphurous stench of hell, before he was allowed to proceed to a theological comprehension in the second step of meditation. In the third stage he had to transfer his feelings and understanding into affective involvement and practical action. In 1954 Louis Martz, and in 1955 Arno Esch, showed this tripartite structure to be characteristic of a great part of English Baroque poetry. In the title of his work Louis Martz even suggested calling all English Baroque poetry "The Poetry of Meditation".

 

· STRONG LINES. In his Ars Poetica, Horace had recommended the golden mean between elliptical brevity and long-winded detail; and the early Neoclassicists of the School of Ben Jonson followed this conventional rule of "Breve esse laboro Obscurus fio". The Baroque poets of the School of Donne, however, revolted by making the very contrary, "masculine" elliptical brevity for the purpose of stylistic obscurity, their poetic ideal. In classical literary rhetorical discourse, obscurity had ever been a stylistic device of the ornatus. Thus, even in its own time, the term "strong lines" was used for English Baroque poetry, vehemently opposed by the early Neoclassical School of Ben Jonson. In the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque age models changed: they shifted from Demosthenes' dense precision of thought to Isocrates' dazzling external form, from Cicero's balanced stylistic clarity to the epigrammatic and elliptical taciturnity of Tacitus and Seneca. This also explains the popularity that Tacitus's contemporary Martial and his Epigrammata enjoyed with the Metaphysicals, who delighted in writing terse epigrams both in English and Latin: Donne's Epigrams, Herbert's Passio Discerpta, Crashaw's Epigrammata Sacra, Marvell's Inscribenda. Thus, the stylistic ideal of the Golden Latinity of Horace and Cicero was replaced by the later stylistic ideal of the Silver Latinity of Tacitus and Martial. Art historians, and, in their wake, literary historians consequently attempted to explain the Baroque as a returning phenomenon of decadence following classical peaks. This was done, for example, by the art historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1855 and in 1860, until in Renaissance und Barock (1880) his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin suggested accepting Baroque decadence as an art form of its own. Decades later, this was still the case with Ernst Robert Curtius: in Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948) he opposed classicism and mannerism as virtus and vitium.

 

· PLAIN STYLE. The plain, partly colloquial, and often consciously deformed poetic style is a particularly striking feature of the English Protestant Baroque. John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne demonstratively rejected the poetic diction and high stylization of Renaissance poetry from Petrarch to Shakespeare, as well as the ornatus malus of stylistic Mannerism (Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism). Thus, the plain style of English Baroque poems stood in antithetical tension to their highly complicated and conceptistic intellectual content. George Herbert expressed this most controversially - and even paradoxically - in his two 'Jordan' poems, with an artificial pun on the 'plains of Jordan':

 

Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair

Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?

Is all good structure in a winding stair?

[...]

I envie no mans nightingale or spring

Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,

Who plainly say, My God, My King.

 

It should, however, be noted that Herbert's 'Jordan' poems are self-deconstructive in their apparent contradiction between their argument in favour of pristine, original, 'natural' plainness (analogous to the Protestant recourse to 'primitive' Christianity) on the one hand, and their 'artificial' though non-mannerist rhetoric on the other hand (analogous to the Roman Catholic insistence on post-primitive tradition and ornament). This expresses the Anglican Church's and the Metaphysical poet's tension between their Protestant and their Roman Catholic heritages, also reflected in the palace architecture of the period, where plain Neoclassical faVades concealed ornate Baroque interiors, - the more private the rooms the more ornate their decorations. Typical examples were Inigo Jones's Banqueting House in his unexecuted designs for a new Whitehall Palace, his Wilton House, and the Caroline Aston Hall near Birmingham.   This contrast between interior and exterior ornamentation can also be traced in the development of the Church of England. Though Protestant in its public self-presentation, the Church of England was secretly re-Catholicizing itself from within, most notably in the religion and politics of King Charles I and Archbishop William Laud.

In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Lyric, a study based on rich source material, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski shows how the plain style of the Bible, so dear to Protestants, influenced English Baroque poetry no less strongly than did Ignatian meditation. It is a well known fact that European Protestantism could only encounter the, in a literal sense, 'sensational' flood of anti-Calvinist, Counter-Reformatory pictorial and emblematic art by its increasing acceptance or 'containment' of the picture itself and simply by using its contents for Protestant purposes. The by now plain churches, robbed of their ornamentation by iconoclasm, were filled again; what was originally a Counter-Reformatory emblem was now dedicated to the Protestant cause, and the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation was adopted for numerous Protestant Baroque poems. English Protestant Baroque, however, differed considerably from Continental Jesuit Baroque in its frequent use of the biblical plain style as an important means of Protestant appropriation.

 

· ARS EST PRAESENTARE ARTEM. The classical maxim "ars est celare artem", often wrongly attributed to Horace, was the rhetorical poetic ideal in the Renaissance as well as in the later age of Neoclassicism. The Neoclassical critic Joseph Addison, for example, found fault with the Baroque poet's 'false wit', as apparent in "Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipograms, and Acrosticks" as well as "Poems cast into the Figures of Eggs, Axes, or Altars". And the Neoclassical critic Samuel Johnson later generally pointed out that the Baroque poet perverted the doctrine of 'ars est celare artem' into its very opposite:

 

The Metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour.

 

In his Neoclassical saeva indignatio, and due to his lack of distance to the Baroque period, Samuel Johnson was unable to understand that the art and learning displayed in the Baroque work of art (poem or sermon alike) were indispensable. They were meant to surprise the readers, hearers, and spectators and thus helped to convey the impression of total novelty and originality, which mirrored a totally new world picture. So, "new" was a favourite adjective in the titles of Robert Southwell's poems. Moreover, they kept the reader or audience in admiration and at a distance, thus guaranteeing the artist's private mode. Both reader and audience were meant to enjoy the absolute originality and scarcely comprehensible complexity of his brilliant wit from a distance, just as they would admire a firework display. The Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino, well known among English Baroque poets, expressed this principle in a memorable couplet:

 

E del poeta il fin la meraviglia [...]

Chi non sa far stupar, vada alla striglia!

 

Moreover, the "dissociation of sensibility", first identified and denominated by T. S. Eliot in 1921, had not yet taken place in the Baroque age. The learning of the Baroque poet expressed in verse and prose was not only intellectual but also emotional. According to Eliot the Baroque poets were "men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility" and felt their thoughts "as immediately as the odour of a rose". Eliot criticized Neoclassicism for having dissociated the original integral unity of life and art, for splitting it into emotion and reflection, decorum and indecorum, as well as into "true wit" and "false wit".

 

II

 

The enumeration and contextual description of these nine characteristic features of English Baroque literature in verse and prose indicates a complex variety of seemingly heterogeneous causes. But their overall coherence and interaction, the nature of and reason for their historical development, as well as their connections with the other Baroque arts both in England and on the Continent demand an even more extensive and differentiated contextual documentation. These characteristic features were often attributed to a returning esprit de révolution against the compulsion by rules and norms characteristic of the Baroque, Romanticism, and then again the Neoromantic Fin de Siècle. Sigmund Freud showed that in human life superego-oriented, Apollonian phases controlled by rules and norms are always followed by id-oriented, revolutionary and Dionysiac phases despising rules and norms. Literary historians such as F. L. Lucas have applied this observation to literary history, as, for example, in their explanation of Romanticism as a revolution against rule- and norm-oriented Neoclassicism. The same is true, at the turn of the 17th century, for the increasing rebellion against the fixed Petrarchan conventions which had dominated Renaissance poetry. Under this aspect, Baroque Metaphysical and Neoclassical Cavalier poetry may be regarded as two very different, even contrary reactions to the same outworn Renaissance tradition. The Metaphysicals reacted by extension and excess according to the principle of originality. They tried to exceed Renaissance art by even more various forms and expressions; they sought its wit and splendour amongst other things by a superabundance of even bolder paradoxy; they extended traditional images to the most tortuous, unexpected, surprising, and original conceits by way of an excess of discordia concors and an innovative urge towards forward orientation, Entgrenzung. The Cavaliers, on the contrary, reacted by restriction according to the principle of imitation. They aimed at less variety, less wit and flashiness, preferring clarity and purification of the language, modification of extremes, reduction of images to natural associations, imitative backward orientation to the model of the Age of Emperor Augustus (1st century BC), obedience to the rules laid down by reason and Horace, Begrenzung and Überschaubarkeit. The fundamental difference appears from an invective that a Cavalier poet, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote against the "male" and "strong line" Metaphysicals:

            The reason why men run into such obscure conceits, is because they think their wit will be esteemed, and seem more when it lies in an odde and unusual way, which makes their verse not like a smooth running stream; but as if they were shelves of sand, or rocks in the way, and though the water in those places goeth with more force, and makes a greater sound: yet it goeth hard and uneasy. As if to expresse a thing hard, were to make it better.

 

John Donne, the figure-head of the Metaphysical school, and Ben Jonson, the head of the Cavalier school ("the tribe of Ben"), were irreconcilable enemies. The Baroque reaction, however, became the dominant tradition and very much the fashion of the day. Its roughness, novelty, and juxtaposition of extremes mirrored the disorientation of the age much better than the countercurrent Neoclassical reaction with its smoothness, elegance, naturalness, and backward orientation. This also explains the fact that more Cavalier poets occasionally wrote Metaphysical poems than vice versa. Yet in the course of time, Cavalier Neoclassicism was destined to prevail and supersede the Metaphysical Baroque everywhere in Europe: first in France (with Malherbe), then in England (with Dryden), and last but not least in Germany (with Gottsched).

 

The distinctive Metaphysical originality can be well demonstrated from the Metaphysicals' radical break with the traditional Renaissance sonnet. There was the compulsory form of 14 lines, with its high stylization of nature and the cosmos and the beloved donna angelicata as well as a fixed characterization of the beloved lady and an equally fixed allocation of roles with stereotyped comparisons. And there was the tragic "star-crossed lover", who could not reach his heavenly and pure beloved lady in this life, and from whom she withdrew even further in death. There were his sweet sighs and his eyes, from which the tears shed as from a fountain at the sight of his unattainable donna angelicata, with her sun-like eyes, her lips as red as corals, her snow-white skin, her breath sweet as the smell of roses, her golden hair and her walk angelic and light under the fateful power of the stars and among the sweet songs of murmuring meadow flowers. After two hundred years such a litany of Petrarchan conventions would necessarily have to lead to a revolution which took place first in the form, later in the content (inventio) and finally, in the Baroque period, even in the diction (elocutio) of Baroque poetry.

A similar development had already taken place in the history of painting. Since about 1520, the pre-Baroque Mannerists had begun to break the canonical forms of Renaissance painting (Raphael, Leonardo) by defocussation, decentralization, and winding lines (serpentinata) anticipating Bernini. Then, immediately in their wake, the high Baroque painters broke the content of Renaissance painting by sensualizing, eroticizing, and aggrandizing biblical history, as well as by dismissing the Renaissance ideals of proportion and beauty. Eccentricity, even deformity, became a hallmark of Baroque art, as in many of the court portraits of the Spanish painter Velazquez.

The history of music sticks out insofar as this stylistic modification of the principle of harmony by distortion, dissonance, eccentricity, and enormity occurred somewhat later, around 1600, with the breaking up of traditional polyphonic composition, and lasted somewhat longer, until around 1750. Pure polyphony began to be hybridized by monophony, further enriched with an increasing wealth of extremes and dissonances. The early period of Baroque music has been aptly characterized as aiming at typically Baroque originality, exploring "new resources such as chromaticism, dissonance, tonality, monody, recitative, and new vocal and instrumental combinations." The introduction of the thoroughbase or basso continuo initiated a stile moderno (as distinct from the traditional polyphonic stile antico) which remained the fashion until the middle of the eighteenth century: the epoch of Baroque music. This chiaroscuro-like thorough bass was often performed by ever new gigantic bass instruments which produced ever lower and darker sounds, throwing into relief tortuous lines of chromatically arranged tones high above: the contrabassoon, the great bass recorder, the bass flute, the bass dulcian, and the large bass viol. By contrast, and analogous to the literary conceit, the instruments playing the upper lines grew more and more elevated in pitch: the Baroque flute or recorder, the (valveless) Baroque trumpet, the favourite oboe or hautboy expressing love (oboe d'amore), the frequently introduced "sharp violins" expressing "jealous pangs and desperation, fury, frantic indignation, depths of pains and heights of passion". Thus, compositional artificiality (including quaintly handled counterpoints and compositiones figuratae such as notes arranged to form a cross or other subject of the piece) coexisted with intense passions as analysed and described in philosophical, literary and musical Affektenlehren. The widening of extremes was reflected in the concerto grosso as a favourite genre of Baroque music, with a small concertino (mostly of violins) playing against an overwhelming orchestral grosso. And it also manifested itself in the popularity of the castrato with his artificial voice ("falsetto"), whose growth-hampered larynx and unbroken voice produced a vocal range that no natural voice was capable of (up to three and a half octaves). His artificial voice, again, was matched by the castrato's monstrous size and androgynic appearance, which later exposed him to the ridicule of the 'nature'-oriented Neoclassical critics. Moreover, artificiality was the hallmark of many musical genres of the Baroque, such as the opera and the fugue, which later incurred similar satirical blame, as in Alexander Pope's second Dunciad (1742). There, the Harlot Opera with her false tinsel thus addresses the Empress Dulness "in quaint Recitativo":

            "O Cara! Cara! silence all that train:

            Joy to great Chaos! let Division reign:

            Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,

            Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:

            One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

            Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;

            [...] "

 

In the history of poetry, however, these compository eruptions are to be observed as early as in the history of painting. In 1530, Sir Thomas Wyatt still imitated Petrarchan sonnets rather closely in his English adaptations. His successor, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was already varying the Petrarchan rhyme patterns by choosing alternating rhymes and a final couplet, a form which was later even adopted by Shakespeare. And in 1582, Thomas Watson published Hecathompathia, a fairly conventional cycle of one hundred sonnets, though revolutionary in its 18-line form. About this time, however, in Astrophil and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney was already beginning to play with the conventional inventio of Petrarchism. He did so by making the failure to imitate Petrarch and Ronsard the precondition of a slowly developing and very erotic passion.

Ten years later his successor Edmund Spenser broke the conventional inventio in his Amoretti, allowing the courtship to be crowned by success and marriage. Finally, in the 1590s, Shakespeare left all conventions behind, replacing the beautiful donna angelicata by a promiscuous bisexual youth and an ugly dark prostitute and complicating this confusion of emotions by introducing a fourth character, the Mannerist Rival Poet, who alternately sleeps with both the youth and the Dark Lady. But Shakespeare -- as well as Surrey and Watson and Sidney and Spenser -- largely remained loyal to the Renaissance conventions of poetic diction, even if he criticized empty elocutionary pathos in his Rival Poet.

It was left to the revolutionary and Baroque poet John Donne and his School to completely break apart the monolithic Petrarchan canon of form, content, and diction.   Donne's originally invented conceits, which may be explained as modelled on the tortuous pictorial illustrations of the contemporary emblem books, exploded traditional Petrarchan diction as effectively as his well-nigh ugly plain style and his originally invented metrical forms, which he freely chose to underline his very un-Petrarchan contents. Thus, the close relationship between the emblem and the conceit needs some further investigation in order to understand the Metaphysical revolt against Renaissance Petrarchism's ideals of proportion and beauty.

As a contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne also wrote his Songs and Sonnets for circulation in manuscript. Donne, born and brought up a Catholic, converted to Protestantism about 1596 and became an Anglican High Church divine. He was well acquainted with the Baroque conceits of the Jesuits modelled on Ignatian examples, as they were used in the underground activities of the Counter-Reformation in England in the 1590s, which took place despite the threat of most severe punishments. The prose meditations and poems of the English Jesuit and early Baroque author Robert Southwell circulated in manuscript and will probably have been known to John Donne, as was Southwell's spectacular and most cruel fate: Southwell was executed in London in 1595, after three years of imprisonment and torture in the Tower. In any case, John Donne was familiar with the "emblems" or "hieroglyphics" of the Alciati tradition, which had its roots in a misunderstanding of the Egyptian hieroglyphs as pictorial moral ideograms. It was a fertile misunderstanding in the history of art, which explains the synonymity of "emblem" and "hieroglyph" in the Baroque period , and which is still apparent in the original misnomer 'hieroglyph'. The Tridentine justification of the theological usefulness and acceptability of the 'sensational' picture, in contrast to Calvin's view, eventually led to the emblem gaining a similar Counter-Reformatory significance. The emblem acted as a mediator between the abstract contents of faith and the human senses, just as the Baroque painting or sculpture did for the concrete contents of faith. Modelled on the Exercitia of Ignatius, it was made to stimulate all the senses. Even the conscious deception of the senses, for example in the Baroque illusionist paintings on walls and ceilings ad majorem Dei gloriam, was accepted in line with the Jesuit principle of 'dulce et utile'.

Thus the 'sensational' visual art of the Baroque did not refrain from presenting abstract items of faith, such as divine grace, divine love and forgiveness, theological and secular sins and virtues through bold pictorial analogues, even if vehicle and tenor lay very far apart without any natural connection, thus acting against all laws of philosophical logic. As obvious clichés were only rarely available, the most important characteristic of an emblem book author in the Alciati tradition was the Baroque sense of 'wit', i.e. the capacity to produce original, artificial and remote pictorial analogies making use of the proverbial Jesuit sophistry and inventiveness. In the eikon of the emblem, he visualized divine grace via the image of a magnet for an iron heart or via the image of a besieger in front of a besieged fortress shaped like a heart. And in the poema of the emblem, he elaborated his lemma to explain the illustrations, thus creating literary conceits.

Baroque poems can often be read as the poemata of emblem books, as for example, John Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Thou hast made me':

 

Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art,

And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart.

 

Thus, the emblem art of the Counter-Reformation turned out to be a highly appropriate instrument to break up clichés by means of witty conceits, including the clichés of a declining literary Petrarchism. The Council of Trent legitimized the practice used in Baroque poetry which, following the biblical Song of Solomon, presented divine love through physical erotic love, and thus made it the object of desire. Presented thus in numberless emblem books dedicated to amor, it easily allowed the rendering of spiritual into secular rhetoric. Instead of applying the stereotyped, obvious and logical comparison of love with fire, John Donne used the tortuously conceited, original, witty, artificial and by no means logical comparison of love with a flea, which is far from obvious and stands in need of a 'Jesuitical' explicatio rabulata.

 

The emblem book as a source of English Baroque rhetoric was to be found all over the British Isles and was generally accessible. It is true that emblem books were originally meant as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation and that the art of printing in England was notoriously backward, so that until the Restoration a relatively small number of English emblem books (compared with the immense flood of Continental emblem books) had been printed. But, firstly, the pressure exerted by the Counter-Reformatory 'sensational' paintings and sculpture was so great that the Protestants had to move away from stern Calvinistic doctrine and avail themselves of the fine arts by adjusting them to their Protestant cause: their churches grew more and more ornamented, they filled their emblem books with pointedly Protestant contents. Secondly, Catholic as well as Protestant emblem books from the Continent circulated freely in England, and English emblem book authors often received their printing plates directly from the Catholic capital of printing, Antwerp, or the Protestant capital of printing, Leyden, and then supplied them with new English lemmata and poemata. English Protestantism even assimilated the Ignatian meditation, also filling it with Protestant contents. The poems of the Protestant Nonconformist or 'Puritan' Metaphysicals, Andrew Marvell and the early John Milton of the hymn 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity' (MS 1629), convey the Calvinist view of nature's corruption with all the pictorial splendour of Baroque emblem books and Baroque paintings. The first step of meditation, the visual imagination of the details of salvation and faith, remained invariably the same: compositio loci, composición del lugar, seeing the spot. This explains the preference for the tripartite structure of meditation also present in Protestant English Baroque poetry.

 

The emblem-generated conceit with its distinctively 'sensational' quality contributed to the distortion of elegant, well-proportioned, though time-worn Renaissance comparisons. It is frequently linked to the closely related paradox, as both rhetorical figures reflect the time's need to live with two logically opposed and irreconcilable world pictures. John Donne called that church the most faithful bride which opened her lap to everyone; and Richard Crashaw identified that woman as the most celestial whose sins and repentance had bowed her down to earth most lowly. Crashaw's 'Saint Mary Magdalene, or, The Weeper' shows how Petrarchan clichés were cited in order to immediately and extensively disrupt them with adynata, antitheses, paradoxes, and to endow them with a sensational and tangible eroticism which replaced the barrenness of the frustrated Petrarchan lover's vain complaints. The sexuality of Christ is marked as clearly as in Baroque emblems, where Christ is often syncretistically presented as a naked Amor-Christ, the son of Venus-Maria, or in Baroque paintings, where Christ is often shown as an ecstatic lover (even on the cross). Streams of bloody sweat pour from the ecstatic face, and streams of blood pour from the vaginal wounds, and believers or saints approach these wounds to suck in the blood or probe them with their fingers. Crashaw's poem, as stated above, starts on the conventional comparison of the repentant sinner's eyes with fountains or orbs and tears with springs or stars, only to eroticize them and to vary them into ever-changing and ever contradictory new images. These are accumulated with an enormously dynamic vitality, creating ever new sensations of surprise. The reader of the poem feels his thoughts whirled around, much as the spectator of the wall paintings of a Baroque church cupola feels his eyes restlessly wandering into heaped-up vistas of splendid and erotic images. The poem's sensational and theatrical composición del lugar quality in its insistence on balmy sweetness and rich perfumes is obvious. Mary Magdalene's tears are no longer mere symptoms of self-humiliation or complaint for the loss of virginity. Paradoxically, they combine virginity and procreation, repentance and enjoyment, lowliness and richness, self-humiliation and self-exaltation, in a markedly erotic diction combined with alchemistic vocabulary suggesting ever new potencies.

Such heaped combinations of antitheses (contentiones) and paradoxes (synoecioses), as defined above, dominate even the shortest Metaphysical poems, everywhere shoring up a neo-mystical and holistic creed against threatening ruin and doubt, shouting "credo quia absurdum" so much the louder in their attempt at bridging the enormity of the gap. This neo-mysticism explains the frequency with which smallness and infinity as well as time and eternity are either juxtaposed or paradoxically joined under one aspect, cutting across the neat Thomistic categories of tempus, aevum, aeternitas. The first stanza of the final chorus of Crashaw's Nativity Hymn, a typically Baroque poem written in the theatrical style of a Caroline court-masque, may serve to illustrate this:

            Wellcome, all WONDERS in one sight!

                        Aeternity shutt in a span.

            Sommer in Winter. Day in Night.

                        Heauen in earth, & GOD in MAN.

            Great little one! whose all-embracing birth

            Lifts earth to heauen, stoopes heau'n to earth.

 

The disproportion and enormity of such cumulated antitheses and paradoxes, disrupting all Renaissance ideals of beauty, not only mirror the tension of men confronted with irreconcilable world pictures, theologies, philosophies, and historiographies. They also attest to a sense of living in a world totally out of joint and fragmented, descended into chaos , standing in need of salvation and in need of a re-orientation on all three corresponding levels of the once ordered cosmos: macrocosm, microcosm, state, as described above. On the state level, especially at court, men observed an increase in political Machiavellianism. In England, Machiavellianism was (mis)understood as a disruptive ethical philosophy, disconnecting ethics from fixed natural norms and linking it to political utility, thus providing a justification for intrigue and murder. The Machiavellian stage-villain, multiplied in Jacobean and Caroline drama, was a reckless devil incarnate and solipsistic individualist divorced from all religious and social ties, "Ego mihimet sum semper proximus".

 

The most famous literary manifestation of this widespread feeling that political, social, and moral coherence was crumbling together with the chaos in macrocosm and microcosm is John Donne's First Anniversary (1611) - a very theatrical poem full of conceits and breaches of logic, using as its central conceit the anatomy of the corpse of the old world after its slow and weary decease:

 

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse that this world's spent,

When in the Planets, and the Firmament

They seeke so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.

'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation:

Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinkes he hath got

To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee

None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

 

Ten years earlier, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1601-2) had shown the exemplum horrendum of a culture in decline, its ruin caused by the relativization of "degree, priority, and place" as well as "moral philosophy" and the "law of nature". Shakespeare had his Ulysses deliver his famous "degree speech" drawing a similarly dark portrait of the horrible and universal chaos caused by the loss of the old geocentric order:

 

O, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!

 

The ominous signs of a world descending into chaos are depicted in many contemporary sources describing similar details. With its enumeration of the symptoms of decadence, John Donne's swan song anticipated the apocalyptic mood of the Fin de Siècle poets, who, in their turn, rediscovered English Baroque poetry as congenial: the assumption of eccentric as well as centric spheres (already made by the Ptolemaic astronomers), of man growing smaller and smaller as well as more prone to disaster, of seasons increasingly out of tune while at the same time losing all attributes of beauty, proportion and colour, of new epidemics (such as syphilis and influenza), of masses of vermin, of numerous fateful meteors, of the loss of the noble art of divination due to the broken "correspondence" between heaven and earth:

 

For heaven gives little, and the earth takes lesse,

And man least knowes their trade and purposes.

 

Between those two corresponding levels - macrocosm and microcosm - there existed a third level of correspondence: the state as 'bodie politick'. But even the state, where order manifested itself in peace within and without, seemed, at that time, to be falling prey to the chaos of war. In England no end to the wars with Spain and France was in sight, and the ever increasing religious and political polarization clearly pointed to the inevitability of the imminent Civil War; on the Continent the Thirty Years' War broke out and devastated Germany with the same vehemence as the Civil War did in England.

 

Thus, the individual Baroque artist felt increasingly disconnected from all three (formerly corresponding) levels which had once been believed to be firmly connected and based on a divinely pre-established world order. This sense of disconnectedness produced various reactions, attempts at bridging the gap on the one hand, and resignation on the other hand. On the one hand, as shown above, devices of contrariety joined in art what could no longer be joined in theology: the poet's conceit and paradox as well as the painter's chiaroscuro and the musical composer's counterpoint. In this context we should understand the idea of the work of art as an atoning sacrifice to reconcile estranged mankind to God, - an idea later revived in Romantic poetology (and another respect in which Baroque poetry anticipated Romantic poetry). The idea is most prominently expressed in George Herbert's The Temple, even in the collection's introductory poem,

            A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies,

            And turn delight into a sacrifice.

 

and then, memorably in his pattern poem 'The Altar', where the "broken ALTAR" of the poet's heart and pen is offered as a sacrificial act of at-one-ment and soteriological reintegration:

            O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,

            And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

 

The self-confessing speaker's private mode shows how, on the other hand, the Baroque artist resignedly withdrew into his own privacy: together with his mistress into the intimacy of his love chamber, with his God into the isolation of his praying-room, with his own thoughts into the isolation of a garden or a library. So, in the one extreme, Baroque horticulture brought forth secluded retiros. In their high-walled and small enclosures man found a visual (and psychological) safeguard against the immensity and the chaos without, a centre regained . In the opposite extreme, the overwhelming and centralized palace gardens of the Baroque princes mirrored the 'new theology', which implicitly taught that immensity, immeasurability, unrepresentability, and apparent chaos were the image of the immensity of God, who had created that seemingly disorderly universe. In this theology, loss of measure became the new measure itself. This provocative creed is also contained in Crashaw's 'The Weeper'. Mary Magdalene, the "pretious Prodigall" ever sweating balmy tears at the approach of Christ her bridegroom whom she ever follows, is exuberant, excessive, luxuriant, and wanton in her overproductive physical secretion , just as the poet is excessive in his cumulation of shockingly sensational images. Excess implicitly appears no longer to be an ingredient of sin, but of the virtue of imitatio Dei. The Baroque princes' excessive gardens as well as excessive erotic lives must be seen in this context of the history of ideas, the more so as love and the garden (as love's classic location) had been closely associated from both classical antiquity and the Old Testament Song of Solomon to the Baroque emblem books.

 

Baroque poetry was characterized by an attitude of a totally unascetic, un-Pauline, Epicurean contemptus mundi, which called into question both the traditional concept of the world and of man as well as the traditional ethical and artistic restrictions of the Renaissance. This was especially true in the context of Ficino's neo-Platonic love ethic. John Donne, the love poet, drove the world and its social norms out of his love chamber by using coarse, unpoetic, and sneering language, thus breaking all ethical and stylistic decorum. In 'The Canonization' he went so far as to paradoxically praise himself and his mistress as saints, not because of any kind of chaste subordination of their bodies to a sovereign mind, but because of the consuming quality of their unrestrained and erotically potent sensuality. The second stanza of the poem is particularly revealing as to the connection between revolutionary and anti-Petrarchan love and rhetoric on the one hand, and the Baroque contemptus mundi on the other:

 

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?

What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd?

Who saies my teares have overflow'd his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?

When did the heats which my veines fill

Adde one more to the plagui Bill?

Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out still

Litigious men, which quarrels move,

Though she and I do love.

 

The Petrarchan clichés (such as sighs like sea storms, tears like spring-tides, spells of cold like winter storms in spring, spells of heat like epidemics) are not only chosen to mock traditions no longer held to be acceptable. They also depict a chaotic world, war and destruction of countless people, to which the witty Baroque poet contrasted the better alternative of voluntary self-consummation in excessive love. Thus, the poet, freed from traditional social and ethical restrictions, simultaneously demonstrated his release from traditional restrictions of style.

 

The same is true for John Donne's religious poetry. In the III. Satire, for example, he broke all conventions of the Anglican Church, dispensed man from both the teachings of the great churchmen and the orders of his King, binding him solely to his own conscience as moulded by the Law of God alone. Wherever Donne emphasized that secular laws and teachings could only be of limited validity, he emphasized the breach of tradition by an extensive use of paradoxes:

 

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;

Those past, her nature, and name is chang'd; to be

Then humble to her is idolatrie.

 

Just as the Baroque poet called on the king, the nobility, the clergy and the traditional guardians of morality not to interfere by scolding breaches of decorum, he also kept his readers, audience and critics at respectful distance. He displayed all his learning in esoteric thought and language, refusing any direct understanding of his poetry. The most extreme example of this is, no doubt, Baroque pulpit oratory with its extensive and complex trains of thought; additionally laden with patristic and rabbinic knowledge, and often also with quotations in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian and Arabic. Baroque poetry, too, shows such strategies of distance and isolation in its private mode: among these were the strong lines with their obscurity as well as their overriding principle not to conceal art: "ars est praesentare artem."

 

In historical perspective, the contemptus mundi increased in the same measure as the new Copernican concept of the world gained ground and wars devastated both England and Germany, and man withdrew into his privacy as described above. Both the lives and the works of the older Baroque poets such as John Donne and George Herbert were torn between the extreme poles of a splendid public career and a private withdrawal. Their poems dramatize the defence of their escapist private mode against the ever present temptations of a chaotic world.

Through his clandestine marriage with Ann More in 1601, against all rules of civil and canonical law, John Donne forfeited his chance of a public career, thus thwarting all his previous efforts: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Vn-done". Later, Donne was deeply disappointed when the King whom he had scolded and rebuked only made him Dean of St. Paul's instead of Archbishop of Canterbury. The bridge between heavenly spirituality and worldly sensuality was never broken down entirely, either in Donne's life or in Donne's poetry, where erotic and spiritual love were so dramatically juxtaposed that it is often difficult to distinguish between his love poems and his divine poems. 'The Canonization' may be regarded as the best example of that double tension.

Donne's pupil George Herbert, younger brother of the prominent Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, born in 1593 and 17 years Donne's junior, found it less difficult to give up his highly prestigious office as public orator at the University of Cambridge. In ostentatious modesty, he became rector of the humble country parish of Bemerton, located within walking distance between Salisbury, the reputed cathedral town, and Wilton House, the gorgeous palace of his family, the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke. His Temple poems -- published in the year of his death by his literary executor Nicholas Ferrar, who also chose to live in rural isolation -- reduce the tension between erotic and spiritual love by submerging Donne's erotic imagery, and are much more easily classified as divine poetry. Yet they retain, albeit in reduced form, the dramatic tension between the desire for privacy and the temptations of the world, as for example in 'The Quip':

 

The merrie world did on a day

With his train-bands and mates agree

To meet together, where I lay,

And all in sport to geere at me.

 

Richard Crashaw, born in 1613 and trained on Giambattista Marino, was even more willing to dispense with an academic career at Cambridge within the Anglican Church hierarchy. Crashaw, a former High Churchman, turned to the Spanish mystics, converted to Catholicism and died in 1649, holding a minor church office in Loretto. His hymn 'The Weeper' ends with two stanzas spoken by Mary Magdalene's personified tears, in which the migrating tears affirm their scorn at pursuing such "inferior gemmes" as are placed on such "toyes" as crowns or coronets, vain and evanescent things even below drops of morning dew hovering upon flowers. They would much rather

                                   [...] goe to meet

            A worthy object, our lord's FEET.

 

The treasures of the world, however, are still present and not yet quite removed from the poem's scope. They survive in its intense sexual imagery, visualizing Mary Magdalene as a typically Baroque woman embracing the extremes of sensuality and spirituality, much as does the Mary Magdalene of the Baroque paintings by Georges de la Tour and El Greco. The strong Ignatian component in Crashaw's Italianate Baroque, amor eroticus as a significant of amor divinus, would not allow a pure saint's total withdrawal and spiritualization. Thus, Crashaw's divine poems lack Donne's dramatic defence of the private mode while retaining (or even intensifying) his dramatic tension between amor divinus and amor eroticus.

Andrew Marvell (born in 1621) and Thomas Traherne (born as late as 1637) were contrary characters in their public aspirations. Marvell was Latin Secretary to the Council of State (as successor to John Milton) before and anti-Cavalier controversialist after the Restoration; whereas Traherne, by contrast, was content to lead a single and devout life as rector of Credenhill in his native Herefordshire. What both had in common though was that, when they died (Marvell in 1678 and Traherne in 1674), they left their private mode Metaphysical lyrics unpublished. Marvell's lyrics were found by his housekeeper and published in 1681 (Miscellaneous Poems), and Traherne's were not found until 1896 and published in 1903 (Poetical Works). The private mode of their Metaphysical lyrics is quite unthreatened by worldly aspirations. In one of Marvell's much-anthologized meditational poems, a drop of dew, symbolizing the soul, has dropped into a bed of roses; yet it weeps with its own tear at the loss of heaven, despising the beauty and fragrance of the earthly roses,

                        So the World excluding round,

                        Yet receiving in the Day.

 

The speaker of Marvell's 'The Garden' drives the private mode to its very extreme, so as to make a tragi-comical fool of himself. Thus, the poem provides a satire on the exuberances of the Roman Catholic (as opposed to Marvell's and the early Milton's more restricted Protestant) Baroque. As such, the speaker of 'The Garden' voices the opposite extreme to the ascetic speaker of 'A Mower against Gardens', neither of which extremes Marvell would have adopted. Marvell's speaker is a sensualist, hedonist, sybarite, whose love of solitude appears as a mere temporary recovery from amorous excesses, to which his fancy recurs again and again. Quite apart from the fact that he grossly misunderstands the mythical tales of Apollo attempting to rape Daphne and Pan attempting to rape Syrinx, his desire "To live in Paradise alone" as a prelapsarian Adam before the creation of Eve stands in blatant contradiction to his erotic fancy, giving the lie to this extreme of the private mode. His equation of his garden with Paradise evokes associations of Original Sin and the Fall of Man, which he seems to blot out. And his spiritual ecstasy, with a free soul "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade", is proved a short-lived illusion by his observations in the poem's final (seventh) stanza: the seasonal flowers, the sundial, the short-lived bees computing "thyme" or "time", suggest the narrow limits of his corporeal existence: memento mori. And even then, the obvious pun on "hours" and "whores" proves him an unregenerate extreme sensualist. Thus read, the poem is a Protestant Baroque plea for a private mode which provides no Donnean excuse for worldly amorousness.

In Traherne's highly visionary Poems of Felicity, such as 'Eden' and 'Innocence', worldly seductions are no longer perceived, any more than worldly pains. Traherne was a Cambridge Platonist, a fact which helps explain his anti-Calvinism and flat denial of a fallen and corrupt earth:

            A learned and a Happy Ignorance

                                   Divided me,

                        From all the Vanitie,

            From all the Sloth Care Pain and Sorrow that advance,

                        The madness and the Miserie

            Of Men. No Error, no Distraction I

            Saw soil the earth, or overcloud the Skie.

 

Traherne's 'proto-Romantic' yearning for infancy and a child's anamnetic view of the world as a reflection and part of heaven uneclipsed by clouds of Calvinistic denigration goes well beyond Crashaw's mysticism. In his lyrics, this spiritual view of the world transcends and rules out Vaughan's contemptus mundi as to the merry world and its enticements. Traherne's parallel 'proto-Romantic' denial of anything profane in the world, anticipating Blake, finds a brilliant expression in his poem 'On Leaping over the Moon'. The poet's vision melts with that of his little brother skipping over a pool of water, and the reflection of this everyday scene in the water interfuses it with the skies, so that the brother seems easily and without any danger to overleap the moon. In the instructive light of this nightly vision, the scene is no longer banal. The same "Place of Bliss" appears "under our Feet" and "o'er our Heads":

            On hev'nly Ground within the Skies we walk,

                        And in this middle Center talk:

                                   Did we but wisely mov,

                                   On Earth in Hev'n abov,

                                               We then should be

                                               Exalted high

            Abov the Sky: from whence whoever falls,

                        Through a long dismal Precipice,

            Sinks to the deep Abyss where Satan crawls

                        Where horrid Death and Despair lies.

 

In this mystical vision, man is again placed into a centre, between an easily reached heaven above and an impotent hell below. Traherne's poem shows men on the lookout for a new anthropocentric orientation, replacing the lost geocentric world picture. However, in the 200 years of reordering which elapsed between Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) and Pope's Essay on Man (1733-34), Traherne's solution of the problem is a very private and unteachable one. Small wonder that Traherne, who never addresses any reader except his brother as his alter ego, saw no point in a literary reputation, remained content with his small parish in his native Herefordshire, where he died, and left his manuscripts unpublished. This demonstrative disdain for literary reputation was only surpassed by the American Metaphysical poet Edward Taylor (1644-1729) in his small frontier village of Westfield in Massachusetts, who in his will even forbade the publication of his manuscripts. Like Traherne's, Taylor's manuscripts were not discovered and published until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively.

Finally, Henry Vaughan, born in the same year as Andrew Marvell, showed no hesitation at all about giving up worldly careers with his conversion after 1648, and about remaining in the seclusion of his home county of Breconshire (Wales). His secular love poems belong to the period before his conversion: Poems (1646) and Olor Iscanus (MSS ca 1647). Quite unlike Donne, Vaughan felt ashamed of their erotic worldliness, and even more ashamed when his friends injudiciously published Olor Iscanus in 1651.His religious poems such as 'The World', 'The Retreat', or 'Corruption' -- all published in 1650 as part of the collection with the paradoxical title Silex Scintillans -- show him to be a nostalgic primitivist in the sense of Neo-Platonism, totally removed from this dark, chaotic world with its aspirations in love and war, and an esoteric admirer of the Hermetic philosophy: Man, no longer the crown of creation on a still earth in the centre of the universe but hurled somewhere around the sun, seeks rest in a world-contemning ecstasy of the mind, carrying him above all physical things even more than the speaker of Marvell's 'The Garden' with his imagined escape to a "green thought in a green shade":

 

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright,

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years

Driv'n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov'd. In which the world

And all her train were hurl'd.

 

And thus, mystically uplifted into the light of the Empyrean, Vaughan's enraptured speaker looks pitifully down on this dark, chaotic world and its hurled-about votaries, who live in lightless caves: the lover and the statesman, the miser and the Epicurean. They are so far removed from the ecstatic speaker's scope that they cannot tempt him any more. Parallel to the decline of the Elizabethan drama and the Ptolemaic universe, Metaphysical poetry was increasingly deprived of its original dramatic tension. The struggle between the temptations of privacy and those of the world upon the 'stage of life', the tension between erotic and divine love, and the conflicting rhetorical figures of disparity, which had been part of its Baroque theatricality, are irretrievably lost:

 

O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night

Before true light,

To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day

Because it shews the way,

The way which from this dead and dark abode

Leads up to God,

A way where you might tread the Sun, and be

More bright than he.

 

The difference between the earlier and the late Metaphysical poets is mirrored in Metaphysical pulpit oratory, if we compare the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne on the one hand with those of Jeremy Taylor on the other hand. Taylor, chaplain to King Charles I (as Andrewes had been chaplain to King James I), and Charles's spiritual aide on the scaffold, preached sermons that accumulated and intertwined Metaphysical conceits in disdain of all worldly aspirations:

            LEARN to despise the world; [...] for it is a cousenage all the way; the head of it is a rainbow, and the face of it is flattery; [...] its body is as a shadow, and its hands do knit spider's webs; it is an image and a noise, with a Hyaena's lip and a Serpents tail [...]

 

In the history of Metaphysical poetry, this loss of dramatic tension and theatricality becomes manifest in a comparison of the late Mary Magdalene hymns or Christmas hymns of Henry Vaughan with the early ones written by Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw. The "Dear, beauteous Saint" of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans has cast away all of Mary Magdalene's traditional pictorial attributes: her mirror, her carefully combed hair, and her vessel of nard which simultaneously denoted the anointing of Christ's feet and the pernicious box of Pandora. Here, the saint's weeping eyes are no longer "sins loose and tempting spies", but fixed stars despising all earthly contact, except for their remote exhortation of "dark straglers" (moral and political sinners lost in the darkness of error). Similarly, Vaughan's hymn on 'Christ's Nativity' presents an unworldly child in a clean manger, and one of the poem's few remaining conceits (the comparison of the manger with a human heart) opens up an estranging gap in time and space between man and God, a gap which God alone can bridge from far beyond human reach:

            I would I had in my best part

            Fit Roomes for thee! or that my heart

                        Were so clean as

                        Thy manger was!

            But I am all filth, and obscene,

            Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean.

 

Robert Southwell's and the young Milton's Christmas hymns, by contrast, describe very personal encounters with a "silly, tender Babe [...] In homely manger trembling" , a tangible God "All meanly wrapt in a rude manger". Pre-Baroque and Baroque paintings of the Nativity, as by Correggio, Barocci, and Caravaggio, mark the extreme poverty and everyday homeliness of the world's most exceptional moment of divine epiphany. The mightiest prince of the whole world appears in the homeliest hut, the greatest weakness is the greatest strength, and the child's sweet birth is envisaged so as to foreshadow the man's bitter passion. The swaddling-cloth is both at once: royal cloak and dead body's shroud. If such paradoxical and highly dramatic bridging of extremes may be regarded as a characteristic of Baroque art, then Vaughan's comfortable adoption of the spiritual and undramatic renunciation of the sensual extreme, both in his life and his poetry, indicates the end of the Baroque epoch.

Conversely, the late Metaphysical disintegration of Baroque complexity and dramaticality could also manifest itself in the very opposite way, fusing with Cavalier poetry (and thus breaking up the Baroque private mode). Abraham Cowley discards all spirituality and mysticism from the love poetry of his collection The Mistress (1646), isolating an extremely carnal amor eroticus from its theological combination with amor divinus. The late or post-Baroque "dissociation of sensibility" (as identified by T. S. Eliot) resulted from God becoming more and more removed from man, an intellectually constructed rather than emotionally experienced deus absconditus. Thus, the dissociation of sensibility increasingly split a more and more beast-like sexuality from a more and more barren and sterile holiness. This is the disintegrative line of the development of erotic literature from Abraham Cowley via the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland to Victorian pornography and the demonic or merely de-spiritualized animal eroticism in the anti-religious poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Gottfried Benn. Cowley's poetry links love to gold, dowries, and treasures, even where his Machiavellian speakers ironically disavow all prostitution, as in 'The Given Love':

            To give All will befit thee well;

            But not at Under-Rates to sell.

 

This speaker's claim to uniqueness and privacy proves mere irony. A comparison of the poem with Donne's 'The Canonization' shows the almost parodistical destruction of the Baroque private mode. Whereas Donne's speaker excludes the genteel world and its accepted values in order to realize his unifying love with his one mistress, Cowley's speaker does so only in order to unmask both that world and himself as true dissimulating Machiavels, changing both amorous allegiances and political allegiances according to opportunity. The only thing that distinguishes him from the world is his honesty:

            I'll some such crooked ways invent,

            As you, or your Fore-fathers went:

            I'll flatter or oppose the King,

            Turn Puritan, or Any Thing.

 

 

This should not, of course, mislead us to regard late Metaphysical poetry simply as a decadent form of Donne's poetry. It stands in its own right, but it moved closer to Cavalier poetry and thus indicated its epoch's need for a less scholastic, less dramatically torn, but more rationalistic way of writing. It has been aptly shown that this development is also reflected in the development of the aesthetic philosophy of and in the style of Thomas Hobbes. The apparent chaos in macrocosm, state, and microcosm had first led the intellectuals into a more or less extreme withdrawal, with the consequence of an upgrading of private and social mode poetry and a simultaneous devaluation of all public mode genres, notably the epic. The heyday of Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry saw an increasing decline both in the production of epic poetry and prose and in the quality of drama. But, as the sense of chaos visibly increased with the Civil War in Britain (and the Thirty Years' War in Germany), there arose a new demand for a new public responsibility in literature.

After 1640 the public mode of poetry flourishing in the Renaissance again gained ground, and with it the classical public mode genres, i. e. the verse epic and the drama (the latter being strictly prohibited though secretly cultivated throughout the Commonwealth). John Milton's early lyric poetry written between 1629 and 1638 (such as the Nativity Ode, the sonnet 'On Shakespeare', and Lycidas) had already shown symptoms of overstepping the private mode and reassuming a public praeceptor populi stance, so that Milton could later claim them as poetical exercises for his epic magnum opus (first his projected King Arthur, then Paradise Lost). By having recourse to the epic models of Spenser and the Spenserians, notably Giles Fletcher, Milton demonstratively reached back across the hiatus which the late Jacobean and the Caroline period had left with regard to the writing of epics. Moreover, as the public mode or epic revival advanced from 1640 to 1660, the lyric poetry of the Metaphysicals and Cavaliers with their private and social modes respectively lost ground, so that the order of genre precedence was reversed again: the verse epic grew first and lyric poetry last in respect. Thomas Hobbes's 'Answer to Davenant', published separately in Paris in 1650 and then prefixed to the London edition of William Davenant's public mode verse epic Gondibert (1651), rates the "Heroique Poem Dramatique" highest, and "Sonets, Epigrams, Eclogues, and the like peeces" lowest, as being "but Essayes and parts of an entire Poem". At the end stood the triumph of Neoclassicism, with Abraham Cowley's recantation of his earlier Metaphysical mode of writing, the 'Ode of Wit' (1656):

            In a true piece of Wit all things must be,

                        Yet all things there agree.

            As in the Ark, joyn'd without force or strife,

            All Creatures dwelt; all Creatures that had Life.

Or as the Primitive Forms of all

(If we compare great things with small)

Which without Discord or Confusion lie,

In that strange Mirror of the Deitie.

 

But, eventually, the decline of Metaphysical poetry was also inseparably linked to the decline of Cavalier poetry. Lyric poetry and the lyric ego's private or social mode, repudiated in High Neoclassicism from Dryden to Johnson, did not reappear until the lyrical revival of the Preromantic and Romantic Movement of the later eighteenth century.

 

III

 

In default of formal artes poeticae and artes rhetoricae, we have to reconstruct Metaphysical ideals and their rationale from various sources. Among the richest sources are no doubt the numerous English and Latin elegies on the death of the famous poet and preacher John Donne in 1631. Some of these were incorporated in the posthumous editions of Donne's poems in 1633 and 1635. They unanimously emphasized the uniqueness of the preacher and the poet. Donne's biographer, Izaak Walton, equated "miraculous Donne" with a prophet, sent by God to his dull people. Sir Lucius Cary and Richard Corbet called Donne a king, at whose death comets ought to have fallen from the sky. Arthur Wilson praised Donne as a spirit of high-flying fantasy "in the aire of Wit", whose flights, though admired by many, only few could follow. Henry Valentine compared Donne to the unique solitary phoenix, 'unica semper avis'. Donne himself had used the same image in his First Anniversary when describing his contemporaries after their loss of 'all relation'. The best known is the elegy by Thomas Carew, who described Donne as the last of his age, gleaning a harvested tradition. After him, poetical quality would be replaced by mere light-weight quantity. Although such demonstrative rhetoric of praise or blame (genus demonstrativum) makes use of literary commonplaces rather than historical facts, Carew's pitching of Donne's Baroque originality against Neoclassical imitation and obedience to rules shows one of the prime characteristics in the self-understanding of the Metaphysicals, in the context of the time-honoured querelle des anciens et des modernes. Carew's epitaph has become a literary quotation:

 

Here lies a King, that rul'd as hee thought fit

The universall Monarchy of wit.

 

In terms of the history of ideas, the ideal of the Baroque poet was the counterpart of the ideal of the absolute prince. Thus, "the divine right of kings" formed the counterpart to "the divine right of poets". In this respect, too, the Baroque poetry of the Metaphysicals reflected the intellectual climate of the age (of Stuart absolutism) much better than the Neoclassical poetry of the Cavaliers with its strict submission to Horatian rules. The Baroque refused to submit to poetic traditions and rules as laid down and reflected in Cicero or Horace, Scaliger or Puttenham. The Baroque prince refused to submit to ancient political traditions and rules as they could still be found in Erasmus or Elyot, for instance. While the medieval authoritative theorists of politics such as John of Salisbury, Bracton and others had placed the prince both above and under the law, rex supra et infra legem, rex legibus absolutus et legibus alligatus, the Baroque prince tended to neglect the latter parts of that dualistic approach. This new understanding of his absolute position had its roots not so much in Bodin or Hobbes, but in Machiavelli's 'absolving' the prince from hitherto firmly established and divinely ordained ethical norms.

In politics, one of these traditional rules had demanded social interaction with the subjects, visits and audiences such as Elizabeth I had still cultivated. But, 'absolving' himself from that time-honoured rule, the Baroque prince, like the Baroque poet, tended to withdraw into his privacy. There may seem to exist a basic contradiction between the Baroque poet and his enclosed garden on the one hand, and the Baroque prince and his gigantic palace and garden on the other hand. But, quite apart from the fact that contradiction was the life and soul of Baroque culture, the contradiction is resolved in the poet's and prince's common pursuit of saving privacy, 'absoluteness', though by opposite means. The poet as the prince's subject kept the world at a distance on a smaller scale, parallel to his forbidding rhetoric; the prince did the same on a larger scale, with his forbidding architectural and horticultural pomp.

As to Baroque palace architecture, the contradiction between the plain 'Protestant' faVades and the Baroque 'Roman Catholic' interiors has already been noted above. It symbolized the progressive estrangement between the early Stuart court and the people, the 'absolutism' which cost King Charles I his life. Later, in Restoration England, during the reign of his son Charles II (1660-85), the same phenomenon manifested itself again in another form, e. g. in Sir Christopher Wren's 'Protestant Baroque' church architecture, which combined Bernini's Baroque with Jones's Neoclassicism. Wren's original designs were too close to Bernini and the Roman Catholic Baroque, and the king's judicious policy demanded a compromise. Wren had to cut Bernini's vertically towering upward lines and arches into segments, interrupting them by strong horizontal lines expressing the curbs set on Stuart absolutism. A similar reduction in force and ornament can be observed in Wren's, Vanbrugh's, and Hawksmoor's palace architecture.

As for Baroque garden architecture, the contradiction appears in the heterogeneous combination of the garden's gigantic dimensions with the private bowers, nooks, and secretive mazes enclosed within its walls. A short characterization of the medieval garden will help us to understand the Baroque garden, not only by contrast, but because the typology of the medieval garden still shaped the numerous Metaphysical garden poems by Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan, as well as the numerous garden pictures of emblem books. The typical medieval garden is a "garden enclosed", entailing all the erotic and divine symbolism derived from the Old Testament Song of Solomon. As such, the medieval garden had been understood as an image of paradise in the religious as well as erotic sense. The Greek word for the Hebrew Garden of Eden was "παράδεισος" ('enclosed'), and associated Paradise with the Hebrew "לואנ ןג" ('garden enclosed') of the Song of Solomon. As a consequence of this association, iconography presented both Paradise and its image in nuce, the medieval garden, as walled round-in, hedged enclosures. The interior - fertile and cultivated - would represent an "idealized, controlled representation of nature" and thus, of course, divine order. Outside the walls was the domain of barren chaos, out of which God had created this orderly world. The gardener of the medieval hortus conclusus was consequently an image of God, alter Deus, - and also of the medieval king, alter rex - , insofar as he cultivated and fertilized the garden (which would otherwise be as barren as the chaos without). He had to graft in order to bring about fertility (note the sexual imagery) and to cut and prune in order to prevent excrescences (note the judicial imagery). This 'garden of love' with its sexual and divine connotations designated both fruitfulness and harmony. The medieval garden was a peaceful fruit and vegetable garden for the cultivation of food and medical herbs, indicating that both God and his terrestrial representative, the king, were in charge of providing peace, nourishment, and healing for their people. Deus medicus and rex medicus were commonplace terms and icons. This iconology and symbolism survived in the emblems and poems of the Baroque period, although the gardens themselves had by then radically changed. The reader of Donne's 'Twickenham Garden', for instance, must have been acquainted with that tradition in order to understand the poem's speaker, a soul-sick man (like Shakespeare's Hamlet) possessed by the deadly sin of acedia. He visits God's garden of love and medicine only to persevere in his grief, because he refuses to see suffering as a precondition to regeneration or Good Friday as a precondition to Easter:

            And that this place may thoroughly be thought

                        True Paradise, I have the serpent brought.

 

After the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, that paradisiacal 'garden of love' metamorphosed from intimacy to grandeur, and from a fruit and vegetable garden to an ornamental garden. Thus, it lost part of its religious symbolism in the wake of the general process of secularization. It adjoined a palace, mansion, or monastery, though not yet as part of a grand design comprising buildings and gardens. The development then progressed to the Baroque garden, facing a royal, ducal, or episcopal palace and proportioned to the whole length of that palace's faVade. Moreover, it enriched the traditional Renaissance parterre by introducing costly, large-scale, artificial terraces. In its gigantic size and design, this ensemble embodied the Absolutist's prince's centralistic concentration of power. Spectacular and theatrical, with large and fragrant (mostly artificially grown) flowers and fruit, and with the magnificent mise-en-scène of its garden feasts to the sound of specially commissioned garden or river fireworks and musical entertainments, the Baroque garden was - like Baroque poetry - designed to appeal to all the senses. Thus, it provides another proof of the close link between Baroque and absolutism. This is also apparent in the Baroque garden's ingenious new water architecture, including machine-operated artificial fountains on meadows and in artificial musical grottos. Nevertheless, as has been stated above, the interior of that gigantic Baroque garden was fantastically subdivided so as to provide the prince with "retiros" from the courtiers, just as the whole garden provided the court with a "retiro" from the 'vulgar' populace. The self-isolatory private mode was guaranteed both ways.

Among these retiros counted the mazes or labyrinths characteristic of the Baroque garden. They mirrored the epoch's sense of disorientation, though they were mostly constructed around a firm and fixed centre - as if insisting on the notion of a still centralized universe and the presence of a God and a Heavenly Jerusalem still acting as the final destination for man (though he may be temporarily lost) on the pilgrimage of his life. But, in their dazzling combination with bowers, crooked lanes, and arboreta (artificial forests), they brought an element of artificial chaos into that otherwise cultivated garden, which had formerly been understood to exclude all chaos in favour of a small undisputed cosmos. Thus, the Baroque garden expressed the epoch's disorientation post Copernicum as well as Baroque poetry, its sense of contrariety or "antithetisches Lebensgefühl". In England, the Baroque garden's association with Stuart absolutism led to the fatal destruction of all Baroque gardens under Cromwell. The walls were pulled down, the bowers and mazes mangled, and the statues demonstratively beheaded, as was the king himself on 30 January 1649. Andrew Marvell's 'The Mower against Gardens' paradoxically condenses all the Puritan arguments against the artificiality of such Baroque gardens into a Metaphysical poem. The poem's plain unreliable speaker, a rustic mower, and evidently more Calvinistic than Marvell himself, argues on the basis of the typically Protestant and anti-Catholic ideal of (Christian) original primitiveness, innocence, and simplicity. To him, the artificial grottos, waterworks, statues, exotic plants and "adulterate" fruits of Baroque gardens constitute a denaturation, a falsification of God's original primitive design:

'Tis all enforc'd, the Fountain and the Grot;

                        While the sweet Fields do lye forgot.

 

Denaturation does not only imply devitalization and vilification, but sin. The poem's initial attack upon the "Vice" of "Luxurious Man" names one of the seven deadly sins, 'luxuria', the irregular lust of lovers, and the loss of both men's and plants' procreative vitality through unnatural excess in those oversecretive and overamorous gardens:

            Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,

                        Did after him the World seduce:

            And from the fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure,

            Where nature was most plain and pure.

 

What follows is a densely and subtly interwoven catalogue of other sins involved in Baroque horticulture: pride (in man's 'dealing between the bark and the [forbidden) tree' by assuming to improve God's natural paradise), robbery (in the Roman Catholic Spaniards' expeditions to exploit the exotic treasures of South America), adultery (in the unnatural breeding of new but unprocreative plants and trees), the Baroque princes' irregular craze for unnatural unprocreative eunuchs as gardeners, singers, or even lovers, and the Baroque princes' neglect of their public duty in the private mode of their walled-in self-seclusion. Here, "A dead and standing pool of Air" is perversely given preference to a more natural and accessible garden

            Where willing Nature does to all dispence

                        A wild and fragrant Innocence.

 

This wild and fragrant innocence is implicitly pitched against the stale incense in Roman Catholic nunneries and churches. Far from Calvin's iconoclasm, Marvell was a Protestant who had appropriated the Baroque, though on a smaller scale and without the Roman Catholics' love of pompous artificial excess, just as the Baroque interior of Protestant churches adapted Baroque paintings and ornament on small panels and in reduced proportions. In that respect, Marvell's preference for natural and proportionate gardens resembled that of the High Churchman George Herbert in Bemerton, Salisbury. Similarly, in Andrew Marvell's topographical poem 'Upon Appleton House. To my Lord Fairfax', the speaker argues not against gardens and garden pleasures themselves, but against unnatural artificiality, unnatural enclosures, and unnatural pompous grandeur and disproportion as typical of the Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformatory Baroque. His tale of the past, when the heiress Isabel Thwaites, wooed by William Fairfax, was confined in the former nunnery, establishes a significant parallel between Roman Catholic monasticism and Baroque horticulture. Both appear as dominated by sinful pride and unnatural luxury, both erect walled-in dungeons, and both lack the natural vigour of procreation. Yet now the original nunnery's confining walls have been pulled down, and Cromwell's General Thomas Fairfax has built himself a solid, unpretentious, and functional brick mansion for temporal residence instead of a vast, artificial, and ornamental Baroque palace for permanent self-seclusion, and a 'military garden' instead of its complement, the 'amorous garden'. Fairfax's garden "laid [...] out [...] In the just Figure of a Fort" was decorated with naturally grown flowers that often bore military names; it had no artificially bred trees and flowers, no artificial waterworks, no artificial grottos, no artificial terraces, and no statues of fauns and fairies. Instead of providing an escapist private-mode retiro, this military garden was as functional and related to the unquiet times as the fortified house. Here General Fairfax would perform military exercises even in times of temporal peace: si vis pacem para bellum.This, as well as the speaker's appeal to General Fairfax not to withdraw but to commit himself to public duties, or his allegorical argumentation both against too high (Cavaliers) and too low (Levellers), make it evident that Marvell's garden stanzas replace the Baroque private mode by a pre-Augustan public mode in keeping with the unquiet times. Accordingly, they are no longer poetry in praise of artificial Baroque retiros, the less so as the speaker repeatedly expresses the author's Protestant conviction that the earth's paradisiacal prelapsarian state cannot possibly be retrieved (natura totaliter corrupta). The poem's expository grotesque satire on the sham perfection and strained inventiveness of Salomon de Caus and his falsification of God's creation and creation's natural proportions establishes the contrast to the excesses and unrealistic escapism of Roman Catholic and Absolutist architecture and horticulture:

            Within this sober Frame expect

            Work of no Forrain Architect;

            That unto Caves and Quarries drew,

            And Forrests did to Pastures hew;

            Who of his great Design in pain

            Did for a Model vault his Brain,

            Whose Columnes should so high be raise'd

            To arch the Brows that on them gaz'd.

 

One of King Charles I's favourite Baroque gardens was Wilton House Garden, in front of the above-mentioned home of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, near Salisbury, begun around 1632 after designs by Salomon de Caus and with the help of Inigo Jones. It was chiefly modelled on the design of the magnificent Baroque garden in front of the palatial Villa D'Este in Tivoli near Rome, built by the powerful and ambitious Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este between 1560 and 1575, and on Caus's Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, built from 1615-1620 for Elizabeth Stuart and her husband Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate. Wilton House was restored by Inigo Jones and John Webb from 1649-52, decades after John Donne had visited Lady Pembroke, the mother of his pupil George Herbert. Although the garden was not begun until the time of Donne's death, the king's and the poet's visits expressing their common predilection for the same palace and family once again show the cultural and ideological kinship of absolutism and the Baroque.

The private mode of the Baroque poet, however, was easier to realize than the private mode of the Baroque prince. In the closed 'internal' circle of his court, the literal 'absolutism' of the Baroque prince's 'external' rule ended. Here, he was obliged to submit to a strict set of formal rules of courtly etiquette. The medieval king's divinely imposed 'heavy burden' had thus shrunk to 'idle ceremony' , the merely formal remains of his ancestors' exacting code of princely virtues.

In contrast to their Neoclassical successors with their strict obedience to formal rules and restrictions, each of the English Baroque poets was a distinctive individual who emphasized his originality by breaking all conventional forms and conventions "as hee thought fit". Eventually, English Baroque literature died together with Stuart absolutism and was superseded by Neoclassical poetry (analogous to Restoration concepts of kingship), following ancient models and obeying rules and norms. In spite of its adulatory rhetoric, Thomas Carew's elegy on John Donne had proved prophetic.

 

University of Bonn

Rolf P. Lessenich

________________________________________________________________________

Multimedia file provided in collaboration with participants in my

Oberseminar:

Carsten Arntz, Volker Bauchhenß, Jens Andreas Faulstich, Hildegard Feinendegen, Felix Forster, Martin Fritzen, Tanja Kohl, Andreas Koerver-Stümper, Norbert Lennartz, Andrea Rummel, Renate Schruff, Ursula Schwalb, Annemarie Stöckel, Barbara Tonn

________________________________________________________________________

 

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Anthologies

Cummings, Robert (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology ,Blackwell Annotated Anthologies, Oxford, 2000.

 

Dawson, Terence / Dupree, Robert (ed.), Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, The Annotated Anthology, Hemel Hempstead, 1994.

 

Fowler, Alastair (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse, Oxford, 1991.

 

______ (ed.), The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items, Edinburgh, 1994.

 

Gardner, Helen (ed.), The Metaphysical Poets, Oxford, 1957.

 

Greer, Germaine, et al. (ed.), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, London, 1988, New York, 1989.

 

Grierson, Herbert J. C. (ed.), Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1921, rev. Alastair Fowler, Oxford, 1995.

 

Hunt, John Dixon (ed.), The Oxford Book of Garden Verse, Oxford, 1993.

 

Spingarn, Joel Elias (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols., Oxford, 1908.

 

 

• Studies and Reference Works

 

Alewyn, Richard / Sälzle, Karl, Das große Welttheater. Die Epoche der höfischen Feste in Dokument und Deutung, 1959, Munich, 1985.

 

______, Deutsche Barockforschung, 4th edition Cologne, 1970.

 

Alvarez, Alfred, The School of Donne, London, 1961.

 

Andreasen, N. J. C., John Donne. Conservative Revolutionary, Princeton, 1967.

 

Baker, Herschel, The Wars of Truth, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.

 

Bald, Robert Cecil, Donne's Influence in English Literature, 1932, Gloucester, Mass. 1965.

 

______, John Donne. A Life, Oxford, 1970.

 

Brown, Jane, The Pursuit of Paradise. A Social History of Gardens and Gardening, London, 1999.

 

Bush, Douglas, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, Oxford, 1945, 1962.

 

Carey, John, John Donne. Life, Mind and Art, London, 1981.

 

Christianson, John Robert, On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 1570-1601, Cambridge, 1999.

 

Coffin, Charles Monroe, John Donne and the New Philosophy, New York, 1937, 1958.

 

Cooper, Nicholas, Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680, New Haven and London, 1999.

 

Corns, Thomas N., (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry. Donne to Marvell, Cambridge, 1993.

 

Curtius, Ernst Robert, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 1948, Berne and Munich, 1961.

 

Daly, Peter M./ Silcox, Mary V., The Modern Critical Reception of the English Emblem, Munich, 1991.

 

Daly, Peter M., Literature in the Light of the Emblem, Toronto, 1998.

 

Daly, Peter M. / Manning, John (ed.), Aspects of Renaissance and Baroque Symbol Theory 1500-1700, New York, 1999.

 

Dammann, Rolf, Der Musikbegriff im deutschen Barock, Cologne, 1967.

 

Deubel, Volker, Tradierte Bauformen und lyrische Struktur. Die Veränderung elisabethanischer Gedichtschemata bei John Donne, Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, and Mainz, 1971.

 

Docherty, Thomas, John Donne, Undone, London and New York, 1986.

 

Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire. English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses, Ithaca and London, 1995.

 

Edwards, David, John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit, London, 2001.

 

 

Ellrodt, Robert, L'inspiration personelle et l'esprit du temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais, Paris, 1960.

 

Ernst, Ulrich, 'The Figured Poem. Towards a Definition of Genre', Visible Language, 20 (1986), pp,. 8-27.

 

Esch, Arno, Englische religiöse Lyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Tübingen, 1955.

 

Fähler, Eberhard, Feuerwerke des Barocks, Stuttgart, 1974.

 

Fowler, Alastair, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry, Cambridge, 1970.

 

Freeman, Rosemary, English Emblem Books, London, 1948, New York, 1978.

 

Friederich, Werner Paul, Spiritualismus und Sensualismus in der englischen Barocklyrik, Vienna, 1932.

 

Garber, Klaus (ed.), Europäische Barockrezeption, 2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1991.

 

Girouard, Mark, A Country House Companion, New Haven and London, 1987.

 

Glaser, Brigitte, The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Heidelberg, 2001.

 

Green, Henry, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers, New York, 1870, 1965.

 

Guss, Donald L., John Donne, Petrarchist. Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in The Songs and Sonets, Detroit, 1966.

 

Harbison, Robert, Reflections on Baroque, London, 2000.

 

Harris, Victor, All Coherence Gone, Chicago, 1949.

 

Hatzfeld, Helmut, 'Der Barockstil der religiösen Lyrik in Frankreich', Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 4 (1929), 30-60.

 

Henkel, Arthur / Schöne, Albrecht (Ed.), Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart, 1967.

 

Hocke, Gustav René, Die Welt als Labyrinth. Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst, Hamburg, 1957, Reinbek, 1991.

 

______, Manierismus in der Literatur, Hamburg, 1959.

 

Hollander, John, The Untuning of the Sky. Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500-1700, Princeton, 1961.

 

Holmes, Elizabeth, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy, Oxford, 1982.

 

Huizinga, Johan, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1941, London, 1982.

 

Hunt, John Dixon / Willis, Peter (ed.), The Genius of the Place. The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, London, 1975.

 

______, Andrew Marvell. His Life and Writings, Ithaca, N. Y., 1978.

 

Ingenhoff-Danhäuser, Monika, Maria Magdalena. Heilige und Sünderin in der italienischen Renaissance, Tübingen, 1984.

 

Kermode, Frank (ed.), Discussions of John Donne, Boston, 1962.

 

Kökeritz, Helge, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, New Haven, 1953, 1974.

 

Kremen, Kathryn R., The Imagination of the Resurrection. The Poetic Continuity of a Religious Motif in Donne, Blake, and Yeats, Lewisburg, 1972.

 

Kullmann, Thomas, 'Höfischkeit und Spiritualität: Dramatische Elemente in der Metaphysical Poetry', Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 35 (1994), 121-37.

 

Larson, Deborah Aldrich, John Donne and Twentieth-Century Criticism, Cranbury, London, and Ontario, 1989.

 

Leishman, James Blair, The Monarchy of Wit. An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne, London, 1952, etc.

 

______, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, London, 1961.

 

______, The Art of Marvell's Poetry, London, 1966.

 

Lennartz, Norbert, "The Unwashed Muse", MS prepared for publication.

 

Lessenich, Rolf, 'Die Rhetorik in der englischen Barockliteratur', in Die Macht des Wortes. Aspekte gegenwärtiger Rhetorikforschung, ed. Carl Joachim Classen / Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock, Marburg, 1992, pp. 63-80.

 

Lever, Julius Walter, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, London, 1956, 1968, 1978.

 

Lewalski, Barabara Kiefer, John Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise. The Creation of a Symbolic Mode, Princeton, 1973.

 

______, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Lyric, Princeton, 1979.

 

Limon, Jerzy, The Masque of Stuart Culture, Newark, 1990.

 

Lopera, José Alvarez (ed.), El Greco. Identity and Transformation, Milan, 1999.

 

Low, Anthony, The Reinvention of Love. Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton, Cambridge, 1993.

 

MacGregor, Neil (intr.), The Image of Christ, London: The National Gallery, 2000.

 

Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation, New Haven, 1954.

 

______, The Wit of Love, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1969.

 

Miner, Earl, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley, Princeton, 1969.

 

______, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, Princeton, 1971.

 

______, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden, Princeton, 1974.

 

Mitchell, William Fraser, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson. A Study of its Literary Aspects, London and New York, 1932.

 

Mönch, Walter, Das Sonett. Gestalt und Geschichte, Heidelberg, 1955.

 

Mourgues, Odette de, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry, Oxford, 1953.

 

Mueller, William R., John Donne: Preacher, Princeton, 1962.

 

Mullett, Michael A., Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558-1829, London, 1998.

 

______, The Catholic Reformation, London, 1999.

 

Nelson, Lowry, Baroque Lyric Poetry, New Haven and London, 1961.

 

Niederhoff, Burkhardt, "The Rule of Contrary": Das Paradoxon in der englischen Komödie der Restaurationszeit und des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, MS prepared for publication.

 

O'Malley, John W. / Bailey, Gauvin Alexander / Harris, Steven J. / Kennedy, T. Frank (ed.), The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, Toronto, 1999.

 

Orgel, Stephen / Strong, Roy (ed.), Inigo Jones, The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols., London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973.

 

Peterson, Robert T., The Art of Ecstasy. Teresa, Bernini and Crashaw, London, 1970.

 

Praz, Mario, Studi sul concettismo, Milan, 1934.

 

Raspa, Anthony, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance, Fort Worth, Texas, 1983.

 

Røstvig, Maren-Sofie, The Happy Man. Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols., Oslo, 1962.

 

Saintsbury, George, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, Oxford, 1905, 1968.

 

Schnurer, Gustav, Katholische Kirche und Kultur in der Barockzeit, Paderborn, 1937.

 

Schruff, Renate, Herrschergestalten bei Shakespeare. Untersucht vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Vorstellungen vom Herrscherideal, Tübingen, 1999.

 

Sedlmayr, Hans, Österreichische Barockarchitekur, Vienna, 1930.

 

______, Die Architektur Borrominis, Munich, 1939.

 

______, Verlust der Mitte, Salzburg, 1948, etc.

 

Selden, Raman, 'Hobbes and Late Metaphysical Poetry', Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 197-210.

 

Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, New York, 1974.

 

Sharp, Robert Lathrop, From Donne to Dryden. The Revolt against Metaphysical Poetry, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1940.

 

Skrine, Peter, The Baroque, London, 1978.

 

Smith, Albert James (ed.), John Donne. Essays in Celebration, London and Edinburgh, 1972.

 

______, The Metaphysics of Love. Studies in Renaissance Love Poetry from Dante to Milton, Cambridge, 1985.

 

______, Metaphysical Wit, Cambridge, 1991.

 

Smith, Hallett, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.

 

Smith, Nigel, Perfection Proclaimed. Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660, Oxford, 1989.

 

Stamm, Rudolf (ed.), Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters, Berne, 1956.

 

Steinberg, Leo, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, New York, 1983, Chicago, 1996.

 

Stewart, Stanley, The Enclosed Garden. The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, Madison, Wisconsin, 1966.

 

Strich, Fritz, Der Dichter und die Zeit, Berne, 1947.

 

Strong, Roy, The Renaissance Garden in England, London, 1979, 1998.

 

______, Britannia Triumphans: Inigo Jones, Rubens and Whitehall Palace, London, 1980.

 

______, The Artist and the Garden, New Haven and London, 2000.

 

Stuart, Stanley, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, Madison, Wisconsin, 1966.

 

Summerson, John Newenham, Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830, 1953, Harmondsworth, 1983.

 

Tandecki, Daniela, 'Der Garten als Symbol und Refugium göttlicher und menschlicher Liebe', Arcadia, 22 (1987), 113-141.

 

Thieme, Ulrich, Die Affektenlehre im philosophischen und musikalischen Denken des Barock, Celle, 1984.

 

Thurley, Simon, Whitehall Palace. An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240-1690, New Haven and London, 2000.

 

Tillyard, E. M. W., The Elizabethan World Picture, London, 1945, 1960.

 

Tuve, Rosemond, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, Chicago, 1947.

 

______, A Reading of George Herbert, London, 1952.

 

Unger, Leonard, Donne's Poetry and Modern Criticism, New York, 1950.

 

Vendler, Helen, The Poetry of George Herbert, Cambridge, Mass., 1975.

 

Wallerstein, Ruth C., Richard Crashaw. A Study in Style and Poetic Development, Madison, Wisconsin, 1959.

 

______, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic, Madison, Wisconsin, 1960.

 

Warnke, Frank J., Versions of Baroque, New Haven and London, 1972.

 

Weisbach, Werner, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation, Berlin, 1921.

 

Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, New Haven and London, 1963.

 

White, Helen C., The Metaphysical Poets, New York, 1936.

 

Whitlock, Baird W., 'The Baroque Characteristics of the Poetry of George Herbert', Cithara, 7 (1968), 30-40.

 

Wiggins, Peter DeSa, Donne, Castiglione and the Poetry of Courtliness, Bloomington, Indiana, 2001.

 

Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth-Century Background, London, 1934.

 

Williams, George Walton, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw, New York, 1963.

 

Williams, Gordon, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols., London, 1994.

 

Williamson, George, The Donne Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., 1930.

 

______, Seventeenth-Century Contexts, London, 1960.

 

Wolf, Philipp, Einheit, Abstraktion und literarisches Bewußtsein. Studien zur Ästhetisierung der Dichtung, zur Semantik des Geldes und anderen symbolischen Medien der frühen Neuzeit Englands, Tübingen, 1998.

 

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

English Baroque

 

Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds

 

 

Literature in the 1600s was full of talent – Shakespeare, Donne, Milton – but religious art was forbidden in Puritan churches, and mythology hadn’t caught on in the United Kingdom. This limited fine art to landscape, still life, and portrait painting, and the imported painters (Holbein, VanDyck) influenced a new generation of British art.

 

Hogarth

 

(1697-1764 William Hogarth) was influenced by political writers of the time, and invented a new genre – the comic strip.  He drew series of pictures that made fun of popular society of the day, whether it was the rich, poor, or politics.  He became the first British artist to be popular outside of England.

Hogarth criticized the view that all fine art was made in Europe, and that English artists were inferior in some way.  He denounced portrait painters and the Old Masters and being full of tricks and no substance.  He refused to make his subjects handsome, believing that their flaws were part of their charm and character, and as commissions were few, he started making satirical prints. 

He exposed horrible conditions of debtors’ prisons and hospitals for the insane in one series of prints, and was the very first political cartoonist, taking aim at corruption. His engravings were so popular and plagiarized that he lobbied for the Copyright Act of 1735 as protection for writers and artists.

 

British Soap Opera

 

His series “Marriage a la Mode” ridiculed the habit of improving one’ social standing by marrying into the nouveau riche (middle class with newly acquired wealth).

 

Marriage A-la-Mode: 1. The Marriage Settlement was the first of Hogarth's satirical moralizing series of paintings that took the upper echelons of society as its subject.

The story starts in the mansion of the Earl Squander who is arranging to marry his son to the daughter of a wealthy but mean city merchant. It ends with the murder of the son and the suicide of the daughter.

 

In the first scene the aged Earl (far right) is shown with his family tree and the crutches he needs because of his gout. The new house which he is having built is visible through the window.

 

The merchant, who is plainly dressed, holds the marriage contract, while his daughter behind him listens to a young lawyer, Silvertongue. The Earl's son, the Viscount, admires his face in a mirror. Two dogs, chained together in the bottom left corner, perhaps symbolize the marriage.

 

Hogarth's details, especially the paintings on the walls, comment on the action. A grand portrait in the French manner on the rear wall confronts a Medusa head, denoting horror, on the side wall.

National Gallery of Art, London

 

Marriage A-la-Mode: 2. The Tête à Tête, about 1743

The Graham Children, 1742

 

Gainsborough

(1727-88)

 

Thomas Gainsborough studied with Van Dyck, where he learned how to proportion figures to make them seem more regal by elongating them slightly.  He also learned how to pose people in natural, relaxed poses to make them more human and alive.  This was in contrasts to the stiff, conservative poses of other painters of the time, and he had many commissions to prove his success.

 

He liked painting landscapes best, but as these were not popular in England at this time, so he often painted portraits in front of beautiful landscapes.

Gainsborough helped establish the concept that nature was worthwhile as a subject, and not just as a background for portraits or historical paintings.  His work is easily confused with Reynolds, unless you note that Gainsborough was a natural, without pretensions or snobbery.

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

Othello, the Baroque, and Religious Mentalities
Anthony Gilbert
Lancaster University


Gilbert, Anthony. "Othello, the Baroque, and Religious Mentalities." Early Modern Literary Studies 7.2 (September, 2001): 3.1-21 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-2/gilboth.htm>.

In a recent article in this journal, Patricia Dorval has analysed, eloquently and vividly, the baroque interpretations of Othello in performance, on screen, by Oliver Parker. [1]The focus in the article is on the visual, liminal aesthetics of the production. It is an important reminder that all plays are performance texts, and that their full meaning can only be brought out by performance, and not by reading alone. The fact that a baroque interpretation of the play is entirely viable in performance is significant for my argument here. [2]For the baroque influence extends, I want to suggest, beyond the visual aesthetics of production to subject matter and topics in the actual text itself, and these are the central concerns of this essay.

In the most recent edition of the play, by E. A. J. Honigmann, we have now an invaluable collation of the original novella by Cinthio with the text of the play itself. [3]We see here clearly, for the first time, how many verbal echoes of the primary source are to be found in the text, and how far Shakespeare has exploited an intuitive reading of the original humanistic narrative. Shakespeare also adds what we may call a contemporary religious dimension to the play, completely lacking in the source. These religious mentalities in the play provide a richer motivation for character than the source offers. I want to suggest this is a typical baroque addition to the source. It is particularly appropriate for a performance of the play at court, on November 1 1604. [4]For the baroque is essentially a court genre of writing, with intellectual and political topics as the centre of interest. There is also the fact that James I was especially well-informed in religious matters, a central aspect of the baroque in its European context, and the play may have been written or rewritten [5]with this royal interest in mind. [6]In effect, I suggest, Othello is an early and original attempt at baroque European themes in English theatre, themes which had been developing on the continent for twenty years before the turn of the century. [7]The fact that most English accounts of later forms of the baroque have restricted the term to the Restoration of the sixteen sixties and beyond, need not be an insuperable objection. [8]On the contrary, some commentators on Shakespeare and early baroque have suggested that such late plays as The Tempest and The Winter's Tale are baroque in conception, and that there are baroque elements in earlier plays as well. [9]

What topics and themes, then, dominate Othello, and can they be interpreted as early baroque in the way they are handled? Perception, representation and truth, and their subjective uncertainties, are central themes in the play, and the emotional challenge of uncertainty is a central topic of baroque drama. There is also the problem of love and honour which haunts the play. For honour defines the social identity of the hero, and the loss of honour is the cause of his despair. Othello is trapped in a conflict of emotions between honour and humiliation, or dishonour, which in his view destroys his identity as the great general of the Venetian army. Another baroque strategy is the emphasis and focus on the audience's interpretation of the narrative. Dramatic irony is the primary device here. We are required as an audience to understand the distance between reality and appearance in Othello's distress. We are asked to reflect on the disparity between a false human engagement with reality, and the actual truth. We are driven to see the terrible absurdity of Othello's misunderstandings, as well as their plausibility, and consequences. But within the dramatic narrative, there is no resolving truth, until the end; there is a deliberate inability to simplify here, a refusal to engage with a clarifying truth, for there is no such clarifying truth for the victims in this narrative. Othello believes Iago, and the dramatic irony of the play establishes this as a terrible and false belief. But we as an audience see how persuasive this subjective and false 'truth' is. We are therefore encouraged by the narrative to view our own truths as less certain than they might have been. For what is truth, but a subjective construct rendered persuasive in the moment of its construction? There are, perhaps, no absolute truths. Again, is 'truth' merely a manipulative notion for covert purposes, as Iago's role in the play suggests? We experience the relativities of 'truth' in the last soliloquy of Othello. In his intended transgression, the murder of Desdemona, Othello confronts the tragically false, but apparently true, conflict between love and honour that motivates the action. He at last discovers that love and honour can be reconciled, but too late for his own survival and for that of his wife. The play closes on a profoundly moral insight into the complexities of appearance and reality. The cost of moral knowledge can be greater than life itself, if we are deceived by appearances and malicious persuasion. An audience of courtiers, who lived in a hotbed of gossip, intrigue and deception, the political world of the court, would recognise these insights. The baroque experience also addresses, in a more general way, the disenchantment and anguish arising from the emergence of new religious views of the world, putting into question the old religion of catholic Europe. [10]The play is, I shall argue, a study of human relations through a 'secularised' religious perspective.

This last point leads naturally to a consideration of the religious dimensions of the play. The discourse of all major speakers is saturated with religious ideas, sometimes explicitly. But to a much greater extent than has, I think, been noticed, we find religious ideas translated into apparently secular form. I should like to suggest that we take further the idea advanced by Stephen Greenblatt, that one of the types of symbolic acquisition of social practices from the real world to the stage is 'metaphorical acquisition.' [11]Here a religious practice is presented indirectly. He gives the example of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who 'consecrate' the marriage bed with field-dew. This he sees as representing the Catholic practice of sprinkling the marriage bed with holy water, although in the play it has merely a magical, and secular mode of signification. The ritual has been partially emptied of its original significance and social function, which could not be directly presented on stage, although 'magical' practices analogous to those of the Catholic church could be.

This 'analogical' use of religious ideas and beliefs explains a great deal about the mode of operation of Othello. It is a play that can best be understood, I suggest, by reference to the popular religious prejudices of the period in which it was written. These prejudices can only be recognised by implication today, but must have been so apparent to a contemporary audience that it was unnecessary to spell them out explicitly in the text. It is, I want to argue, a play about two contrasting modes of belief which have been transposed onto a popular humanist tale. The play deals, in effect, with prejudicial notions about papist belief, and calvinist critiques of that belief system, mediated and popularised into commonly held views that would find natural assent from a contemporary audience. These beliefs provide motivation and interiority to the central figures, without sacrificing their identity as historically located individuals. One of the chief obstacles in the analysis of religion in Othello has been the overwhelming critical assumption that if it is a religious narrative, it must be rooted in explicit Christian doctrines of a pseudo-allegorical kind. [12]But is it not likely that various contemporary religious mentalities could provide a dynamic source of dramatic confrontation in the play? By exploiting these mentalities, Shakespeare gives deeper motivation to the characters, transforming them from the sketchy figures in the novella to recognisable contemporary types for the Elizabethan audience.

Now my argument is that both Othello and Iago represent in various ways an extreme form of sectarian belief, if we take them as secular types of religious position. Othello is almost idolatrous in his love for Desdemona, and Iago refers to her as Othello's "god" at one point in the play (2.3.343). Desdemona is not of course a goddess, but she has an enormous power over his affections, which is pivotal in the play. Iago is talking alone here, and we need not think for once that there is some ulterior motive at work in what he says: there is an 'honest' prejudice here, based on anti-popish attitudes. Idolatry, and its associations with magic, was one of the common prejudices of the day against catholicism. The 'worship' of saints was one form of this, as was 'bread-worship' in the mass. [13]Othello's acceptance of the magic in the handkerchief is perhaps an example of the mindless acceptance of beliefs and practices merely because they were ancient, and in the context of a primitive 'barbarian' these beliefs can be read as mere superstition, but with a covert pseudo-sacred religious reference. [14]In the desacralised space of the Elizabethan stage this is as near as we are likely to get to an explicit reference to catholic 'superstition.' Othello appears to believe that his wooing of Desdemona is based on some covert idea of 'justification by works,' not in the sense of a religious absolution, but in the sense of inspiring pity and admiration in Desdemona. Again, a secular transposition of the sacred notion. But he comes to believe that his love is founded on trickery and illusion by Desdemona herself, for has she not deceived her own father in her sudden elopement, and has she not continued to betray her husband by her affair with Cassio? Although this seems a wholly secular consideration in the plot, the notion of trickery and deception is associated with the catholic mass and the confessional in contemporary protestant prejudice. Has what seemed an almost sacred love been transformed here into a sordid calculation? So Desdemona's association with the divine becomes tarnished with negative associations. Is she not in fact that "cunning whore of Venice" whom Othello mistakenly loved? Is her claim to virtue and innocence a mere sham? Does repentance not then require the austerities of an authoritarian religious discipline, such as the catholic church prescribed: "A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer, / Much castigation, exercise devout…" (3.4.40-1)? Shakespeare makes Othello seize on the traditional catholic response to such moral failings, because Othello, I suggest, is meant to appear a 'secular analogue' to the devout catholic. [15]He wishes to retain his faith in Desdemona at all costs. Yet his reason tells him that this is impossible. She becomes the goddess that failed. Is this an analogy to the discovery of corruption in the catholic church by Lutheran protestants? There is at the least a shocking loss of faith. And Othello is tormented by doubt and uncertainty, the classic dilemma of the baroque hero, who confronts schein und sein, appearance and reality, in its most painful form. [16]This challenge of uncertainty and newly-found doubt is also the classic dilemma of the catholic reformation itself. Is there a religious analogy here? There is, I must dare to assert, no 'extraordinary promptness' in Othello's reflections on Desdemona, but a slow, anguished rational analysis based on the incontrovertible fact that Cassio had many times been Othello's intermediary when he wooed her. [17]What would a man like Cassio be capable of in the corrupt world of Venice? He is obviously promiscuous, and unmarried. Othello can only speculate, governed by the hideous reasonableness of Iago's various general arguments. Othello undergoes a tragically false, but persuasive 'enlightenment,' a secular analogy to the 'enlightenment' of the protestant critique of catholicism.

Earlier in the play, the account he gives of his life is an ironic rebuttal of a suggestion of witchcraft, but his use of the terms associated with magic would have had satisfying associations in the minds of the audience. There is something suspect, many in an Elizabethan audience might think, and unnatural, about the wooing of Desdemona; Brabantio, who has charged Othello with witchcraft explicitly, calls the Duke's acceptance of Othello's explanation "equivocal." [18]There is perhaps some casuistry here, equivocation being a jesuitical sin in the eyes of protestants, and a whiff of popery in the references to witchcraft by Brabantio and Othello, even though they are uttered as allegations and rebuttals. But this is at the beginning of the play, when the audience is being drawn into an acceptance of their own unexamined prejudices, which they have later to reject and re-examine. [19]

Othello's love for Desdemona is made to have the associations of a false miracle, typical of the antics of catholicism (in protestant opinion), when he begins to doubt her. The glitter and extravagance of the rhetorical sublime, when he lands in Cyprus after the storm that wrecks the Turkish fleet, and might have drowned Desdemona, is perhaps too baroque and brittle to last. Nevertheless it becomes the final truth, and this is what we are to understand by it at the end of the play. The love of Othello and Desdemona is sublime, noble and authentic. It shares some of the mystical quality of the sacrament of marriage in the catholic church. Yet the marriage is soon shown to be flawed by a conflicted relationship between the protestant notion of equality in marriage, held by Desdemona, and the old-fashioned catholic notion of patriarchy, and the man as the head of the household. [20]The highly rhetorical passage of the baroque sublime follows the conversation of Iago and Desdemona, with its "critical" remarks from Iago. [21]His view of Cassio's gallantry towards his wife, Emilia, his satire on domesticity and women, and his cynical remarks later to Roderigo, the gull and fop, present a world opposed to traditional catholic values and social customs, in effect, the emergent world of puritan resentment. We stand in the presence of two quite distinct and opposed discourses: the language of the sublime and the language of doubt, scepticism, and domestic, rational 'enlightenment.' The two discourses interrogate each other. There is a deliberate structural opposition here, I suggest, which implies a narrative focus on the questions raised in the play. In fact, a contrast between the protestant world of domestic duty and its minor key, and the world of the catholic baroque and its heroic sublime. The baroque style is not heavily mined in the play, but used as a structural contrast to the much more domestic and local events of daily life. Shakespeare knows the fragility of the fashionable public style of speech; it cannot bear too heavy a load of narrative, 'world of the play,' reference. Othello's account of the origins of the handkerchief, another example of this discoursal antithesis, combines, in a contrastive fugal pattern, domestic detail and the mystical sublime of an empowering love. There is magic in the web of the handkerchief, perhaps a secular analogy to the transubstantiation of the host and wine in the catholic mass. Marriage and human love acquire a sacramental value in the context, but only for a moment. And the handkerchief becomes transformed again, by tragic irony, into a visual argument for Desdemona's adultery. We might further suggest that the baroque sublime in the play is rendered strange and almost alienating, like Othello's language itself, making him the "extravagant and wheeling stranger/Of here and everywhere." Could this notion of making things strange be Shakespeare's most original insight into the new dramatic role of the baroque? For it reminds us always of Othello's difference from others, by exploiting a linguistic difference, ("bombast circumstance" in Iago's terms), marking out his own speech from the rest of the characters. They speak for the most part in the language of contemporary English, with its range of formal and informal registers. Iago is particularly clever at varying his language across the formal/informal register to suit his listeners. He is clearly a sophisticated speaker, whose knowledge of fashionable rhetorical strategies is persuasive and considerable. But he can also play the rough-spoken military man when he wants to.

In the last soliloquy before Othello kills Desdemona, we see the confusion of a mentality deprived of moral knowledge. The so-called enlightenment (which is the reverse), that Iago has achieved in Othello, is unable to destroy his love for her, and the images he uses are at once falsifying and truthful. They express the conflicted torment between duty and love, a typical baroque dilemma. This conflict of view implies an emergent rejection of Iago and his clever destructive visual imagery. But it doesn't prevent the murder. Again, popish attitudes to sex are nicely exploited in the immediate motive for killing Desdemona: papists were held to tolerate a notorious sexual laxity, and the revenues of the church from the Roman stews were often cited. Desdemona must die "else she'll betray more men." [22]Iago has pointed this up already in his earlier remark, "I know our country disposition well: / In Venice they do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands. Their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown." (3.3.205-7). Desdemona is condemned for a typical popish practice, in the eyes of the calvinist. But Othello is wrong, and has merely accepted a common prejudice against papists. The effect of this recollection by Othello is to expose the damage prejudice does to innocent catholics, for it is obviously a mistaken view in the knowledge of the audience. Iago has also added here a gibe at the confidentiality of the confessional, which was regarded as a sign of hypocrisy on the part of papists. The guilt of any sin could be assuaged by a simple act of external religious observance, according to anti-popery prejudice. This is a popular protestant misunderstanding of the confessional.

We see Othello, then, gradually infected by the scepticism of Iago, and coming to see his love for Desdemona as a false miracle of utter hypocrisy, a form of idolatry from which he must escape to achieve enlightenment, rationality and the sounder knowledge of a calvinist/protestant belief. Yet Othello is at the last able to see that this is a false enlightenment, based on a travesty of his true beliefs, and he is able to recover the divine vision, and make a final gesture that asserts a spiritual truth at the cost of his own martyrdom. For his death asserts the innocence and value of Desdemona, his love for her, and his belief in their love for each other. The notion of the sublime and its transcendental values has been recuperated, after the travails of the baroque saint/hero in his moments of doubt and disbelief. The audience have experienced their own prejudices against catholicism through the eyes of Iago and Othello, and have, perhaps, been forced to recognise a sublime truth. Evil may corrupt, but it cannot finally destroy all. The pearl may have been flung away in ignorance of its true value, but ignorance has been replaced with moral knowledge, the loss is understood, and the moral consequences accepted.

Can the recovery of full moral knowledge at the very last really be interpreted as the consequence of a mind unconsciously trapped by a racist ideology? For that paradoxical suggestion is, in effect, the confused conclusion some modern critics draw from Othello's death. [23]He has internalised the racism of Venice, it is argued, and obeyed the implicit racist social order to expunge the alien from that white world. It was not in historical fact a wholly white world. But the "turbanned Turk" he refers to at the moment of death is a figure of religious significance to him, an infidel, a "circumcised dog," an alien Mohammedan. An enemy of Venice he had a duty to kill. So, surely, Othello affirms in his death his loyalty to Venice, and his sense of a betrayal not only of the Venetian world and Desdemona, but of a religious truth as well. Can he really be thought to kill himself, as another infidel? Can moral knowledge be simply a construct from social knowledge? Can a Shakespearean hero die deceived to the end? Could Shakespeare himself have believed this, as an Elizabethan? It is an extraordinarily modern view. For Othello is clearly, I suggest, a catholic conformist. His last speech and his death are theatrical moments beyond all reason and expectation; his words define and contextualise his action as martyrdom, not suicide. He must at once accept his guilt and the consequent punishment, and affirm his recovered love for Desdemona. A martyr dies to make a statement about some transcendental truth more valuable than life itself. Since Othello nowhere shows any inclination to protestant views of marriage, or the scepticism about Venice that Iago displays, and seems to show in a secularised form many catholic beliefs, it is surely easier to see him as a secular version of a catholic martyr. As a martyr, he must explain his actions and give meaning, however paradoxical, to his last moments.

Othello is not cheering himself up, nor is he indulging in vainglory. These are stabs in the dark at an explanation that is much more complex. Shakespeare's sense of the theatre as an explanatory narrative, rendering transparent what would otherwise have been an unintelligible, irrational act is, I suggest, the purpose of this last scene. But this at once gives authority to the unconscious motives of Othello, whatever he says now. Or does it? "Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice" seems to have been ignored by theorists preoccupied with racism. For them, Othello kills himself out of awareness of an internalised Venetian, racist contempt for blacks. But this is not what he says, and to defend this view, we have to ignore or treat as mere irrelevance, or as rationalisation, what he does say. Yet what do we expect him to say in context: can such a terrible moment produce clarity and explicitness? Does not the crisis of the moment reach down into the inner depths of Othello's very being, and expose a humiliating truth? But if Othello dies a deluded and confused figure, would that not rob him of all dignity and nobility, turning him into the pitiful victim of a vicious, hostile society? But perhaps not: a victim is not necessarily ignoble or contemptible, except in the racist terms of others. It is possible to defend the racist view, and argue that Othello in his death exposes something that he is unaware of. His actions then would speak louder than his own words. His words, it could be suggested, are a mere pretext for a deeper and more terrible racist guilt, which society has made him accept and internalise without realising it. But Othello is clearly not deluded in his recovered belief in his wife, and confronts at least some of the truth about his actions at the last. But perhaps he believes out of awareness that he was unworthy of his white wife, and so must punish himself for that. There may well be a racist element of internalisation here, but I cannot see it as a major part of Othello's actions. It may well be unconscious. For Othello now, again, loves and believes in Desdemona, even if, at the same time, according to the racist argument, accepting implicitly his inferior status as a black Moor despised and rejected by Venice. As a baroque hero he has the courage to recognise and accept the tragic error. But is not love and honour more important to him than racist attitudes? Is not Othello a general first and a black second? What are the priorities here in his own conscious mind? Again, because racism is something outside the consciousness of the victims of racism in many cases, it could be argued that he has absorbed, without knowing it, a racist contempt for himself. But has not Othello recovered his self esteem, even at this late moment, and shown himself to be a courageous person without fear? Again, doubt arises, for although he is a successful general on any account, is the public role enough to justify his actions? In spite of all arguments about a non-textual unconscious, which can neither be demonstrated nor rejected by an appeal to the text, it remains a fact that only Iago voluntarily uses racist language in the play, while Roderigo imitates him; Brabantio calls Iago a "profane wretch," "a foul-mouthed despicable person," a "villain," and does not appear to agree with the racist slanders. Perhaps he would do so in private. There is an undercurrent of the lingua mordace of the Italian streets in this early scene. [24]And this is where in the play the racist prejudice is planted and seeded, for it is not evident in the rest of the play. [25]Readers today can carry over the early racist remarks into the rest of the play, as we are all inclined to do. Perhaps we should not indulge in the old 'New Criticism' idea of the organic coherence of the text, and let the text, in its fault lines, speak for itself in all its ambiguity. There may be no intended consistency in the matter of its supposed racism.

If there is a cluster of 'secularised' catholic ideas associated with Othello, when we turn to Iago we find, if we historicise his attitudes and remarks in contemporary terms, another set of ideas which have a distinctly protestant flavour. He represents an oppositional figure in the play, a typical early 'puritan' figure at the turn of the century. [26](The Arden editor now suggests a new date of late 1601-2 for Othello.) [27]Because he is an 'ethical' puritan, "honest Iago," he does not need to be explicitly named as a puritan or calvinist. [28]He believes, or affects to believe, in a subjective form of reason which he uses to advance an extreme and destructive hostility to the papist world around him. [29]The mercantile city of Venice had been particularly astute in keeping excessive catholic and protestant influence at bay during the sixteenth century, and was virtually an independent enclave in the catholic south of Europe. Hence the plausible presence of a puritan or calvinist amongst catholics in the city. It may be significant that Iago claims he was supported by "three great ones of the city" in his application to Othello, for although this may refer to the Savii Grandi, or 'ministers of state,' it could also refer, for a contemporary Elizabethan audience, by a semantic glissage, to the puritan grandees of the city of London, who would be quite likely to support such a calvinist artisan as Iago. They would have met such people through the puritan classis in their local church. Thomas Middleton, we may recall, had many such patrons later in the century, from 1615 onwards. [30]Most of Shakespeare's patrons in his later career were of course catholics, which tends to support the pro-catholic tendencies I claim to see in the play.

What evidence, then, is there for Iago's 'ethical' puritanism, and can it be demonstrated in the text? I want to suggest here that everything Iago says is directly related to the presentation of 'ethical' puritanism. It cannot be accidental that most of the quotations from the Bible in the play, or allusions to it, come from Iago. [31]When we first discover Iago onstage in the first scene, he is busy explaining to Roderigo his resentments against Othello in the matter of the promotion of Cassio. This would immediately have struck a contemporary audience as the typical whingeing of an 'ethical' puritan. For puritans resented the notion of careerism, and condemned it as ungodly. [32]Rising through the ranks, by the influence of supporters, implied a positive self-regard, which puritans emphasised one could never claim as a certainty. Iago complains of "preferment" which is taking the place of the "old gradation," where each man stood to move upwards automatically, in turn. This had nothing to do with merit but with years of service. Had not Calvin demonstrated the total depravity of man, without the intervention of divine grace, whose actions were invisible to man because of his corrupted will and deficient self-knowledge? And one could never be certain of divine intervention. Divine grace was unknowable directly, and could only be seen by its indirect effects. However, these could be calculated by the famous syllogismus practicus, or 'practical syllogism', much employed by calvinists. The argument went like this:

All who are elected exhibit certain signs as a consequence of that election.
But I exhibit these signs.
Therefore I am among the elect. [33]

It is significant for my account of Othello that this is exactly the argument Iago employs in his first extended utterance onstage. Again, it is transferred to a secular context and emptied of sacred meaning. Iago clinches, to his satisfaction, his own claims for recognition by saying of Cassio, "but he, sir, had th'election / And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof / At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds, / Christian and heathen, must be be-leed and calmed." ( 1.1.26-29). The puritan mentality and characteristic mode of thinking is evident, but transformed ironically into a secular argument. The "election" is to the post of lieutenant, and the "proofs" are not of success in the world, but of loyal service in battle. [34]We can add a further point that confirms the 'ethical' puritan stance: Cassio is attacked for having no practical experience of battle, "mere prattle without practice / Is all his soldiership." (1.1.25-26). "Practice," or praxis, the demonstration of social virtues in action is a key notion in puritan thinking. Iago uses the discourse of puritanism for his own advantage here. [35]Another puritanical comment may lurk in the obscure reference to Cassio as "A fellow almost damned in a fair wife," for puritans were preoccupied with the potentially sinful aspects of married relations. Sexual relations were not for pleasure but for the production of children only. The fact that later in the play Shakespeare seems to have forgotten that Cassio is married need not worry us too much, especially if the play was written backwards. [36]It's a minor lapse, but the reference here is consistent with Iago's thinking at this moment. [37]

Later in the first scene, Iago boasts to Roderigo of his deceptive nature, and his intention to serve Othello for his own advantage only. (1.1.40-64). Here again, a puritan or calvinist stance may be detected. He is virtually admitting to being a hypocrite puritan. Where did this cultural strategy come from; was it simply the stance of a disaffected servant? Or can it be that it derives from a wider cultural tendency? The insistence on outward conformity only in Elizabeth's religious policy meant a widening gap between inner convictions and observable behaviour. It is here that the explanation must surely lie for Iago's self-congratulation. He is pretty sure he can get away with his strategy. As Peter Lake remarks of Elizabeth's religious policy: "This, at least potentially, opened up a gap between the inward and the outward, the real inner convictions of a person and his or her outward behavior, a space which, it seemed to many contemporaries, could be exploited for all sorts of dissimulation and pretence by the faithless and the unscrupulous. Here, rather than in some nebulous practice called 'Renaissance self-fashioning', may be a major source of the contemporary obsession with dissimulation and the de facto atheism of the Machiavel." [38]The baroque also has a preoccupation with deception and uncertainty, as we have already seen.

An important passage on the calvinist notion of the will occurs in Iago's conversation with Roderigo in 1.3.320 ff. Here Iago is urging, in a typical puritan way, that Roderigo should take practical steps to advance his cause, translating belief into action (again in a secularised context, for he is encouraging Roderigo to commit adultery), and spend some of his cash prudently on the project, by improving his appearance, and entertaining more lavishly in his pursuit of Desdemona. Again, a sacred notion of praxis is perhaps translated ironically into a secular context. Iago's speech is a mock sermon, [39]but it contains in its colloquial form certain elements that reflect calvinist thinking. The will is capable of discrimination between good and evil, but it is wholly corrupted by original sin in fallen man. Only through the intervention of divine grace can it make the right choices. Human will opposed God's will in all matters; it suffered from concupiscence, a perpetual disorder in all our actions. [40]Love, to Iago, is "merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will" (1.3.335-6). Here the "will" is clearly a matter of "concupiscence," or false desire. When he first speaks, Iago refers to the will as an ethical force (1.3.321 ff), and this may cause confusion. But Iago is referring in the first context to the ability of the will to choose between right and wrong, supported by the reason when it is inspired by divine grace. The will is the servant of reason when it acts rightly.

The total depravity of man, without the saving grace of God, as a general calvinist principle, may well also account for Iago's readiness to convince himself of Othello's and Cassio's adultery with his wife ( 1.3.385-89 and 2.1.284-310). Both ideas may be "mere suspicion," but Iago is willing to consider that even he himself is guilty of lustful thoughts about Desdemona (2.1.289-91). So depraved and distorted is the calvinist view of the human condition, and human relationships. And it is sexual behaviour that Iago constantly shows interest in, as when he comments on Cassio's friendly, but entirely polite, exchanges with Desdemona (2.1.167-77). Does Shakespeare write here from a sense of the difference calvinism or puritanism makes to the perception of others? Othello is a play based almost completely around mutual misperceptions, deliberate distortions of perception, and their consequences.

Iago's success in disgracing Cassio is another instance of 'puritan' attitudes in the play (2.3.45 ff.). For puritanism was particularly concerned about the increasing secularisation of society, and the unacceptable social practices that went with it. Piety of a personal kind was not enough; it should be openly displayed in an oppositional stance to society and its conduct. Professor Patrick Collinson has something apt to say on this: "Yet a Puritanism which was no longer in contention, no longer setting itself against the stream, would cease to be in any meaningful sense Puritanism." [41]As Iago says, "I am nothing if not critical" (2.1.119). By which he means, 'censorious, fault-finding.' [42]Another recent commentator adds, "I shall use Puritan and ...puritanism to denote the aggressive, reformative, and hence socially disruptive aspects of zealous Protestantism. Puritan, as I understand the term, implies a will to impose certain standards upon society as a whole. Puritanism entails hostility to the traditional culture as well as enthusiasm for sermons and predestinarian theology. A man of irreproachable personal piety who nevertheless has no objection to his neighbors' boozing on the Sabbath or fornicating in haylofts is not a Puritan. A Puritan who minds his own business is a contradiction in terms." [43]Iago does not mind his own business at all. He intervenes in Othello's marriage; he destroys Cassio's reputation; he deceives Roderigo; he brings about the death of Desdemona. He is at war with the social order of society. And being a hypocrite ethical puritan he can justify this in terms of justice to himself. As Professor Collinson remarks elsewhere, "Puritanism was more of a process and relationship than it was state or entity." [44]Iago's dealings with others are the centre of the play, and his manipulative techniques are the main focus of the action. He is a character engaged in process, without any clear position on anything; he responds to opportunity with lightning quickness, but remains an enigma. There is a general resentment against society in his stance, and his hatred of the Moor and Cassio is only a particular symptom of it.

It can be no accident that puritan surveys of their ministers are concerned mainly with the leisure of the parson rather than his labours, about his attendance at the alehouse more than his work as a farmer, as many of them were. [45]For this was evidence of an undesirable association with, and submergence in, secular culture. Perhaps it is significant then that the disgrace of Cassio through drinking is not mentioned in Shakespeare's main source for the play. [46](And it is not mentioned again in acts III, IV, and V; further evidence of the play having been written in two halves.) Iago himself is opposed to the gallantries and polite talk of Cassio, especially in regard to Desdemona. He stands outside the officer class, and also despises the gull Roderigo for his foolish obsession with Desdemona. All these commonplace ideas of social resentment and rejection characterise the puritan at work in society.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Iago's speech is his use of Ramistic logic to distort reality and persuade others of the truth of his own perceptions. [47]Ramism was a particularly protestant and puritan form of rhetorical argument, favoured by many Cambridge puritan preachers. [48]Iago even goes so far as to employ the Ramistic method of crypsis or prudence in his persuasion of Othello in act III. This was distinct from the normal method of presentation of arguments in Ramistic logic, the method of nature, which proceeded from general points or axioms to particular, less obvious, and more detailed points. In the method of crypsis, or the "craftie and secrete methode," as an early translator of Ramus describes it, [49]the speaker proceeds by indirection and dissimulation from apparently casual and disconnected particular points until his listener has gathered the threads of his argument together himself, and so constructed the concealed general argument in his own mind. [50]Ramistic logic was concerned with the persuasive presentation of arguments and had no ability to test the truth of axioms against uncertain evidence. It was a fundamental break with the Aristotelian distinction between logic and rhetoric, as Barbara J. Shapiro explains: "For Aristotle, if one began from premises that were certain and proceeded by arguments that were logically correct, one arrived at a demonstration of truth. This was the realm of logic. If one began from plausible but uncertain premises and proceeded by logical argument, one had entered the realm of dialectic. Many humanists believed that this was a distinction without a difference because both involved the same operations. Accordingly, dialectic became the appropriate means of handling all kinds of argument, and all kinds of subject matters." [51]In this way Ramus' logic became a form of rhetorical discourse that lent itself to the manipulation of words without being able to relate thought to experience or reality. [52]A thought, to Ramus, was a matter of 'natural reason,' an intuitive act as natural as the way the eye sees colour. If a thought occurs to you, it must by definition be true, otherwise it could not be thought at all. Obviously, observation and reflection play a part, and correct distorted thinking which is visually or evidently absurd. But often observation is ambiguous, and we see this clearly in Cassio's alleged guilty disappearance when Othello and Iago approach as he is talking to Desdemona. Cassio is not in any way guilty of improper advances to Desdemona, yet Iago can construct a plausible interpretation of his action. The idea of a thought as 'natural reason,' available to all, and something we see rather than analyse, perhaps explains Iago's reference to "ocular proof" as the final test of Desdemona's infidelity. This kind of proof would seem true to a Ramistic rhetorician, mainly because there is no way in Ramism to distinguish between true and false arguments. But the difficulty of obtaining such proof means that Iago carefully warns against it (is "ocular proof" another example of Iago's use of swanking technical jargon to give him a spurious authority with Othello?). Iago uses instead 'inartificial' arguments: testimony of Cassio's dream, the departure of Cassio from Desdemona as he and Othello approach. These inartificial arguments in Ramistic terms rely on the integrity of the reporter or observer, and cannot require any other proof but that. Iago weaves a web of suspicion with no other 'proof' than his own false reputation for honesty in Othello's eyes. He then engages in persuasive argument that distorts the truth, and isolates Othello from his own knowledge of Desdemona. Othello has a distorted visual image of her, and cannot rid himself of that evil construction. He is deceived by the apparent integrity of the ethical puritan. He cannot confront Desdemona with his suspicions, so they grow and become real to him. He struggles with an internal doubt that poisons his mind. He too is the victim of the fashionable notion of rhetoric, logic and truth that was so widely admired at the time. The handkerchief, that appears to be the Aristotelian 'clincher,' is just another 'visual argument' in Ramistic logic, for it seems to confirm the infidelity of his wife. Yet the significance of the handkerchief is entirely constructed by Iago. Perhaps Shakespeare knew of Ramus' famous remark that everything that Aristotle said was false, and applied it here. If a contemporary audience could recognise Iago as a Ramist, they might have seen the irony of this apparent Aristotelianism. This is perhaps yet another example of Shakespeare's acute exploitation of contemporary fashion.

If, as I have suggested, Othello depends to a much greater extent on the religious mentalities of the time, translated into secular social types, than has been previously recognised, we need no longer regard it as a covert allegory of a strictly doctrinal Christian form. We can however retain the significance of the religious dimensions of the play. The study of conflicting subjectivities in the play may derive from religious beliefs, but it is clear there is a distinctly different modality of borrowing for each of the main characters. The catholic baroque hero, Othello, is less obviously constructed in terms of a religious position than Iago and Desdemona. His character is formed by a sense of honour and duty typical of the baroque hero. Yet he is associated in a secular way with many ideas that have a catholic origin. The primitive, alien elements in Othello's speech and thinking, for example in relation to the history of the handkerchief, his clear belief in old-fashioned catholic notions of authoritarian religious discipline, his belief in justification by works, and his baroque ostentation in language, are sufficient indications of his difference from his wife and Iago. Iago is more overtly calvinist in his social outlook, both in his professional outlook as a soldier in relation to Cassio, and in his general philosophy of life, as we might call it. He frequently introduces religious notions, commonplace as they may be, into his conversation. But significantly, not so much with Othello. In the persuasion scene he avoids all religious references, and focuses on a secular rhetoric of a fashionable kind, as we have seen. But this rhetoric was known to be entirely protestant, constructed by a famous protestant martyr. Desdemona speaks in a vigorous plain language with a strong ethical dimension. This is the language of the practical housewife, and establishes the domestic world of the play. Yet here too, as has been shown by a recent commentator, the language and social outlook are derived from a conflicted religious discourse of contemporary protestant thinkers. [53]Shakespeare, then, seems to have made the old story of Cinthio relevant to an Elizabethan audience by modernising the characters, and transforming them into social types that could gain instant recognition from an English audience of the day. The plot has been refashioned as a baroque study of innocence, deception, and betrayal, but the play as a whole carries conviction by its subtle exploration of contrastive and irreconcileable religious mentalities. The audience undergoes the anguish and disenchantment of the classic baroque experience. And there has always been a complex relationship between the baroque and religious ideas, for the baroque as a genre is concerned with the loss of belief, the necessity to recover that belief, and the desperate need to overcome a moment of religious doubt. But as we see in all examples of baroque, in literature and art, this religious doubt is presented in secular terms, in vivid, realistic images that attempt to counter the reforming zeal of a bleaker and more abstract protestant world. Shakespeare demonstrates in Othello, I suggest, a conflicting order of religious discourses in society that cannot be resolved by any totalising or simplifying strategy, such as allegorical Christian interpretations might appear to offer. These secularised religious discourses convey, and construct, the characters' mentalities, the way they see the world. Such discourses explain the events of the plot in a way that renders redundant any further explanation, for they are fundamentally opposed to each other in almost every social and religious aspect. Shakespeare uses them to imply the social animosities and tensions that arise quite naturally when people of such contrastive outlooks live together.

Notes

1. Patricia Dorval, "Shakespeare on Screen: Threshold Aesthetics in Oliver Parker's Othello," Early Modern Literary Studies, 6.1 (May, 2000), 1.1-15.

2. We must also take into account the fact that all of Shakespeare's plays are capable of substantial reinterpretation in performance, as has been shown by Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, London, 1992. But the baroque interpretation of Othello seems so natural, unforced, and illuminating that it carries a compelling authenticity.

3. E. A. J. Honigmann, (ed.), Othello, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Edition, 1997, Appendix 3, "Cinthio and Minor Sources," 368-87. All future references to the text of Othello are to this edition.

4. See Honigmann, op. cit., Appendix 1, 344. This is unlikely to have been the first performance of the play, which Honigmann argues convincingly in the Appendix, "would have been performed not later than March 1603, a terminus ante quem that again points to 1602 as the probable year of the play's first performance," (ibid., 350), for Elizabeth was ill on the 19 March in 1603, and plague broke out in London in April, and continued for the rest of that year, which almost certainly led to the abandoning of playing for that year. (ibid.) We might speculate that since James was the only obvious successor to the throne, a play like Othello could have been written in 1601-2, or revised (see note 5 below), with that virtual certainty in mind.

5. See further E. A. J. Honigmann, The Texts of 'Othello' and Shakespearian revision, London, 1996.

6. Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character: Polemics and Polarities in early Seventeenth-century English Culture, Los Angeles, 1989, 18, makes the apt remark "Puritans, like Catholics, were important parts of the stage scenery composing this king's world view"; see further R. Ashton, (ed.), James I by his Contemporaries: An account of his career and character as seen by some of his contemporaries, London, 1969, 4: "He discusses literary matters, and especially Theology, willingly." A wider political view of James's religious strategy can be found in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, "The Ecclesiastical Policy of James I," Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169-207.

7. See F. J. Warnke, Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven and London, 1972, 1-2, where he suggests 1580-1610 as an early phase of the baroque in Europe; further references passim. See further, D. Scarisbrick, Baroque: the Age of Exuberance, London, 1973, and P. N. Skrine, The Baroque: literature and culture in 17th century Europe, London, 1978. Skrine refers to Othello on 71-2, and comments that "Shakespeare anticipated the tastes and preoccupations of the century, as its admiration for his play bears out," although he thinks the strangulation of Desdemona is "an outcome far removed from that which baroque taste was to demand of its heroes." But what of the idea of the 'sacrificial hero'and the interest in martyrdom and sacrifice in the baroque of later years, discussed by Warnke, op. cit., Chapter 8, 187-204? Desdemona's innocence and Othello's 'martyrdom' for the truth of her love for him, against the lies of Iago, seems entirely within the baroque traditions of violent narrative closure. For the European tastes of the court of James, see L. L. Peck, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, Cambridge, 1991.

On the particular point of Othello's death, new historicists have spent much energy on promoting the 'racist' elements in the text, reducing the noble Moor to a black barbarian who has internalised the racial hatred of the Venetian state. As a good Venetian citizen, Othello finds it is his duty to destroy himself as the alien within Venetian society. (A. Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, Oxford, 1992, 33-35, argues this very point.) Sinfield suggests that the civilised and the barbaric are not very different from each other in most states, and by this deconstructive move eliminates all possibility of any moral interpretation of the text. (Morality becomes, from this point of view, part of the Ideological State Apparatus to keep state violence 'legitimate,' and other forms of violence 'illegal.' Can all moral values be as arbitrary as this seems to imply? Is Othello's violence to himself simply an ideological act of political conformity, robbing him of all nobility and tragic self-knowledge? Does his death not confirm something positive, his recovered belief in his wife, even as it condemns his betrayal of Desdemona? Helen Gardner, in ''Othello: A Retrospect, 1900-67," Shakespeare Survey, 21 (1968), 1-11, describes Othello's suicide as an "act of justice" [6] now that he sees the truth at last. ) Yet Othello becomes, in this ideological reading, merely the dupe of racial state prejudice against blacks. The full meaning of the tragedy seems in this approach, to some readers at least, flattened and trivialised. But in fact all the racist comments in the play come from Iago to begin with, even if Brabantio and Othello, encouraged by Iago, consider them at times. Gratiano, Lodovico and Cassio betray no such prejudices. Iago's animosity to others relies notably on the visual for its Ramistic invention of argument, and this may be the immediate rhetorical reason for his references to Othello's appearance. (For the emphasis on visual ordering of argument in Ramistic 'logic' or rhetoric, [Ramus confuses both], see W. J. Ong, Ramus, method, and the decay of dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1958. This is an austere work of massive formal scholarship; we have to imagine Shakespeare's intuitive response to Ramistic 'logic' as a popular and accessible way of thinking in a pseudo-intellectual way, favoured by tradesmen as well as university students and professors, particularly at Cambridge in England in the 1580s. Ramism was the most popular form of Protestant rhetoric, as opposed to more formal Aristotelian forms favoured by catholic writers. Shakespeare must have known this. He would also have known that Ramism never developed in Italy at all, mainly because Ramus was known as a protestant martyr throughout Europe.) Iago, in his social outlook, and use of this protestant 'rhetoric,' is probably a calvinist figure in the play, as I hope to show below, but Calvin himself displays no racial 'prejudice' in his writings, apart from the traditional Augustinian reference to Africans and Asiatics being more quick-witted than westerners; see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, (ed.) J. T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles, Philadelphia, 1960, repr. 1975, IV. vi. 16. (Perhaps this idea of quick-witted superiority lies behind Iago's strategy to persuade Othello in the temptation scene, for Othello has to follow up the implications of Iago's remarks. Iago avoids the direct statement that Cassio and Desdemona are having an affair that probably started before her marriage, when Cassio was a go-between for Othello. Mainly because, as we know, this is untrue, and so Iago wants it to be something Othello infers for himself; Iago does not want to risk making an explicit allegation that he knows could then be directly challenged. So Iago's view of Othello may be a calvinist one, in his direct dealings with him. To Brabantio and Roderigo, Iago can afford, he may think, to be contemptuously racist in his references to Othello.) See further, for possible Italian influence on the social aspects of language in the play, Note 24 below.

However, racism remains only part of the play's meaning, and cannot explain the 'martyrdom' of Othello as an affirmation of a sacred truth, his love for Desdemona. Corneille remarked that the theme of a fine tragedy should always be "au delà du vraisemblable" (cited in L. L. Schücking, '"The Baroque Character of the Elizabethan Tragic Hero," Proceedings of the British Academy, XXIV (1938), 85-111, 103. The 'martyrdom' of Othello is tragic, almost impossible to accept, unless on banal racist or legal grounds (he's guilty anyway), for modern readers. But we should resist this reductive response. Othello's death has an emotional truth: this is the way such a man would go. It is a strangely dis/honourable death, beyond all reason and likelihood, highly theatrical and contrived, yet with a powerful rationale of its own; it transfixes the audience by its horror, by its moral truth, and by its transgression of conventional categories of meaning and morality. There is a final affirmation here of loyalty, love, and belief in another human being; "Whatever cries in man beyond the last sea." Othello seeks to gain no merit by his action; he merely affirms his belief in Desdemona, and his knowledge of his own guilt. He also appears to seek no religious salvation by merit here, for the tone of his last speech is entirely secular. (The religious motive is suggested by I. Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1960, 113.) (The theatricality of Othello's last speech has been famously criticised by Eliot, but isn't the idea that Othello is 'cheering himself up' a misreading of baroque taste and ostentation?) The dramatic moment is, I suggest, secular, a soldier's end, but an honourable death in paradoxically dishonourable circumstances. Ideology translates this paradox into 'bourgeois individualism,' if not racism, and destroys the transcendental moment by denying human identity, except as the product of an almost impersonal socio-political process. The study of ideology in literary texts tends to destroy their affects, and simplify the complexity of meaning in the dramatic moment.

8. For example, Skrine, op. cit., 15: "But it was only with the return of king and nobility in 1660 that England suddenly and with an upsurge of dramatic activity established a type of theatre that does indeed reflect continental Europe's baroque obsession with the underlying theatricality of life." It is always tidier to have clear divisions, and historically precise moments of development, in literary taste, (and perhaps in all intellectual discussion), but the theatricality of Othello can be recognised in such scenes as Othello's observation of Cassio talking to Iago, borrowed from Cinthio (4.1.75-143), or Iago's interpretation of Cassio's embarrassed departure as Othello approaches Desdemona (3.3.29-244). Othello's defence of himself before the Venetian senate, and his last speech, are highly theatrical, ostentatious, and self-conscious forms of utterance. He is deeply aware of the need to construct, and perform, a public identity which others can recognise. Skrine himself refers to Othello in terms that argue for some baroque elements in the work (see above, n. 7). But in general, the notion of the baroque in Shakespeare has been approached with the greatest caution. I suspect that this is because the term is thought to be more related to art history than to literary genre; it was first proposed by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin in the nineteenth century: see Warnke's discussion, op. cit., Chap. 1, "Terms and Concepts," 1-20. Precision is not always possible with terms for literary genre, but that does not mean they have no useful value in interpretation.

9. P. Cruttwell, "Shakespeare and the Baroque," Shakespeare Jahrbuch, XCVII (1961), 100-08, refers to A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest as plays that have elements of the baroque, but he arrives at a cautious conclusion that the Shakespearean baroque was limited by the isolation of England as an island from the continent, by the 'puritanical' English resistance to the blending of the fleshly and the spiritual, the sexual and the devotional, and by the fact that Shakespeare appealed to popular audiences more than the court. All these points, I suggest, seem to be challenged by Othello. Shakespeare based his play on a source text set in Venice, so encouraging a European baroque interpretation of the play; the fleshly and the spiritual are clear centres of tension in the drama, between Iago's allegations about Cassio, and Othello's love for Desdemona; the play focuses on the subjective, and the conflict between appearance and reality, which are unlikely to appeal to a popular audience. There is an intellectual analysis at work here, which would appeal to the tastes of the court of James. The opening remarks in this article are more persuasive: the writer refers to the characteristics of baroque as the cult of unreality and fantasy, changeableness, inconstancy of mind and character, shifting boundaries between the real and unreal; confusion of emotional states, blendings of tragic and comic; 'ostentation,' a liking for extravagance in expression and themes; elaboration of detail; surprising juxtapositions. All these typical themes can be found in Othello. Even the elaboration of detail in Othello's account of the handkerchief may be regarded as a baroque extravagance.

The account of the "Othello music" with its "enamelled" and "theatrical" imagery in Othello's speech, beside the ugly evasiveness of Iago's language, remains a marvellous insight by Wilson Knight; in his remarkable essay, he also refers to "[t]he pervading religious tonal significance relating to infidelity" and "the necessity of an intellectual interpretation" in the play, as well as the ostentation of Othello's language. ("The Othello Music," Chap. V, 97-119, [115, 119], in The Wheel of Fire, G. Wilson Knight, London, 1930, repr. London, 1970.) E. A. J. Honigmann, "Shakespeare's 'bombast,'" in Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in honour of Kenneth Muir, (eds.), P. Edwards, I-S. Ewbank, G. K. Hunter, Cambridge, 1980, 151-62, (159), remarks that "Othello's language is, in my opinion, more dangerously inflated than that of any other Shakespearian tragic hero." This comment draws attention, I think, to the radical, innovative fashionableness of Othello's speech, its ostentation as early English Baroque, and the dangerous insecurity of this new style, which Shakespeare exploits in the play. But this is early baroque and does not have the rigidity and preciosity of later European forms. The conceited, imagistic forms of baroque in later Spanish literature have not yet appeared; see J. Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty : An Introduction to Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literature, London, 1998, 98-115 for examples of that style of poetry.

M. Mincoff, "Shakespeare, Fletcher and Baroque Tragedy," Shakespeare Survey, 20 (1967), 1-15 (2) notes that a dominant baroque theme shortly after Shakespeare's death, was the love-and-honour conflict of European theatre. This theme is clearly central to Othello's own understanding of his predicament. Othello is humiliated by the assumed loss of honour that he thinks has followed from Desdemona's betrayal (3.3.348-60). Shakespeare touches on the theme for a moment only. For this reason, perhaps, Mincoff argues that the major theme is love and jealousy (1). Recently, Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies, Oxford, 1989, repr. 1990, 37, has questioned the importance of jealousy: "[I]f the plot of Othello really centres on jealousy, then Shakespeare wrote it badly; for a fiercely faithful wife can do nothing but distract from the seriousness, the authenticity of her husband's condition" (my italics). Othello is, nevertheless, seriously confused as the play shows, and deceived in the most tragic way. His confusion is both authentic to him and false to the audience, at the same time. He suffers a false, and obviously false, loss of belief in Desdemona, that he eventually recovers. This is the major theme of the play, I would like to suggest.

Most commentators have tended to take as an absolute starting point the earlier readings of the play, (perhaps out of a confused respect for Rymer and his views; see C. A. Zimansky, (ed.), The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, New Haven, 1956, 134, "His Love and his Jealousie are no part of a Souldiers Character, unless for Comedy," and 153, "As if for the first year or two, Othello had not been jealous?" [text italics]), and in an almost unthinking deference to many other critics, have paraphrased the action of the play in these terms. Some earlier critics, however, such as Schücking, (art. cit., above note 7), refer to the passion of Othello as a baroque theme (98), as does R. Soellner, "Baroque Passion in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries," Shakespeare Studies, I (1965), 294-302 (297, 299-300, 301). Again, F. J. Warnke, "Baroque Poetry and the Experience of Contradiction," Colloquia Germanica, I (1967), 38-48 (43-44) refers to the experience of the "validity of contradictory truths," which in Othello have so much deeply ironic force, clearly expressed in 3.3.387-8. In effect, the variety, and innovative nature of Shakespeare's work has been underestimated by the widely accepted view that he is not an early baroque playwright. There are too many different styles and modalities in the plays for us to doubt his extraordinary powers of assimilation, and his profound intuitions about emergent ways of writing dramatic texts.

10. See further J. Robbins, op. cit above. The topics Robbins deals with in his elegant account of Spanish baroque are: appearance and reality, the impact of scepticism, challenging the mind, forming and performing identity, in the theatre and court, and in general the performative contexts of baroque culture. I suggest these are clearly developed themes in Othello. Barbara Everett, op. cit., above, notes that "Othello is the only tragedy set entirely in the present," (40), and that Venice is "an interior place, a kind of psychic geography" (ibid), drawing attention implicitly to the baroque tendencies in the work. The subjectivity of the narrative is noticed again in her remark that "Othello transforms what would be merely trivial cynicism in Iago into what is, in his own experience of it, morally horrifying. The experience is actual and is Othello's" (51). Othello lives the anguish and disenchantment of the baroque experience. These effects may well arise from the choice of the novella form of Cinthio's narrative, instead of a history (so Everett, ibid.,), but they may also reflect the proto-baroque tendencies of Cinthio's narrative.

11. S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988, 11, 119.

12. For example, D. Farley-Hills, Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights 1600-1606, London, 1990, 107-121, explores what he calls the "divinity" of Desdemona in the play. But he restricts "symbolic characterisation" (which he rejects in general for the play, but returns to in his discussion of Desdemona and "morality drama" traditions, 109 ff), to conventional notions of essentialist 'good' and 'evil,' without reference to the contemporary popular religious context. This tendency to seize on a word or phrase in the text and develop wider-ranging connotations for it, however distorting this may seem, is also illustrated by the work of other commentators in R. H. West's sceptical account of Christian approaches to the play, "The Christianness of Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly XV (1964), 333-43.

Again, R. W. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises, Bloomington, 1969, repr. 1971, 95-102, uses the variant reading of "Judas" for "Indian" to develop a strenuous set of analogues between Othello's final hours and the account of Christ's own death in the New Testament. Here Desdemona is claimed to have Christlike qualities. However, the most recent editor of the play (E. A. J. Honigmann, op. cit., "Longer notes," 342-3), rejects the Folio reading Iudean, citing R. Levin, "The Indian/Iudean crux in Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly XXXIII (1982), 60-7, who suggests that it is appropriate for Othello to compare himself with the Indian, whose action results from ignorance, and "very inappropriate for him to compare himself to Judas, whose action was regarded as a conscious choice of evil" (cited from Levin by Honigmann, ibid., 342-3).

More recently, R. N. Watson, "Othello as Protestant propaganda," in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds C. McEachern and D. Shuger, Cambridge, 1997, 234-57, argues for a view of the play as a reformation attack on catholicism. Iago is seen as a Jesuitical devil, Desdemona as a Christ-like heroine, and Othello as an imperfectly reformed infidel (250). But would a Jesuit use Ramistic rhetoric, as Iago does, which is the very sign of a calvinist/protestant mentality? It seems very unlikely, unless Shakespeare didn't know what he was doing! There is also the continual problem in Watson's argument that he has to refer to rather extreme forms of allegory: for example, "Othello and Desdemona represent the precious but unstable marriage between the sinner's soul and its Savior" (ibid., 235). But Othello has not sinned before he comes to believe in Desdemona's adultery. And Desdemona does not save him, but her servant Emilia reveals the truth. Desdemona is an unconventional young woman who is not afraid to speak up, and rebuke Othello when she sees fit. Her love for Othello is vividly presented in the most natural way. Watson also relies on the "Judean" reading, which seems inappropriate in context; see above. There is a general sense of strained interpretation in Watson's arguments as well. When he says (ibid., 249), "The foreigner Othello reclaims his place in Desdemona's Christian world by re-enacting the violence against the 'circumcised', the believer in works, that first won him that place," we are asked to accept a whole host of assumptions. That Othello is a half-reformed catholic, which may be true; that his death, which removes him from the world altogether, is somehow an act of reclamation; that a circumcised Mohammedan is a recusant catholic; that killing himself is a "self-referential act of [religious] pride" (ibid.). I find no sinful pride or improper self-regard in Othello's final speech, but instead a terrible clarity of moral knowledge which he sees necessitates his death. His baroque sense of secular honour requires it. Again, is not Watson misreading the baroque hero's discovery of uncertainty and error as a sinful religious confusion? Does this not render absurd the honest self-appraisal of these last words? Allegory, in any case, at a stylistic and narrative level, is constantly under attack in the play, as A. B. Dauber has shown in a subtle analysis of allegorical language, "Allegory and irony in Othello," Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), 123-33. All the allegorical and theological approaches to the play, ingenious and erudite as they are, demand a belief in an audience more interested in (rather subtle) Christian doctrine than in a secular dramatic narrative. For the baroque is primarily a secular narrative, with religious undertones that have no allegorical effects at a general level. The catholic Othello, the calvinist Iago, and the protestant wife are easily recognisable stereotypes from contemporary England. It is their religious mentalities that construct the tragedy, but in a derived, secularised, and indirect form. I think all these writers on Christian themes in Othello are trapped by their insistence on specific doctrines which seem to contradict the force and sense of particular moments in the play. An audience of amateur theologians might be fairly unusual, even in Elizabethan times.

My argument is that the religious mentalities of the play are partially secularised (as in Greenblatt's proposed analysis above) and transformed into historically plausible human motives (a view supported from a protestant position in Watson, and D. Stempel, "The Silence of Iago," PMLA 84 (1969), 252-63; but I cannot see Iago as an hypocritical jesuit, as they both suggest). The 'religious' dimensions of the play must be contemporary, as Watson argues, but show themselves for the most part indirectly in concrete material practices, and superstitious beliefs, rather than as theology or Christian doctrine (even implicitly). The secular dominates and partially absorbs the religious elements in the play; there is a suggestive ambiguous reference to sacred ideas subordinated to the humanistic secular drive of the narrative. Helen Gardner (art. cit., note 7, above) remarks that "It could hardly be expected that Othello could escape a 'Christian interpretation' which neither Johnson nor Coleridge, whose personal commitment to Christian beliefs cannot be doubted, thought it proper to read into it" (6). But could not Shakespeare exploit religious mentalities for dramatic effect without depending too much on specific points of Christian doctrine? Johnson and Coleridge would have looked for explicit Christian remarks in the text. I am dealing with social outlooks derived from a general religious position.

13. Cf. William Perkins' remark, A Golden Chaine, 1591, "Surely, if a man will but take a view of all Popery, he shall easily see that a great part of it is mere magic," in The Workes of …William Perkins (Cambridge, 1616-18), i, 40, cited in K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971, 25.

14. In Francis Bacon's Essay XVII, "Of Superstition," (practically a compendium of common prejudices against catholicism), he condemns "Pleasing and sensuall Rites and Ceremonies;…Over-great Reverence of Traditions, which cannot but load the Church;…The taking an Aime at divine Matters by Human, which cannot but breed mixture of Imaginations;…So the Similitude of Superstition to Religion, makes it the more deformed." In M. Kiernan, ed., Sir Francis Bacon: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, Oxford, 1985, 55.

15. M. Matheson, "Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello," Shakespeare Survey, 48 (1995), 123-33, 130, comments on Othello's "very un-Venetian" attitude here, which indicates his remoteness from the tolerant religious outlook of Venice. Does this suggest that he is meant to represent a traditional catholic figure in the play? I rather think so. Venice may have been a lax republic as far as Rome was concerned, and there were many foreign traders and mercenaries in its territories, which contributed to religious pluralism. See further for foreign traders, Ugo Tucci, "The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century," in Renaissance Venice, ed. J. R. Hale, London, 1973, 346-78, 364-6, 373, and W. H. McNeill, Venice; The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797, Chicago and London, 1974, 174-5; ibid., note 43 on 175, McNeill remarks interestingly that "between the 1540s and the 1560s both Calvinism and Anabaptism excited some attention" in Venice. For foreign mercenaries see M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale, eds, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State: Venice c.1400 to 1617, Cambridge, 1984, 313-30. The Venetian fleet that sailed to the battle of Lepanto had 2-3000 Spaniards from Don John of Austria on board (ibid., 323). But is it likely, it might be asked, that Iago, probably a Spanish mercenary, would be a protestant? Surely, he too would be catholic, as Watson, art. cit., p. 237, argues from his name, but there were in fact quite a group of Spanish protestants in London in the 1570s and 80s, as P. Collinson records in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism, London, 1983, 234-43. This might be just the kind of 'local knowledge' that would allow a Spanish calvinist to be plausible to a London audience. The population of London was after all very small then. We can never know enough about the contemporary knowledge Shakespeare may have exploited for a play written to a deadline. All his plays have contemporary associations in them at one level or another.

16. See further, Scarisbrick, op. cit., and P. N. Skrine, op.cit.; see above Note 7.

17. A critic who seems to have been lost sight of in contemporary discussions of Othello has taken to pieces Leavis's violent dislike of Othello, in his analysis of that famous essay, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: or the Sentimentalist's Othello," in The Common Pursuit, London, 1952: John Holloway, in The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies, London, 1961, Appendix A, "Dr. Leavis and 'Diabolic Intellect,'" 155-65, argues for a close pragmatic reading of the text, defending Othello against sudden and irrational decisions. There is no "extraordinary promptness" in Othello's response to Iago, as Leavis suggests. Holloway rejects the sentimental view of Othello advanced by Bradley, as does Leavis, but I suspect both Leavis and Holloway may have failed to understand the early baroque 'ostentation' of the hero, which they appear to regard as provoking, or eliciting, a sentimental response about Othello's nobility on the part of critics. They dislike, I suspect, the "pretentious" effect of Othello's language, and this conditions their response. If Othello's language is "egotistical," "self-regarding" and "theatrical," then so is he. Yet the baroque always appears pretentious to anglo-saxon minds. (And especially to provincial puritans like Leavis.) Although Othello is genuinely a noble figure in the play, he must display uncertainty and perplexity, and a fierce sense of honour, for that is the very centre of the baroque dilemma. Indeed, the challenge of uncertainty is the pivotal focus of Othello's discussion with Iago in Act III. But Othello is not a modern figure of heroism; he is a baroque hero with a courtier's sense of honour and prestige. Bradley held the a priori view, from his 'theoretical' position, that all of Shakespeare's heroes had a fundamental flaw of character, which subverted their heroic status. Yet they retained, in his account, an absolute heroic quality to the end (which was not historicised in Elizabethan contexts by Bradley in any way). I happen to believe in the heroic part of this argument, (Shakespeare's major figures suffer more, and understand more than others, and that is heroic), but I do not believe there is any fundamental flaw in any of them. In a sense, does not Leavis still hold unconsciously to the notion of a Bradlean 'fatal flaw' in his reliance on Othello's 'brutal egotism'? 'Men are as the times are,' and this applies to critics as well as characters in a play. Bradley failed to historicise sufficiently, I think, and was limited by an absolute Edwardian notion of the heroic 'sublime' in his view of Shakespeare.

Othello is a noble, heroic, generous figure nevertheless, but a baroque hero of his time, and not the victim of a "brutal egotism," as Leavis asserts; on the contrary, he is a rational, sophisticated thinker who understands implication, as I hope to have shown in an earlier analysis of his discussion with Iago in Act III: A. J. Gilbert, "Techniques of Persuasion in Julius Caesar and Othello," Neophilologus 81 (1997), 309-23, 316-21. (See also my remarks in note 7 above.) My analysis in this article will not appeal to those who want to see Iago's racism, and the racism of Venice, or the 'brutal egotism' of the hero, as the dominant themes of the play. But I should be glad to think I had rescued Othello from a near racist contempt for his intelligence, at the least. Othello understands, and is impaled by, the Ramistic disjunctive syllogism that Iago constructs about Cassio, as Othello's intermediary, when Othello was wooing Desdemona. The pair of enthymemic syllogisms are: "If Cassio is honourable, then I must suppose he didn't know of your love for Desdemona when you were wooing her, because he was courting her too. If Cassio is dishonourable, which I'm not sure about, then his conduct gives rise to suspicion, both before and after your marriage." (see my article, art. cit., 317). But Cassio did know Othello was wooing Desdemona, and Othello knows this; that is the point of Iago's remarks, even though he pretends not to share Othello's knowledge of Cassio, which he must, and shows he does. Othello remains unpersuaded by some of Iago's more ambitious generalisations: Holloway, op. cit., 158-9 notes that Othello does no more than take in with surprise Iago's suggestion that because most Venetian wives are generally unfaithful, therefore Desdemona, being Venetian too, must also be disloyal. It is not clear that Othello even agrees with the first generalisation. This Ramistic syllogism, designed to persuade rather than convince rationally, is one of Iago's failures. (Stempel, art cit., 260, thinks Othello is convinced by this 'valid'[?] syllogism; but its validity depends on whether Iago is understood to mean 'all Venetian wives' or 'most Venetian wives,' which would make it invalid; he typically leaves this unclear. There is evidence in Othello's neutral reply that he is not persuaded by this loose 'syllogism,' as Holloway notes. Othello's reply suggests that he treats the argument as reported opinion, mere testimony, not irrefutable deduction from universally accepted premisses, which would not be a Ramistic syllogism anyway, but Aristotelian. Ramus sees syllogisms as persuasive rather than demonstrative, as part of rhetoric rather than logic, which he fuses together. Later in the same scene, Iago's testimony about Cassio's dream carries conviction, because Othello trusts honest Iago. The audience knows it is a lie, for Cassio is innocent.) Othello has a keen and cautious intelligence, and there seems no reason to think it is typically 'black,' whatever that might be thought to mean. (It may represent the wiliness of the typical non-European, as Calvin thought. See Note 7 above.) A baroque hero, in any case, cannot be presented as simple minded or inferior, for the sophisticated audience of a baroque play would only despise him for his stupidity. Othello is the equal of all those he meets in the play; his death is neither contemptible, nor meaningless to those who witness it. It is a tragic affirmation of a recovered loyalty, honour, and truth. The baroque hero is driven by the absolute need for honour, which Othello achieves finally in this 'honourable' death. Would not 'brutal egotism' also be unacceptable, to courtiers and a distinguished general, as obvious bad manners? Would Othello as an uncouth barbarian command the respect of his troops, or that of a sophisticated court audience of the play? Iago's remark about him as an "erring Barbarian" ("a wandering stranger") is clearly designed to encourage Roderigo, and cannot be thought anything but malicious. It is all part of his racist attack on Othello in the first two acts, which inspires Roderigo to refer to Othello as "the thicklips."

19. See further, Stuart Clark, "King James's Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship," in S. Anglo, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, London, 1977, 156-81, and Stuart Clark, "Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft," Past and Present, 87 (1980), 98-127. See, for anti-popery prejudice, Peter Lake, "Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice," in Conflict in Early Stuart England : Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, eds R. Cust and A. Hughes, London and New York, 1989, Chap. 3, 72-106.

20. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama, Ithaca and London, 1988, 116-55, 126-29, shows the conflictual relations in contemporary puritan thought between marriage as equality of partnership, and marriage as a subordination of women. Out of this confused and contradictory perspective, Shakespeare develops the character of a fiercely loyal and confrontational wife. The social implications of religious thought are exploited for dramatic purposes. Here again we have a vivid secular characterisation based on a general, and widely held, if badly thought out, religious/social theory.

21. Patrick Collinson, "Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism," in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and culture in the last decade, ed. J. Guy, Cambridge, 1995, 150-70, 159-60, notes Martin Marprelate's rhetorical affinity to a popular tradition of Elizabethan culture, the composing of mocking and libellous rhymes and libels, which was familiar on the London stage at the time. In The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, London, 1988, 108-12, Professor Collinson outlines the moralisation of secular ballads by protestant writers in the 1560s and1570s, but by 1580 such appropriation of secular ballads had almost ceased. Does Iago's ballad, 'King Stephen,' 2.3.85 ff., represent an earlier tradition of protestant moralising? Honigmann, Othello, ed. cit., "Longer Notes," 336-7, notes that the ballad pre-dated the play, and was referred to in Robert Green's Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). It may have been composed much earlier.

22. See Lake, art. cit., 75, for the popular views on catholic attitudes towards sexual laxity.

23. See also my comments above, Note 7.

24. Are there wider contemporary Italian influences on the choice of language in the play? Othello's distinctive style of speech may be a conscious imitation of the favella toscana, the Tuscan standard of upper-class speech favoured by Venetians who did not like their own local dialect. This artificial style was modelled on literary language from the trecento, especially the poetic language of Petrarch and Boccacio: it was an archaic style of speech, and very different from that of sixteenth-century Tuscany; see O. Logan, Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the Renaissance and its Heritage, London, 1972, Chap. 6. Shakespeare's exploitation of a baroque style to imitate this emerging Italian standard may have been a compromise to make Othello seem more fashionable as a speaker, and yet authentic as an Italian upper-class Venetian by adoption. By contrast, Iago's speech is set in variable registers, some polite and formal, (and even fashionably technical in its use of Ramistic rhetorical terms, which give him authority in his persuasion of Othello), but he also uses another register when he thinks it useful: the language of the fama commune, "the voice of public opinion" (see P. Burke, "Insult and Blasphemy in early modern Italy," in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication, Cambridge, 1987, repr. 1989, 95-109, 107), which often descends to the lingua mordace, "the biting tongue," the language of insult and offensive comment used in colloquial registers of Venetian. (Burke, ibid., 97). Iago uses this register when talking to Roderigo, and encourages him to use the same offensive language.

25. Here we have to face up to the possibility that the play was written in two parts, as N. B. Allen, "The Two Parts of Othello," Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968), 13-29, argues. I happen to agree with the argument in this article that Shakespeare first wrote Acts III, IV and V, and then turned to Acts I and II. This would account for the discrepancies about racism in the two 'halves,' and the absence of racist comments in the first piece of writing, as opposed to the second, earlier part of the play. There can be no coherence in this play, in my opinion, in the matter of racism. The non-textual 'psychological' critics, who argue for a 'racist' unconscious in Othello, are simply, I suggest, reading in 'racism' in Othello's final speech from a first part that was written later. There is too much solid textual evidence in Allen's article about significant discontinuities in the play to dismiss his argument.

26. It is relevant here to note that Henry Parker, a staunch supporter of puritans, and related to important puritans, in A Discourse concerning Puritans, 1641, identifies four categories of puritans which had been employed during the period 1560-1640. These were ecclesiastical puritans, anxious about popish ritual in the church; puritans in religion, noted for their hatred of popery; political puritans who opposed the policies of Charles I during the 1620s and 1630s; and the most important group, in his opinion, "ethical puritans." These were distinguished by their "honest strict demeanor," and were denigrated as hypocrites by anti-puritans: "the religious honest man has the vizard of an hypocrite and dissembler put upon him to make him odious." See C. Durston and J. Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700, London, 1996, 14, and for the last quotation, L. A. Sasek, ed., Images of English Puritanism: a Collection of Contemporary Sources, Baton Rouge, 1989, 164. W. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words, London and New York, 1951, 218-49, suggests that when the word "honest" is used patronisingly in the play it "carried an obscure social insult" (219); perhaps these contemporary remarks of Henry Parker clarify the nature of this insult. Hypocrisy might be implied at a narrative level to the audience, as well as social inferiority in Othello's remark to Iago. Certainly, the play endorses the anti-puritan view of Iago, if he is a hypocritical puritan/calvinist.

27. See Honigmann, op.cit., Appendix 1, 344-50, and Note 4 above.

28. See note 6 above, and further, the suggestive remarks of Patrick Collinson, "Ecclesiastical vitriol," 155, "a certain nastiness was inherent in the idea of puritanism, since the word was a broad and sticky brush with which to tar those who usually denied that they were puritans and insisted that they were nothing but orthodox and loyal protestant Christians." The calvinist nastiness of Iago is evident from the start of the play, and naturally he never calls himself a "puritan," given the social and religious animosity the term implied. Even Richard Bancroft, the most venomous opponent of puritans, only used the word once in all his vitriolic writings: see Collinson, ibid., 164-5. Perhaps "puritan" was a slang term inappropriate for serious writers to use, when Bancroft was writing. Professor Collinson argues persuasively that it was the Martin Marprelate and Anti-Martin tracts of the 1590s that created the Stage Puritan, "a character implicit in Shakespeare's Malvolio," "and otherwise made the stock figure or caricature of the puritan a subject for more or less sophisticated literary treatment" (ibid., 154). Iago, I wish to suggest, is the most sophisticated form of this figure. See also, for an analogous argument, Patrick Collinson, "Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre constructs Puritanism," in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, eds D. L. Smith, R. Strier, and D. Bevington, Cambridge, 1995, 157-69. Harold Fisch, "Shakespeare and the Puritan Dynamic," Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974), 81-92, although he does not deal with Othello, remarks that "Shakespeare takes puritanism very seriously" (83). Angelo shares the insidiousness and deception of Iago, using his power to manipulate others.

29. Hugh Grady, Shakespeare's Universal Wolf : Studies in Early Modern Reification, Oxford, 1996, 98-109, describes Iago's Ramistic 'logic' (really a form of rhetoric), as "instrumental reason," a form of reason disassociated from any ethical base. Again, Shakespeare's prejudice against puritan/calvinist thinking is evident here.

30. See M. Heinemann, Puritanism and the Theatre, Cambridge, 1980, Appendix A, 258-83.

31. See Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, London, 1935, 216-221: he finds eight allusions to biblical passages, mostly New Testament or Psalms. I hardly need to repeat the fact that the Bible was of the greatest importance to puritans, and that the Geneva Bible of 1560, with extensive Calvinist notes in the margins, was the most popular version. See C. Durston and J. Eales, op. cit., 16-17: "for the puritan the Bible was elevated to the status of the sole and complete repository of doctrinal and moral truth" (16).

32. David Morse, England's Time of Crisis, Basingstoke, 1989, 161, makes a relevant comment: "Iago, it would seem, belongs to [a] bygone world of established hierarchy and unquestioning obedience, yet despite this he devotes himself wholeheartedly to its converse, an unscrupulous, self-serving opportunism." In my terms, a familiar social type of the time, a hypocrite 'ethical' puritan, who resents the new careerism of the Cassios of this world. Again, in John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560-1640, Cambridge, 1986, 146, we find the remark, "Almost universally, however, writers condemned those who attempted to rise through the ranks." For this argued a high opinion of themselves, and contradicted the notion of humility, and fear of pride that haunted the puritan mind. Othello's ostentatious language would be an intolerable sign of this to the puritan.

33. Cited from Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture, Oxford, 1990, repr. 1991, 241.

34. When, later in the play, Cassio refers to "election" (2.3.102-5), in a calvinist sense, in his drunken state he thinks social status may have something to do with it! "The lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient." Again, a revealing comment on the self-importance of careerists, who had no sense of the humility a good calvinist should display in their lives. But the court was full of persons from humble backgrounds who had risen to the highest ranks in the court by virtue of their abilities and skills. A new world, with new values and attitudes, was emergent, and Iago hates it.

35. Iago accuses Cassio of having only theoretical military knowledge, as out of date as that of the Romans, and little practical experience of real fighting. This emphasis on practical knowledge as the test of ability is also characteristic of puritanism. Arthur Dent, A pastime for Parents: or A recreation to passe away the time, London, 1606, sets out a catechism in which the elect and the reprobate are contrasted in terms of their knowledge: "The knowledge of the reprobates is onely literall; and historicall / The knowledge of the elect is spirituall, and experimentall." (Here "literall" means 'from books', "historicall" means 'past knowledge, so probably out-of-date knowledge,' while by contrast "spirituall" means 'of the spirit, inspired,' and "experimentall" means 'tested by actual application to practice.' Another contrast is between the reprobate's 'speculative' knowledge, all theory, and the elect's 'practive' knowledge, 'based on practical experience.' (Cited in Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy, Princeton, New Jersey, 1984, 62.)

36. See Note 25 above.

37. Honigmann, op. cit., 335, in a longer note to 1.1.20, records the contrived and desperate attempts of earlier editors to make sense of the line on its own, or merely in the context of the play. The actual context of Iago's puritan thought here is not identified by any of them. Because Iago is not thought of in terms of his religious mentality. There is no sense of historical context outside the play.

38. Peter Lake, "Religious Identities in Shakespeare's England," in D. C. Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Oxford, 1999, 64.

39. A point noted by Honigmann, op. cit., Footnote to l. 321.

40. See further, John Morgan, op. cit., 46-47, and in more technical detail, A. Dakin, Calvinism, London, 1940, repr. 1942, 35-43; T. F. Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man, London, 1949, 83-125; John H. Leith, "The Doctrine of the Will in the Institutes of the Christian Religion," in Reformatio Perennis: Essays on Calvin and the Reformation in Honor of Ford Lewis Battles, eds B.A. Gerrish and R. Benedetto, Pittsburgh, 1981, 49-66.

41. Patrick Collinson, The Puritan Character : Polemics and Polarities in early Seventeenth-century English Culture, Los Angeles, 1989, 12.

42. C.T.Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, Enlarged and Revised throughout by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford, 1986, s.v.

43. W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment : The Coming of Revolution in an English County, Cambridge, MA, 1983, 146.

44. Patrick Collinson, "Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair," op. cit., 158.

45. See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants : The Church in English Society 1559-1625, The Ford Lectures 1979, Oxford, 1982, 103-107.

46. Honigmann, op. cit., 374. The attack on Montano is the only explanation for Cassio's disgrace in Cinthio's text.

47. For Ramistic logic, see W.J. Ong, Ramus : Method, and the Decay of Dialogue : from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Harvard, 1958; W.S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, Princeton, 1956, Chap. 4 : "The English Ramists"; Donald K. McKim, Ramism in William Perkins' Theology, American University Studies, series VII, Theology and Religion, vol.15, New York and Bern, 1987; Michel Dassonville, (ed.), Pierre de la Ramee, Dialectique (1555), Geneve, 1964; John Morgan, op. cit., refers to Ramistic logic in various places, see index. Probably the best account of Iago's Ramism is by Kenneth Palmer, "Iago's Questionable Shapes," in "Fanned and Winnowed Opinions": Shakespearean Essays presented to Harold Jenkins, eds John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton, London, 1987, 184-201.

48. See further, Donald K. McKim, op.cit.

49. Rollandum Makylmenaeum, The Logike of the Moste Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus etc, London, 1574, 100.

50. Ramus remarks of the method of prudence or crypsis, "Si c'est homme cault et fin, il ne fault pas incontinent manifester noz pièces l'une après l'autre, mais changer, entremesler, frivoler, feindre le contraire, se reprendre, ne monstrer aucun semblant d'y penser, dire que c'est chose vulgaire et accoustumée, se haster, courroucer, débatre, procéder par grande hardiesse, et en fin finalle descouvrir et exécuter l'embusche tellement que l'adversaire estonné dye: 'A quelle fin tend cecy?,'" Michel Dassonville, op. cit., 150. Translation: 'If we are dealing with a man who is wily and shrewd, we should not straightaway reveal the arguments we intend to deploy one after the other, but we should vary our approach, mix things up, appear to be obtuse, pretend to the opposite of what we want to persuade him of, appear to correct ourselves as we go along, without appearing to give what we say any careful thought, say that this is the sort of thing that's always happening and is pretty common, hasten forward in the argument, provoke our listener to anger, dispute the issues, move on with great boldness and suddenness, and in the final moments show our hand and spring the trap in such a way that our astonished opponent cries out, 'What on earth is he getting at?' (This is a loose translation to bring out the full rhetorical, pragmatic insights of Ramus.) This is the exact rhetorical method used by Iago in his persuasion of Othello in Act III, and almost every tactic here can be found in Iago's response to Othello's enquiry. I have discussed Iago's tactics in some detail without reference to this source in my article; Gilbert, art. cit., see Note 17 above. It is quite possible that Shakespeare could have read this edition of Ramus (Paris, 1555), in the original French. There were also many other editions, but the English translation (see above Note 49), is much more concise in this part of the textbook.

51. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, Princeton, 1983, 230-31.

52. For a withering exposure of Ramistic logic and its absurdities, see Norman E. Nelson, "Peter Ramus and the Confusion of Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetry," in Contributions in Modern Philology, vol. 2, 1947.

53. See Note 20 above.

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Ashton, R., ed. James I by his Contemporaries: An account of his career and character as seen by some of his contemporaries. London: Hutchinson, 1969.

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End article about English Baroque Literature

 

The Baroque PerioD

 

Subtopics: Characteristics Trends Vocal Instrumental Composers

The Baroque period was an important time in the history of the world. Galileo, Kepler and Newton were discovering new ways to explain the universe. In music, art, architecture, and fashion, fancy decoration and ornamentation became the rule. Both men and women wore wigs and coats with lace. Throughout the Baroque period, composers continued to be employed by the church and wealthy ruling class. This system of employment was called the patronage system. As the patron paid the composer for each work and usually decided what kind of piece the composer should write, this limited their creative freedom. Important Baroque composers include Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederic Handel, Johann Pachelbel, Georg Phillip Telemann, Henry Purcell and Antonio Vivaldi.

 

 (1600-1750CE)

 

Baroque Characteristics

Form

Dances were popular during this period as well as preludes, fugues, suites, toccatas and theme and variations. Binary and ternary forms were used frequently.

Harmony

Two or more melodies played at the same time created a musical texture called counterpoint. There were frequent harmonic changes. Tonality was based on major and minor keys.

Keyboard Instruments

The clavichord, harpsichord, and organ were used.

Rhythm

Emphasis was on strong beats, upbeats and fast-changing rhythmic motion. Eighths, 16ths and triplets were frequently used.

Style

Phrase and expression marks were not used. Faster notes were normally played smooth; slower notes were normally played not very smooth. Ornaments were used frequently.

 

Trends in Baroque Music

 

Composers like Johann Sebastian Bach reacted to the Baroque trend of fancy ornamentation by creating complex polyphonic music consisting of elaborate melodies layered top of each other. Often these melodies contained trills and fast moving notes. The idea of using chords to accompany one or more melody lines also became common. In addition, composers began to write dynamics and tempo markings in their music. Improvisation also became common, even in the Church. Finally, composers began to use their music to express emotions such as joy and anger.

Vocal Music

 

The Baroque period saw the birth of a new form of music called opera. Opera combined music, acting, scenery, costumes, and props. Actors and actresses sing the script, or libretto. Some Operas are serious (opera seria), and some are funny (opera buffa). The first opera was Orfeo, by Claudio Monteverdi. Similar to the opera is the cantata. The Cantata, like the opera, is a series of arias and recitatives. However, the cantata is not staged or acted.

 

Instrumental Music

 

During the Baroque period, instrumental music became as important as vocal music. The Baroque period saw a rise in music for flute, oboe, bassoon, trombone, valveless trumpets and horns, harpsichord, and organ. Recorders became less popular, and viols were gradually replaced by violins, violas, and cellos. Timpani was the only percussion instrument used in serious music. Much of the music written for instruments contained several contrasting sections or movements. One example is the concerto. Concertos were developed in the second half of the 17th century by Italian composers like Torelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Corelli. Within 25 years, almost all major centres had their own concerto composer. One of the most famous concertos is Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Concertos sometimes featured one soloist or a group of soloists. Concertos featuring a group of soloists were known as concerto grossos. Concerto grossos were written for a group of solo instruments and orchestra, and usually contained three movements (fast-slow-fast).

 

Baroque

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)   
Dietrich Buxtehude
Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) by Meagan & Stacey
Francois Couperin (1668-1733)
Girolamo Frescobaldi
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1659-1729)
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
Jacopo Peri
Georg Phillip Telemann
Henry Purcell (1659-1695) by Jean-Marc & Stephane
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)
Alessandro Scarlatti
Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672) by Haley & Erin
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) by Ben & Mark

 

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

Baroque Art and Architecture

 

            I         INTRODUCTION   Baroque Art and Architecture, the style dominating the art and architecture of Europe and certain European colonies in the Americas throughout the 1600s, and in some places, until 1750. A number of its characteristics continue in the art and architecture of the first half of the 18th century, although this period is generally termed rococo (see Rococo Style) and corresponds roughly with King Louis XV of France. Manifestations of baroque art appear in virtually every country in Europe, with other important centers in the Spanish and Portuguese settlements in the Americas and in other outposts. The term baroque also defines periods in literature and music.

 

            II      DEFINITION  
The origins of the word baroque are not clear. It may have been derived from the Portuguese barocco or the Spanish barueco to indicate an irregularly shaped pearl. The word itself does not accurately define or even approximate the meaning of the style to which it refers. However, by the end of the 18th century baroque had entered the terminology of art criticism as an epithet leveled against 17th-century art, which many later critics regularly dismissed as too bizarre or strange to merit serious study. Writers such as the 19th-century Swiss cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt considered this style the decadent end of the Renaissance; his student Heinrich Wölfflin, in Principles of Art History (1915; translated 1932), first pointed out the fundamental differences between the art of the 16th and 17th centuries, stating that “baroque is neither a rise nor a decline from classic, but a totally different art.”

Baroque art encompasses vast regional distinctions. It may seem confusing, for example, to label two such different artists as Rembrandt and Gianlorenzo Bernini as baroque; yet despite differences, they shared certain baroque elements, such as a preoccupation with the dramatic potential of light.

            A       Historical Background  
Understanding the various forms of baroque art requires knowledge of its historical context. The 17th century could be called the first modern age. Human awareness of the world was continuously expanding. Many scientific discoveries influenced art; Galileo's investigations of the planets, for example, account for astronomical accuracy in many paintings of the time. The assertion of the Polish astronomer Copernicus that the planets did not revolve around the earth was written by 1530, published in 1543, and only fully accepted after 1600. The realization that the earth was not at the center of the universe coincided in art with the rise of pure landscape painting devoid of human figures. The active trade and colonization policies of many European nations accounted for numerous portrayals of places and peoples that were exotic to Europeans.

Religion determined many aspects of baroque art. The Roman Catholic church was a highly influential patron, and its Counter Reformation, a movement to combat the spread of Protestantism, employed emotional, realistic, and dramatic art as a means of propagating the faith. The simplicity sought by Protestantism in countries such as the Netherlands and northern Germany likewise explains the severity of the architectural styles in those areas.

Political situations also influenced art. The absolute monarchies of France and Spain prompted the creation of works that reflected in their size and splendor the majesty of their kings, Louis XIV and Philip IV.

 

            B       Baroque characteristics  
Among the general characteristics of baroque art is a sense of movement, energy, and tension (whether real or implied). Strong contrasts of light and shadow enhance the dramatic effects of many paintings and sculptures. Even baroque buildings, with their undulating walls and decorative surface elements, imply motion. Intense spirituality is often present in works of baroque art; in the Roman Catholic countries, for example, scenes of ecstasies, martyrdoms, or miraculous apparitions are common. Infinite space is often suggested in baroque paintings or sculptures; throughout the Renaissance and into the baroque period, painters sought a grander sense of space and truer depiction of perspective in their works. Realism is another integral feature of baroque art; the figures in paintings are not types but individuals with their own personalities. Artists of this time were concerned with the inner workings of the mind and attempted to portray the passions of the soul on the faces they painted and sculpted. The intensity and immediacy of baroque art and its individualism and detail—observed in such things as the convincing rendering of cloth and skin textures—make it one of the most compelling periods of Western art.

 

            C       Early baroque styles  
The roots of baroque styles are found in the art of Italy, and especially in that of Rome in the late 16th century. A desire for greater clarity and simplification inspired a number of artists in their reaction against the anticlassical Mannerist style, with its subjective emphasis on distortion, asymmetry, bizarre juxtapositions, and biting colors. Annibale Carracci  and Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, were the two artists in the forefront of the early baroque. Caravaggio's art is influenced by naturalism and the grand humanism of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance. His paintings often include types drawn from everyday life engaged in completely believable activities, as well as heroic and tender depictions of religious and mythological subjects. The school that developed around Carracci, on the other hand, attempted to rid art of its mannered complications by returning to the High Renaissance principles of clarity, monumentality, and balance. This baroque classicism remained important throughout the century. A third baroque style developed in Rome about 1630, the so-called high baroque; it is generally considered the most characteristic mode of 17th-century art, with its exuberance, emotionalism, theatricality, and unrestrained energy.

 

            III   BAROQUE ART IN ITALY  
In Italy painting, sculpture, and architecture evolved from Mannerism to an early baroque mode. This change followed the Council of Trent's call in 1563  for art that would instruct and cultivate piety through simplicity.

 

            A       Italian Baroque Painting  
Some of the first and most influential artists to undertake a systematic reform of the Mannerist style were of the Carracci family. Annibale, his brother Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico were Bolognese artists who had an enormous impact on the art of the baroque's greatest center, Rome. Annibale arrived there in 1595. Having already become famous for his frescoes in Bologna, he was commissioned to execute the ceiling painting (1597-1600) in the Galleria of Rome's Farnese Palace, his most significant work and a key monument in the development of the classical or ideal, baroque manner, of which Annibale was the chief initiator. This style appealed to such artists as Guido Reni, Domenico Zampieri, called Domenichino, and Francesco Albani, who were trained by the Carracci at their workshop in Bologna. Other baroque classicists, such as the French painters Nicolas Poussin  and Claude Lorrain, came from abroad to work in Rome. Also drawn to Rome was Caravaggio, who became the principal rival of Annibale. Works such as the Calling and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (1599?-1600, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome) found sympathetic response, and Caravaggio came to be the guiding spirit behind an entire school of baroque naturalists. Naturalism was spread throughout Italy in the first two decades of the 17th century by such native painters as Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Caracciolo, called Battistello, and later by foreigners working in Italy, including the French painter Valentin de Boulogne, Gerrit van Honthorst  from the Netherlands, and the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera. Although of lesser importance in Italy after about 1630, baroque naturalism continued to have an enormous impact throughout the rest of the century in all parts of Europe.

Another turning point in the history of baroque painting took place in the late 1620s. Many artists attempted to introduce greater liveliness and drama into their works to create illusions of limitless space (illusionism). From 1625  to 1627 Giovanni Lanfranco painted the enormous dome of the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle in Rome with his Assumption of the Virgin. Although this fresco was inspired by Correggio's Renaissance ceilings in Parma, it virtually overwhelmed contemporary spectators with its exuberant illusionistic effects and became one of the first high baroque masterpieces. Lanfranco's work in Rome (1613-1630) and in Naples (1634-1646) was fundamental to the development of illusionism in Italy.

The illusionistic ceiling fresco was a particularly important medium for high baroque painters. Pietro Berrettini, called Pietro da Cortona, developed it to an extraordinary degree in works such as the ceiling (1633-1639) of the gran salone of Rome's Barberini Palace. From 1676  to 1679 Giovanni Battista Gaulli, also called Baciccio, painted Adoration of the Name of Jesus on the ceiling of the Gesù Church in Rome. From 1691  to 1694 Andrea Pozzo painted The Entrance of Saint Ignatius into Paradise for the ceiling of Sant' Ignazio, Rome, with the same theatricality, drama, and emotion that had characterized high baroque painting throughout the century.

 

            B       Italian Baroque Sculpture  

Anti-Mannerism in Italian sculpture is first seen in Saint Cecilia (1600, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome) by Stefano Maderno. Its simple curving lines represent a dramatic departure from the more pronounced contortions of earlier works. It was Gianlorenzo Bernini, however, who dominated baroque sculpture in Rome. Among his early over-life-size group sculptures,  Abduction of Proserpina (1621-1622) and Apollo and Daphne (1622-1624, both Galleria Borghese, Rome) display his virtuosity in the handling of marble, creating effects of realistic dramatic tension, strong light-and-dark contrasts, and the illusion of variegated colors. His Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1645-1652, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome) epitomizes the highly charged theatricality that is a hallmark of the baroque. Bernini was the favorite artist of the popes, for whom he did highly ambitious works in the Vatican. The huge baldachin, a pillared canopy (1624-1633), above the high altar in Saint Peter's Church, as well as the Cathedra Petri (Chair of Saint Peter, 1657-1666) in the apse of the church, attest in their colossal size and precious materials (including marble and gilded bronze) to the sumptuous splendor of Roman Catholicism. Bernini also excelled in portraiture, as may be seen in such examples as Costanza Buonarelli  (1635?, Bargello, Florence) and Pope Innocent X (1647?, Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, Rome). His only rival in this genre was the sculptor Alessandro Algardi.

Fountains were among the principal types of baroque public monuments, and those by Bernini are among the most outstanding examples. Fountain of the Four Rivers (1648-1651) in Rome's Piazza Navona startles the viewer with its mammoth statues and obelisk balanced almost precariously on ledges from which gush dramatic cascades of water. Bernini was also an important and influential architect; in addition to the vast colonnade (begun 1656) embracing Saint Peter's Square, he designed such churches as Sant' Andrea al Quirinale (1658-1670) in Rome.

 

            C       Italian Baroque Architecture  

Among the first major architects of the early baroque was Carlo Maderno, who is known principally for his work on Saint Peter's. Between 1606  and 1612 he built the nave extension and facade of this structure, begun approximately 100 years earlier by Donato Bramante. Aside from Bernini, the major architects of the Roman baroque were Francesco Borromini  and, to a lesser extent, Carlo Rainaldi. Together they designed Sant' Agnese (begun 1652) in Piazza Navona. The elegantly undulating facade of Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1665-1667) in Rome, with its convex and concave rhythms echoing those of the interior, might be called the quintessence of Italian baroque architecture.

Building activity also occurred in centers outside Rome during the early decades of the 17th century. Francesco Maria Ricchino, in Milan, and Baldassare Longhena, in Venice, both designed central-plan churches. Longhena's Santa Maria della Salute (begun 1631) has been noted for its extravagantly ornate exterior and its superb site at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Especially theatrical is the work of Guarino Guarini  in Turin. His Cappella della Santa Sindone (Chapel of the Holy Shroud, 1667-94) astounds the observer with its intricate geometric forms derived from Islamic buildings in the unusually high dome.

 

            IV    BAROQUE ART IN SPAIN

 Although he is acknowledged as one of the great Spanish painters, the influence of El Greco's Mannerism was fairly slight in Spain. The early appearance of a naturalistic baroque style was due to an influence from Italy.

 

            A       Spanish Baroque Painting  

Vincente Carducho, a Florentine artist, was influential in establishing a Counter Reformation anti-Mannerist painting style in central Spain. Juan Sanchez Cotan and Juan van der Hamen were both expert at painting realistic still lifes that combine an influence from the Netherlands with that of Caravaggio. In Valencia, a naturalistic baroque mode is observed in the work of Francisco Ribalta, inspired by the art of both the Italian High Renaissance painter Titian  and Jusepe de Ribera. Seville and Madrid became the two greatest centers of Spanish baroque art. For example, early in the 17th century, baroque characteristics emerged in the paintings of Juan de las Roelas, Francisco Pacheco, and Francisco de Herrera  the Elder. In his early work, Francisco de Zurbarán, who settled in Seville in 1629, derived some of his inspiration from Flemish prints, but his most impressive baroque compositions are deeply moving for their direct and realistic approach to religious subject matter. Zurbarán worked almost exclusively for convents and monasteries. Late in his life his style was touched by the softening influence of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Works by Caravaggio were seen in Seville by 1603. Their popularity partially accounts for the strong realist influence on the work of Spain's greatest baroque painter, Diego de Velázquez. In Seville Velázquez painted such earthy works as Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). In 1623  he moved to Madrid to serve as portraitist to Philip IV, a post he retained throughout his life. His series of royal portraits culminated in The Maids of Honor  (1656, Prado, Madrid), representing the royal family, court functionaries, and the artist himself. Velázquez was also noted for historical and mythological compositions and for his work as an architect and decorator.

Two other important artists of Velázquez's generation were also from Andalucía—Alonso Cano and Murillo. Cano (also a sculptor and architect) is noted for his sensitive renderings of flesh, as in the Descent into Limbo  (1650?, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), one of the few Spanish baroque treatments of the nude. Murillo specialized in sentimental genre paintings and renderings of the Immaculate Conception. The late baroque in Seville is best represented by Juan de Valdés Leal, whose two paintings (1672) of vanitas  (reminders of mortality) subjects in the Hospital of La Caridad, Seville, are horrifying in their morbid, ultrarealistic depictions of skeletons and putrefying cadavers. In Madrid, the last generation of baroque painters includes Francisco Rizi, Juan Carreño de Miranda, and Claudio Coello, artists who cultivated a style based on the Italian high baroque.

 

            B       Spanish Baroque Sculpture  Italian art had little impact on Spanish baroque sculpture, which was essentially an outgrowth of the medieval woodcarving tradition. Realism and intense attention to detail characterize all Spanish wood sculpture; it is usually polychromed, and, at times, provided with glass eyes, hair, and garments. Among the most important works of Spanish baroque sculpture are numerous carved wood retables (altar pieces), many of considerable size and richness, produced by sculptor-architects. Of these, Gregorio Fernández, who worked principally in Valladolid, was the major sculptor of central Spain, while the southern school is best represented by Juan Martínez Montañés and Juan de Mesa from Seville and Pedro de Mena and Alonso Cano working in Granada.

 

            C       Spanish Baroque Architecture  Spanish architecture of the early baroque often continues the pattern of the muted severe style of the monastery-palace of El Escorial (1563-1582) near Madrid, as in the Buen Retiro Palace (begun 1631, now destroyed) in Madrid. Cano's facade for Granada Cathedral (designed 1667) contains classical elements but, in its surface decoration, points the way to the development of the rococo style. The most ornate baroque buildings are found in Andalucía. Seville's Hospital of Los Venerables Sacerdotes (1687-1697), designed by Leonardo de Figueroa, is typical. In the rest of the country the Churrigueresque style, a wildly exuberant baroque mode named for the Churriguera family of architects, is evident in richly adorned buildings in Barcelona, Madrid, and especially Salamanca.

            D      Spanish Baroque in the New World  The art of the New World in the 17th century followed lines similar to that of the Iberian countries. Among the major centers in Spanish America were Mexico, Guatemala (especially the city of Antigua Guatemala), and Peru (Cusco and Lima). The art of Brazil followed the patterns set by Portugal. In painting, the styles of Caravaggio, Zurbarán, and Murillo had tremendous impact. Paintings of the Cusco school combined indigenous decorative forms with European-like figures. Sculptural decoration from native sources also served as an integral part of the interiors and exteriors of the hundreds of baroque churches constructed in a flamboyant and exaggerated Churrigueresque mode, in all parts of the Spanish colonies at this time.

            V       BAROQUE ART IN NORTHERN EUROPE  The baroque spread rapidly to the countries of northern Europe from Italy, where most of the major masters went to study the manifestations of the new style. Each country, however, developed distinctive versions of the baroque, depending on its particular political, religious, and economic conditions.

            A       Flemish Baroque  
The Flemish baroque is dominated by the brilliance of Peter Paul Rubens. His youthful painting style was formed from such diverse Italian sources as Caravaggio, the Carracci, and Michelangelo, evidenced by his Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1616-1617?, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Rubens and his atelier executed a large number of mythological and religious paintings for patrons all over Europe. Rubens's mature style, with its exceedingly rich colors, dynamic compositions, and voluptuous female forms, is the peak of northern baroque painting and is exemplified by his famous series of 21 huge canvases, The Life of Marie de Médicis (1621-1625, Louvre, Paris). Among Rubens's pupils, his most worthy successor was Anthony van Dyck, whose specialty was elegant portraiture, such as Portrait of Charles I in Hunting Dress (1635, Louvre). Jacob Jordaens  and Adriaen Brouwer are best known for their convincing peasant genre scenes, which are also the subjects of Flemish artist David Teniers  and Dutch artist Adriaen van Ostade.

Flemish baroque sculptors often derived inspiration from Italian art. François Duquesnoy worked with Bernini in Rome, executing the gigantic Saint Andrew  in Saint Peter's in 1633. The style of the work of Artus Quellinus was derived from Italy and from Rubens. Italian taste is equally present in architecture, as in the former Jesuit church of Saint Charles Borromeo (1615-1621, now a museum), in Antwerp, Belgium.

            B       Dutch Baroque  
At the turn of the 17th century many Dutch artists, such as Hendrik Goltzius, were still working in the Mannerist idiom. Caraveggesque baroque was brought to the Netherlands when several artists, including Gerrit van Honthorst  and Hendrik Terbrugghen, returned to their homeland from Italy; by the 1620s naturalism was entrenched in Utrecht. In that decade and the next Frans Hals  produced portraits remarkable for their deft brushwork, informality, and naturalness. Many of Hals's paintings are of local militia companies, as is The Night Watch  (1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) by the greatest Dutch baroque master, Rembrandt. Unlike most Dutch artists, Rembrandt painted a wide variety of subjects—portraiture, history, mythology, religious scenes, and landscape—with unmatched virtuosity. His handling of glowing light against dark backgrounds, his deft, flickering brushwork in thick paint, his truthful but sympathetic rendering of his subjects are among the virtues that place Rembrandt in the highest rank of painters. His fame as a graphic artist is also unsurpassed. The creation of a convincing psychological ambience and masterly evocation of shimmering light effects distinguish the midcentury work of Jan Vermeer; his meticulous draftsmanship and delicate handling of pigment, often imitated, are unique. Landscape, still life, animal painting, and architectural views now became important genres in Dutch baroque painting.

Until about 1650, Dutch sculpture remained Mannerist; a strongly baroque exuberance was then introduced by Flemish sculptors, most notably by Quellinus with his work for the interior and exterior of the Amsterdam Town Hall. The building, now the Royal Palace, was begun in 1648  to the plans of Jacob van Campen. It epitomizes the pervasive taste of the time for a classicism based on the published designs of the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

            C       English Baroque  Baroque painting in England was dominated by the presence of Rubens and van Dyck, who inspired an entire generation of portraitists. British sculpture was influenced equally by Italian and Flemish styles. The architect Inigo Jones  studied the classicism of Andrea Palladio in Italy, as is evident in his Banqueting House (1619-1622, London), with a spectacular ceiling painting, Allegory of Peace and War  (1629), by Rubens. Sir Christopher Wren  also journeyed to Italy, and his plans for Saint Paul's Cathedral (begun 1675, London) reveal his study of Bramante, Borromini, and other Italian architects. Wren, who was in charge of the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666, influenced the course of architecture in England and its North American colonies for over a century.

            D      French Baroque  
At the start of the 17th century in France, the Mannerist school of Fontainebleau  was still active in commissions for the Palace of Fontainebleau, where projects such as the decoration of the Chapel of Trinity with paintings (1619) by Martin Fréminet continued earlier traditions. Mannerism is also found in the prints of Jacques Callot and Jacques Bellange. The candlelit scenes of Georges de La Tour, however, suggest Caravaggio's influence. Baroque naturalism arrived with artists such as Valentin de Boulogne, who had lived in Italy and with those who had contact with Flemish realism, such as the Le Nain brothers and Philippe de Champaigne. Of greatest importance for the history of French baroque painting is the classicism of Nicolas Poussin. Although he lived for most of his creative life in Rome, Poussin's impact—and that of his fellow expatriate Claude Lorrain—in his own land was enormous. Late in the century classicism combined with a high baroque manner in Charles Lebrun's frescoes at the Palace of Versailles. In the late baroque paintings of Antoine Coypel, the pervasive influence of Rubens is strongly apparent, especially in those for the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

The sculpture of Pierre Puget is also in the high baroque style; François Girardon and Antoine Coysevox expressed a marked classicism in monumental sculptures for the king. Girardon's group Apollo and the Nymphs (1666-1672), in the Grotto of Thetis at Versailles, is indicative of the French taste for a chaste version of the antique.

The Palace of Versailles (begun 1669), created for Louis XIV—the Sun King—by Louis Le Vau, André Le Nôtre, and Charles Lebrun, is the single most important French baroque architectural monument. It is dedicated to the Sun King, and its measured classical forms, vast and complex gardens, and sumptuous interiors glorify the power of the monarchy; it gave rise to imitations by dozens of other rulers throughout Europe. A similarly grandiose project was the enlargement (1660s-1670s) of the Louvre by Le Vau, Lebrun, Claude Perrault, and others, a work of great restraint and subtlety.

            E       Austrian and German Baroque  
Although political events—the Thirty Years' War  (1618-1648) in Germany and the Turkish presence in Austria—prevented baroque art in those countries from truly flourishing until the 18th century, some 17th-century artists of merit did emerge. Two masters of German baroque painting are Adam Elsheimer, who moved to Rome in 1600, worked in a classical manner and was strongly influenced by Italian painters, and Johann Liss, who traveled to Venice in 1621 and worked there and in Rome.

Sculpture in 17th-century Germany and Austria retained a late Gothic or Mannerist quality in the 17th century. In Germany the Überlingen altar (1613-1619) by Jörg Zürn represents the continuity of the alpine woodcarving tradition. The altar (1623?) at the Insterburg Lutheran parish church, by Ludwig Munstermann, epitomizes the Mannerist influence. Balthasar Permoser, a Bavarian, assimilated high baroque styles in Italy and brought them to Dresden, where he became its leading baroque sculptor. His festive sculptures for the Zwinger Pavilion (begun 1711), the Dresden Palace's grandiose extension by Matthäus Pöppelman, account for much of the structure's beauty. In Vienna, as in Dresden, baroque architecture found favor with the ruling court on a spectacular scale. One of Austria's greatest baroque architects, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, demonstrated his understanding of Italian forms in his masterpiece, the opulent Karlskirche (1716-1737) in Vienna.

 

Contributed By:
Edward J. Sullivan

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

Baroque Period Literature

 

Literature of the Baroque period gave us such great authors as William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes and King James, just to name of few.

 

The Baroque Period covers the timeline 1600 – 1750.  Its literature works involved different styles than the Renaissance, it was aimed at ‘the senses.’ 

 

William Shakespeare, born in 1564, did the majority of his writing in the later part of the Renaissance period.  Some of his best writing, however, was completed in the early Baroque timeframe.  It was rather interesting to discover that Shakespeare’s father died in 1601, the same year that he completed Hamlet.  How Hamlet suffered with the death of his father, maybe tells us of Shakespeare’s love for his own father.  Another one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Mac Beth, 1605, was written just 3 years before the death of his mother in 1608.  Only 8 years later, Shakespeare himself died.  So much has been documented and written concerning William Shakespeare, so I won’t go much further into detail except to invite everybody to look at the website www.enotes.com/Shakespeare-quotes/; it is really an informative page.

 

 

Miguel de Cervantes, (1547 – 1616), was best known for his Don Quixote de la Mancha.  It is said of Cervantes’ Don Quixote that this is one of the greatest works of Western Literature, and the greatest in the Spanish language.

 

Cervantes was born the son of a surgeon out of work, and that led to the necessity of the family moving constantly, searching for work for his father.  Unfortunately, there is nothing documented regarding his mother.  In 1575, before the Baroque period begins, Cervantes and his brother were taken prisoner, to be slaves, from the ship they were on, trying to return home.  He spent 5 years as a captive, which probably, (later on), greatly influenced the writing of Quixote.   In keeping with the ‘elegant’ style of Baroque, Cervantes’ idea was to paint pictures of real life and manners by expressing himself in clear language of the day.  An interesting tid-bit regarding Cervantes:  His death is recorded on the Gregorian Calendar on the same day as William Shakespeare’s death on the Julian Calendar…April 23, 1616.

 

King James VI of Scots and I of England:  His childhood tutor, (school master George Buchanan), treated him harshly.  Even so, King James had a passion and love of learning and literature.  It was interesting to read that King James was responsible for changing the name of Shakespeare’s company from “Lord Chamberlain’s Men”, to “The King’s Men.”  Of course, his greatest accomplishment however, was not a name change, but a namesake:  The King James Version of The Holy Bible, still in print today.  The first publication of The King James Version was in 1611.  Not only did and has King James inspired Christians around the globe, his works went on to inspire other great authors such as, Bunyan, Milton, Melville and Dryden, just to name a few.

 

Baroque Period VISUAL ART

Peter Paul Rubens, 1577 – 1640 was the most popular and prolific European painter of the 17th century.  The Baroque style used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, and music.  The style started around 1600 in Rome, Italy and spread to most of Europe.

As many of his paintings feature full-figured, voluptuous women, the word "Rubenesque" (meaning plump or fleshy, yet not "fat," and used exclusively to describe women) is derived from his last name.  He painted numerous portraits and self-portraits, religious paintings, as well as landscapes and historical pieces. He designed tapestries and houses.

 

                                  

     Adoration

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque#Baroque_visual_art

Caravaggio, by name of Michelangelo Merisi, Italian painter whose revolutionary technique of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow, became a hallmark of Baroque painting. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. His three paintings of St Matthew (c. 1597-1602) caused a sensation and were followed by such masterpieces as The Supper at Emmaus (1601-02) and Death of the Virgin (1605-06).

Caravaggio was the son of Fermo Merisi, steward and architect of the Marquis of Caravaggio. Orphaned at age 11, Caravaggio was apprenticed in the same year to the painter Simone Peterzano of Milan.

In 1600, soon after he had completed the first two canvases for the Contarelli Chapel, Caravaggio signed a contract to paint two pictures for the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo of the finest artists ever to work in Rome: Raphael, Carracci, Caravaggio and Bernini.

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/05/index.html

 

CAPPELLA, Francesco, Italian painter (b. 1711, Venezia, d. 1774, Bergamo Italian painter, also known as Daggiù, one of the most famous students of Piazzetta.  His first notable painting is the Madonna and Saints from 1740 (San Marco della Pietà, Venice). The Beheading of St Eurosia can be dated after 1744 (Udine, Museo Civico), after 1744 he worked in the church Sant'Andrea in Cortona on the altarpiece Immaculate Conception with St Margaret.  In 1749 he executed three paintings for the parochial church in Alzano Maggiore (Triumph of the Cross, St Apollonia, St Lucy), then in 1757 a Magdalen in the same church.  

 

Miracle of San Francesco da Paola

 

Other sites for famous Paintings and Art:

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/05/index.html

 

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/art/

 

http://www.nga.gov/press/2000/releases/baroquepr.htm

 

Baroque Period Architecture

 

The unique architectural style of the Baroque period was signified by massive curving forms rising and falling, with firm lines and full colors.

 

The style spanned Europe during the period. Distinctly of the same style, architectural masterpieces of the period appeared prominently in great works in major European countries of the time. Sensual in nature, sometimes to the point of horrific figures, many of the works encompassed entire buildings, from massive domes like the one at Castle Howard in England and ceilings, exampled by the La Chapelle Royale in Versailles, France.

 

Baroque architectural style did not reign long in England, although structures such as the Clarendon Building and Queen’s College remain strong and firm today. France is considered as the birthplace of the Baroque architectural style. Today’s architecture fails to inspire and overwhelm individuals. In fact, it is difficult to think of modern architecture as a form of art. Great design planning and painstaking details marked the Baroque style. The Spanish structures of the period can be quickly recognized, but are essentially toned down models when compared to other European creations.

The following are some elements used in the Baroque architectural style.  Frescos are creations of plaster and pigment. When the plaster dries, the Frescos actual become part of the wall of ceiling. Chiaroscuro or the employment of natural lighting, although intangible, was used to create dramatic formation within structures. The putto, a figure of a plump, fleshy often unclothes winged infant, is a striking design that frequents structures of the time. In perspective mural-like paintings, architectural artists deceived the viewer with painting utilizing visual illusions to create depth. Naves are the central approach to a high alter or building section. Ornamental beyond past standards, naves were sometimes domed and always highly embellished.

 

La Chapelle Royale in Versailles, France

 

Passau Cathedra, Germany

 

Church of Santo Domingo, Puebla, Mexico

 

Florence, Italy

 

 

http://experts.about.com/e/b/ba/Baroque_architecture.htm

 

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/c/craftg/HRS134/Baroque%20Art%20and%20Architecture.doc

 

http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/DF_art4.shtml

 

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761578082_8/Architecture.html#p101

 

http://www.britainexpress.com/architecture/baroque.htm

 

End article about English Baroque Literature

 

“Baroque” is the word used to describe music composed between roughly 1600 and 1750. Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel are three of the most famous baroque composers. It follows the Renaissance period and pre-dates the Classical and Romantic periods.

 

Baroque music expresses order, the fundamental order of the universe. Yet it is always lively and tuneful. The English word baroque is derived from the Italian “barocco”, meaning bizarre, though probably exuberant would be a better translation more accurately reflecting the sense. The usage of this term originated in the 1860s to describe the highly decorated style of 17th and 18th century religious and public buildings in Italy, Germany and Austria, as typified by the very baroque angelic organist adorning the Gottfried Silbermann organ completed in 1714 for the Cathedral in Freiberg, Saxony (illustrated above). Later, during the early-to-mid 1900s, the term baroque was applied by association to music of the 17th and early 18th century, and today the term baroque has come to refer to a very clearly definable type or genre of music which originated, broadly speaking, around 1600 and came to fruition between 1700 and 1750.

 

Listen to music of the 1200s and 1300s. It's relatively primitive in terms of melody and harmony. If we move to the 1500s we find a great difference, as Italian music began to blossom and English composers like Dowland, Morley and Tomkins produced the wonderful melodies and surprisingly sensitive poetry which accompanied them - or vice versa. A major theme underlying music at that time however was the exploration of form. There was still so much new to discover: new melodic lines and harmonic progressions to be explored, new combinations of instruments, and new forms in music such as the fugue, canon, and variations on a bass-line, a popular tune or a chorale. As the 1600s progressed, so these different musical forms took on definite shape, and the period from 1700 to 1750 can clearly be seen as the "high baroque".

 

Two geographical influences were at work here. In north Germany and Holland, composers such as Froberger, Kerll, and particularly Dietrich Buxtehude were concentrating mainly on the art of counterpoint, especially the fugue. Here, organ and voice were the major elements. At the other end of Europe, in Rome, the instrumental forms of the sonata and concerto were formalized. Every period in music has certain recognizable clichés, and much of what is typical in baroque music, specific cadences and snatches of melody, can be traced back to Arcangelo Corelli, who seems to have influenced just about everybody, from his Italian contemporaries and students to Handel who sojourned in Rome from 1704 to 1710. From Rome, the "Italian" influences spread northwards while the stricter north German forms flowed southwards, intermingling to produce a common baroque vocabulary. Indeed, the inter-mingling of musical trends from different parts of Europe was surprisingly extensive, considering the relatively primitive methods of travel and communication. Vivaldi, Geminiani, Corelli, Scarlatti, Handel and many others all met one another or were thoroughly conversant with one another's music. Bach journeyed north from his "base" in Thuringia and Saxony, southern Germany, to hear Buxtehude, and his later travels included Dresden and Berlin. Bach owned and/or copied the music of many of his contemporary composers, often re-writing them for different instruments. Indeed this was a recognized method of study widely practised in baroque times.

 

It is also important, when studying the composers and their music of the baroque or indeed any age, to review the circumstances in which composers worked. Take Vivaldi for example. Though he wrote many fine concertos (like the Four Seasons and the Opus 3) he also wrote many works which sound like five-finger exercises for students. And this is precisely what they were. Vivaldi was employed for most of his working life by the Ospedale della Pietà. Often termed an "orphanage", this Ospedale was in fact a home for the female offspring of noblemen and their numerous dalliances with their mistresses. The Ospedale was well endowed by the "anonymous" fathers; its furnishings bordered on the opulent, the young ladies were well looked-after, and the musical standards among the highest in Venice. Many of Vivaldi's concerti were indeed exercises which he would play with his many talented pupils.

 

Two major influences in Germany were the Church and the State, or rather, States. Neither Italy nor Germany existed then as we know them today. Germany was a complex mass of small princely states, each with its own court and, with any luck, court musicians. Alliances came and went as princely families inter-married thus uniting, for a time anyway, their respective territories. That is why so many princely titles of those days were hyphenated, as for example, Anhalt-Köthen or Saxe-Coburg. Many a composer's fortunes rose or fell with the status accorded to music at the court in which he was serving, and composer-musicians would try to seek a position in a city or court where music was known, for the time being anyway, to be thriving under the patronage of an enthusiastic king or prince. The direction of Bach's music was influenced in his early years by several courts at which he was employed; the greater part of his working life however was spent in Leipzig where his position as Cantor of St Thomas' Church required church cantatas in abundance (200 have come down to us, some 100 more are supposed lost).

 

A brief look at the life of Handel illustrates both the mobility, and the influence of royal patronage on a composer typical of the baroque age.

 

Georg Friederich Händel was born in Halle (Germany), on 23 February 1685, just a month before JS Bach was born in Eisenach, not so far to the south.

 

Handel's father intended him for the law, but his own musical inclinations soon prevailed. Following his studies in Germany, Handel went to Italy where he spent more than three years, in Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. In Rome, he studied with Corelli, and no doubt met and exchanged ideas with a number of other Italian composers.

 

Handel left Italy early in 1710 and went to Hanover, where he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector, George Louis. The Royal Houses of Britain and Europe had always been closely inter-related, and England's Act of Settlement of 1701 which secured the Protestant succession to the Crown, placed George directly in the line of succession. In 1705, George was naturalized by Act of Parliament, and in August 1714 the death of Queen Anne made him King of England. Handel, who had already visited London and apparently found it to his liking, was to follow the Elector in adopting British nationality, and indeed part of Handel's success in London was due to the royal patronage of the Elector of Hanover, now King George I.

 

Handel became deeply involved, both artistically and commercially, in the growing London opera scene. Later, during the 1730s he would lean more to the English musical forms, the oratorio, ode and the like, and his Messiah belongs very much to the Anglican anthem tradition. When Handel died on 14 April 1759, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, recognized in England as the greatest composer of his day. In his association with royalty and royal occasions, Handel followed a tradition set fifty years earlier by Purcell, and is still regarded as one of England's greatest composers.

 

In the music of JS Bach, the different forms and styles of the baroque came together and were brought to perfection. Johann Sebastian Bach came from a musical family stretching back through many generations, and the Bachs were well-known throughout their "home ground" of Thuringia in what is now southeast Germany. The Bach family members were church and court musicians, teachers, and one or two were instrument-makers. Though Bach himself travelled less than some of his contemporaries, he seems to have been able to draw freely and widely on the developments taking place throughout the western musical world as indeed were all the other major composers. Later in Bach's life, during his Leipzig years, his son Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote that "no musician of any consequence visiting Leipzig would fail to call upon my father". Leipzig was an important and cosmopolitan university city, and visiting musicians would call upon Bach or stay at his apartments in the Thomas School building where they would make music together on whatever ensemble of instruments the occasion could muster. Many of Bach's later concertos were written or modified for such occasions - the 3 and 4 harpsichord concertos for example.

 

When Bach died in 1750, he left a legacy which summarized his art, his life's work in which he had, by general recognition, brought baroque musical forms to the peak of their development. He left 48 Preludes and Fugues for the keyboard adopting the new "equal temperament" enabling all keys to be played equally and modulation between keys; he left us the Art of the Fugue (complete, though many deny this, attaching an incomplete fugue which is not part of the "Art"), and the Goldberg Variations, a set of 30 Variations on a popular tune. He also left numerous collections of chorale variations, canons, and fugues, as well as many pieces in more standardized form such as preludes, sonatas and concertos. Add to that, some 200 cantatas, the Passions, and the monumental B-Minor Mass (plus the Four Shorter Masses which Bach "assembled" drawing on what he considered as his finest cantata movements).

 

After Bach, music took a different turn. Even the music of his sons, with the possible exception of Wilhelm Friedemann, was quite different in character, expressing the new "gallant" style which was lighter, with less stress on pure form - and having its own set of clichés! Here we find composers such as Haydn and Mozart, to be followed by the romantic composers such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. It was however in the baroque period that the essential language of music was defined, and it is interesting to note how successive composers would often "return to base", studying and playing Bach's works, writing fugues in the baroque style, or adapting the works of baroque composers. Mendelssohn led the baroque revival, while Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven and many others produced fugues in strict baroque style. Max Reger, as well as writing many pieces in baroque contrapuntal style, adapted Bach's Six Brandenburg Concertos for two pianos.

 

Many instruments reached the peak of their development at the height of the baroque era; the organs of Arp Schnitger (north Germany) and Bach's close friend Gottfried Silbermann (Saxony, south Germany) were among the period's finest and are still regarded as such today. Likewise the violins and other stringed instruments of the baroque Italian masters are the prized possessions of today's professional string players. The domestic, and later concert keyboard instrument provides an example of disappearance, replacement, then rediscovery. The baroque age favoured the harpsichord, in which the strings are plucked and the player cannot vary the tone through finger touch. After 1750 the piano took over, offering touch sensitivity, and developing later into the "iron grands" needed for concert-hall performances of the great romantic concertos by such as Beethoven. Interestingly however it was the organ builder Gottfried Silbermann, working with Bach, who contributed substantially to the development of the piano. King Frederick the Great is said to have owned no less than fourteen Silbermann fortepianos (as they were then called) in his Sans Souci palace at Potsdam, just west of Berlin, and it was ostensibly in order to "try out" such an instrument that JS Bach was invited to Potsdam in 1747. The result of this visit was the Musical Offering.

 

Music which is melodious yet so constructed as to reflect the "perfect order" of the universe: that is the essence of the baroque. In the words of baroque composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux: "A composition meets the demands of good taste if it is well constructed, avoids trivialities as well as wilful eccentricities, aims at the sublime, but moves in a natural ordered way, combining brilliant ideas with perfect workmanship."

 

These days more and more people are seeking a return to music for the mind, music combining beauty with the order of an underlying architecture and structure. So we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in the baroque, and those who are fortunate enough to be as yet unfamiliar with it have a wonderful experience awaiting them.

 

Text: Michael Sartorius

 

Baroque music performance: “authentic” or “traditional”

 

A discussion of the essential issues

It has become fashionable over the last ten years to talk of authentic performances, as if others are not. In truth, the attempt to rediscover baroque music and its spirit has been with us since the mid-1800s.

 

But if there is a need to rediscover it, how was it lost in the first place? There is much evidence that, until Bach’s death in 1750, the musical tradition was very much continuous. The music played and sung in the Leipzig church services when Bach was Cantor (from 1723 until his death in 1750) was not confined to what we would now call baroque. Far from it. Interwoven into the service among Bach’s own compositions were chorales and plainsong chants going back one, two and three hundred years in an unbroken tradition.

 

After Bach’s death, however, music took on a different style, and, perhaps for the first time in musical development, the older style was considered unfashionable. There was a major break with the past. The break was not complete of course, but it was such that baroque music could be rediscovered a hundred years later as something of a revelation. Mendelssohn and his sister played Bach regularly in their home, their favourite works being the 48 Preludes and Fugues. And it was Mendelssohn's promotion of the St Matthew Passion in 1829 which marked the first public revival of Bach and his music.

 

This ground-breaking performance was given with a choir of some three or four hundred, certainly not at all as Bach would have known it. But this was not an intentional romanticisation of Bach; rather it was something of a relief to Mendelssohn personally, and ultimately a triumphant re-birth.

 

Mendelssohn himself, though personally enthusiastic and dedicated to the revival of the St Matthew Passion, had been very dubious as to its reception by the public; indeed he was equally dubious as to his choir’s reception of it. If they didn’t like it they would slowly drift away. Would he be left with a “choir” of four voices by the end of rehearsals?! And would anybody be at the concert to hear it? In fact the opposite was the case. Such was the choir’s enjoyment of this work that its numbers swelled with every rehearsal as the word went around. Hence the rather over-large vocal section, which may not have been ideal for a Bach performance, but in the circumstances made Mendelssohn very happy!

 

Wilfred Blunt gives this account in his detailed and perceptive biography of Mendelssohn:

 

The choir of the Singakademie, which it had been feared would gradually fade away as rehearsals proceeded, grew ever larger and ever more enthusiastic under Felix's inspired direction: they noticed, too, that he knew the work so intimately that he dispensed with a score; his musical memory was extraordinary.

 

Excitement in the cultural world of Berlin mounted as the great day approached, for the choirs, three or four hundred strong, had passed the word round that the work was a revelation: that old Bach was after all capable of drama, passion and melodiousness; that here was 'an architectonic grandeur of structure' undreamed of by those familiar only with his smaller instrumental works.

 

Everything had gone so well it seemed impossible that on the day itself the standard achieved during rehearsals could be surpassed. Yet it was. 'Never', wrote a contemporary participant, 'have I known any performance so consecrated by one united sympathy. Our concert made an extraordinary sensation in the educated circles of Berlin. If only old Bach could have heard our performance!' The King and his whole Court were there, and the hall was completely full. More than a thousand people had been unable to get tickets, and two further performances which were called for followed almost immediately.

 

That performance marked the beginning of the move towards what we would now call a baroque revival. The Bach Gesellschaft (Society) began in 1850 the task of publishing all Bach’s works (all that could be found that is), a project which they completed fifty years later in 1900.

 

In the early 1900s, Wanda Landowska “re-invented” the harpsichord, which had been almost completely supplanted by the piano for home and concert performance. Her great "iron grand" was, to say the least, unlike anything built during the baroque period. But to have the prestigious Paris firm of Pleyel temporarily abandon their piano manufacture in order to attempt a re-creation of this peculiar antique instrument was a major pioneering achievement in the rediscovery of the baroque. Landowska’s performances, incidentally, though the recorded sound is not of today’s technical quality, are still exemplary, and Landowska's interpretations are rarely matched today in their insight and technical precision.

 

So the movement of rediscovery gradually progressed. In 1950 the advent of the long playing record created a new vehicle and a new public for classical music, followed in 1960 by stereo with the parallel improvement both in recording equipment, and in the standard of home sound reproduction.

 

During the 70s and 80s further valuable research was conducted into the music and performance of the baroque, applied in practical recording and concert performance. It was during this period that performances began to bear the title "authentic" or "on period instruments".

 

At the same time however, it should also be understood that performance to a major degree reflects the spirit of the times, and some of today's "authentic" performances have less to do with historical accuracy, attempting rather to produce a performance which, in John Eliot Gardiner's words, will "excite modern listeners". Thus it is that "authentic" performances, while aiming to please modern tastes, often make presumptions which lack historical authenticity and which fail to bring out the full potential inherent in the music.

 

Nor has "authenticity" fully percolated through to the recording and balance engineers, who are still failing to pay enough attention to contrapuntal clarity which requires very delicate balancing - the harpsichord particularly suffers consistently from adverse balancing treatment.

 

Tempi, balance, and instrumental timbre: these key issues of performance and recording practice may be reviewed one by one.

 

Tempi

Many "authentic" performances of Bach's cantatas adopt a fast, almost racy tempo which would never have been considered or tolerated in the staid atmosphere of a Lutheran church service in 1730. Tempi if anything would have been slower and more deliberate than we today would probably want to accept. Likewise many “authentic” performances of orchestral and solo works adopt a tempo the speed of which may display the players’ dexterity but obscures much valuable and enjoyable detail. Many a time I have listened to a racy performance; having heard many slower and clearer performances and studied the scores I at least know what I’m missing, but I feel sad for those listening for the first time, who will miss so much wonderful detail. The tempo should never be faster than that which will allow the fastest (shortest-value) notes to be articulated clearly.

 

Another issue of authenticity might also be considered in relation to tempi: the question of relative tempi as between movements of a concerto. Many believe that the ultra-slow middle movement contrasting with excessively fast and often hectic outer movements was a 19th century creation. The respected Romanian/French conductor/composer Georges Enesco believed that the three movements of a baroque concerto (or sonata for that matter) should be approximately equal in duration, that the slow movements should be faster than current practice, and the "fast" movements should be slower. He put this principle into practice in his wonderful Bach clavier concerto recordings, now long ago deleted. Internal evidence of the music itself suggests that the difference between the two outer, and the middle movement was one of character not speed. The outer movements would be lively and outgoing, while the centre movement would be more introspective or lyrical. Thurston Dart, a major pioneer in the search for authenticity in performance during the 1960s, was also of this view.

 

As a simple rule, "slow" movements should move along gracefully, never drag, while "fast" movements should never express haste, and should always respect the player of the fastest notes, so that every note is distinct. As Alessandro Scarlatti wrote in a letter to the Grand Duke Ferdinando de Medici: Where 'grave' is marked, I do not mean 'melancolico'; 'allegro' should be judged so that too much is not demanded of the singer.

 

Many "authentic" performances also adopt unsteady tempi, so that the music seems to move in waves, or fits and starts, ignoring the fact that a regular tempo was universally accepted in baroque times when the major concern was keeping unruly players and singers together. Indeed it was quite usual for conductors to beat time with a heavy object on a desk, or, more commonly still, on the floor with a staff. The French composer Lully was conducting a Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from illness; he was banging loudly on the floor with a staff when he struck his foot with such force that it developed an abscess, from which the unfortunate Lully died shortly after. Slow, steady and deliberate tempi were the order of the baroque day. And clarity of contrapuntal line was paramount, which itself dictated a slow and deliberate rendition.

 

Balance

The importance of contrapuntal clarity leads to the issue of balance. Many recording engineers and studios will record a harpsichord concerto one session and a piano concerto the next; in both cases there is a keyboard soloist set against the orchestral background. Yet while the piano is given prominence in the piano concerto, the harpsichord will be pushed into the soundscape background for the harpsichord concerto! It is not always easy to find recordings of Bach's harpsichord concertos in which the harpsichord is given correct prominence; and as for the poor Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, often (and rightly) billed as the world's first Triple Concerto, it seems impossible to find one recording from the zillions available in which the harpsichord is given the same prominence as the violin and flute, the other two solo instruments. The harpsichord is doing lots of wonderful things, but balance and excessive speeds usually render most of the player's work inaudible. When the harpsichord emerges into its beautiful solo cadenza it is barely audible; indeed in one recent "authentic" recording the harpsichord volume is actually turned up for the solo, either during the recording, the mixing or mastering - a shameful practice hardly worthy of any self-respecting recording company!

 

The tradition of the Inaudible Harpsichord is probably based on the perception of the harpsichord as being solely a continuo instrument, there only to keep the rhythm and to fill in the background harmony. While this may be a true reflection of the harpsichord's major traditional role, this fine instrument was obviously much more significant to Bach, who pioneered its use as a solo-in-concerto.

 

Another example of poor balance which fails to reflect Bach's own view of the harpsichord's role can almost universally be found in his sonatas for violin and keyboard. These were written as 3-part Trio Sonatas, one part for each keyboard hand, and the third for the violin. But once again the harpsichord is generally relegated to the rear of the sound spectrum, the result being an almost solo violin with a faint tinkling in the background. Thus when the counterpoint moves from violin to harpsichord it is all but lost. The same applies with the sonatas for flute - or viola - and harpsichord. In choral music too, balance is often inappropriate musically, when for example the choir is given prominence over the instruments, although baroque composers generally and Bach in particular wrote equally for instruments and voices, taking the musical lines freely from one to the other.

 

In the case of Bach's cantatas and choral works, most performances and recordings use a small portable organ for the continuo, ignoring the church's main organ in the gallery. This arrangement, while no doubt preferred by conductor and recording engineer, may be adequate for the accompaniment of arias and recitatives, but not for the opening choruses in cantatas such as 29 and 146 which feature what amounts to a solo organ concerto movement. Here the thin, almost pitiful sound of the little chamber organ is simply not up to the task. This is one fine aspect (among many others!) of Karl Richter's cantata recordings for Archive, where the big organ is always used. In the accompaniment of concluding chorales too, the big organ provides what Bach would call gravitas. A document in Meissen Cathedral written by JF Doles (1715-97) gives detailed organ registration recommendations for the performance of Preludes, and for the accompaniment of chorales sung by the congregation. Since Doles was a pupil of JS Bach for five years (1739-44) his recommendations may be presumed to reflect Bach's own views. Full organ is recommended for congregational accompaniment, including the 16' Posaune in the pedal. Doles incidentally, after a spell at Freiberg Cathedral, took over Bach's old post as Thomaskantor in 1755 which he held until his death.

 

Timbre

The third major issue to be considered is that of timbre, or sound quality produced by the instruments, in particular the violin and the harpsichord.

 

The harpsichord sound generally associated with most "authentic" performances is, in the words of one outspoken reviewer, “tinny and jangly”. Was this the sound Bach would have preferred from his own harpsichord? This is not a rhetorical or unanswerable question, for we can ascertain Bach's taste in harpsichord sound with some accuracy. To begin with, the harpsichords built today as copies of baroque instruments normally copy the lighter French and Flemish designs. German harpsichords of the baroque period however, were much heavier and more solid, giving a deeper, richer, rounder tone. Even this was not entirely satisfactory to Bach, whose ideal was a harpsichord more resembling the soft tone of the lute. In pursuance of this ideal, Bach had two "lute-harpsichords" custom-built with gut strings and other modifications rendering an even gentler, more rounded sound. Though an actual example of a lute-harpsichord has not survived, there are historical records of orders and specifications, and a wonderful reconstruction has been made for Gergely Sárközy (among others) whose equally wonderful performances of Bach can be heard on the Hungaraton label. It would seem fairly conclusive that this is the sort of sound Bach would have preferred. For more detail about the lute-harpsichord check the link at the bottom of this page.

 

Nor was Bach in any way opposed to the use of the 16' stop in harpsichord performance (as "authentic" performers imply); the inventory of Bach's possessions at the time of his death reveals that as well as two lute-harpsichords, he owned several harpsichords of which his main instrument had a 16' stop on its lower manual.

 

Also fashionable in "authentic" circles is to scorn such "bells and whistles" as foot pedals for registration changes, and - perish the thought - Venetian swell-shutters for volume variations. Once again however, "authentic" ideology disregards historical accuracy. Among the instruments in the Fenton House Collection, London, is a harpsichord built by Burkat Shudi and John Broadwood in 1770. In addition to its six hand stops, it also has three pedals to control the lute, machine and buff stops for quick registrational changes. When the machine stop is put into the 'on' position the upper keyboard commands the upper eight foot stop, and the lower keyboard the three sets of strings. On depressing the lute pedal this combination is changed to: upper keyboard, the lute stop: lower keyboard, the lower eight foot. The case also contains a Venetian swell, an inner lid consisting of eleven hinged shutters covering the whole soundboard area. These shutters can be opened by depressing the buff pedal, which permits crescendo and diminuendo, and also alters the tone colour.

 

Similarly in the case of the violin, the research movement into "authentic performance" has totally overlooked one very important aspect of baroque performance on stringed instruments generally: the ability of the performer to produce true chords, a technique which required a type of bow widely used in German baroque performance.

 

The German baroque violin bow was quite different from its Italian counterpart, reflecting differences in German musical taste. The Italian bow was slim, light, almost straight, and very similar to those in general use today. The German bow was heavier and deeply arched; the strings were loose, and the tension was maintained by the pressure of the player's thumb which was placed under the bow strings. The more cumbersome method of holding the bow which this required, would have dictated slower performance speeds. But more significantly, the tension, being maintained by the player’s thumb, could be tightened for single-line melody, or loosened to play chords on three or all four strings simultaneously. This technique was expounded by one Emil Telmanyi who recorded Bach's solo violin sonatas and partitas for German Decca (Das Alte Werk series) many years ago using a modern reconstruction of the baroque German violin bow. His performance brought out for the first time the alternation between chord and solo line which is such an important feature of Bach's solo string writing - all other performances play broken arpeggios which are not the same as true chords.

 

There need be no doubt as to the historical validity of the arched German baroque bow, with its associated technique of using the thumb to control tension and play chords or single line as required. A cursory glance at the frontispiece to the Musikalishes Lexikon published in 1732 and edited by Bach's cousin Gottfried Walther clearly shows players using arched bows, their thumbs holding the tension of the bowstrings. And there is other documentation, as for example in the written comments by Georg Muffat (1698). A further point is that Bach was not the sort of slapdash musician who would write chords for an instrument incapable of playing them. His solo flute sonata has no “chords” which the player must replicate with arpeggios. Bach wrote chords in his solo string sonatas and partitas because chords were what he intended to be played and chords were what he himself would have played (he learned the violin at an early age and was very fond of the viola). In the absence of a revival of the baroque German bow and a fund of expertise in its use, the only way at present to render a truly authentic performance of Bach's solo violin and solo cello sonatas and partitas - authentic in the sense of how Bach visualized and would have heard them - would be to use a quartet.

 

Fuller detail on the German baroque bow together with the illustration mentioned above and several others can be found by following the link at the bottom of this page.

 

Another very prominent feature of string playing in today's "authentic" performances is the almost total absence of vibrato, resulting in a flat, plaintive and lifeless tone. It seems quite unclear as to where this aspect of "authenticity" derived from, since much evidence supports quite the contrary view. A star pupil of Corelli, Geminiani moved from Naples to London in 1714 and was to become the most important Italian violin virtuoso resident in Britain, also teacher, composer and the author of an immensely influential treatise addressed to advanced players, The Art of Playing on the Violin (1751) as well as several other advanced musical treatises. He published several challenging collections of violin sonatas which require dramatic flair from the player. Geminiani provided ornaments for both slow and fast movements as well as cadenzas in his treatise; he advocated the use of vibrato 'as often as possible', and the expressiveness of his playing was much admired by both Hawkins and Burney. Vibrato was also well known and much valued during baroque times in its application on the clavichord, known in German as Bebung. There are also many references in baroque musical literature, both to the importance placed on warmth and vibrato in vocal performance, and to the ideal in violin playing of replicating the human voice. A further, more practical consideration arises from the fact that musical instruments in those days were not maintained to the same high standard of tuning as they are today, since they were usually stored and often played in damp, cold conditions. It was recommended that instruments play in groups of at least three in order to minimize this problem, and vibrato likewise would have helped overcome the perception of imperfect tuning.

 

Period instruments

A word or two might also be said about the use of the term "period instruments". Some rare and unusual instruments have indeed been revived, but with very few exceptions, these are more relevant in the performance of mediaeval music rather than baroque. The use of the (wooden and much softer) baroque flute is important, as opposed to its more strident metal counterpart - this is a matter of balance, between the flute and harpsichord or other instruments. In the case of stringed instruments however, few stringed instrument players of any standing have ever used an instrument produced more recently than the mid-1800s. The violin, viola and cello players recorded in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were all proud owners of original baroque instruments. Thus the use of the term "period instruments", while it may be indisputably accurate, should not be taken to imply that this is an exclusively modern-day revival phenomenon.

 

Clarity of diction in arias and recitatives

It is important to understand that baroque listeners to cantatas and other sacred works were not there simply for the musical entertainment, as may be the case with today's listener. Bach's cantatas, for example, formed a major part of the lesson for the day, and his texts were expected to reflect the gospel and theme of the sermon. Arias and recitatives were an essential tool in the telling of a biblical story or the communicating of the lesson. Thus the diction would always have been clearly articulated, the voice projected from the front of the gallery for the whole congregation to hear. In many performances of vocal works heard today it is difficult to tell what language the singer is using, let alone the precise words. Such a performance on the part of the vocalist is neither authentic nor useful.

 

The Baroque spirit

While the debate on authenticity in baroque performance will continue, certain essential characteristics should be present, if the performance is to reflect the true baroque spirit. The musicians must first and foremost show a respect and an affection for the music; this is most important. A violinist or singer performing with real sensitivity, even just for a few lines, immediately seizes one's attention. Tempi also are extremely important; if the tempo is too slow the piece drags; too fast and vital detail is lost as the musicians scramble to grapple with unnecessary challenges of physical dexterity. Too many performances today reflect this unseemly haste. Balance is vital too, so that everything can be heard.

 

In the performance itself it is very important, particularly in the works of JS Bach, to display the "architecture" of the piece, especially in his organ preludes and fugues, many of which are constructed in the form of an arch with side pillars at beginning and end, curves and a keystone at the top, with excursions into carved embellishments along the way. A good performer will study the architecture and reflect it in performance through changes in registration. All too often today such considerations are dispensed with, and indeed there is a school of thought which supports performance from start to finish on one manual with one selection of stops, overlooking the fact that much of Bach's organ-writing was produced specifically for and at the request of students and colleagues who wanted pieces which would show off the full power and also the individual sounds of newly built organs which they had been invited to test and approve.

 

A good Bach performance and recording might be summarized in one simple objective: "if Bach wrote it, the listener should hear it". The selection of recommended recordings (listed on a separate web page) reflects these essential elements of baroque music performance; historical authenticity, whilst an important consideration, takes second place.

 

There is a spirit to every age, every composer, and every piece of music. In baroque times, secular and sacred life were very much inter-related, and music was to be enjoyed, but also respected as a spiritual gift. Bach spoke often of a piece, its performance, and the instrumentation or style with which it was performed as requiring gravitas. More importantly, the spirit of the baroque is characterized above all by clarity, for the music is very contrapuntal (fugal/canonic) and every note, every line has its place. Love and respect for the music, enjoyment in performance, and above all, clarity in the articulation, ensemble and recording balance. These are the true essentials of baroque music. If performance practices billed as “authentic” on "period" instruments can reveal these qualities and this spirit then that is true authenticity. If modern instruments can do the same, then that too is authenticity. It’s the spirit that counts.

 

Michael Sartorius

 

 

 

English Baroque Literature

 

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