I prefer
Shakespeare the playwright to Shakespeare the poet, but I have a great edition
of his sonnets. It has modern translations into Finnish by Kirsti Simonsuuri,
with the facsimiles of the 1609 edition and annotations of each sonnet side by
side with the originals. For Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, I chose a random sonnet from it. It
turned out to be sonnet number 81, which I find it appropriate for the occasion
with its sentiment of the poet’s loved one living on in his poems.
Or I shall liue your Epitaph to make,
Or you suruiue when I in earth am rotten,
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Altough in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortall life shall haue,
Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye,
The earth can yield me but a common graue,
When you intombed in mens eyes shall lye,
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,
And toungs to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall liue (such virtue hath my Pen)
Where breath most breaths, euen in the mouths of men.
Nor houres,
dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.
Yesterday
marked the death of John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and the Dean of St
Paul’s. I have a particular interest in him. I wrote my master’s thesis about
him, specifically about his concept of time.
Donne isn’t
exactly known as a philosopher of time. I chose him because he was a prolific
writer and the abundant material promised me an access to his mind. I wasn’t
interested in a philosopher’s formulated concept of time anyway. I wanted to
know how an ordinary Elizabethan Englishman understood it. And despite not
being a philosopher, Donne’s texts had plenty of references to time – even from
a philosophical point of view.
I have been
interested in time ever since I started studying history. The early modern
concept of time became my focus later on, especially in relation to the
emergence of the modern concept of time. But I wasn’t interested in change when
I studied Donne; I wanted to know how time was understood at a particular time
in history.
Meticulously,
I posed questions that seemed relevant back then about subjective and objective
time, cyclical and linear time, secular time and timeless eternity.
Unsurprisingly, Donne’s thinking didn’t easily yield to my systematic approach.
It was linear and cyclical at the same time, as well as secular and sacred. He
had a strong sense of decline, that the world was deteriorating towards the
inevitable end, which was a fairly common view in Renaissance.
I seem to
have concluded in my thesis, having read it for the first time in ages, that
for Donne, the concept of time was a theological issue. He mostly wrote about
it in his devotional material and he expressed views similar to theological
thinkers, especially St Augustine. The bulk of his texts is devotional,
however, so the data is slightly biased towards that interpretation.
His
emphasis on sacred meant that time was irrelevant compared to the timeless
eternity that was to follow. For example, he wrote in Devotions upon Emergent
Occasions (1624), when he thought he was on his deathbed, that happiness shouldn’t
be bound to time:
What poore
Elements are our happinesses made of, if Tyme, Tyme which wee can scarce
consider to bee any thing, be an essential part of our hapines? […] if this
Imaginary halfe-nothing, Tyme, be of the Essence of our Happinesses, how can
they bee thought to be? Tyme is not so; not so, considered in any of the parts
thereof.
But he had
more irreverent ideas too, especially in his poetry where he could bend time to
his liking. In Womans Constancy he tells how a woman is unable to be faithful
for longer than a fleeting moment:
Now thou
hast lov’d me one whole day,
To morrow
when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?
Wilt though
then Antedate some new made vow?
Or say that now
We are not
just those persons, which we were?
One couldn’t
trust anything temporal. The conclusions
of my thesis are temporal too, bound to time. I stand by them, but they offer
only a superficial understanding of Donne’s concept of time, and that of the
early modern in general.
Yesterday
was the birthday of William Morris (1834-1896). To mark the occasion, I take a break
from the early modern and venture forth to more modern utopian thinking. Morris
is best known as a textile designer and a member of the Arts and Crafts
movement, which was formed as a reaction against the industrial production and
impoverishing design.
But Morris
was a socialist and an author too. One of his best known books is a utopia
called News from Nowhere (1891). It didn’t make a great impression at its time,
mostly because it was overshadowed by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887),
a veritable bestseller. Morris’s book was written as an answer to Bellamy’s and
the books are fairly similar.
News from
Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest) is a socialist utopia set in 21st century London.
The protagonist, William Guest, wakes up one morning to find himself in the
future. He sets out to study his new surroundings and is very impressed by what
he sees. There is a common ownership of everything. There are no classes or
cities. Labour has ceased to be painful and people work joyously. Work is
recycled too, so that people do both manual labour and creative tasks like
writing poetry. Everyone is expected to do all kinds of work.
As well as
a socialist utopia that seeks to answer why people would work in communism,
Morris’s book is an ecological utopia. Fed up with the level of pollution in
the industrialised England, he imagined an idyllic society where the
industrialisation has been stopped and reversed. The world has returned to a
kind of pseudo medieval, agrarian society where people find pleasure in nature.
The industry has ceased from polluting and the nature has been able to recover.
Swimming in the Thames is possible, unheard of in Morris’s time. Along with
nature, beauty is valued above everything else. Morris’s romanticised medieval
ideal comes up in the clothing people wear, for example.
The story
itself takes a form of a medieval romance, a quest for love and (communist) fellowship.
The goal is Ellen, a working class woman emancipated under socialism, but also a
benign nature spirit. However, the goal turns out to be unattainable for the
visitor from the past.
While
Morris’s utopia is set in a future world, it looks backwards to a world already
lost – or a world that never really existed, an imagined pseudo medieval
creation of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. But while his book didn’t cause a
stir, he had a right notion about the attractiveness of the romanticised past.
His designs have had a lasting life, the romantic medieval spirit winning over
new people generation after generation.
Ranters was
a Commonwealth era sect that wasn’t necessarily Utopian or apocalyptic as such.
Some say it didn’t really exist either. I bring them up anyway, because
they held some interesting beliefs that suggest the idea of change unlike any
other during their time. Namely, that God wasn’t immutable.
Ranters
came about around 1649. They adhered to a notion similar to that of Quakers,
that Christ was present in every believer – or in all living creatures. While
Quakers took this to mean that the believer existed in a sinless state when
Christ was present in them, Ranters maintained that nothing could be sin while
Christ was in them. This led to a behaviour that was judged amoral by their contemporaries,
like cohabiting without marriage and multiple partners living in a
marriage-like arrangement. Mosaic laws didn’t concern them either when they
were in the state of grace.
Parliament
considered Ranters to be a highly disruptive force that had to be destroyed at
all costs. However, some modern historians argue that the group didn’t really
exist, that they were created by the conservatives as the other to be feared. The
middle view is that they were small disconnected groups without proper leaders.
Whatever the true scope, they disappeared soon after the Restoration when the
sects were being purged.
Even though
the sect was never large or powerful, some texts are attributed to them. A
Single Eye (1650) is a pamphlet by Laurence Claxton (1615-1667). In it, he questions the
immutability of God. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one reason why
Christians were unable to see the future different from the present was the
notion that God and His word – in this case, the end of the world – were
unchanging.
In the
letter to the reader, Claxton states that he has seen God being worshipped in
so many manners around the country that it isn’t possible He is the same for
all. According to him, God “thou pretends to Worship, whether he be Infinite,
or Finite; whether he be subject to passion and affection, … and whether he can
be changed by thy prayers, so us to expiate a judgement, or produce a
deliverance … is passionate, God is affectionate, and if either, then
changeable.”
For
Claxton, a god who could be one thing to one person, and completely different
to another, was changeable. In a culture that believed in the immutability of
God, the idea was radical. It’s also the kind of mentality that is prerequisite
for the modern concept of time. I haven’t run into similar examples, however.
As a unique text, it is intriguing, but doesn’t yet herald a new word view.
One
Commonwealth era apocalyptic Utopian sect was True Levellers that formed around
Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1666) in 1649. Originally called True Levellers so
that they wouldn’t be mixed with Levellers – an earlier group that aimed at
social equality – they were soon given the name the Diggers.
Diggers were
mostly landless and poor people. They were drawn to Winstanley’s idea of
communal ownership and living, based in a verse in the Book of Acts that speaks
for common ownership. Winstanley’s ideal community was to be a land-based
equality, where the private ownership of land was to be abolished. This would
happen peacefully, when the workforce left to farm the common land in Digger
communes. The land thus freed would be divided among the landless.
Winstanley’s
vision has been called a proto-Communist utopia. The new world order would be
based on rural lifestyle and agrarian work. The aim was to return the humankind
to the pure and sinless state it had been before the Fall, which would herald
the Millennium. The society would be controlled with laws, and the task of the
government would be to govern peoples’ manners.
Winstanley
and his followers put the theory into practice, too, and began to farm the
common lands. The land-owners reacted swiftly, and employed the army to dispel
them. In the end, however, they resorted to the courts of law, where Diggers
lost. Digger communities were small, scattered, and without strong leaders.
Faced with the determined opposition, they dispersed and disappeared within a
year.
The declaration and standard of the Levellers of England, 1649.
Here’s a
brief interlude for the Valentine’s Day, a poem by John Donne. It’s somewhat
cynical take on love, but I like the imagery. Plenty of analyses exist about
the poem. Mostly it’s seen as an analogy on how the search for spiritual love
is futile. Donne doesn’t have a great notion about women in love either. They
are “but, Mummy, possest”, a body without mind.
Loves Alchymie by John Donne
Some that have deeper digg’d loves Myne then I,
Say, where his centrique happinesse doth lie:
I have lov’d, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mysterie;
Oh, ’tis imposture all:
And as no chymique yet th’Elixar got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinall,
So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summers night.
Our ease, our thrift, our honor, and our day,
Shall we, for this vaine Bubles shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that my man,
Can be as happy’as I can; If he can
Endure the short scorn of a Bridgegroomes play?
That loving wretch that sweares,
’Tis not the bodies marry, but the mindes,
Which he in her Angelique finds,
Would swear as justly, that he heares,
In that dayes rude hoarse minstralsey, the spheares.
A large
number of the sects that formed during the Civil War and Interregnum era were
apocalyptic. They expected Christ to return and the world to end during their time.
What would follow was a paradise on earth, a utopia of plenty and goodwill for
all.
Some of
these sects and movements didn’t settle for passively waiting for the end times
to begin. They tried to actively work towards Christ’s return. Despite the
Christian framework of these groups, some of them had more secular means to
achieving their end. Some of them were very radical too.
One of
these groups was the Fifth Monarchy Men that formed around 1649. It consisted
mostly of craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices, but some powerful men
belonged to it, too, and it had some political power. For a brief time, they
even had Oliver Cromwell’s ear.
For the Fifth
Monarchists, Millennium was first and foremost a political and social issue. Their
aim was to make England a godly nation. Its apocalyptic nature came from the
belief that the timing of the Interregnum was significant, because the year
1666 – the year of the Beast – was so near. According to them, four monarchies had
already reigned, as prophesied by Daniel in the Old Testament, and now it had
come time for the fifth and the last.
The godly
rule was a hierarchy based on the piety of people and the Mosaic Law. The good,
who were called Saints or Free Men, would rule, and the bad would be their
slaves. The poor would be forced to work, and they would be provided for with
what the government mines earned.
The supporters
of the Fifth Monarchy movement believed that it was their duty to help God to
bring about the new world order – with violence, if necessary. After the
Restoration, they were kept a strict eye on, as they were thought to be a threat.
Indeed, in January 1661, fifty Fifth Monarchists tried to take London in the name of
"King Jesus," only to be caught, hanged, drawn and quartered for high
treason. Some members planned to assassinate Charles II in 1666, but that come
to nothing.
The Fifth
Monarchists’ failure to take London tightened the laws against all sects,
making it more difficult for them to operate. Although some events like the
Great Plague and the Great Fire of London made it possible for the members to still believe that the end was near, they didn’t achieve anything visible that would
have supported their faith. The passionate movement eventually wore itself out,
and disappeared in the 1680s.