GORGON

Time 2020-12-13 17:05:12

Web Name: GORGON

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would reap the pearl that London scorned,hisLenten Stuffeindicting only of those that would deem itlibellous and so the return of Nashe to London smerry lanes surely assured, as the herring from the Dogger Bank each orbit of the spheres. As that renowned Rabbiescaped the Sack of Jerusalem concealed inside a coffin, passing unconsideredas inanimate dead matter, so the Praise of Red Herring proved a sufficientlyunthreatening casement to encrypt the infectious invective of Nashe and conveythe account of his own arraignment between creaking allegorical lines.Had Troy kept Whitgift its high-priest, an edict might havebeen sent out that all sculptural parodies of nature be cut down, and for goodmeasure all animate livestock, pots, pans and houses within the great wallsflattened that the liminal transit of blood-lusting legions, concealed forinstance within any rigid absurdity of craft, might not transit the Cityterminus. Troymight have stood as long as London,yet no tricks of triumph would memorialise it for comparison, nor poets whettheir wits on its fall.As Lenten Stuffe foretold, the barbarisation of Nashe wouldinstead be wrought with the binding bonds of law. The Bishop s Ban calling all his works to bebrought in and burned. And so his tonguecut out and pen taken away, what greater horror than the clown unseen, the shipof fools, that all invention, art and mirth might still not overcome the tidesof sin, the tempest of death, for whilst the cure to a broken heart may bedrink, of drink there is no cure. I am[sic], I must die.There is Nashe, glimpsed on the cusp of an age by middlingyoung imitators in the Stews above Smithfield, three doors down from Pict-Hatchat Mistress Silverpin s, between two threadbare stage screens of painted cloth,between drunk and sober, that is, between sleeping and waking, but the Deviland Prigbeard know exactly where. There he is also, resurrected as Ingenioso to dine withcourt-destined Cambridgers, the censored hero whose praise alone (As the oldBricklayer of Lincoln would have it) enough to bring the sharp sting of dangerto the gravy-soaked and sugar-frosted dining table. A muse-shepherding talent, railing againstdry-fisted patrons, the authorial truth behind the self-enamoured commissionsof carterly bumpkins eager to imitate Sweet Shakespeare, speaking from myriadmouths and entering his works in other pens names, his own forever bound forthe Isle of Dogs. There again, anatomised truly by Tridgemini, hisstraight-jacketed sparring partner, the tear of the rival devoid ofcondescension and shed with the true tribute of spite, for a rejection ofHermes, Plato, Orpheus and all those marvellous moonshone-eggs and admiredinstead for his lived understanding of life as a gaming, a juggling, ascolding, a lawing, a skirmishing, a war; a comedy, a tragedy, a stirring wit,a quintessence of quicksilver, for there is no dead flesh in affection, orcourage.We end with the death of Thomas Nash, who died 1599, recordedat Stratford on Avon, an otherwise unremarkable place, with Thomas Nashe,living at Westerleigh in Gloucestershire, died that same year, with ThomasNashe, who lived until 1619, recorded at St George Tombland, Norwich, with ThomsNashe, baptised 1567 in Throwley, Canterbury, whose death is also unknown, withThomas Nashe the Child, who died in London in 1603, perhaps to the bakers inthe parish of St Olave. We travel on thecusp of exhaustion, to the grave of Thomas Nosse erected in 1601, a southernname rendered in Yorkshire accent on the perishing hills of Kirkby Moorside,where Lady Brooke had died the year before and the Duke of Buckingham would catchcold and die, a hundred years later, with Thomas Nashe, committed to thecasebooks of Bedlam, the Hospital of Incurable Fools, in 1603. ***1 note 5 years agoDogsDo I sketch too briefly? Have I daubed in half a beat toomany years? Have I anatomised an epoch? Have I butchered andbotched? We are blown by the wind yet know nothing of convection, we are washedin the rain and mind not whence it came. The bare-trodden rocks give way to strange engines, thegreen leaves to lawyers bills, forest boughs to market stalls and from nature srich topsoil we dig out our oxidising handfuls of Nashe and divine from erodedsatire the taste of the past, like the ghost of the grape in the wine. The gorgonate willow shakes butcher s-yard entrails fromFleetside snakey locks, stained black as the printers shops flush out theirinky plates in the river s gore-veined eddies. Far out east, theLimehouse gut washes red as Stepney killing ground sweats to feed the poorerpreceincts of a burgeoning population. Uprooted by the free-determinatewinds and encroaching tides of opinion, that adamantine oak of Lambeth releaseda clearing on the banks of the Thames through which we now see Bancroft stridingforth, to set up his thorny Arimathean staff in the impermanent filth of theIsle of Dogs. Now Bishop of London, his fortuitous election was newlyaugmented by the reversion of that sodden ground to the Diocese of London aftera 70 year lease from a brewer called Knight. The setting up of Bishop s armsalong its seasonally ebbing breadth and girth signalled to the city-desperatedenizens of debt that the flood-baptised entirety of this holy land was againunder supra-normative jurisdiction, of ancient laws a sanctuary from arrest. Shaking to the ground the fetters of Whitgift s Calvinisticbridle, London s tolerant lanes burst at the seems, waves of refugees blowingin from Europe as the Emperor, the Pope and Suleiman roiled the seas andploughed the earth, sending the foam of humanity onto England s welcomingshores. Amongst the throng, theoccasional ship from the other side of the world, so long at sea that the hairycaptains stand in antiquated fashions on the docks, dishevelled, not nearly attractingthe attention they had hoped for, instead, merely an overworked Clerk and new taxes. All refracted in the thousand facets of everysoul-filled stone, in every droplet of the swelling Thames, in every apothecary s crystal cure, in every proudly windowed lane, in everychild s eye, in every cup of news. Yet the mist descends and we areshipwrecked ere we leave the Thames upon theIsle of Dogs. For that same-titled play that Nashe at last cast up amidstthe boards of the Swan is lost, his inventive young acompi arrested for hispart in its fabrication, Nashe escaping from the City, pursued like Acteon, tolive as Ovid, exiled from the beloved City walls over the telling of a trist,his notes and works taken from his house by Robert Cecil s agent, Topcliffe,tipped to the scurrilous nature of the play by the Earl of Kildare.***0 notes 5 years agoPenry and MarloweArrested to the north of the Isle of Dogs by the Bishop ofStepney, John Penry hangs at 4pm, 29th May 1593 for playing Marprelate.His accuser-in-print is Nashe, our parroting protagonist, Whitgift ssignature the first on the warrant for execution. The following day, tothe south of the Isle of Dogs, Nashe s collaborator Kit Marlowe is killed inDeptford, a reduction in Liabilities, expressed as a debit, a reduction inAssets, expressed with a credit, one man accounted twice in the erasing. What, was he loved for his shows? As the banner raisedabove the battleground may think itself both cause and end, until the day slast rays seek out the ribbonned cloth em-bandaging the victor s limbs, ourhero, having galloped to London on Bancroft s borrowed hobby-horse, now withunguarded dolorosity weeps inkyTears over Jerusalemfor the friendthat used him like a friend.Unrepentant proud justices! Mechanical men! Would youarraign the warning bell and give over the floor to fiddling flatterers?Would you unhorse the fool and let the tyrant be thought wise? London, thou seededgarden of sin, will you laugh at all the world but blush at thy own folly?Does that great pedantic amongst you not see it is but a tilt amongstbookstalls on either side of St Pauls? Imprisoned in Newgate prison for railing against theLondoners, his conscience falls to devilish audit, no sense but surrenders atrue bill of detestable impieties, an index of iniquities, all thoughts buttexts of condemnation. His oily unabsorbable weepings float out beyondthe prison walls, out atop the yellow sea of Spanish gold that springs unstimmiablefrom the Madre de Deus, captured at Cadiz andunloaded at Plymouthby looting. Born on this sin-fertilising tide, a glorious unmatched jewelthimble-riggs through the stews, pawned and cut, hidden in a dung-heap, pawnedagain, brokered at Limehouse and magnified in many-multiplied sums leantagainst the very rumour of this silk-wrapped stone. Wracked and rent by such ever-increasing currents ofcrystal-locked credit, the inflated underbelly of London heaves with Herod-likeputrefaction, the outer-ward blisters and boils, bear-pits and bordellos, setin shadow by the climbing heights of the Swan theatre, built as a fit place forthe gold-bloated burghers of Thames-bank to en-culture their Castile-crownedand nutmeg en-garlanded brows. Look out to it from Newgate, Thomas Nashe,your muse is cut (like a diamond) with your own dust, and upon t you must pawnand borrow. HeraclideRelieved out of prison for the dedication of his children sbookTerrors of the Nightto the young Elizabeth Carey, niece of LordStrange, Nashe with Lazarus-lamenting lacrimosity resurrectsDido, Queenof Carthageas posthumous joint-progeny, and lest no man look to theReckoning, cements this call against the domineering dictates of duty bycasting Jack of Wilton as the far-journeyingUnfortunate Traveller. I would for all the exegesist s ink to decipher here thiswork, but so as not to place a volume in the precincts of a pamphlet and skippingMarigolds and Montaigne, the misfortunate Wilton witnesses the rape of innocentHeraclide, who then determines this Calvinistic conclusion - Why should not Ihold myself damned (if predestination s opinions be true), that am predestinateto this horrible abuse ?What, Whitgift! Was all this meant to pass? Will theunwitting agent of sin be damned? Did the text not pass your Grace sself-laid censoring hurdles into the Stationers Register, entered underprotection of your own unwitting hand? Did such argument first reach yoursaintly scent-misted eyes, swaddled as a bound-child of the printing press, ordo the Stationers have you evidenced there at the conception? Sleep anhour or two on it! What to make of the absence of new work from theever-extemporal Nashe for a full thirty-two month thereafter, but that Whitgiftfumed. Which lieutenant divine had waved on through this scurriloustract, that seeped Comedic dew between the cracks of his intolerantinflexibilities? Just as the crystaline choir stalls of his earthlydomicile at Croydon already moulded into the rheumatic native ground, so hisconfection of Calvinism proved too rigid for the living, shifting soil of life. Growing ever more lofty in his self-estimation, ever morebrittle in his en-towered opinions, Archbishop Whitgift finally wrought themeans of his own arraignment with the codification of his doctrine in the nineLambeth Articles. Contested and criticised even by such close-treadingepiscopal accompli as Bancroft, who had brought Nashe to London, and Harsnett, his champion againstthe censors ever after, the Articles sought to firmly brand the doctrine ofPredestination upon the pate of the nation. But ho Whitgift! A fool to go ahead in this unsanctioned bythe Queen. Wouldst thou take from herhands her own redemption? Wouldst thoutake it from her self-determinate City walls? Wouldst thou take it from England stolerant shores? When the river ran dry,the Arians could not baptise, but from the wells of the City, the burghers maybaptise their own. The ever-incisiveedge, dissecting destiny itself from the bones of belief, abhorred the Popish presumptionsof Whitgift, who found his articles cut down and censored and himselfarraigned, and what more can be said of this, but that that that is, is, andthat that that will be will be.***0 notes 5 years agoJohn BaleIn the Eastern extremes of England lay a great port City bythe sea, above whose tiled rooftops twelve great churches towered, chiming homeits fleets of ships, sent out for fishing and for war. Weavers andspinners, carpenters, cows, patriarchs and matriarchs, bottles, bridges, bellsand belt buckles and all conceivable manner of trades and graces and conceitslaid out, reflected in the gleaming puddled streets. The proudest lanes already lay beneath the tottering wavesof wrinkled memory when in 1495 November storms cleaved clean the cliff andclawed the apse of Nicholas Church across the Dunwich bay. Not ten milesnorth, the quakes subside and Margaret Bale s waters break, her son strikes outupon the disappearing coastal stage amidst a cloud of holy stone. Blasted with the windblown sleet, washed in salty spray andseasoned with all the indecisive moods and forms imaginable of water nowcarrying the shifting blocks aloft, now sucking at the sands, boy Bale wouldpilot the comedic spirit through the tempestuous humours of Henry VIII, who toredown cloisters in his search for a son and threw up fortress after fortress inthe face of the far-off Pope. Banished from this half-built land when Henry died and Maryhanded England back to Rome, boy Bale, the last Librarian of the MonasticHouses of England, author of satires, commentaries, histories and twenty-fourknown plays, brought his barnacled barque to rest again upon the Suffolk coast,as Queen Elizabeth once more claimed England free from Papal reign. She set the learned Bale to work with no lesser labour thanthe Settyng Forthe of the Storye of This Our Realme, yet ringing in his earlike the golden bone of a driftwood mariner, his death would delegate this lastdictate to fresher wits, a promise of patronage for Pasquil s progeny, a schoolfor the methods of Bale.Thomas NasheLashed one final time by the gales of 1567, the remnants ofSt Nicholas Church are blasted into the sands below, and a raven blown from theruin might in a moment find itself twenty miles north, drenched and freezingand peering through the glass of St. Margaret s Church in Lowestofte, witnessto a glowing chapel fire and the baptism of the curate s second surviving son,Thomas Nashe.Weep yet no patronly tears for this salty child of a fishingfleet preacher, for Dead Bale s deathbed dedication of the Reliques of Rome tothe Bishop of Norwich would whet the wheels of empathy, sending Nashe s fatherto the fertile fields of Thetford, from where the remaining miles to St. JohnsCollege, Cambridge could be clipped from the collection tin and combed from thechests of old Marian vestments. Bale in his younger years had studied there at JesusCollege, founded on the Nunnery of Blessed Virgin Radegund upon the Midsummergreen, where temples tilled beneath the fields once held the gods our forebearsfelled, now raised again on Maypole piles, cemented with spilt beer fromstar-counted solstice fairs, and folded into the College charters, with dolmenstones and Elysian Fields, the plays and dances, the Songs, the screen forChrist s rod and depending on the tale at hand, the altar or the table at thefront of the Church. Twelve disciples and ate their bread from it, andAbraham lay his son down on t. How soon the sackcloth pulpit seemed more real than stone,and underneath each footstep travelling out across Elysian fields, the woodenboards met sackcloth streets, under sackcloth skies and piercing with a woodensword the crumbling sackcloth screens and foul copied sermons and decrees ofold Cambridge boys dressed now in Bishop s robes and stately golden chains, theheretics and atheists could set forth and be replied, but set forth none theless, dressed as death, a barbarian king, a usurper, devil, or a fly lodged inthe nose of the Pope, each Christmas in a world turned upside down!Richard BancroftStagecraft broke to statecraft in the Diocese of Ely. Bishop Cox resigned his See and quarrelledwith Diana, the schoolboys having taken Wisbech Castlefrom his grasp and stuffed it like a herring last with captured Catholic spies. His home in London, Ely Place, prised from quaking hands and occupiedby agents of Lord Hatton to entrap the Scottish Crown. Thrown in with thehouse was Cox s chaplain, Richard Bancroft, a Jesus Collegepreacher remembered from his own schooldays for prowess with the quarterstaffand in the boxing ring, and now immersed amongst intelligencers, cryptographersand special agents of the Queen.Travelling down the river Ouse past rustling willows to Cambridge, Nashe wouldpass the vacant Bishop s throne, which so cleared, allowed the subtle green shootsof thought that sprang amongst the nervous rocks and bank-side briars toflourish confident against the overzealous mowing of Gethsemane Gardeners.Tolerantly husbanded by Robert Browne, watched over by thegreat Lord Burghley, Secretary to the Queen and chancellor of Cambridge, whosent his second son to study at St John s that same eventful year, these gentlyflowering vines would yield the sacrament in Bacchus vein, bled ruddy in thewaters of the Ouse and poured with wild inventive joy as each approached anintimacy with the natural word of God, unmediated by the Church. Still the forest begets the Ivy that will strangle greateroaks, and the gardener will step upon a rake left hidden in the untamed grass.From out this paradise of possibility emerged the parasite princeling JohnWhitgift, who in 1583 mounted those fractured palace steps to be crownedArchbishop of Cantebury.Thinking himself a cunninger shearsman than Burghley, and topiarythe highest art, Whitgift went lopping heads in the Garden of Gogmagog. Bancroft was himself sent back to confrontthe Brownists over a libel against the Queen, pinned up in church, comparingGloriana to Jezebel. With Hanno s lesson well in mind, the calcifyingchurch then censored, banned and forbid all publications not passing before theArchbishop s own frigid nose.Like the Hebrew priests who wrote their temple in thetravelling Torah scrolls, the Brownists then packed their printing press into ahay-stacked cart, with packs of print-block type an ever changing holy book,and in true originating letters lived the word of God upon the rutted roads.Crossing Bridges, at the house of Widow Crane, they consecrated MartinMarprelate their self-built pseudonymous saint, and aimed their printedmissiles (missives I should say), back at Whitgift s crystal throne. The Bishops stone-cold gramatic theologising was no matchfor the lived humours of mendicant Martin, whose penny papers outsold printedsermons heard oft times for free in Church. So road-worn Bancroft set off tofind fresh witty ban-dogs and hunted out the scurrilous Martin from his ownsatiric realm. Sweet sainted St Dominic and all the Inquisitors of Spainused not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their prey as they thatnow like dogs from Joan of Aza s womb, made Albi out of Albion.Nashe had been in Cambridgeseven years around the time his father died. He left, we re told, with one lastrole as Jack of Clubs in Terminus est non Terminus, though whether Bancroftplucked the student Nashe from out the deck, or whether Nashe himself soughtrefuge in the houndsman s pack, St. Fame could grant no greater stage thanMarprelate that year.Dressing himself up as Cutbert Curry-Knave, or the RenownedPasquil, his agitating wit teased out the suspects faults, accusing all andnone with allegory, then circling in on those who leapt in fright fromhidyholes, their self-betraying guilty fears reflected in the mirror ofnonsense-verse. Then chasing acrossdoctrinal fields, the quarry cannot go to ground, but leaving printed trails(trailing printed leaves, that is) they so set up their fall. As Martin heads past Manchester,a fumbled box of type betrays the press and Lancastrian Lord Strange sends mento apprehend the travelling Brownist trebuchet. But pamphleteering Penry,Patriarch of the Printers and known by Nashe from Cambridge,skips the net and makes away to Scotland srambling hills. Pierce PennilessAt the Cross Keys in London s Gracechurch Street, a parodictoast to the censorship of Martin is played against the protestations of thegilded City hall, but safe amongst the costumed ranks of Strange s Men andBancroft s dogs, the conny-catching Cambridgers count Robert Greene, KitMarlowe, Anthony Munday, Thomas Kyd, Will Kemp, John Lyly, Richard Burbage,Edward Alleyn and of course, Thomas Nashe, protected over all by Whitgift sfavouring hand.And so the battle likely won for the constables of theAnglican Church, Nashe scrapes unripe remains of obsolete state-sanctionedcounter-cuffs into his own ragbag tract and dressed ingloriously as the loosingside s Pierce Penniless, offers up his Supplication to the Devil withpermission to print granted by the Prince of Predestination himself. So shielded by divinity at the Archbishop s palace, youngNashe could safely satirise even as tender a topic as the childless Queen ssuccession. But no ornamental destiny for Pierce, no contented secretionamongst the carved oak ballastrades and mechanic whirligigs of doctrine, forwhilst Summer may predestinately choose Autumn as successor, the Comedic lifeis lived beyond the almanactical prognostications of harvest-tide chuffs andcan t help but jostle the staunch shoulders of the certain as it pulls on itsboots and ascends the steps to the stage. Speculated against the odds of experience, invested foradventure, extended beyond means, the Comedic dance treads tautologicself-enamoured justifications afoot and wipes its brows with disputation.Did you think that, because thou art virtuous there would be no cake andale?***0 notes 5 years agoThe Elephant HannoFor reason that the Cardinals were Roman, yet the Pope andAretino both Florentine, Aretino escaped execution for bequeathing thedeceased s testicles to the cardinal of Senegaia, and his penis to cardinal deGrassi, inThe Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno. Withthis poem pasted to the talking statue of Pasquino in Romeand Satire made legal in Christendom, Martin Luther picked up his pen and,after scant two years scribbling, pasted his own95 Thesisto thedoor of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, forreason that a witty statue is nothing to a whole mountain of Wit. So history tells us, but is it too extreme a propositionthat Hanno had in deed written a will, simply for Aretino to take credit?Pliny tells us of an elephant fluent in Greek letters, after Hebrew thelanguage of the apostles and for the Cardinals of Rome there was no greaterembarrasement than this fact in their wars with the Byzantine Church.The loyal elephant Hanno, favorite of the Pope, may haveauthored his own will, and then ascribed it to Aretino, an uneducated jobbingpornographer, to save the Pope from the jealousy of the Cardinals, and theChurch of Rome from the scorn of the Greeks. Christendom, shakingwith laughter when it might have shaken with schism, Hanno escaping indisguise and fugitive for over a hundred years before emerging in Germany asthe elephant Hansken, whose portrait by Rembrant bears an uncanny resemblanceto another by Raphael, that we know to be of Hanno. Of course, it does not follow of logic that an elephantwould be so cunning, for to learn Greek letters is no evidence of guile, butonly ofimitation, which can be bodged together from universities and theRamaian handbooks of the moderns. True invention cannot be learned butonly lived, and who had lived more than Aretino?Such Aretine proponents locate the pachydermic subjection toimitatio in the tragic epitome of the elephants graveyard. In tar pitsand quicksands, the ancient boar may snort and wheeze its final sunrise, gazingor lying on the bones of aunts and uncles. Sheer size is no safeguard,and ferocity is made a toy. The elephant unquestioning,uncreative,bereftof the tricks and tools of art, is but chaff to the winds, blown upon thecurrents of time. The elephant without art is pathos, passionate sinful,sheer matter. But having sketched the argument for the Elephant Tragic,counterpoise the Elephant Comic, the Hanno we imagine writing his own will,taking his legacy unto his own control, the self-reflective elephant effectiveupon the world. This is the elephant who shatters the cake of custom,whose breath moves the winds themselves, whose footsteps rattle the Gods, whoperforms the divine work. The epistle of the elephant to her people, theVerbum Elephantus orlogosof the elephant. Is it not obvious that the Elephant Comic must precede theElephant Tragic? For all the canyon-piled bones of the elephant cemetery,for all the elephantine lines snaking tail in trunk towards the precipice, forall the elephants curious, elephants investigative, elephants intrigued only bythe destination of the elephant in front, there was once a single corpse at thebottom of the cliff, and while the motives of this true originator cannot beknown, we may yet conclude it was trying to fly. All the treasures of Romeforfeit that Hanno stay suspended, turning celestial summersaults above aninfinite gorge. This base misunderstanding desire to coddle animategenius. But thunder shakes the air, the firmament cannot hold,Christendom cracks with laughter, and fracturing doctrines burst in shards fromthe printing press.All certainty receded from the world, burying itselffor survival in the heads of the mad, the maligned and the marginal. Downwardsplunged Hanno. The pilgrim in the Church became a buyer at the bookstall,a congregation of one before a whole council of priests. Downwardsplunged the pillars of heaven.Amongst those churchmen in the north that had heard Luther,yet declined to vacate the shattered temples, however ridiculous Hanno hadrendered their officiousness, the Calvinists cobbled an argument workmanly, anddubbed it Predestination, that might yet encase Hanno in crystaline shrouds andalleviate from the buyers at the bookstalls the new-found pressure of theirself-determinate and capricious comedic choice.This tragic argument held that the salvation or damnation ofeach child had already been determined by an omniscient power, that all lifewas lived in imitation of an unalterable plan, that choice was as vain a follyas free will. The Testament of Hanno was forfeit, illegal on the circularfallacy that elephants are incapable of change. What counterblast did the Comedians have against thisaccusation but to be martyrd of originality? To the reader, the future mayappear fixed on the page, but take it from the writer, that Hanno s will wasonce un-writ, and the censoring fires of Savonarola, John Leiden and ofWhitgift will not consume, but only un-un-write it, to re-print from the pagethe words upon the earth. As the bones of Elephantus Tragicus pile up, ElephantusComedicus lost within, so do the sands of the Thames,the ashes of nations, encase a prodigious wit. Somewhere beneath this present City, golden light flooded a meadow,smoke oozed from the mead-hall and children carried full stomachs through themote-filled air of the first Island Summer. Pollen frosted their hair,they waded a stream, they ducked into the cool canopy and climbed a hill.A ray of sunset light in a clearing, and then the hill descends, treescrowd in, brambles are damp now, the air smells green and is cold like anotherage. The earth breaks to stone beneath the feet, but then to unforgivablebrick and worse unseemly stuff. The ruins that flowering nature scrabblesstill to shroud, the shaming scars that prove a prior consort with the pox ofreason rise up, grazing knees and shredding fingernails.Neither superstitious nor stupid, though strangers as muchto life as this land, in the great heap of ruin they look for valuable remnantsof the Romans in the palace below the hill crest. There the bones pile upmore numerous and mix with animals and birds and statues just as dead. Twogreat skulls with poleaxe tusks are found beneath and dragged atop the pit tosit uneven on the pillar stumps that front the palace gate. Inside theoval court the final light of day soaks down through shattered slats and dripsaway. Noon revolves to Night, the resurrected skulls can t helpbut watch the childish chase wink out between the trees, delighted disembodiedscreams. A broom-shaft topples back amongst the weeds. Each meetsthe other s eye. Gog and Magog, atop a City built and built again andonly in the building truly called a City and once complete, a tomb.Gog - Who knocked us down, brother Magog?Magog - Queen Boudica, brother Gog!Gog - Which Queen will then set us up again?***0 notes 5 years agoThe ArgumentGORGON, HIS DEATH - Or, The Isle of Dogs, In which isrevealed the true story of Thomas Nashe, his life. An ague for the abatement of melancholy andsharp prodding of sloth and cast amongst the sinful by the grace of as right goodfullGargantua as ever threw steak at thespit. This the bounty of his moststrange and unworthy life being offered up for a profitable meditation on redemptionin an epistle to that Babylon in which a man is not a man, nor a woman a woman,nor else as it might be named withal the scant approval of her Majesties Censors***0 notes 5 years agoDavid ManningTo an imaginary readership of dining-club old boys, UnicornThrone offers a dated fantasy in which Robert Pye, a cross-dressing female spy,acts as a fig leaf for the author s own inhibitions, suppressed as they areunder a layer-cake of pseudo-historical charlatanism.Here, conceit replaces any real evidence either of lifeexperience or in-depth investigation into the late Elizabethan era, as may bestbe exemplified in the main plotline, such as it is. Government attempts to forestall thewidespread looting of a captured Spanish treasurer-ship, the Madre de Deus, by asentimentalised London underworld, allow an Elizabethan orphan girl to discovera talent for accountancy when she enters the service of Sir Robert Cecil, whois tasked by Queen Elizabeth with recovering a famous diamond.The wanton addition of stock characters from a B-list ofShakespearian conspiracy theory then provides the author with an ever-rotatingstone at which to grind an axe fashioned in lieu of any finer literary point. I need not trot out the names of such wellworn whipping-boys as are utilized here, but to convince the reader of howlittle this blind flying fling at the donut of authorial truth may benefitthe serious-minded academic. Mentioned alongsidethe oft-abused figure of Sir Robert Cecil (portrayed, as ever, Machiavellian), thenecrophiliac author summons Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe to parrotbellicose statements on the theme of social and literary rejection, deliveredwith an idiomatic inconsistency that the laws of sheer probability should havetempered. In the interest of fairness, one can marvel at how theauthor has shoehorned into this fudgepacket an antiquated doctrinal disputeover the Christian symbology of the unicorn. Not withstanding historical accuracy (the dispute was in fact settled asa footnote to the Council of Trent thirty years before the main events of thestory), this is perhaps the least-confused of a range of sensationalistreferences that infest the corpse of this arbitrary work. Religion is always a sensitive topic, and it will be nosurprise to learn that it is handled here through recourse to guzzlingCatholics, Anglican hypocrites, wealthy Jews, secretive Jesuits, sodomical Atheists,firebrand Presbyterians, barbarous Muslims and humourless Puritans. Depth of character is replaced by xenophobiclatitude and extremes of caricature, made worse by situating such prejudiceinvariably in the mouths of lower-ranking members of the cast. Nor in this day and age, can even a story thatdeals so lightly with history find a justification for its comradely chauvinismin an assumption that Tudor women were content to be marginalised.It is at least mercifully short.- David Manning, Ridgefield Press ***1 note 5 years ago

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