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proximoception) wrote2011-01-23 05:01 pm
proximoception) wrote2011-01-23 05:01 pm
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Three allusions in a row in Troilus piqued my interest:
1. "Why, she is a pearl / Whose face has launched above a thousand ships"
Slight modification of the most famous line from Dr. Faustus. Shakespeare quotes "whoever loved that loved not at first sight" in Winter's Tale [Edit: As You Like It], but identifies that quotation with a further allusion to a sad [Edit: dead] shepherd: Marlowe's one surviving lyric being "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." And though I've found my Pavane, I'm still missing the allusion Shakespeare makes to the Jew of Malta's "but that was in another country and besides the wench was dead" arch-startlement which I can't seem to convince myself I hallucinated, along with passages from Proust and Tolstoy. You wonder if any other playwright even mattered to him.
2. "Paris, you speak / Like one besotted on your sweet delights."
"Sweet delight" is a phrase Spenser uses in his Garden of Adonis episode, then Marlowe in his Dr. Faustus prologue, Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece and apparently here, Webster in Malfi, and Blake much more famously in "Auguries of Innocence" and I think at least a couple other places? It's at least inclusively sexual everywhere but in Marlowe, where it refers to Faust's love of forbidden magic - which we later find, proto-Zuckerberg that he is, was about sex too. Are any two words together more sweetly delightful? Blake retired the phrase, we all just think of Blake now.
[Google finds it a couple times in The Mirror for Magistrates too. Maybe a classical source?]
3. "Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy."
Hector walks off-meter in that line so Ben Jonson, conceivably playing one of the characters on stage, has a second to completely lose it. Bloom's sure the 'Coast of Bohemia' in Winter's Tale was planted to give Ben a hernia. This one here couldn't possibly not be.
1. "Why, she is a pearl / Whose face has launched above a thousand ships"
Slight modification of the most famous line from Dr. Faustus. Shakespeare quotes "whoever loved that loved not at first sight" in Winter's Tale [Edit: As You Like It], but identifies that quotation with a further allusion to a sad [Edit: dead] shepherd: Marlowe's one surviving lyric being "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." And though I've found my Pavane, I'm still missing the allusion Shakespeare makes to the Jew of Malta's "but that was in another country and besides the wench was dead" arch-startlement which I can't seem to convince myself I hallucinated, along with passages from Proust and Tolstoy. You wonder if any other playwright even mattered to him.
2. "Paris, you speak / Like one besotted on your sweet delights."
"Sweet delight" is a phrase Spenser uses in his Garden of Adonis episode, then Marlowe in his Dr. Faustus prologue, Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece and apparently here, Webster in Malfi, and Blake much more famously in "Auguries of Innocence" and I think at least a couple other places? It's at least inclusively sexual everywhere but in Marlowe, where it refers to Faust's love of forbidden magic - which we later find, proto-Zuckerberg that he is, was about sex too. Are any two words together more sweetly delightful? Blake retired the phrase, we all just think of Blake now.
[Google finds it a couple times in The Mirror for Magistrates too. Maybe a classical source?]
3. "Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy."
Hector walks off-meter in that line so Ben Jonson, conceivably playing one of the characters on stage, has a second to completely lose it. Bloom's sure the 'Coast of Bohemia' in Winter's Tale was planted to give Ben a hernia. This one here couldn't possibly not be.