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Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England . Miriam Jacobson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp viii+286.

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/686930

1545-6951

Holly Dugan,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBarbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England. Miriam Jacobson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp viii+286.Holly DuganHolly DuganGeorge Washington University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOf all the English poets indulging in shaped poems in the 1590s, Gabriel Harvey seemed to be the most zealous. If we’re to believe Thomas Nashe, Harvey wrote poems in the shape of “a pair of gloves, a dozen of points, a paire of spectacles, a two-hand sword, a poynado, a Coloussus, a Pyramide, a painter’s eazill, a market crosse, a trumpet, an anchor, a par of pot-hooks,” among other things (76). Nashe’s list seems outlandish; no such poems exist, if they ever did. But it raises intriguing questions: How can a poem form a pair of spectacles (76)? What kinds of relationships between words and things were possible in early modern poetry?Many more than we think, as Jacobson adroitly and elegantly argues in Barbarous Antiquity. And, as Jacobson argues, outlandish is a surprisingly apt term to describe such relationships. Tracing the philological histories of certain words imported into English as well as the network of associations that English poets crafted from them, Jacobson argues that English poets drew on material and metaphoric associations to imagine a different kind of investment in the classical past (21). Take, for instance, that spectacle-shaped poem. Although we might be tempted to ignore such a literary trifle, Jacobson’s approach reveals a different way of thinking about its material history. Reading English desire for new kinds of poetic form (like shaped poems) as part of a much broader, cultural appetite for sugar imported from North Africa, Cyprus, and Crete, Jacobson argues that poetic and confectionary conceits were linked (60, 63). Sugar can crystallize, which transformed the metaphorical sweetness of words into material and malleable forms that challenged the limits of the possible (63). Though this is merely one example among many in the book, I emphasize it in order to highlight the strength of Jacobson’s unique and compelling intervention into cultural history, new materialism, and early English literary studies.Jacobson’s larger argument is that English poets drew on a complex web of literary associations born of global trade with the Ottoman Mediterranean in order to reorient their approach to classical antiquity. In doing so, Jacobson argues that English poets replaced “an already fraught vision of classical antiquity with a further estranged and exoticized one;” the result was that “antiquity itself took on the characteristics of Levantine and Asian cultures, becoming ‘barbarous’” (7, 8). Barbarous Antiquity thus offers an important intervention into how we read early English poetry, especially its investments in ancient Greek and Roman literary culture. In the introduction, Jacobson draws on key terms from Foucault, Agamban, Bakhtin, and especially Latour to argue that the relationship between the classical past and the global present was intermediated, mediated, and remediated in English poetry vis-à-vis newly imported words and things. Each chapter that follows explores how certain words and things came to matter significantly for English poets seeking to engage with ancient Greek and Roman poets.These imports—inkhorn terms, sugar, zero, horses, bulbs, pearls, and dyes—might seem at first like a random list of terms, but as Jacobson argues, all serve as mediators in the Latourian sense, fundamentally altering social networks of meaning. Three segments allow Jacobson to excavate how such associations may have worked. Part one tracks the arrival of newly fangled words and things from the east into England; both Jonson’s Poetaster, with its dramatic ending of an upstart poet vomiting “inkhorn” terms on stage, and Puttenham’s Arte of English Poetry, with its investment in Turkish shaped poems that resemble sugared lozenges, demonstrate the surprising materiality of English poetry. Part two examines how such newly associative links may have influenced English poets, using Shakespeare’s investment in Ovidian narratives as its core: for instance, Shakespeare’s use of ciphers, zeros, and Os in his retelling of The Rape of Lucrece utilizes English translations of Arabic accounting as a way to represents Lucrece’s “invisible, unseen” shame in ways that cannot only be spoken but can also be published, “lending Ovid’s tragic heroine pen and print, as well as a voice” (23). Likewise, Adonis’s Arabian horse as well as his transformation into a chequered purple flower (or a Turkish fritillary bulb) offers a surprisingly generative ending for this famously tragic narrative, one that perhaps reveals Shakespeare’s investment in poetic legacy. Part three turns to more spatial matters: analyzing the watery world of the Hellespont in both Chapman’s and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Jacobsen attends to how these sixteenth-century associations are returned to the space of the classical past, forming a deliquescent and poetic “palimpsest” (24, 184). The dynamic space of the Hellespont becomes the epicenter of both classical poetry and contemporaneous trade (186), as Marlowe and Chapmen traverse its imaginary landscape through the metaphoric imagery of pearls and dyes.Jacobson contends in the epilogue that the associative model she proposes is malleable and moveable: seventeenth-century new world trade offers a compelling “afterlife of the process of remediating classical poetry through Mediterranean trade” (190). On English ships, and in spaces like Cape Verde, English poetry becomes an exported, ornamental object projected into new kinds of mercantile encounters, these investments in a barbarous antiquity remediated once again (193). But perhaps the strongest example of portability of her approach may be found in Jacobson’s own prose; I found myself drawn to the untimely words that pepper her analysis, words like plasticity (to describe sugar, 72), trophy wife and shopaholic (to describe Chloe in Jonson’s Poetaster, 42), cemented (to describe the use of zeros in early modern accounting systems, 94), crush (to describe Ligon’s feelings for the Portuguese governor’s African mistress in the Canary Islands, 193), hydraulic (to describe Hero’s boots, 194), modern perfume accords (to describe Shakespeare’s investment in Ovidian poetry, 190), and a Matryoshka (to describe Chapman’s epic similes of Leander, 183). Such associations are used sparingly and to great effect, illustrating both her point about early modern poetics and also her larger argument about the power of poetry to fashion new associations from surprising networks of meaning. It is a powerful argument, performed stylishly. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686930HistoryPublished online August 23, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.