renaissance people
Mar. 4th, 2009 05:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethHave successfully done both laundry and reading.
I borrowed Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Teacher recommended.
So far I have read the first chapter and skimmed the second, and so far I have found two things that contradict at least in part what we were told out loud in class.
The first chapter is interesting because it's all about women. Some of the reading done thus far might suggest there was only Queen Elizabeth I and a whole bunch of men. This book kicks off with talking about the poet's mother, aunts, sisters, and nurse. Win.
There's a lot of marrying their cousins. Their family trees are more like thickets. Especially since with all the dying, and the occasional bit of scandal, people have two or three marriages and some people need to be in several places on the tree at once. And that's with just a few generations of Sidney's immediate relatives!
Also the whole 'cousin' label gets complicated rather with people being other people's wards and also their cousins and I think I'm still a bit lost even with the helpful diagrams.
The important bit is that these women probably had the same good education as the men in their family. They were educated, and they were poets too. So if you're looking for poetic influences you don't start with his male relatives, who were busy with politics, you start with the women, even if there's only a few rhymes to look at. It's interesting.
His sister made his poems and all get printed after his death. While he was alive they circulated in manuscript, which I knew, but this book reckons they went mostly to his sister and her friends, a mostly female coterie. Teach keeps saying sonnets are by men speaking to men, so I don't see how that fits.
The 'Stella' lady in the sonnets is only mentioned briefly, but she's his cousin too. Also I skimmed a few bits and towards the end it says that maybe they were playing a literary game where the both of them knew the rules and that they were playing. Other books do go on about doomy doooom doomed adulterous love, so that's a refreshing possibility.
The other bit that's a bit contradictory is that teach said he studied at Cambridge and the web said he studied at Oxford. Obviously the web is frequently wrong, but the specific page in question is Cambridge University, so. I wondered. Well this book says that there's evidence he paid to go to Oxford, but very little mention of him after the money parts, and a mention from someone who claimed he'd done the research about Sidney being a great scholar at Cambridge, which is difficult to make fit in.
I wonder if it's like all those 'King Arthur slept here!' places, where everyone likes him so clearly he was to do with them.
The best bits are all in the chapter about women. I should go get more books from the reading list that are about women. There was a passing reference to women married to men who got sent abroad having to stay at court to represent their interests, and I was all *lightbulb*
That makes it sound much more interesting than the versions where it's all men trying to make nice with Elizabeth.
There was also a bit about smallpox, and how Sidney and his mother probably both had it and had lots of facial scars as a result. Which you don't tend to get nowadays. Thanks be for vaccination.
I don't understand the guy who was complaining about how we don't need all this history to understand the poems. The more you read about what was happening at the time, families that were mostly young girls who kept dying as children, the only male heir being a nephew or cousin or someone who married in, people being widowed and remarrying so much, disease leaving permanent and very visible scars, family quarrels about who dumped who when that turn into massive political weights that shove history around, the more you realise all this is woven in to the poetry like the long strong threads. Sure, the pretty patterns are words on a page, we can see those, but it's the stuff holding it all together that tells us why it mattered. How much more threatening an adulterous passion when large units of politics and economy are bound up in the people involved? And how much of a barrier would marriage truly seem when death was so present? It all adds depth.
It's quite frustrating being both interested and dozing off over the book.
But hey, sink unblocked, cleaner did the magic, laundry got done, reading got done, Wednesday jobs achieved. I can fall asleep again if I wants to.
... which really yes.
I borrowed Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Teacher recommended.
So far I have read the first chapter and skimmed the second, and so far I have found two things that contradict at least in part what we were told out loud in class.
The first chapter is interesting because it's all about women. Some of the reading done thus far might suggest there was only Queen Elizabeth I and a whole bunch of men. This book kicks off with talking about the poet's mother, aunts, sisters, and nurse. Win.
There's a lot of marrying their cousins. Their family trees are more like thickets. Especially since with all the dying, and the occasional bit of scandal, people have two or three marriages and some people need to be in several places on the tree at once. And that's with just a few generations of Sidney's immediate relatives!
Also the whole 'cousin' label gets complicated rather with people being other people's wards and also their cousins and I think I'm still a bit lost even with the helpful diagrams.
The important bit is that these women probably had the same good education as the men in their family. They were educated, and they were poets too. So if you're looking for poetic influences you don't start with his male relatives, who were busy with politics, you start with the women, even if there's only a few rhymes to look at. It's interesting.
His sister made his poems and all get printed after his death. While he was alive they circulated in manuscript, which I knew, but this book reckons they went mostly to his sister and her friends, a mostly female coterie. Teach keeps saying sonnets are by men speaking to men, so I don't see how that fits.
The 'Stella' lady in the sonnets is only mentioned briefly, but she's his cousin too. Also I skimmed a few bits and towards the end it says that maybe they were playing a literary game where the both of them knew the rules and that they were playing. Other books do go on about doomy doooom doomed adulterous love, so that's a refreshing possibility.
The other bit that's a bit contradictory is that teach said he studied at Cambridge and the web said he studied at Oxford. Obviously the web is frequently wrong, but the specific page in question is Cambridge University, so. I wondered. Well this book says that there's evidence he paid to go to Oxford, but very little mention of him after the money parts, and a mention from someone who claimed he'd done the research about Sidney being a great scholar at Cambridge, which is difficult to make fit in.
I wonder if it's like all those 'King Arthur slept here!' places, where everyone likes him so clearly he was to do with them.
The best bits are all in the chapter about women. I should go get more books from the reading list that are about women. There was a passing reference to women married to men who got sent abroad having to stay at court to represent their interests, and I was all *lightbulb*
That makes it sound much more interesting than the versions where it's all men trying to make nice with Elizabeth.
There was also a bit about smallpox, and how Sidney and his mother probably both had it and had lots of facial scars as a result. Which you don't tend to get nowadays. Thanks be for vaccination.
I don't understand the guy who was complaining about how we don't need all this history to understand the poems. The more you read about what was happening at the time, families that were mostly young girls who kept dying as children, the only male heir being a nephew or cousin or someone who married in, people being widowed and remarrying so much, disease leaving permanent and very visible scars, family quarrels about who dumped who when that turn into massive political weights that shove history around, the more you realise all this is woven in to the poetry like the long strong threads. Sure, the pretty patterns are words on a page, we can see those, but it's the stuff holding it all together that tells us why it mattered. How much more threatening an adulterous passion when large units of politics and economy are bound up in the people involved? And how much of a barrier would marriage truly seem when death was so present? It all adds depth.
It's quite frustrating being both interested and dozing off over the book.
But hey, sink unblocked, cleaner did the magic, laundry got done, reading got done, Wednesday jobs achieved. I can fall asleep again if I wants to.
... which really yes.