All,

I didn't mean to sound generally skeptical about numerology -- I'm alarmed at generating a response from Anne that's even a little defensive! Her readings of Fletcher are splendid, and convincing, and I also take David Wilson-Okamura's point about the numbers mentality (counting, counting) likely to have been induced by an education in quantitative metrics. All this makes perfect sense. And I find the studies by Hieatt, Fowler, Rostvig and others illuminating (indeed I dip into numbers briefly myself in my work on Psalms). My concern is mainly with the kind of probability tests that Anne uses -- i.e., we do need to use them. There is a numerological fringe (if you like) that smacks of cryptanalysis and alien landings. The example that comes most readily to my mind is the interpretation of Psalm 46 in the KJV that finds "shake" 46 words from the beginning, and "spear" 46 from the end, and thus concludes that Shakespeare translated this Psalm and perhaps much else in the
 KJV. Obviously, this is extreme (though it crops up regularly on the SHAKSPER list) and would certainly not pass Anne's tests, but there are fuzzier areas. Patterns involving calendrical numbers (hours, days, weeks, years, etc.) seem especially reasonable to me, especially when, as in Anne's example, they can be connected to the sense of the poem. When we move into more arcane numbers, I begin to be more skeptical. The same tests apply, of course, and if the numerological patterns are consistent, demonstrable, and enhance the meaning of the poem, they seem valuable. But the more abstract the calculations become, and the more they depend on various mystical understandings of numbers (and if one yokes together all the ancient number systems, there are a LOT of numbers that are significant -- almost any number can be made significant somehow), the more rigorously I think we ought to apply our tests.

But all this is probably obvious enough to this list (on the whole rather saner, I think, than SHAKSPER)!

Hannibal


Hannibal Hamlin
The Ohio State University
1680 University Drive
Mansfield, OH 44903

----- Original Message -----
From: [log in to unmask]
Date: Friday, April 22, 2005 7:32 pm
Subject: Re: Poems longer than The Faerie Queene

> Having contributed to number stuff myself (more on the liturgical
> numbersin Amoretti, for example)I may feel a little defensive on
> this, but for me
> there are two main criteria: does the number symbolism go with the
> text in
> any probable way (this sounds primitive, but I simply mean that
> Christiannumerology in Homer would give me pause and to deduce the
> magic date 1789
> in Samuel Daniel would too) and does it require suspending the
> laws of
> probability to deny the number stuff. For example (see a minor
> essay of
> mine years ago in Ren&Ref), when Giles Fletcher writes 52 sonnets
> to his
> Licia one might suspect an allusion to the year. That's not a stretch.
> Allusions to her are cold at the start, hot up in the middle, and
> cool off
> again toward the end. If he has a January start that's pretty
> clear too.
> Now if each sonnet is a week, then each day gets two lines. OK,
> that's a
> bit more stretched, and it doesn't add up to 365 days. Oops. BUT: one
> sonnet adds some lines as though Fletcher "intended" to make the
> lines,too, add up to a year. He adds four, though. Two too many.
> Damn. But aha!
> 1592 was a leap year, which works out. No wonder the lady's name
> gesturesat "light." And then there's the internal allusion to how
> he spends days
> and weeks loving her. At that point the mathematical probability that
> there is *not* number stuff seems to me too small to worry about.
> Nor is
> this sort of play dead--both Anthony Burgess and John Gardner use
> it. A
> Columbia student wrote Gardner to ask if *Grendel* is indeed based
> on the
> Zodiac (with a March start, of course, and ending in Pisces, which
> is good
> symbolism for how Garder reads *Beowulf*). Garder wrote back saying
> something like "Well, duh" and adding that no reviewer--including
> my late
> husband--had caught it. Where I get skeptical is when the
> numerology is
> extremely complex and seems not to relate to the matter at hand.
> A note on numerology: years ago I was telling a class about Kent
> Hieatt's book on Epithalamion and used the word "numerology" without
> writing it on the board. On her exam she said, "Spenser believed
> in a
> New Morology and he thought this Morology would make his marriage
> last a long time." I told Kent, who wrote back that "According to
> Desiderius E. without the Old Morology nobody would get married to
> begin with." Funny. Anne P.
>
> > Hannibal Hamlin wrote:
> >> At the risk of
> >> committing an intentional fallacy, how far is it reasonable to
> expect>> that Spenser went in constructing the numerological
> puzzles? How far
> >> can a reader be reasonably expected to go in rooting them out? It
> >> reminds me of the numerology of Renaissance motets (Josquin et
> al. --
> >> some compositions use patterns embodying the golden mean, or the
> >> dimensions of Solomon's Temple, etc.), but music is much closer to
> >> mathematics anyway, and the general take on such patterns (I
> think) is
> >> that they are there not for the human listener (for who could
> possible>> hear proportional ratios??) but for God.
> >
> > 1. Intentio auctoris may or may not be a fallacy, but it's something
> > that the old commentators always try to provide. Old = ancient to
> > Renaissance.
> >
> > 2. I was skeptical about some of this until I read Derek
> Attridge's book
> > on quantitative meter in vernacular verse. The first part of the
> book> reconstructs how Greek and Latin meter were taught, and
> shows that the
> > primary method for deriving vowel quantities was "by position."
> As a
> > result, when these kids read classical poetry, they were always
> > counting. Counting, counting, counting. Numerology, even of the most
> > minute and trivial sort, is a natural development of this habit.
> > Granted, some of the games seem petty, and as Thomas Aquinas
> says of
> > allegory in the Bible, you wouldn't want to use them as a basis for
> > "doctrine." But that they played the games does not surprise me
> anymore.>
> > 3. On poetry and music: one of the reasons for resurrecting
> quantitative> meter was to bring poetry closer to music.
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
> > Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org
> [log in to unmask]> English Department Virgil reception,
> discussion, documents, &c
> > East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude
> Fauchet> ----------------------------------------------------------
> -------------
> >
>