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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Embodying
Adaptation
Character and the Body

Christina Wilkins
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture

Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA

R. Barton Palmer
Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive
understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger
phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not sin-
gular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural
forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations,
remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes
studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and
these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on
aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as con-
nected to various forms of visual culture.
 Christina Wilkins

Embodying
Adaptation
Character and the Body
Christina Wilkins
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK

ISSN 2634-629X     ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-08532-1    ISBN 978-3-031-08533-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08533-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Tommaso Tuzj

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Julie Grossman and Barton Palmer for their brilliant adapta-
tions series of which this adds to. I am indebted to the support of Geoff
Howell, along with my fantastic colleagues and students, for all the insight-
ful discussions that have informed this book.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Works Cited  10

2 The Acting Body 13

Typecasting and Adaptation  17
Body as Medium  25
Body as Adaptation  29
Bodily Fidelity  32
Works Cited  40

3 Bodily Knowledge 43
Reception and Adaptation  44
Stardom, Performance, and the Body  53
Constructing/Receiving a Character  56
Performance and the Character  59
Adapting Character as Audience Practice  65
Works Cited  68

4 Character Infusion 71
Actor Versus Character  73
Creating Character  78
Character as Spectrum  90
Character/Charactor and Adaptations  94
Works Cited 100

vii
viii Contents

5 Embodying Identities103
The Body, Ideology, and Performance 104
Queer Adaptation and the Biopic 111
Race and Adaptation 124
Death Note, Ghost in the Shell, and Advantageous 127
Representation and Spectating Racebending 132
Works Cited 137

6 Shaping the Psyche141

Illness, Identity, and Narrative 143
Constructing Psychological Difference 149
The Body as Symptomatic 154
Repetitions 160
Works Cited 173

Index177
 About the Author

Christina Wilkins has written on adaptations, identity, nostalgia, and

popular culture. She currently lectures at the University of
Birmingham, UK.

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Star-actor-performance relationship 65

Fig. 5.1 Freddie Mercury onstage as shown in Bohemian Rhapsody115
Fig. 5.2 Emma Stone in Battle of the Sexes caught between partners 117
Fig. 5.3 Signposting of queerness in Bohemian Rhapsody118
Fig. 5.4 Taron Egerton in Rocketman and mirror reflections 118
Fig. 5.5 Rami Malek reflected in sunglasses 119
Fig. 5.6 Rami Malek superimposed as Freddie in media 120
Fig. 6.1 Mads Mikkelsen’s face appearing in blood in Hannibal167

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When we tell stories, or watch or read them, the characters are our guides
through the narrative journey. We follow their footsteps through the path
of the plot; everything is framed by them, including what is important and
the perspective it is seen from. Characters not only colour the narrative
but shape it around themselves. We may conjure up an idea of the charac-
ter, and the story they are involved in, filling in the gaps as we go. As
Thomas Leitch notes, ‘Every story ever told omits certain details’ (53).
The characters may shape how we fill in these details; equally, we may also
fill in the details about the characters themselves. In literary narratives, we
are given a sense of character through description, dialogue, and their
mode of engagement with particular events of the story. This sense often
takes a form, and the character becomes an imagined body in our minds
running through the pages. An imagined body gives the character signifi-
cance, presenting an ideal of character. This ideal is often what causes fric-
tion with adaptations—the body of the actor portraying that character
often does not live up to the imagined body. This is because the reality of
the actor’s body is seen to overwrite the character in some way, becoming
the dominant thing—bringing with it various inter- and extratextual
meanings and significations, thereby reshaping the character.
The importance of the actor’s body, however, may seem like it is being
undermined with the growing use of CGI. A slew of films that feature
CGI characters have been hugely successful in the last decade (including

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Wilkins, Embodying Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08533-8_1
2 C. WILKINS

The Avengers, Ex Machina, and Beauty and the Beast). This gives rise to
what Lisa Bode calls the ‘synthespian’, an actor working with the synthet-
ics of CGI (6). Will CGI’s use become more prevalent and the need for
the actor’s body disappear? This is doubtful. With a number of these films
featuring CGI, there is still a reliance on the actor’s body to be used in
promoting the film as Bode notes—particularly in interviews where the
process of becoming the character is discussed, and there is a focus on the
human body underneath the layer of CGI. Audiences still want to see the
body responsible for the character.
This is because like characters shaping the understanding of the story,
bodies shape our understanding of the world. Our experience of the world
around us is filtered through the boundaries of our body, which shapes
and is shaped by our environment. Not only our own bodies, crucially, but
the bodies of others form their own stories through a negotiation of their
boundaries and the resultant meanings they generate. Thus, it is unsur-
prising that when it comes to popular cultural narratives, we are invested
in the bodies telling them. It is important to note, however, that the bod-
ies in narratives are not real in the same sense as our everyday experiences,
despite how they may look. They are still as imagined as the literary char-
acter body. The key difference however is the physical fact of the actor
whose form will shape those imaginations of character through the social
and psychological meanings their body connotes. This is further compli-
cated by the understanding of how these bodies are meant to act. Different
perspectives on acting see the body as being a tool to access reality.
Stanislavski, for example, believed acting should be ‘more natural’ than
real life (qtd. in Aronson, 318). It should open some understanding of the
world that was not previously accessible. This, says Aronson, is the differ-
ence between illuminating and imitating reality. Illuminating reality is
what is strived for, which he argues is a form of ‘generating adaptations’—
a crucial idea for this book. These bodies illuminate, adapt, and therefore
reshape our understanding of selves. The importance of reality is touched
upon in other scholarship about film, from early theorists such as Kracauer,
who argues that ‘films come into their own when they record and reveal
physical reality’ (qtd. in Sternagel 414).
This illumination of reality requires the audience to see the actor’s
emotions as truthful, and to see them as not just communicating the char-
acter, but becoming them. Hetzler, in a survey of actors, discusses how
actors approach a role and whether they ‘feel’ the emotions of the charac-
ter or whether they are mediated through the imagined character self. This
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

mediation could manifest as ‘feelings about’ the circumstances in which

the character is in. What he asserted was that there was a clear difference
between feeling and portraying. The illumination of reality wants both
feeling and portraying. It also requires a realist style of acting. The need
for both raises questions over how we separate the body from the perfor-
mance of character. The body becomes multiple: a medium, tool, repre-
sentative, owned, possessed, and mediated. How do we conceive of the
body in these ways, and simultaneously? The notion of multiple bodies has
been discussed by other scholars (including Sobchack and Graver), which
will be touched upon in later chapters. What the multiple bodies here
signify is the many and varied selves a body can contain, which has implica-
tions for understandings of not only the self but the other, too. How do
we portray the other that is not us? Is it a donning, a becoming, a morph-
ing? These questions may allow us to think about the boundaries we have
begun to note. However, when we discuss the performance of the other,
or a character self, what often emerges are questions about whether the
actor is ‘true’ to a character or we discuss the actor themselves in lieu of
the character. Thus, we look for the surface of the performance to critique
it—its external presentation. The performance must merely be believable,
in terms of feeling. Discussions of performance highlight the importance
of the actor (and their body) in understanding the character.
It is important to note the different understandings of the term perfor-
mance here. Within the book, the primary use of performance is that of
the acting performance, which is the movement and manipulation of the
actor’s body in order to represent a character. However, it does also touch
on other, related, notions of performance, including concepts of perfor-
mativity, and borrows at points from performance theory. This is not to
conflate the two, but rather to illuminate further aspects of acting perfor-
mance that intersect with performance more generally. Simon Shepherd
talks about the spectrum of meaning when it comes to the word perfor-
mance. Crucially, Shepherd argues that there are many meanings to the
word performance and the problem that might occur with a universal defi-
nition is the sense of ‘flattening out the landscape in order to produce
something slightly banal’ (x). This can be seen through the way perfor-
mance is defined by film scholars. Lori Landay simply states that perfor-
mance is an ‘action done for someone’ (130). This general definition
moves beyond film and into wider circumstances, edging towards perfor-
mance theory more broadly. It is perhaps then useful to touch upon Peggy
Phelan’s discussion of performance to distinguish between different
4 C. WILKINS

understandings of it here. She argues: ‘[P]erformance in a strict ontologi-

cal sense is nonreproductive’ (148). This refers to performance art, which
becomes singular. Film performance, however, is by its very nature a
reproductive form. Whilst it may be a singular instance of a performance,
it is captured in order to be reproduced multiple times. There may be
actions done for someone (the viewer), but film performance is under-
stood as repeating or repetitive. This is the perspective being taken here—
that of repetition, which again is useful for adaptations given Linda
Hutcheon’s definition of adaptation as ‘repetition without replication’
(7). Performance is both a representation and an adaptation of a character.
The concept of performance is useful for this book because of the way it
clarifies the body: what gestures and movements create a performance of
a character, and how the character in turn shapes that body. It becomes
clear by a reassertion of boundaries—of both the body and the character—
that emerge in performance.
Performance and the body implicate medium through the ways in
which the former is shaped by technology. Many of the discussions of act-
ing, both in this book and more broadly, are indebted or at least coloured
by the legacy of the theatre. Questions, and definitions of acting, are
engaged with in Chap. 2. Here, I want to stress the importance of medium
in shaping both acting and the body. Kaja Silberman argues a similar point
that highlights the importance of the body and medium:

[A]sk whether the art of acting changed in response to the evolution of a

new medium. To anticipate my conclusion: yes, it did; and by extrapolation,
this historical change suggests that a similar shift is now under way. The
recent, but not uncontroversial, focus on the actor’s body and on perfor-
mance theory and practices is in my view part of a more general cultural
response to the increasingly dematerialized body in the electronic age. (559)

This returns us to a point made earlier about CGI—despite fears of the

digital, the actor’s body is still important. The medium the body resides in
also shapes how it is seen and understood. With a shift towards online
platforms for viewing films and other media, there are increasing chances
to situate an actor’s body intertextually (and extratextually). Logging into
Netflix, for example, viewers may be able to search for an actor’s reper-
toire. This overt display of the same body in different roles may shape the
understanding of characters even more forcefully than had been done pre-
viously. Viewers are reminded of roles the actor has played, conjuring a
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

reminiscence of character that could feasibly shape their subsequent

understanding of whatever film they choose to watch from the list in front
of them. Similarly, searching for a film online may throw up results about
the actor themselves, thereby shaping the understanding of the character
through extratextual information about the body portraying it. The digital
age has altered the understanding of bodies through its redefining of
boundaries. The inter- and extratextual meanings of the body have become
more apparent. Arguably, these meanings are more readily visible in adap-
tations which provide an understanding of a character body in the material
being adapted. The gaps between the texts more clearly define the bound-
aries of each by virtue of what is absent and what is present in its place.
This may be a literary to a film adaptation, or film to television adaptation,
or a comic book to film. Each offers a body to be adapted; what seems to
be different is the medium it resides in. Cook and Sexton warn against
this, arguing that ‘the very concept of adaptation might also seem in crisis,
dependent as it is upon distinctions between media’ (363). However, I
want to argue not for a distinction between types of media like film, litera-
ture, and television, but instead a focus on the distinction between bodies
and the meanings they communicate in their adaptation.
Whilst the primary focus in this book may be character and the impor-
tance the body has in communicating and shaping it, the heart of it is
adaptation. It is through adaptation that character may become clearer, in
part due to the role the body has in communicating that character. The
body itself becomes adapted by the character, and character adapted to the
body. The visual of the body itself and its importance—notable through
the sheer volume of film and television adaptations of literary texts—has
been remarked upon by Cartmell and Whelehan, who note that ‘adapta-
tion is, perhaps, the result of an increasingly post-literate (not illiterate)
world in which the visual image dominates’ (Adaptations from Text to
Screen 145). What adaptation is, and what it can do, has been discussed
thoroughly; my aim here is not to address and summarise each of the per-
spectives in the field, but simply to assert that the book responds to a
number of concerns in the field. Namely, concerns raised by Katja Krebs
and Glenn Jellenik. Krebs argues that ‘adaptation studies has yet to excise
its, arguably, over-reliance on the case study at the expense of more
detailed consideration of the conceptual framework within which we read
adaptations’ (207). Similarly, Jellenik argues that the task of the adapta-
tion critic is to ‘move away from local studies and toward a consideration
of the larger operations and implications of the act of adaptation’ (256).
6 C. WILKINS

Both see the current need in the field to be a broader approach to adapta-
tion rather than a focus on specific texts. Jellenik continues: ‘S/he can set
to charting the ways a text works through other texts—the ways intertexts
weave and dovetail into one another, the specific ways that they all reflect
and drive the cultures that produce and consume them’ (257). Here, I am
moving on from this idea and adapting it more broadly to the central con-
cerns of the book—character and the body. Jellenik’s idea will be used in
the sense that what is being considered is the way one text (the character)
works through another (the body). Similarly, rather than case studies per
se, the book offers broader theoretical frameworks for understanding
adaptation, notably through the framework of the body and character.
The examples given in later Chaps. 5 and 6 are not singular instances, but
clusters of texts that illuminate something about particular cultural
moments and trends through their production and consumption.
The overall argument of this book is twofold: that the adapted body is
a way to understand our place in the world, and that considering the hier-
archical relationship between the actor and the character, and possibly
reconfiguring that, raises useful parallels with the field of adaptation—
namely what seems to be ‘original’ or ‘true’ is to be viewed as more valu-
able. The book here argues that indeed, the body does matter, and perhaps
more so than ever in our increasingly intangible world. However, despite
this, the character cannot be always rendered as second position to it—it
has a body of its own that exists beyond the sum of its parts (perfor-
mance—actor—character) in the filmic text—that shapes both cultural
understandings of bodies and the actors that portray them. In the literary
text, the character is formed as we see from both the technical aspects
(description, narration) and it requires a construction of character—the
same goes with the filmic text too, which takes these separate parts and
creates something more. This is, I have denoted in Chap. 4, termed char-
actor—a fusion of character and actor, which some may see as having simi-
larities to stardom, but I think here, the image of a character recalled is
often this specific fusion. This highlights the role the audience plays in
understanding the character and the adaptation, which the field has
touched upon in more detail recently, but here the focus is on the way the
audience constructs, shapes, and reads the adapted body.
Chapter 2 sets out the groundwork for thinking about specific concerns
across the book, namely the element of the acting body and its relation-
ship to adaptations. Primarily, it argues that the physicality of the body
itself is crucial to understanding the nature of adaptation and how it is
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

received. This is explored in three different areas across the chapter: type-
casting, body as adaptation, and fidelity to the body. The adaptation of
character to a visual media relies on an acting body. We, or audiences, may
assume that the body chosen is the one that is the ‘best fit’ for the charac-
ter. However, this does not take into account the practice of typecasting.
Certain physical traits are relied upon for typecasting which enable a par-
ticular ‘type’ to solidify an understanding of a particular ‘type’ of charac-
ter. Yet, can the same be said for the character we encounter in a literary
text? The element of the physical body complicates our understanding of
character, perhaps threatening its reduction to a type. It therefore begins
to complicate our understanding of what an adaptation can do. The role
of the body as medium further complicates the relationship between per-
formance and adaptation. The body becomes a defined object: ‘[T]he
notion of body as an object … stands in close relationship to the way they
are read by the world’ (Mitchell, 144). This reading by the world encom-
passes both the complex role of typecasting and an awareness of the ‘origi-
nal’ body. Fidelity to the imagined ‘original’ body in literary cases is an
issue raised in audience response to particular adaptations. Physicality thus
becomes central in thinking about adaptation, but also reinforces the
notion of fidelity as subjective given differences between these imagined
physicalities of the ‘original’ character.
Expanding on from Chap. 2, Chap. 3 seeks to explore how the body is
understood by audiences in adaptations. Specifically, it addresses concerns
over star performance and the element of audience knowledge. Reception
has been an ongoing concern in adaptation studies as debates over inten-
tion and understanding have occurred. This is primarily in terms of
whether audiences understand a text is an adaptation and how this impacts
its reception. Scholarship around this has sprung from critics such as Linda
Hutcheon who describes adaptation as our reception of texts as palimp-
sests, thus privileging the subjective experience. Yet, as noted by Cutchins
and Meeks: ‘[U]ntil adaptation studies finds a way to understand adapta-
tions in terms of reception, it will continue to chase its own tail’ (303).
The exploration of the acting body both as form of adaptation (established
in Chap. 2) and impacting audience reception of the adapted text compli-
cates the discussion around reception within the field. Audience under-
standing of the text as adaptation may be in place, but complicated by the
inclusion of a well-known body. Thus star physicality may in some cases
obscure the notion of character or function as a dilution of character. In
this scenario, the performance of the star becomes central to the text,
8 C. WILKINS

rather than the understanding of character. The text operating as adapta-

tion is therefore complicated with the inclusion of star performances,
priming audiences to see a character in a particular way that may not be
present in the text it is adapted from. These ideas will also be explored
through the ways in which the body onscreen channels character, explor-
ing Dyer’s performance signs and Pomerance’s notion of performed per-
formance. This embodying of multiple characters in the latter concept
allows for a consideration of the technicalities of presenting characters
through a particular body known as something else.
Chapter 4 begins by establishing the particular hierarchies in place in
both performance studies and adaptations—particularly the primacy of the
source in adaptations and the technical ability of the actor in performance
studies. This builds on work done by Cartmell and Whelehan in 1999,
which attempted a rethinking of traditional structures in place within the
field of adaptations. From the perspective of this book, the focus is on
character and how the character moulds the acting body and the physical-
ity of that body impacts the text. Discussions and understandings of char-
acter in terms of performance present the actor as inhabiting the character,
wearing it as a mask. It thus becomes something to enter into, to flesh out,
a hollow to be filled. Situating it as such creates an understanding of char-
acter as an adaptation of the actorly body, and therefore in another hierar-
chy. This chapter thinks through a restructuring of such hierarchies,
considering how we could theorise the character inhabiting the actor and
the impact that has on the adaptation. This is aided by a discussion of the
role of medium in presenting character and how character is understood.
This begins to think through a medium-specific approach to character,
positioning it as a textual element. Seeing it as a discrete aspect of an adap-
tation, as we do with recurrent figures such as Sherlock Holmes and
Dracula, gives us a route into an understanding of character as a key to
unlocking avenues of thought within adaptation and performance.
Given the foundations of this approach to adaptations has been estab-
lished, Chaps. 5 and 6 explore clusters of examples that highlight the
inherent tensions in thinking about the actorly body as adaptation. As
noted, rather than singular case studies as is the problem with the field
according to Krebs and Jellenik, these two chapters instead identify key
moments that speak to something in culture, exemplified by distinct
groups of texts. They tell us something about how identity is shaped by
the body, and how those meanings are shifting through their physical rep-
resentation. Krebs thinks about adaptation of identities, positing it as a
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

way to understand something of the identity of the spectator, but one that
is imaginary: ‘[A]daptation of an imagined identity represents identity
within the adapting culture rather than offer a glimpse of the identity of
the imagined other’ (212). This functions as a way to establish under-
standings of the adapted body onscreen and is further complicated by the
use of acting approaches which debate the actor as representing himself or
inhabiting a character. Both of these rely on an understanding of the
reception of the text, which leads on from ideas established here in Chap.
3: how does the audience knowledge impact performance of particular
identities? To think through this in more detail, an examination of queer
performance, biopic, and adaptation functions as the focus of the first half
of the chapter. This takes into account scholarship around queer adapta-
tion and queer performance. How does a queer character challenge the
hierarchies of adaptation and performance? What problems are inherent
within acting queer? The reliance on queer expression through physical
signs and behaviours is crucial and brings the element of the physical into
focus. Giving physical form to adaptations of queer identities may change
our understanding of character; again, the tension comes in audience
knowledge and reception. These discussions of particular examples
(Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Battle of the Sexes) allow for a closer
reading of character in adaptation, and how the multitude of factors affect-
ing the physical body onscreen work to create a particular form of adapta-
tion, complicated by the aspect of the biopic. The second half of the
chapter considers the importance of the physical in representing and shap-
ing understandings of race and identity through a number of texts that
feature whitewashing of Asian characters. This complicates our under-
standing of the body’s adaptability to character.
Whilst Chap. 5 explores the manifestation of a particular identity, Chap.
6 moves beyond and thinks about giving form to an aspect of the self that
can never be truly seen or understood, the psyche. It begins by establish-
ing key perspectives in disability studies and understandings of adaptations
that construct specific identities (following Chap. 5). This allows for an
understanding of the complexities in portraying characters with psychiat-
ric or psychological differences. Drawing together the approaches here,
this chapter first examines a cluster of texts that adapt characters who are
depressed, to consider how the psyche is mediated through the physical
and, equally, how the physical/external both limits and expands the com-
munication of the internal. The second half uses the exploration of a psy-
chopathic character, Hannibal Lecter, to elaborate further on these ideas.
10 C. WILKINS

The character of the psychopath also draws in Pomerance’s notion of per-

formed performance given the common need for the psychopaths in nar-
ratives to hide their ‘true’ nature with a performance of normality. This
dual approach to performance and identity layering presents an interesting
way to think through the physical manifestation of character and how they
can be contained and expressed in a body. This chapter also argues that
these characters function as particularly striking for audiences and thus
mark the actorly body in some way with their trace.
There is a need for tangibility and identification with character that
comes from physicality to an extent. The importance of physicality comes
from audience knowledge, our imagined understandings of these charac-
ters which are either confirmed or deviated from in the actorly body
onscreen. It also allows for a deeper exploration into thinking about how
we construct character in a non-visual sense, and why the element of the
physical is so important in valuing of an adaptation for audiences. The
examples explored across this book show how the change prompted by
adaptation is crucial; it allows us to see these characters in different situa-
tions not necessarily morally but literally, thereby allowing for a different
understanding of the body and its meanings. The change in physicality is
key: the physical aspect cannot be ignored, shaping and being shaped by
the text that is the character. Character, and the body it inhabits, may per-
haps be the most important aspect of an adaptation given audience identi-
fication with them and their ability to shape understanding of identities.

Works Cited
Aronson, Oleg. 2003. ‘The Actor’s Body Constantin Stanislavski’s Cinematic
Theatre’, Third Text, 17 (4), pp.313–321
Bode, Lisa. 2017. Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in
Popular Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Cartmell, D., and Whelehan, I. 2010. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Cartmell, D., and Whelehan, I. 1999. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to
Text. London: Routledge
Cook, M., and Sexton, M. 2018. ‘Adaptation as a Function of Technology and Its
Role in the Definition of Medium Specificity’ in The Routledge Companion to
Adaptation, ed. Cutchins, D., Krebs, K., and Voigts, E. London: Routledge.
pp.361–371
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leads to a more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which
includes the sentence already referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard and
inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne.”
The notes now keep close to literature throughout in substance,
though their titles (e.g., Ignorantia animæ), and so forth, may seem
wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p. 26), leads to yet another
of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is
intercalated a curious Scriptorum catalogus, limited, for the most
part, though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And
then for some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have
Ben’s chief attention.[276]
We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic
glance at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious
unheaded letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of
which is translated directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian;
and then directly accost it again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo
scribendi genere, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben’s
prescription is threefold: read the best authors, observe the best
speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well aware
that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old advice to
English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before
Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or
Gower at first. Here occurs the well-known dictum, that Spenser “in
affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for
his matter.” A fine general head opens with the excellent version of
Quintilian, “We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of
Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on diction—
the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom makes, and ever
will continue to make, the best speech—with a sharp stroke at
Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity of style,
Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (Oratio
imago animi), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to
anticipate Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by
insisting that style is not merely the dress, but the body of thought.
[277]
All this discussion, which enters into considerable detail, is of the
first importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book.
It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a separate
discussion of poetry.
It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat
acid, though personally guarded, description of the present state of
the Art introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary
that a poet is not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all
as we have found it before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in
succincter and more scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet
is ingenium—goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts
—“bringing all to the forge and file” (sculpte, lime, cisèle!); the third
Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new, for we have
met it from Vida downwards), which is not an improvement, by
keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the following of
the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an
exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to
be so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to
some interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had
evidently meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.[278] We turn to
the Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the
fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this
also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an
evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like
a brewer’s cart on the stones.”
These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general care
Form of the before we examine them more particularly. They
book. were, it has been said, never issued by the author
himself, and we do not know whether he ever would have issued
them in their present form. On the one hand, they are very carefully
written, and not mere jottings. In form (though more modern in style)
they resemble the earlier essays of that Bacon whom they so
magnificently celebrate, in their deliberate conciseness and
pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to doubt that
some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to think
that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly
constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and
erudition. It is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the
thoughts are co-ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose,
as if for future treatment of the same kind.
Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the
Its date. time of their composition. Some of them—such as
the retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of
Shakespeare—must be late; there is a strong probability that all date
from the period between the fire in Ben’s study, which destroyed so
much, and his death—say between 1620 and 1637. But at the same
time there is nothing to prevent his having remembered and recopied
observations of earlier date.
Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the
Mosaic of old composition of the book. It has sometimes been
and new. discovered[279] in these Discoveries, with pride, or
surprise, or even scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from
the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though less,
from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his own.[280] But
in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—and in neither is
there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have wished if
he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned
age. When a man—such as, for instance, Sterne—wishes to steal
and escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is
reading. And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas,
Petronius, Quintilian, Pliny, were specially favourites with the
Jacobean time. In what is going to be said no difference will be made
between Ben’s borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact
of the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical
reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon, are
made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase, and its
thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous and
massive temperament.
Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief
flings at Montaigne and at “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams,” and the
longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.
The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is
especially interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson
elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English
Essayist of his time, and because of the fact that not a few of these
very Discoveries are “Essays,” if any things ever were. Nor would it
The fling at be very easy to make out a clear distinction, in
Montaigne; anything but name, between some of Ben’s most
favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is, however,
somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation.
Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious
desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it
were out of mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it
quite impossible that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and
was to some extent the dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of
promiscuousness.
The “Tamerlane and Tamercham”[281] fling is not even at first sight
at Tamerlane, surprising. It was quite certain that Ben would
seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed
at—the confusion, the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the
“University Wits”—and it is not probable that he was well enough
acquainted with the even now obscure development of the earliest
Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous improvement which
they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as
Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a little
bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division
of the critical creed—in this also.
The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear
from this to the best known passage of the whole, the section De
the Shakespeare Nostrat. It cannot be necessary to
Shakespeare quote it, or to point out that Ben’s eulogy, splendid
Passage, as it is, acquires tenfold force from the fact that it is
avowedly given by a man whose general literary theory is different
from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying it loses
force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any
ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what
Ben praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus,
would have seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never
wrong but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The
paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of course, not
been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of garbling or of
forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It
is very like Shakespeare to have written what Ben says: very like
Ben to object to the paradox (which, pace tanti viri, is not “ridiculous”
at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players
to have changed the text; and most of all like the commentators to
make a fuss about the matter.
What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less
and that on interesting. For here it is obvious that Ben is
Bacon. speaking with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full
acknowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke,
“when he could spare or pass by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation
that Strength, the gift of God, was what Bacon’s friends had to
implore for him, there is no admixture whatever in the eulogy of “him
who hath filled up all numbers,[282] and performed that in our tongue
which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty
Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not
been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he should
regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon, unluckily
for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the
dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could
never have soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s
materialist-Idealism. But they were both soaked in “literature,” as
then understood; they were the two greatest masters of the closely
packed style that says twenty things in ten words: and yet both
could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne
or Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon’s own scientific scorn for
words without matter surpassed Jonson’s more literary contempt of
the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, there
was between them the idem velle et idem nolle.
A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special points,
cannot do the Discoveries justice. The fragmentary character of the
notes that compose it, the pregnant and deliberately “astringed” style
in which these notes are written, so that they are themselves the
bones, as it were, of a much larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet
it is full of value, as it gives us more than glimpses

“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,”

or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter, to his
relative position; but something should be said here of his intrinsic
character.
He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the
General “classical” limitation. With some ignorance,
character of doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of
the book. the actual achievements of prose romance, and with
that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose
purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did
not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old
mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the
supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new
versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his
handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it,
that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the
(stopped) couplet[283] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects
in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of
English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries.
The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all
Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully
reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have
made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments
“for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s
theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics
and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe
to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne
downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in
the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for
Order, Uniformity, Classicism.
He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with
sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to
Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the
sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more
interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and
Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as
shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes
admirably, expressed, in a style which unites something of
Elizabethan colour, and much of Jacobean weight, with not a little of
Augustan simplicity and proportion. He does not head the line of
English critics; but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who
have been great both in criticism and in creation.[284]

198. The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, op. cit., in
the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E.
Schelling, Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth,
Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together
in Ancient Critical Essays, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber
the most important separately in his English Reprints. Mr Gregory
Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection
yet issued.
199. Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the
strictures passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the
“default in mine English” (History of Troy); on the “right good and fair
English” of Lord Rivers (Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers).
200. There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue
that despite the constant use of the word Rhetoric in the fifteenth
century, the teaching of the thing had declined. I do not think there is
much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and curious
passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong evidence
against it. Rhetoric has no less than eight chapters of the Pastime of
Pleasure, as against one apiece for Grammar and Logic.
201. The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London,
1845), pp. 27-56.
202. This Fourth River will appear a less startling “novelty” when
the illuminating power attributed to the stone is remembered.
203. Wilson has usually been dignified in this way: but some
authorities, including the Dict. Nat. Biog., deny him knighthood.
204. It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having
preceded him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of
Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance.
205. My copy is of this, which is the fuller.
206. Fol. 82.
207. Fol. 1, verso, at bottom.
 208. One may regret “sparple” and “disparple,” which are good
and picturesque Englishings of e(s)parpiller. The forms “sparkle” and
“disparkle,” which seem to have been commoner, are no loss, as
being equivocal.
209. Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been
a catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s
version of Jovius (1546), &c.
210. Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian
concerning Julius Florus (v. supra, i. 313).
211. Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.
212. This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just
cited, p. 5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp.
12, 13.
213. For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly
be bettered. But for our purposes the Letters are also needed; and
these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the Works,
3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.
214. Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante
aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui
nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum,
Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis
senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur—Giles,
i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading.
215. P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at
monasticism.
216. P. 80, ed. Arber.
217. Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii.
189. The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect,
particularly literary.
218. V. supra, p. 46.
219. V. supra, p. 127.
220. There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song
in ballad, carol, and what not.
221. It is curious that, in this very début of English criticism, the
incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged
makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-
natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the
true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow
the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat
acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.”
Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering
blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c.
222. Schoolmaster, ed. cit., p. 73. Ascham actually quotes the
Greek and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s
stuff to be made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other!
223. Ibid., p. 145.
224. P. 147. The extraordinary confusion of mind of the time is
illustrated by Ascham’s sheltering himself behind Quintilian!
225. Not to be confounded with Thomas Watson, the author of the
Hecatompathia, who came later, and was an Oxford man.
226. Some authorities have been much too mild towards it. For
instance, the late Mr Henry Morley, who says, “Thomas Drant, of
course, did not suppose that his rules were sufficient.” This is
charitable, but outside, or rather against, the evidence.
227. Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse
or rhyme in English, ed. Arber (with The Steel Glass, &c.), pp. 31-41,
London, 1868. Originally in the 4to edition of Gascoigne’s Poems
(London, 1575). Mr Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to Ronsard.
228. The observations of Ascham, Wilson, and the others being
incidental merely.
229. “If I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I
would neither praise her crystal eye nor her cherry lip.”
230. Gascoigne does not use this division, or ¯ and ˘ but ´ and `
for long and short, ~ (circumflex) for common, and indented lines (
and ) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic foot
arrangements.
231. “For the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and
the verse that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted horse.”
232. See Mitford, Harmony of Language, p. 105, who thinks the
licence just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the
pronunciation in one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest
thinks the dis-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary
disagreement!
 233. See Grosart’s Works of Gabriel Harvey, vol. i. pp. 6-150.
Parts will be found in the Globe edition of Spenser, pp. 706-710.
234. I am not responsible for the eccentricities of this form.
235. In order of composition, not of publication.
236. This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a
good example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their
preciousness by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to
use against him; and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his
Virgil. Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (vide Mr Arber’s Reprint
in the English Scholars Library, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks
partly to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English
literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has
some method in its madness.
237. La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.
238. The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has
borrowed from the Camden Society’s Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey,
touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important
deliverances. In the later (1592) Four Letters, the embroidery of
railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely
hidden the literary canvas.
239. Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately
subsequent Apology. I wish he had added the Ephemerides of
Phialo which accompanied the Apology, and the Plays Confuted of
three years later; for these books—very small and very difficult of
access—add something to the controversy.
240. Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in
Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets (London, 1892).
241. Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber,
London, 1868; Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston
(U.S.A.), 1890.
242. V. supra, p. 28.
243. Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr
Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He
quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among
the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the
moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or
nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following
them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case
of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of
1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of
them, pretty well. But his attitude is very different from theirs as a
whole, and already significant of some specially English
characteristics in criticism.
244. Savonarola, v. sup., p. 20.
245. “I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old
song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more
than with a trumpet.”
246. “As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”
247. It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very
well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know,
was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.
248. All three are included in Mr. Arber’s Reprints, where the
desirable, or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will
be duly found.
249. It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere
copyist of Gascoigne.
250. Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient
stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.
251. Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves
exception perhaps best.
252. The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly
to seek in English now than, teste Porson, they were a century ago
in Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely
done; and of course some Englishmen have followed the Germans.
Lydgate himself knew better, though some of the shorter poems
attributed to him are metrically, as well as in other ways, not
contemptible.
253. V. infra, p. 354.
254. The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly
put, in Mr Arber’s Introduction. The first attribution is in Bolton (v.
infra) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not
quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who
has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons
of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s,
and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship
is well known.
255. Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman,
perstringes this as well as other things in his fling at the Art.
256. Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible
revision in the book. That there was some such revision is certain;
for instance, Ben Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not
uninteresting) contains a large cancel of four leaves, not found in
other copies known. For this and other points of the same kind, see
Mr Arber’s edition.
257. “Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one
though, with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have
understood its little ways rather well.
258. Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to Promos
and Cassandra (1578) and A. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588)
are earlier still. The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the
irregularity of English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical
metres, his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben
Jonson in his Conversations, v. infra, p. 199.
259. Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, English Garner,
ii. 94 sq.
 260. Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton
(iv. 204 sq., ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and
speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting
the Hymns) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can
“endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course),
Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey,
Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital,
judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.
261. Ed. Bullen, Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889.
262. Chalmers’s Poets, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s Works of Samuel
Daniel, iv. 29-67.
263. It ought to be, but from certain signs perhaps is not,
unnecessary to say that the De Augmentis is itself no mere Latin
version of the Advancement, but a large expansion of it. There
seems, however, no necessity here to deal with both.
264. Advancement of Learning, Bk. II. iv.
265. I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in
detail with other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see
what has been said for Bacon will find most of the references in
Messrs Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from
my honoured friend and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr
Worsfold—all rely on the description of poetry above referred to, as
“Feigned History,” with what follows on its advantages and on
poetical justice, &c. All this seems to me, however admirably
expressed, to be obvious and rudimentary to the xth and the nth.
266. To be most readily found in Rogers’s Memorials of the Earl of
Stirling (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it
appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less
pure genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date
or provenance. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of
Drummond’s Works: and to have been written in 1634, between
Bacon’s death and Ben’s.
267. From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not
always agree with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better
advised when he called it “disappointing.”
268. It may be well to point out that these days carried him far
beyond the point at which we have stopped for Italian and for
French. His solidarity with the Elizabethans proper, however, makes
his inclusion here imperative: and the fact must be taken into
consideration in judging the relative lengths of this and the preceding
chapters.
269. Take as one of a hundred, and from the less read pieces, that
interesting passage in the masque of The New World Discovered in
the Moon, which Gifford has made more interesting by a further
discovery in Theobald’s copy:—
Chro. Is he a man’s poet or a woman’s poet, I pray you?
2nd Her. Is there any such difference?
Fact. Many, as betwixt your man’s tailor and your woman’s tailor.
1st Her. How, may we beseech you?
Fact. I’ll show you: your man’s poet may break out strong and
deep i' the mouth, ... but your woman’s poet must flow, and stroke
the ear, and as one of them said of himself sweetly—

“Must write a verse as smooth and calm as cream,

In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.”
Whereon the injured “Tibbalds”: “Woman’s Poet, his soft versification
—Mr P——.”
The Induction to Every Man out of His Humour, a very large part of
Cynthia’s Revels, with its principal character of Crites, and its
audacious self-praise in the Epilogue, not a little of The Silent
Woman, and scores of other places in play and poem, might be
added.
270. These dicta, thus juxtaposed, should make all argument
about apparently one-sided judgments superfluous. If Drummond
had omitted the first or the last, we should have been utterly wrong in
arguing from the remainder.
271. The best separate edition is that of Prof. Schelling of
Philadelphia (Boston, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of this, as well as
the Latin Headings of sections, which will enable any one to trace
the passage in complete editions of the Works such as
Cunningham’s Gifford. It is strange that no one has numbered these
sections for convenience of reference.
272. It may be observed that the shorter aphorisms rise to the top
—at least the beginning.
 273. “He is upbraidingly called a poet.... The professors, indeed,
have made the learning cheap.”
274. It is here that Ben borrows from Petronius not merely the
sentiment but the phrase, “umbratical doctor” (see vol. i. p. 244
note).
275. “Taylor the Water-Poet,” certainly bad enough as a poet—
though not as a man. But the selection of Spenser as the other pole
is an invaluable correction to the sweeping attack in the
Conversations.
276. Perhaps, indeed, an exception should be made in favour of
the section De malignitate Studentium, p. 34, which reiterates the
necessity of “the exact knowledge of all virtues and their contraries”
on the part of the poet.
277. He may have taken this from the Italians.
278. This is one of the most lacrimable of the gaps. Ben must
have known other authorities besides Quintilian well: he even
quotes, though only in part, the great passage of Simylus (vol. i. p.
25 note).
279. I am most anxious not to be thought to reflect on Professor
Schelling in this remark. Dr Schelling’s indagations of Ben’s debts
are most interesting, and always made in the right spirit, while, like a
good farmer and sportsman, he has left plenty for those who come
after him to glean and bag. For instance, the very curious passage,
taken verbatim from the elder Seneca, about the Platonic Apology
(cf. vol. i. p. 237).
280. Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after a pretty elaborate
overhauling of the Italians, I find very little certain indebtedness of
detail. Mr Spingarn seems to me to go too far in tracing, p. 88, “small
Latin and less Greek” to Minturno’s “small Latin and very small
Greek,” and the distinction of poeta, poema, poesis to Scaliger or
Maggi. Fifty people might have independently thought of the first;
and the second is an application of a “common form” nearly as old
as rhetoric.
281. P. 27. “The Tamerlanes and Tamerchams of the late age,
which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious
vociferation to warrant them.” It is just worth noting that Jonson
thought there was more than this in Marlowe; and that the early edd.
of Tamburlaine are anonymous.
282. One cannot but remember—with pity or glee, according to
mood and temperament—how the Bacon-Shakespeare-maniacs
have actually taken this in the sense of poetic “numbers.” But in truth
their study is not likely to be much in haughty Rome and its
language, or to have led them either to Petronius and his omnium
nume[ro]rum, or to Seneca and his insolenti Græciæ.
283. Daniel had frankly defended enjambement.
284. It seemed unnecessary to enlarge the space given to the
men of Eliza and our James, by including the merer grammarians
and pedagogues, from Mulcaster to that fervid Scot, Mr Hume, who,
in 1617, extolled the “Orthography and Congruity” of his native
speech (ed. Wheatley, E.E.T.S., 1865). Of Mulcaster, however, it
deserves to be mentioned that, not so much in his Positions (1581:
ed. Quick, London, 1887), which have been, as in his Elementarie,
which should be, reprinted, he displays a more than Pléiade
enthusiasm for the vernacular. Unluckily this last is not easy of
access, even the B.M. copy being a “Grenville” book, and hedged
round with forms and fears.
 INTERCHAPTER IV.

The proper appreciation of the period surveyed in the foregoing

Book is of perhaps greater importance than that of any other part of
this History. We have seen, in the three preceding Interchapters,
what it was that prevented Greek, Roman, and Mediæval criticism
respectively from attaining completeness, and how the preventives
worked. We saw further, in the last pages of the First Volume, in
what condition literature, and at least the possibilities of the criticism
of literature, were left at the beginning of the Renaissance. And now
we have seen what additions the Renaissance made—not, indeed,
in detail, to literature itself, for that belongs to another story than
ours, but what additions it made—to the criticism of literature. In
mere bulk these additions were very considerable. The extant critical
writing of these hundred years (or rather of the last seventy of them),
excluding mere rhetorical schoolbooks, probably exceeds, and very
largely exceeds, the total of classical and mediæval work on the
subject which we possess, even inclusive of schoolbooks. For the
very first time Criticism, not as a sort of half accidental and more
than half shame-faced extension of Rhetoric, but in and for itself,
received a really large share of the intellectual attention of the
period.
Moreover, the advantages possessed by Renaissance critics (as
we partly also saw in the place referred to) were likewise very great.
Men were beginning really to know and really to understand
antiquity; they had the whole body of mediæval literature complete,
finished, ready for their appreciation; and they or their
contemporaries were daily and yearly building up great literatures in
all the principal countries of Europe, except Germany, and not wholly
despicable literatures there and elsewhere. The excuse of the want
of comparison, which had been valid for Greece, less valid but still
partly so for Rome, and valid again, though for different reasons, in
the Middle Ages, was dwindling and disappearing every day. There
was no want of interest in the subject; there was no want of
examples, both encouraging and warning, of method.
Nor is it possible to deny that the actual accomplishment of the
time was very considerable likewise. When a century finds a certain
department of intellectual activity almost uncultivated; when it leaves
that subject in a state of active cultivation; and when, further, two
following centuries are content to opine almost wholly in the sense to
which it has generally inclined,—that century can hardly be said to
have wasted its years. Accomplishment—very remarkable and solid
accomplishment—it can certainly boast. It must be the business of
this Interchapter to examine the nature and (partly at least) the value
of that accomplishment, now that we have fully surveyed its items,
and frankly admitted a certain general result.
In considering the critical achievement of Italy, the earliest in time,
the most abundant in result, the most influential—in fact an
abridgment, and no mean abridgment, of that of Europe—we cannot
but see at once that there was a certain disadvantage accompanying
the inevitableness and the general propriety of this Italian
prerogative. No other country had so much learning; but, for this very
reason, no other country was so certain rather to over- than to
under-value the importance of ancient doctrine. No country had so
perfect a literature, though other countries had literatures older,
richer, and more vigorous; but this very perfection, while it might
seem to provide a fertile field for criticism, had two dangers. The
Italians were likely to look down upon, or simply to ignore, other
literatures; and, from the failing, though slowly and not conspicuously
failing, force of their creative power, they were likely to turn to
logomachies and debating-society wrangles. Nay, there was a third
peril. No country had so little properly mediæval literature as Italy;
and none therefore was more certain to set the fashion of ignoring or
slighting that mediæval performance which is so invaluable as a
check and balance-redresser. And perhaps we might even add a
fourth—that while French and English had got practically beyond the
reach of mere dialect-jealousy, Italian had not; and that too much of
the abundant interest in literature was throughout turned upon mere
grammar and mere linguistics.
 Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, perhaps for none
assignable except by superfluous guess-work, Italian criticism, active
and voluminous as it was, settled very early into certain well-marked
limits and channels, and almost wholly confined itself within them,
though these channels underwent no infrequent intersection or
confluence.
The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian
Renaissance were three—the Ars Poetica of Horace, the Poetics of
Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with poetry. These
latter had, as we have seen, begun to affect Italian thought, directly
or by transmission through this or that medium, before the close of
the fourteenth century; and the maintenance of the Platonic ban, the
refutation of it, or the more or less ingenious acceptance and
evasion of it, with the help of the Platonic blessing, had been a
tolerably familiar exercise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of
Savonarola. But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of
much more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical
literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly comment
these texts; others follow them with more or less selection or
combination; many take up separate questions suggested by them;
very few, if any, face the subject without some prepossession
derived from them.
The very earliest regular criticism, as in Vida and the first books of
Trissino, is either strictly grammatical and formal or else tends to
expatiate further in the Horatian path of rather desultory practical
hints for composition, these latter usually tending towards a more or
less slavish “Follow the ancients.” But, from the time of Daniello
onwards, more abstract views and questionings, especially in the
direction of a sort of Eirenicon between Aristotle and Plato, begin to
engage the attention of critics, sometimes as a prelude to study of
formal Poetics, sometimes to the exclusion of this. The most
thoroughgoing as well as about the ablest example of this latter kind
is probably the Naugerius of Fracastoro, where this distinguished
physician and physicist, himself a skilled versifier and even
something of a poet, scarcely touches poets and poetry in the
concrete more than he might in a dialogue on physics or
metaphysics, and is entirely occupied with questions of the
extremest “metapoetic,” or metacriticism.
This kind of discussion, which is prominent in the whole body of
critics from Daniello to Summo, is, with its extensions in the direction
of the Theory of the Drama, the Theory of the Heroic Poem, &c., no
doubt the most characteristic, and perhaps even the constitutive,
feature of Italian criticism. It seems to have been that which most
attracted foreign scholars, and stirred them up to emulation; it is very
rarely omitted altogether by anybody, save the merest grammarians.
In fact, it so impressed itself, during this period, upon the
imagination, the memory, the intellectual habit, not merely of Italy but
of Europe, that to this day critics who neglect it are looked at
askance by many, if not by most, of their fellows.
Questions, however, more practical than these, yet not of quite
such extreme practicality as the mere questions of grammar and
dialect, of metric and composition, did actually occupy the Italians.
About the middle of the century the lucubrations of Cinthio and Pigna
on the question of the Romances and their relation to Epic and to the
Aristotelian system, opened up the most promising prospect by far
that had ever yet been disclosed to criticism. Had these inquiries
been followed up—had they been extended from the Romance to
the novella, which had already become such a feature of Italian
vernacular literature—had Italy provided something not less
vigorous, but more polished, than the English Interlude and romantic
mystery of the Mary Magdalene type, or the French farce and sotie,
so that a similar investigation might have been further extended to
drama—there is no saying what might not have been achieved. But
this was not permitted.
As a matter of fact, the times were not ready, nor the
circumstances. The profitable promise of the discussion on the
romanzi dwindled off into the mere logomachies or personalities of
the Gerusalemme controversy, and into endless formula-making for
the abstract Heroic Poem. But little trace of it is seen on the vigorous
and independent mind of Castelvetro; less on the equally vigorous,
still more independent, but perhaps rather more scholastic, mind of
Patrizzi. For the former, Aristotle is still the special though not quite
the exclusive battleground, or canvas, or whatever metaphor may be