At 4:40 PM -0400 7/28/03, David Wilson-Okamura wrote:
>
>Chester, Allan Griffith. "Thomas Churchyard's Pension." PMLA 50 (1935): 902.
> there is no reason to suppose that the pension was not paid.
That statement jumped off the screen at me as simply backwards
(though quite likely I'm the one who's backwards, or just ignorant).
It seems to me the thing one would "suppose" would be that the
pension no longer got paid after the first time or two without
vigorous reminders and ongoing influence on and/or access to the
court. My own supposition is colored by being a bit more familiar
with how this worked in the 14th century than in the 16th (e.g.,
Chaucer's "Complaint to His Purse"). Was the Elizabethan office of
accounting and budget so much more efficient than the Ricardian one
that people really did get paid regularly and on time without a lot
of extra begging and reminding?
If the answer to that question is no -- getting a pension paid was
hard work -- then the promise of payment, though significant, would
not by itself carry quite the weight Chester thought it did. If the
answer is yes -- pensioners got paid like clockwork in the late 16th
c. -- then that strikes me as a noteworthy evolution in the
pensioner's relation to power; the initial grant would be more
significant if the likelihood of its continuation was more or less
assured.
--
________________________________________
Craig A. Berry
mailto:[log in to unmask]
"... getting out of a sonnet is much more
difficult than getting in."
Brad Leithauser
