Henry Vaughn’s poetry, especially “Unprofitableness” and “The Night,” remind me very much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, particularly “Pied Beauty” and “God’s Grandeur”. More than two hundred years before the Victorian poet Hopkins, Vaughn professes wonder and awe, an unironic appreciation of divine beauty, and gratitude for a god for bestows him with all this spiritual and aesthetic pleasure. Vaughn does not engage the contest between Protestantism and Catholicism. Is it possible that he writes to transcend this political debate? Is his apolitical poetry actually kind of political in its insistence on what really matters?

Representation, as we have discussed in class, is a central theme in Twelfth Night (and certainly in Shakespeare’s sonnets as well). Viola masquerades as a man and Olivia masques herself. The fool qualifies his title as Olivia’s “corruptor of words,” always speaking aslant of meaning, playing with multiplicities, paradoxical, ironic, or taboo, putting language itself to task, doing away with the “over-worn”; And Viola says that the fool is more clever for it: “For folly that he wisely shows is fit, / But wise men, folly-fall’n, quite taint their wit” (3.1.66-7). This play does not just represent representation. It demonstrates how representation might convey reticence and virtuousness in Olivia, sharpness and laudable skill in the fool, deceit on Viola’s part that creates a messy love triangle situation, which, she says at one point, she cannot possibly untangle. Representation and “seeming” in Twelfth Night (if we can say that representation and seeming are the same… ?), are also themselves a matter of interpretation, as we learn in Viola and Olivia’s comedic/cringe-y repartee in Act 3 scene 2. Viola says, “[I think] you do think you are not what you are.” Olivia replies, “If I think so, I think the same of you.” Viola: “Then think you right, I am not what I am. Olivia: “I would you were as I would have you be.” Viola: “Would it be better, madam, than I am?” Olivia and Viola are not, of course, referring to the same sorts of misrepresentation, since Olivia does not know Viola is actually a woman. But their dialogue is so synchronized, so syntactically and tonally matched, that the reader/spectator might lose the plot here. What is the veiled truth? Who is what? Shakespeare’s characters often ask, “what are you?” as opposed to our familiar “who”… So, is there any “authentic” self? What is “authentic”? Can’t representation–especially self-presentation–be authentic? Maybe today, but perhaps not in Elizabethan England.

So excited I get to use one of my favorite words, ekphrasis.

Spenser does linger quite long over the tapestries of the House of Busirane. He does not just show them to us–which would be just to say that a tapestry depicted, for example, the story of Leda and the Swan. Spenser does not say, “Oh, what a lovely tapestry. The artistry in it is just remarkable.” The tapestry, the material object, is subsumed by the remarkable story it represents. It is overtaken or elaborated upon by the narration, from Britomart’s perspective. The tapestry is like a translation (transubstantiation??) of the Leda and the Swan story, a new language through which the viewer can actually come into contact, emotional and visceral, with the myth. Britomart is taken with the “snowy Swan,” with “his lovely trade,” “wondrous skill” and “sweet wit.” She is admiring. So, I wonder, is this RAPE SCENE, quite literally writ large here, an occasion for Britomart to assume a more womanly form and be taken with/by the swan? Or, is Britomart empowered and inspired to take, to “invade”?