I read a couple more essays from one of the Renaissance books. I should put the title in here but it's on the other side of the room and I can't be bothered. Something about Renaissance Writing.

one was about patronage. It's interesting, because a lot of those 'love' poems were less about 'love me and lets all have sex' and more about 'love my work and send more money pls'. And poems could get hugely political, not least because the ones with the most money were the ones with the most political power. Writing anything about the queen is a good way to get her attention, but how will she react? So, the queen as a patron, same as the queen as bestower of jobs at court, rather a high stakes employer.
It points out again the obvious combination of praise and the promise to make a patron immortal through these really good poetry words. You don't so much get that as a sales pitch these days. TV doesn't go up to advertisers and say 'psst, wanna live forever?' As far as I know. But they do have a lot of that 'praise' bit mixed in, along with the kudos then and now associated with being patron to a widely appreciated work. So I end up wondering how much all this poetry was about growing brand Gloriana? But then how much does a monarch with proper actual power need good advertising? Hmmm, come to think, it's a couple of monarchs away from the one they removed the crown from by removing his head, so quite a lot. And then I must remember that the poetry wasn't a mass audience thing, it was a audience that could read, and probably mostly the bits of it at court. So all the praise and the good associations would be in a relatively small pool.
Interesting also to see how pervasive the influence of patron on work could be. We might be studying the renaissance with an eye to how they do things different, but there's some pretty pervasive similarities too.

The next bit I read was about masculinity and how it's not as confident as it sounds even in the really explicit 'love' poems. There was a whole section on analysing poetry for references to impotence. They're not actually subtle once they've been pointed out.
The bit that irritated me though was when it analysed a poem about Sappho and her lover, a poem about two women, having lesbian sex, with only women in the poem. It concluded that it was Secretly All About Cock. Because, you see, it was a male poet writing it for other men, and that makes it either masturbatory or homosexual between men.
*sigh* Look, okay, I can see the argument, but... Exactly what would it take for this analysis to conclude it's secretly about lesbian sex? I mean, seriously? I haven't read the poem, which obviously would help me talk authoritatively about it, but all the bits the essay quoted and everything it said to support its secretly-cock analysis were talking about women with women's bodies doing things with other women. Why is this complicated?

The essay ends with stating that women students find renaissance love poetry increasingly annoying because it is by men talking to other men about silent and absent women.

I think I also find it rather annoying that when there are apparent women they're quickly ignored for the all-about-men interpretation. Especially since I keep *hearing* that it's by men talking to men, but I keep *reading* men talking to women, and being told what I'm seeing gets on my nerves.


I am grumbly. This isn't the kind of analysis I like. I like stuff that I can translate into ways to get on and write better stuff.