from Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, a letter sent to Elizabeth I during his imprisonment (1600)
I not only am subject to their malicious informations that first envied me for my happiness in your favor, & nowe hate me out of custom: but as if I were throwen into a corner like a dead carcas, I am gnawed on & torne by the vilest and basest creatures upon earthe. The prating tavern-haunter speaks of me what he list: the frantick libeler writes of me what he list; already they print me & make me speak to the world; and shortly they will play me in what forme they list upon the stage.
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This excerpt from a letter to Elizabeth illustrates with vivid precision the ways in which new media and increasingly public culture forms around celebrity figures. Ironically, Essex had used these very forms of media--print, rumor, mini-portraits--to promote his own celebrity. His rivals at court, who accused him of "popularitie"--that is, using these kinds of appeals and courting the affection of the people, would have been pleased to hear Essex gnawed by his own devices. Especially interesting here is the embodiment of representation and circulation.
Also, Essex was as melancholic as they came: he likely suffered from what we now call bi-polar disorder, and many have argued that Hamlet's disposition is based on Essex's.
About a year after this letter was written, Essex tried to seize the Queen, with the hope of purging some of his enemies at court (his prosecutors claimed he tried to take the crown for himself, but I think that was highly improbable). He might have been pleased that after his death, he was mourned by the people and, to the regime's chagrin, popularly recuperated as a hero.
Slow posting around here lately. I think that the format we've chosen goes for (broadly speaking) either the lyrical or the comic, which are, by their very nature, excerpt-able, and not much I've been reading lately fits in that mode. And yet I've been reading a lot. By way of substitution--since this blog is kind of a record of what I read--I'm going to make a list of what I've been reading in the past week (with the rule being that they are all things that I have been really reading rather than intending to read. This caveat is necessary because, in honor of "the commonwealth," the survey will be conducted spatially.
on coffee table:
--one poem per day from English Renaissance Verse, edited by David Norbrook
--Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library"
on my desk:
--Judith Butler, Excitable Speech
in my bag:
--Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
--Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics
--Jean Howard and Paul Strohm, "The Imaginary 'Commons'
kitchen table (the dreaded liminal space between bag and coffee table):
--John Hayward, The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII
nightstand:
--Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
I notice that one space not represented in the above list is the toilet. About a year ago, I severed, once and for all, the pleasure of reading from the pleasure of shitting.
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