Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England

Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England By Miriam Jacobson Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 Early in Miriam Jacobson's impressive new study of Eastern imports and English poetry, she contrasts our contemporary approach to the reading of poetry with the early modern approach: Although poetry is always drawing attention to its sinews and musculature, today we are supposed to wrestle through this infrastructure to arrive at a poem's meaning ... But early modern language was neither transparent nor fixed in meaning, nor was composition distanced from the physical exertion of writing and printing as much as it is in our digital age. Though this could be said about all poetry, early modern writers and readers in particular demonstrated a heightened awareness of the "thingness" of words, not only as building blocks of text but also as marks on a page and as imports from other countries and cultures. (15) Barbarous Antiquity examines the nature of early modern English poetry--above all, its semantic flexibility and "thingness"--at a crucial moment in its development. In the late sixteenth century, Jacobson argues, the growth of English trade with the Ottoman Empire coincided with a waning in the authority of Greek and Roman literary models. The fruits of this trade (new goods from Constantinople, Persia, and India) furnished English poets with new words and images that they, in turn, imported into their representations of classical antiquity. In the poetic imagination, then, the eastern Mediterranean became a kind of palimpsest, with visions of the classical world bleeding through at one moment and visions of the Ottoman world blotting them out at another. Although English writers generally found the growth of Ottoman power disturbing, many also found this double vision of the East useful as they progressed from close imitation to freer adaptation of classical literary models. "In this way," Jacobson writes, "the classical antiquity represented in early modern English poetry became newly barbarous" (1). In each chapter, Jacobson "reorients" a central text by focusing on the imported words and images that helped its author to "remediate" the classical past. Chapter 4, for instance, explores Shakespeare's descriptions of Arabian horses and Turkish bulbs in Venus and Adonis, images that mark the poem's main points of departure from its Ovidian source. Other chapters uncover connections between George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie and sugar, Ben Jonson's Poetaster and inkhorn terms, Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and the lately introduced concept of zero. In the final chapter, Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman's Hero and Leander oozes with pearls, dyes, and ink. Tracing the etymology of key words, the origin of imports (e.g., sugar from Crete, the concept of zero from India), and their presence in English life, Jacobson develops a rich picture of a cosmopolitan literary culture eager for "strange things and stranger words" (4). To give voice to this culture, she enlists not only poets and playwrights but early modern monarchs, merchants, naturalists, and travelers, as well as the authors of manuals on horticulture, cooking, and horse breeding. Why these things and texts? Barbarous Antiquity considers imported objects and technologies that fit into Bruno Latour's category of social mediators, things that "reconfigure] the markets and culture into which they [are] imported" through a material change (128). Latour contrasts mediators with intermediaries, which "indicate] a change through an abstract, symbolic relationship" (16). Silk stockings, to use Jacobson's example, were once intermediaries in so far as they "symbolized upper-class luxuries"; then nylon, the material development that made stockings more widely available and changed their symbolic value, emerged as a mediator (16). …