Make the Most of Mythology

Most of the authors that I am writing about were educated in a time when Latin and Greek were the main points of focus on the ‘curriculum’, and the works of Homer and Virgil, among others, were studied vigorously. The Classical past was looked upon as a refined epoch, the period of immense wisdom and philosophy, and the environment that created some of the best texts that were ever going to be produced. Anyone who knew about the Classical past could use it in their work to demonstrate their impeccable education, and insert their own writing into the long-standing tradition of great pieces of intellectual output. This, of course, is just what many writers did. Classical mythology often plays a fundamental role in Early Modern literature, and a lot can be missed if it is disregarded.

Of course it is unlikely that the casual reader will become an expert in Classical mythology overnight, or even over a week or two, or a month, or a year. As you keep reading these texts more and more myths come into your sphere of knowledge, variant names popping up too, and it can all seem overwhelming. Knowing the intricacies of this Classical mythology is immensely rewarding though, and can be easily accessed. I would recommend Encyclopedia Mythica as a quick and comprehensive dictionary of Classical figures. If you are more serious and have money to spare, then The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology is invaluable. Being able to understand the stories of the Classical figures referenced can make a big difference to how a text is perceived, and can work wonders when it comes to detailed interpretations. For instance, in my post on ‘Comus’, it is mentioned that Comus is the son of Bacchus. Knowing that Bacchus is the god of wine then suggests something about Comus, which adds another dimension to his hypnotic, powerful character.

Brush Up on the Bible

In the periods about which I am talking in this blog, religion was incredibly important. My tutors have often told me that today we cannot begin to fathom how pertinent religion was to these people. It informed their everyday lives, from food shopping to relationships to clothing, and was felt throughout society in a way that it just isn’t, in many cases, nowadays. Therefore, most people looked at the world through a religious lens. And it most likely would have been a Christian lens as well, as, to put it mildly, most were not very religiously tolerant. Even Christians would fight amongst themselves, arguing over whose was the ‘true’ religion. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 saw Catholics versus Protestants in a horrific massacre, as just one example of the many there have been. Charles I partly stumbled into so much trouble because there were fears he was a secret Catholic; during the Reformation there was great hostility to Catholics from Lutherans, and of course vice versa; and then of course, looking back to earlier centuries, the Crusades saw Christians, Muslims, and Jews all fighting for the Holy Land and the city of Jerusalem.

My point here is that religion was everything to the majority of people, including most of the writers I will discuss. Therefore religious allusions are bound to pop up, and because the majority of people knew the Bible inside-out, they rarely provide their own footnotes! My focus here is on the Bible because, as a blog about English literature, I will be encountering writers that are primarily Christian, given the status of England (and indeed most of Europe) as Christian during the Early Modern period. Therefore it is references to the Bible that will be most prominent. The best way to get around these often hidden allusions is to make sure to search for a copy of a text with good footnotes – Oxford World Classics are particularly good for these, especially for Shakespeare, or the anthologies published by Norton, and the Norton Critical Editions. If you are really keen then I cannot recommend Michael Counsell’s ‘A Basic Bible Dictionary’ highly enough. It is an incredibly comprehensive accumulation of all the names, places, objects etcetera that appear in the Bible, and is compact enough to carry with you.

The reason I am stressing the understanding of Biblical allusions is that, as I have said seemingly many times in this small space, religion was paramount to the writers you will encounter in Early Modern England. The references to the Bible that they include in their work are there for a reason, because it means something extraordinary to them, and it can only add an extra layer to the text to understand along with them precisely what they mean. To them it was second-nature, to us it may take a little more time, but is definitely worthwhile.

Think Synonyms

This was a piece of advice that came to me from one of my university tutors, and is a great starting point for getting to grips with the often ‘high-brow’ language and distorted syntax of some texts. Basically, the idea is that if you do not understand a line, or a passage, jot down what it means in colloquial language by the side.

For example, take Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10, ‘Death, be not proud’ as an easy example. The first few lines run as follows:

“Death, be not proud, though some have called

Thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me”

If you are unfamiliar with reading language like this, the meaning can be tricky to determine. But, as I said, it is a matter of making it a language that you understand. So, just the first few words – “Death, be not proud” – become ‘don’t be proud Death’, which is much more familiar syntax. The next few – “though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so” – require attaching to the first of our ‘translations’ so to speak. It becomes ‘don’t be proud Death, because even though people have called you strong and scary [the “mighty and dreadful” of Donne’s verse] you aren’t really’. Overall, then, it becomes:

‘Don’t be proud Death, because even though some people have called you

Strong and scary you aren’t really;

The people who you think you kill

Do not really die, silly Death for thinking so, and you cannot kill me either’

It is simply the case of looking at the words and really dumbing them down to the most basic synonym you can think of for them, and perhaps also adding some extra words to make it even clearer, or changing the order of words. For instance, here “die not” becomes “do not really die”, and I have added a ‘because’, just to work the meaning through to its full extent.

Yes, I realise that this isn’t the most wonderfully poetic version ever! But the point of creating the colloquial version of difficult passages is not to replace the original text. In creating a version of the meaning in more accessible language, the intended message is ingrained in your head, so that when you next read the original the subject of the passage is clear. This way one is far more at ease to enjoy the language and poetry, rather than frustratedly struggling to make sense of something and not really getting anything from it. Hopefully this technique will be of use to people, and will open up reading for them. This may not be something you need to do in the first place, such language may come easily to you, but if it doesn’t then this technique will definitely open the door to it, and the time will come when you don’t need to perform it any more.

Introduction —

This page is intended as a kind of ‘hints and tips’ page, giving advice on how to get more out of reading texts like those I am talking about. These are methods that I have either employed myself or have heard worked for friends. A major objective of this blog is to make Shakespeare and other such writers accessible, and it seems that a logical way to do this would be to provide suggestions for engaging with the texts themselves at their most basic level. From there comes all manner of joys and ideas and interpretations!