Seraphs, Cherubs, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

[matociquala]

I'm reading E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture, which isn't so much teaching me anything I didn't already know, as illuminating some things I did know in new and useful ways. For example, I've just finally come to understand that my intellectual appreciations of Tyge Brahe and of Kit Marlowe are linked. Not y their accomplishments,

Comments

[andelku]

I love you.

[matociquala]

Because I'm sticking up for Brahe?! *g*

[andelku]

Well he was my neighbor for a while :D

[ex_truepenn]

I think Shakespeare's position is a little more complicated than that.

Not that I disagree with your fundamental point--Shakespeare is a genius, but he's not a radical thinker. Hence his fondness for Plutarch and Montaigne.

But in his tragedies, I don't think the restoration of order is ever more than a token gesture--or if it is, it contains the seeds of its own destruction, as in Titus Andronicus. Because either order is being restored by outsiders (Fortinbras, the Venetians in Othello) who have NO IDEA of what's happened and thus no genuine ability to enact closure, or order is being restored by people who are complicit in the tragedy: Edgar in Lear, Titus's son whose name I've forgotten in TAAnd even with Fortinbras--who I think comes the closest--part of ending the play is having its events retold: "... give orders that these bodies / High on a stage be placèd to the view; / And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world / How these things came about

[matociquala]

Oo. I wanna hear the counterargument about why it's a token gesture? if, yanno, you're bored?

[ex_truepenn]

Or avoiding work? *g*

---

Lear is the best example of closure/restoration of order as a token gesture.

You start the play with Lear in power, dividing his kingdom among his three (legitimate) daughters. Which of course turns into a clusterfuck, because Lear is a self-absorbed idiot who can't understand anything that can't be quantified ... but that's a different discussion.

Meanwhile, the B plot (which come to think of it is highly Marlovian) is all about the eruption of chaos and the defiance of the received order ("Now gods, stand up for bastards.")

Chaos is corruption is infection in Lear. The bastard son usurps the the legitimate son; the legitimate son, for no really clear reason, masquerades as a madman--and (I would argue) goes mad: the corruption of reason. Regan and Goneril turn out to be beasts (animal imagery is everywhere in Lear); Cornwall is every bit as bad as his wife. Albany rejects his wife (so he's the good guy, but he's still participating in the erosion of order). Edmund becomes the lover of two of Lear's

[matociquala]

Yes. I agree with this very much. The chaos takes over the play, and there's no tidying, after. I think it's significant that it's a late play, too; he's figured something out, auctorially, and found a way around it. The tyranny of the Hollywood ending, maybe.

Come not between the Dragon and the end of the goddamned world.

[heresluck]

Tamburlaine is not Emperor of Everything because he has some right to be. He is Emperor of Everything because he is the baddest son of a bitch in the valley, amen.

That right there is the best bit of literary analysis I've seen in months. Plus it made me chuckle. Yay!

[matociquala]

*g* I should have said "some divine right to be."

But, yanno.

...and now my Inner Tamburlaine is being played by Samuel L. Jackson. "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia, mutherfuckah."

[ex_truepenn]

Ooooh. I wanna see that movie.

[matociquala]

Yeah, baby.

Just yeah.

[poukledden]

While Copernicus was fucking around with perfect solids and crystal spheres, trying to build a model of the heavens, Tycho Brahe was out in the cold of night making painstaking measurements of the path of Mars through the night sky, innovatively using parallax to establish that a stella nova, a new star (his term, by the way. still in use today) was in fact *not* in the sublunary sphere, but out there where the so-called fixed stars dwelled.Lots of folks don't know that Copernicus was a mystical nutter :-), his system chosen because the Sun seemed a better stand-in for God -- remember that medieval acceptance of the idea that the world's order mimicked heaven's order. This also explains why he insisted on two completely, utterly wrong things -- the perfect circles for orbits, and the geocentrism at the heart of his heliocentrism -- technically, his system had the Earth orbitting around the Sun, and everything else orbiting around the Earth

[matociquala]

Tyge rocked a *lot.*

And yes, Copernicus gets all the credit, but Tyge was a very cool guy. And... a feminist. Er. Sort of.

[lnhammer]

Is it time to bring in John Donne? His verse practically reverberates with those cracking sounds -- both astronomical and philosophical.

---L.

[matociquala]

Sure, feel free. I may be mellowing about Donne....