Thursday, September 04, 2003

Elizabeth Writes Re: Lucrece


I went through the footnotes to Lucrece in _Venus and Adonis, Lucrece
and the Minor Poems_ by Albert W. Feuillerat, Yale University Press,1927. Feuillerat's book--I think he also wrote the Yale Shakespeare--is an example
of the supremely high level of Shakespeare [ not to be confused with Stratfordian] scholarship that preceded the loss of (especially) Latin and Greek in academia.

Feuillerat has about a hundred notes for Lucrece, most of them taken up with correcting other scholars who misattribute lines to Ovid, not Livy, but there are
> definitely some lines that would defy attribution to a very young poet--I don't know how old Crowley thinks Oxford was when he wrote Lucrece--late adolescence?

Here's one of the notes on music that looks intellectually mature:

In line 1134. descant' st. 'To descant: to play or sing an air in harmony with a fixed theme' (N.E. better skill. I.e. with better skill. So Malone and others. But Wyndham explains more subtly: 'p, [sic] here, as ever, exhibits a complete grasp of technical terms. He makes Lucrece contrast her sad, monotonous accompaniment of groans-- humming on Tarquin still--with the treble descant of the nightingale, complaining in a higher register and with more frequent modulations of the wrong wrought her by Tereus, according to Ovid's tale. The one he compares to a single droning base, chiefly in the diapason or lower octave; the other to the "better skill" or more ingenious artifice of a contrapuntal melody scored above it.' Ibid. p 160.

There are numerous legal terms in Lucrece which are punned on by a poet with easy familiarity with law. Knowledge of law would put the author beyond the age of a young adolescent.
>
> Elizabeth


Good info, as usual, from Elizabeth...As she has said elsewhere, it's down to
Marley and Bacon...and you/we haven't yet discussed what their relationship might have been prior to 1593. Marley, like many other poets of the day, aspired to the favor of the Pembroke clan, (and appears to have gotten it, judging from the testimonial of "Heminge and Condell" in the Folio).

So what's Bacon's story, circa early 1590s? What do we (you) KNOW? and how might he have had a connection to Marley...because if Bacon DID write V&A and Lucrece, then how did he get hold of a manuscript of H&L. He didn't travel in the same circle(s) as Marley.

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