For my third blog post in a row (yikes), I have a stray thought/question: doesn’t the corporeality and the baroqueness of Donne’s work make him feel like a poet of a rather Catholic sensibility? As opposed to Spenserian sanitized Protestantism. It’s interesting because, as we talked about in class, Donne literally was a Catholic poet until he converted to the Anglican Church. But it seems to me that the Catholicism sticks around in his work. Even in the Holy Sonnets, which are substantially less sexual and bodily than the poems we read for last class, the paradoxes that he plays with and the richness of his ideas+language lend the poems a sort of opulence. 

(Plus, the Holy Sonnets sequence play so perfectly into the trope of Catholic guilt. Holy Sonnet VII, IX, etc.)

I rewatched She’s The Man recently (in my opinion—still p good, but doesn’t hold up THAT well?), and I noticed that when Viola cross-dresses, she takes up Sebastian’s name, as opposed to taking on the new name of Cesario. The plot of She’s The Man actually demands that she takes on Sebastian’s name (because she wants to take his place at boarding school so she can play men’s soccer), but it struck me as a difference that actually significantly changes how we think about Viola’s new identity when she presents as a man. In Twelfth Night, the change to Cesario is the invention of a completely new male identity. In She’s The Man, she’s not inventing a new male identity so much as performing the identity of her brother. In this way, She’s The Man seems to sort of sanitize or un-trouble the gender complications of  Twelfth Night (which makes sense because it’s mainstream Hollywood). But I think this also speaks to the lack of resolution in the final act of Twelfth Night, because Olivia’s marriage to Sebastian does not actually resolve the fact that she has been in love with Cesario. Cesario and Sebastian are twins, but they are not perfect substitutions for one another. They have two different names, but still two different identities.

One distinction I would make between comedy and the sonnets is the embodiment of performativity. As we (sorta) talked about in class, the sonnets are performances in that they can be thought of as dramatic monologues. But the performativity is more diffused—it exists either solely on the page, or in the aural experience of someone reading the poem out loud. An interesting thing happens there where the reader inherently and I think unintentionally takes up that performance—but that seems different to me than actually taking on a role for a play. For the comedies, the performance is an embodied performance. It is deliberately written to exist beyond the page. That doesn’t mean we should discount the performativity that exists only on the page—because there definitely are plays that are never performed, and perhaps never intended to be performed—but in the case of Shakespeare, I would choose to privilege the performance over the page.

I have also become increasingly curious about Spenser’s relationship to Classical mythology as a religious entity. Or, more broadly, how would the Anglican Church relate to Greek paganism? Would it be recognized as a legitimate religious entity, fanciful stories of a bygone past, important mythology, etc.?