Sometimes, Alison, I can feel that all of our literature is tainted,
except for John Clare in his rare moments of sanity, and maybe Thomas
Hardy, however, I think projecting terms like colonialism or
imperialism back on the Elizabethans is slightly misleading, there
certainly were ambitions that we would see in that light but I'd give
them the allowance that they were innocent of the contemporary hues of
those concepts: Spenser on Ireland is not nice, nor is the fact that
Raleigh was a slave trader, but I don't think they would have the same
awareness that our very slightly more grown up world has, I say that
with hesitation.
The fascination of Elizabethan-Jacobean poetry is the verve of its
language, particularly the the theatre, Shakespeare the writer of
Hamlet and Lear is a far greater writer than the author of the Sonnets
or Venus and Adonis. One of the endless confusions in discussing
gender in the stage plays is of course that women weren't allowed to
act, and how much of what was going in the companies was what we might
call gay culture, we just don't know.
I know too many people who are Beowulf in their own trousers, btw, I
hate it all. The wretched primitiveness that underlies even a
supposedly sophisticated country like contemporary England, I find
myself in the counsels of despair.
best
Dave
2008/11/23 Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>:
> Hey David - By that token, practically all of our literature is
> impossible to touch. All of Elizabethan poetry is tainted by
> colonialism and imperialism, etc etc. I find it rather more
> problematic - and fascinating - from the point of view of its gender
> stuff. If you mightn't have wanted to be a man in that society, you
> most certainly didn't want to be a woman.
>
> For all that, I just like it. I even like that you can see the joins,
> or that there are those weird ellipses where the poetry leaps from
> here to there, or where another story begins and ends with the barest
> of warnings.
>
> Translating it culturally! Hmm. There might be legends in their own
> trousers hanging around in local pubs who think they're Beowulf, but
> the thought makes me blench. There actually aren't modern equivalents
> for the story of Grendel or his mother, or the dragon and, to be
> serious about it, there's a starkness in the poem which I'm finding,
> from my point of view, quite illuminating. There ain't nothing _nice_
> about Beowulf, and leaving it in its time and place means we can make
> of it what we will. I guess I'm primarily interested in seeing how it
> might be cast effectively in plain contemporary English as (from my
> point of view) a gripping narrative.
>
> I never saw the most recent movie, but Hal Duncan's review is
> hilarious - http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2007/11/i-am-beowulf-youre-going-daaaaahn.html
>
> "...At this point, anyone who's read the Anglo-Saxon source text might
> well be stroking their chin. Grendel's Mother was a super-sexy
> babe-demoness? I don't remember that in the original! One might grow
> more curious still when Beowulf proceeds to shag aforesaid super-sexy
> babe-demoness rather than dispatching her. Um... isn't that, like, a
> *radical* departure from the original? we might ask. No matter; all of
> these considerations pale into insignificance against the key question
> raised by this representation of Grendel's Mother: just how Mother
> Dearest, given her barbie-doll smooth and entirely slitless pubic
> mound, manages to get it on with both Beowulf and Hrothgar -- here
> revealed as Grendel's father, ye see, to provide a nice pat theme of
> parental responsibility as opposed to all that complex guff about the
> conflict of Christian belief systems with autochthonous religion and
> mythology; remember, it's about "the Age of Monsters", not the age
> of... well... the Christianisation of Northern Europe. Fuck that shit!
> It's about Monsters! Big 3D Monsters THROWING SHIT OUT AT THE
> AUDIENCE!!! But, I'm getting off the point, so, yeah, how exactly did
> she shag them? And from which orifice did she drop her sprogs? Sure,
> sure, others might ask *why*, given that Beowulf is all about "the Age
> of Monsters", we have Grendel's Mother as a stereotyped Evil Sexy
> Vixen rather than the ass-kicking, man-munching Monster of the source
> text, why she has to use her "womanly wiles" on the hero rather than,
> well, going mano-a-mano with him in an underwater slug-fest cause she
> ain't nobody's bitch, motherfucker. Me, I just want to know *how*.
>
> "It may seem that I'm overemphasising the importance of Grendel's
> Mama's labia-lack. To be sure, I have to confess I'm not quite sure
> what Zemeckis was trying to say by this, so it's entirely possible I'm
> missing something important. I can only be sure that we're *meant* to
> take this as highly significant from the close-up crotch-shot of
> Grendel's Mum that, in Imax, cannot fail to impress with it's
> in-yer-faceness (It's a giant gold barbie-crotch and IT'S COMING TO
> GET YOU!!!)."
>
> xA
>
> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:11 AM, David Bircumshaw
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Anglo-Saxon literature was of interest to white supremacists like
>> Pound or Tolkien, which doesn't mean that people who follow on in that
>> are of the same ilk, the trouble is that of taking on a poisoned
>> chalice.
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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