It says Cronica de Bebe. It is. This is, well it's decided it's Spanish,
so it's turning Spanish into English. I don't know if Ronica's in here.
Maybe Ronica's gone for coffee. I'm going to get rid of the transcription.
I'm basically nervous. There's an element to which the Hanoverians are
convenient. I can't really see. The Hanoverians are, well if we leave it
there, then somebody comes in. Excellent. But not necessarily wholly
legitimate. The thing about George I, who sounds wonderfully British, is a
little bit like, who comes from Holland? John Cavett was the first English
explorer of North America, until you find out that he was Giovanni Cavotto,
and he was not very English at all. He was hateful by the English. And the
same sort of thing happens with George I. George I is of course Georg von
Hanover, and he couldn't speak any English really. In fact, one of the
reasons why the Parliamentary system, the Cabinet system, developed in
Britain was because the first couple of years of his reign, they tried to
have meetings with his ministers in French, as a sort of common language,
but then they just decided to give up. He was more interested in eating and
hunting, and it was just easier to run the business of the country in
English. And so that is where the sort of Cabinet system came from. British
people probably think it's because of the profound love of democracy or
nonsense like that, but it was just a convenient solution to deal with
having a German monarch. And then of course, his son George II was a little
bit like... Hello Sylvia, could you turn the microphone on? Do you want to
say something Sylvia? No, let's turn it off. Okay, perfect. George II was a
little bit like King Charles, or whatever he is, what is it, Charles III?
The King of England is Charles III? It's sort of starting to become king
quite late in life, and then George III was mad, etc. etc. So, I mean, the
Hanoverians were not sort of particularly high status. It was difficult to
sort of see them as semi-divine, like what happened later with Queen
Victoria. So, yes, I mean, you could be a little bit critical. And as we
saw last time, or the time before, or whenever, the censorship laws have
lapped. So, actually, there was a lot of free speech. So, he could make
jokes about the royal family and get away with it. Okay, so does anybody
anywhere online or here have any questions before we start about the Waffle
Vlog, or anything else, quite honestly? Have as many as you like. That's
what we're here for. Okay, so I just think, in case you can't hear, because
I've got the microphone, the question was, what features of heraldic poetry
can we see in this poem? Okay, so we're always slow. All right, this could
be a perfectly good question in a peck, so we might as well go through it
slowly. We have the idea of a battle scene, which is, in fact, a card game,
but it's described in the terminology of a battle scene. Before that, we
have the description of the army. A very standard, it's a possible one,
Barbara, to come. Which Barbara? Yeah, okay, well, so we'll just come to
that, just make sure there's nobody else who's been sort of waiting. No,
okay, there doesn't seem to be. So, yeah, that goes back to Homer. We have
in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well, etc., etc., and in the Fairy
Queen, the idea of, you know, describing how people put on their armour.
Doesn't sound very interesting to us, but that is a classical convention.
There are epic similes to some extent, sort of long, discursive,
descriptive similes. Definitely the divine superstructure. So, if we, the
same way that we have the sort of gods watching like spectators in the
Knight's Tale, which is basically an epic poem, or in the Spanish tragedy,
which is very much sort of has epic elements, and of course, in the Aeliad,
in the Odyssey, etc., etc., we have all of these divine, these sort of
supernatural characters intervening in the poem, or in the action of the
poem. Of course, where Zeus intervenes, or when Neptune intervenes in the
Knight's Tale, that's decisive, whereas all of these nymphs and people are
absolutely useless. There's lots of sort of flying, even, they're a little
bit like insects, if you like. Yeah, yeah, they're very little. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, I mean, it's a joke. So, yeah, exactly. For example, in the case of
that, of one being cut in half by the scissors, that is a reference to
Paradise Lost, where Satan is cut in two by one of the archangels, I'm
going to say Gabriel, because nobody's going to contradict me, but I can't
remember which, one of the archangels cuts Satan in two, which of course
doesn't really matter, because Satan is immortal, but it's embarrassing to
say. And so we get one of these little fairies getting cut in two. And the
idea of a pair of scissors as a machine, now the use of the word machine,
generally speaking, of this time is talking about war machines, so it's
like sort of cannons and this type of thing, mechanisms of war, and to
describe a pair of scissors as a machine is, of course, inflated and silly.
Anything else? Yes, yes, I mean, she's the equivalent of an epic hero, but
of course, I mean, because it's mock epic. So, I mean, we have all the
description of having like the sun, we have the fact that her lock of hair
is turned into a constellation. Where does that come from? Yeah, actually,
I think, yeah, by catch list. Anyway, one of those types of things. And of
course, the speech by Clarissa is based on a typical sort of classical
enunciation of, you know, one of these formal speeches that you have in the
classical world. So on and on and on. I mean, there are plenty of examples.
You only have to write 250 words in your epic or in your exam. So it's
quite easy to cover that. And if you could mention all or most of those
things, that very much covers it. So I think, I mean, I think there's
probably a couple of other things if you scour through my notes, you will
see that. Yes, that basically does that. Question number two. Oh, I know
how to. Perhaps you're taking it much too seriously. Basically, what is
being described here is really quite young people. So I mean, you could you
could see these people as effectively sort of late adolescence in the sort
of way that sometimes people can be late adolescence in Spain and to learn
sort of 22, 23, 24, perhaps like some of my students at the university. But
they're very young. They have they have absolutely nothing of any
importance to do in life except for drinking a bit, playing some cards and
playing pranks on each other, going up and down the Thames on boats, road
by working people, etc. A fundamental concept, a fundamental problem in the
society, which I think is very aware of is and I think, again, I mentioned
this before, but I didn't mention it as many times as I like, because it's
good for you to get this idea. We are talking about a nobility who are
defined by not working. In Italy, you have working aristocracy, you have
members of the aristocracy who actually do something useful and do some
work. And there's a confusion between, you know, sort of aristocratic
families like the Borgia or the Medici or these sort of famous Italian
families, apart from sort of being popes and things, also work in commerce,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's fundamentally important for these people
in Britain not to work. If they were to start working, they would stop
being part of the nobility. They would lose their status. So they can't
actually be useful. They are by definition parasitic. And so that is one of
the things that Pope wants to point out to us. Another, in relation to
that, there is the fact that Pope, as you know, is a classical scholar. I
gave you the anecdote about his translation of the Aeneid, I think it was,
but it doesn't matter which it is. And so he's aware of etymologies and
things. And he knows that aristocracy means the rule of the best, the rule
of the first, as it were. So the whole idea of the aristocracy in Europe
comes from the idea that there are some people who are just better. And
generally speaking, they are the warrior class or the warrior caste,
Beowulf and Coe. And they risk their lives for the rest of us. And so they
have special privileges. Because they're the people who go to war. They're
the people who protect us. They get some special privileges. And of course,
you can argue whether that is a good idea or a bad idea. But by this stage,
what we have is a bunch of bandies, a bunch of flops, people who, as in
accordance with this poem, it's much more important the special lots that
they have on their sword belts and their swords. I mean, these people are
never, ever going to be involved in a fight. They are just sort of... Their
only job, both men and the women, is to find a suitable partner. The women
have the added responsibility of maintaining their respectability. The men,
of course, most of them by this stage are going off to Europe, where they
can have all sorts of experimental sex with all sorts of different people,
animals, whatever. And it doesn't matter because it's a little bit like
what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. The whole idea of the grand tour,
formally, the pretend... I mean, there's so much hypocrisy going on here
that it is impressive. But the whole idea of the grand tour is that it is
young people, especially young men, going to be cultured, to learn about
classical antiquity, go and see great paintings, great architecture. A lot
of the people who accompany them, the so-called bear keepers, which is the
name given to people who accompany these young aristocrats, because you
have to sort of... Yeah, chaperones, somebody who paid to get them out of
prison, you know, when they've been caught, when they're drunk or whatever,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reality, of course, is that it is an
opportunity to get your wildness or whatever out of your system. And it's
very... An example, I think, a modern example, a modern sort of comparison,
might be what happened with the... Did you say Amish or English? Amish. One
of the weird, sorry, weird Protestant groups in America are the people who
wear big hats and don't use cars. Have you seen that movie called Testigo?
Paris and Ford? They are the people who are German and old German. Do you
know who I mean? Yeah. Right. Okay. Everybody who is not Amish is called
the English, which is quite amusing. But anyway, what they tend to do these
days is when young... Let me just say that. When young people are about 18,
they are sent out into the community, into the English. And what tends to
happen is really quite quickly, after a couple of months, they will come
running back, because going out into the big wide world, going out into
American cities, etc., at 18, with no family support network, etc., etc.,
etc., they have that experience of the rest of society without any support
system. And so they come back. It's a very intelligent thing to do if
you're going to have a, whatever we want to call it, a sect or an exclusive
religious community, a closed community, because you will fortify your
community by doing that. It's a little bit like what happens as well with
the Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. They come to Spain without any language of
Mormons, whoever, and they're knocking on people's doors. Most people say,
no, thank you, slam the door, whatever. And of course, that makes you much
stronger, much closer as a community. So there's all sorts of those types
of things going on with the ground talk. But young women, of course, are
completely different as has been the case until now, and possibly still now
in most societies. They have much more responsibility to protect their
reputations, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so there is this
difference value system. And one of the things that is going on here is
that this is fundamentally a marriage market. So you have lots of parties,
lots of dances, lots of games of cards to find somebody who is appropriate
to get married to, somebody who is more or less compatible and of the same
class and acceptable and respectable and blah, blah, blah. And to get that
good fit. There's a lot of possibility here for studying this in terms of
what's called literary Darwinism. It's a little bit like, as I mentioned
with The Way of the Woke, peacocks and things strutting in front of each
other and showing them their feathers, etc. And cheating and blah, blah,
blah. And so you have a certain value as a young woman with your potential
income, what we saw with Millamont in the previous play, etc. But of
course, if you have a sexual scandal in your past, that reduces your value
substantially. And how would we know about this? We don't have tabloids. We
don't have people taking photographs of the sex scenes, or they can go into
the newspapers, etc. One of the things that will happen is that somebody
might be able to demonstrate that they have received... Oops, you can only
see the top of my head. It's made me better to only see the top of my head,
wouldn't you? If you demonstrate that you have a love token from somebody,
then something happened. There was some type of relationship. And a
standard love token would be a lock of hair. And so the baron, from one
perspective, probably from a male perspective, is just having a little
joke. He's cutting off the end section of a bit of her hair. It may look
slightly uneven for a month, but it's nothing, really. It's of absolute no
importance from a male perspective. But from a female perspective, there is
the danger that this person could say, oh, look, I had a relationship with
her. Look, I have proof. And of course, in this type of society, because
it's so sort of incestuous, everybody knows everybody, and there's lots of
rumours. Yeah, exactly. And which is basically exactly the same thing of
another line that we had when Farnwell was describing the evening's
entertainments that Lady Wishmore, they destroy reputations constantly. So
there is this constant danger of your reputation being destroyed, which of
course is one of the things that Belinda is doing. Belinda, in the moment
that her hair is cut off, makes a big scandal so that everybody there knows
that he has cut off her hair publicly while she was playing cards, not in
any type of private twist. OK. At the same time, we can, there is a subtle
mention of the hypocrisy that's going on. Did you get the list? Yeah, OK.
The subtle mention of the hypocrisy. No, no, it's fine. Because she
basically says she would prefer to have lost some hair in a more private
place than hair off the top of her head, which you can see. So that, of
course, would be referring to having had sex with him and her woman, hidden
hair, as it were, without going into some of the details. But there is this
idea that it is better to have actually had a sexual liaison and it's been
kept quiet, which would be the question of real morality, than for there to
be a public rumour when you have done nothing wrong, but there is a public
rumour about your behaviour. So that, of course, is the hypocrisy of
society being projected onto the individual. The individual is much more
worried about the public image than the reality. He's not really worried
about her own morality, about going to heaven, etc. Again, because we have
a society where you have non-conformist Protestants, you have a lot of
Anglicans, you have quite a lot of Catholics, you have a few, one or two
Hindus, you have some Jewish people, etc. Religion is much more relativised
and people are thinking about religion much less in their daily lives. It's
much less of an aspect of society. And, I mean, without, just to be
historically accurate, while you were still having the Inquisition in the
18th century, there's nothing like that happening in Britain. There is
toleration, what's called toleration in terms of religious activity, and
more and more people who are effectively either Anglostic or Atheist.
Generally speaking, to say, to publicly and explicitly say I'm an Atheist
was probably a bad text. But effectively, more and more people just didn't
care about religion. Yes. So what? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's because
the Catholics, the Catholics are a political threat. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
exactly. But that's exactly the same for the non-conformists. Yeah,
exactly, yeah. So, I mean, we have, yeah, so it's only Anglicans. I mean,
there's not a lot of universities. There's Oxford and Cambridge. That's the
universities there are. So, not, I mean, it's far fewer people go to
university. There is a, if you are very clever, if you're a very clever
young Catholic, and of course, no women, it's restrictive in society. It's
not, it's not the sort of situation like in Spain, where 62% of the
population goes to university. It's a tiny, tiny minority. It's not
necessary for almost anything to have gone to university. What does happen
is that if a Catholic adolescent is very, very clever, they can go to
Oxford or Cambridge at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever, and do quite a lot
of studying, before at the age of 16, they would have to take the oath of
supremacy. So, they would have to say that they are loyal to the monarch as
the head of the Church of England, at which point, of course, they would
stop studying. Yes, so that, I mean, you could not have a sort of Catholics
in Parliament, and you couldn't have a Catholic prime minister. And in
theory, the still, the, I think they're sort of, I think they're going to,
if it comes up, they're going to get rid of it very easily, very quickly.
But at the moment, I think they haven't actually changed the law.
Certainly, 10 years ago, they haven't changed the law. The monarch is not
allowed to marry a Catholic. So, there is still some time in If we have the
situation where whoever, I suppose, well, William and, what's your English
called? What's it called? Littleton, Kate Littleton, yeah. They have two
children, but I'm not very good at this. Three, that's three children. All
right, they're doing the job properly. Their job is to have children.
They're doing it right. If whoever is the oldest child were now to want to
marry somebody who's Catholic, that would be absolutely no problem. I mean,
in the same way that, I mean, as I understand, Kate Littleton's grandfather
was a miner. So, I mean, she comes directly from a working class family,
and they're absolutely no problem, etc, etc. In the same way as the Spanish
system has conformed the current queen does not come from an aristocratic
family, etc, etc. The sort of silliness is they just solve when they need
to solve them. But, I mean, that was part of the problem with Mrs. Simpson.
Mrs. Simpson was Catholic, and she was a divorcee, and even worse, she was
American. So, you know, that was why there was a constitutional crisis, you
know, a hundred years ago. So it's not, it still affects things. But
because it's the same for Protestants and the Catholics, it's sort of seen
as even-handed. And the ideological argument, as I said before, very
conveniently, is that if you have Catholics in power, they will not allow
anybody else to do their thing. And if you have non-performing Protestants
in power, they will not allow other people to do their thing. The Anglicans
are a guarantee of toleration. They are quite happy to live in a society
where there are people who believe in other things. There's an element of
truth, but it is also very convenient. But, I mean, again, you can't,
there's something like, I mean, a parliamentary majority is decided by
something like 10 or 14,000 people. I mean, the, you can only, only people
who own, only men who own property are allowed to vote, etc, etc. So, the
mother of democracy, which, well, Britain has been a democracy for all of
us, depends on how you define democracy, very, very few people are voting.
There is a system by which when there is a lot of bad feeling in the
country, especially amongst the ruling class, you can change government
peacefully. That is very convenient. But to call it democracy before 1860,
I mean, really, before 1918, when women start voting, but to call it
democracy before 1860 is a farce, because it's a tiny group of people. It's
a little bit like talking about democracy in Athens or in ancient Greece.
Okay, so long as we exclude the majority of the population of slaves or
women, blah, blah, blah, then yes, it's a democracy. Fine, okay, whatever.
That's, it's a relative concept. Question number three. Did I answer
question number two? I don't know if I answered question number two. Okay.
The poem, not the play. I can't, I haven't read the poem recently. I can't
quite put my finger on what you're referring to. I'm afraid. I mean, the
superstructure of the conference. The good one. Yeah. So, yeah. When they
use that, they use that and start to, to, to. Yeah, well. Yeah, so, yeah,
so basically what you have, I mean, one of the basic ideas that Hope is
suggesting is these people need to grow up. Okay, and what you have. Hello.
So what you have is a situation where, when this silly practical joke takes
place, this Brahma-Pathala takes place, Belinda goes into a sulk. Yeah. And
that means that she is sort of metaphysically transposed to the cave and
spleen. He introduces the whole idea of the cave and spleen because the
normal thing to do when you, the standard thing that happens in epic poetry
is that there is a journey into the underworld. Yeah. And it, well, it's
almost all heroic poetry. There's some type of journey into the underworld,
which could be Grenzel's mother's pain or whatever it is. It even happens
in the Bible, just to show how ubiquitous it is. So that's what's happening
here. That's what the cave and spleen represents. But it is also a
situation where, from being this sort of very, very light, sort of slightly
brainless young woman, but her whole character changes, the divine
superstructure changes. So instead of having, being surrounded by these
silks, she's surrounded by gnomes. And there is the idea that, if in modern
society there is the idea that at a certain age women stop being the focus
of all attention, become invisible, in this context they become gnomes.
They become, especially a spinster, a woman who hasn't, I mean, if you
become invisible but you've got married, not on a personal level, on a
social level, well, that's okay. But if you haven't managed to get married
and you've just rejected men, and so you've become a spinster, you've
become an old woman who's unmarried, I mean, that is complete disaster from
this point of view, for some reason, whatever reason that happened. And so
there is this whole idea of this being one of the things that could happen.
So there's, in a lot of the literature we're going to see, there is this
idea that women face an obstacle course, or if you prefer, a minefield,
where they have to traverse a situation where, of course, they have to be
attractive to men, they have to be able to trap, in big inverted commas,
the best possible man that they could do. But there's all sorts of mistakes
they could fall into. And of course, we're talking about a sort of very
unmodern, very politically incorrect society where, in many cases, even if
a woman is sexually assaulted, she's going to be to blame, again, for
allowing herself to be in that type of situation. And so, I mean, and
again, in the mid-century, Fielding and Clarissa is talking about, talking
about this whole idea of, you know, of that position that women are put
into. But, so, yeah, I mean, you've got to be attractive, but you have men
constantly criticizing you for your vanity. Choose, yeah? Either you say
women are primarily objects of beauty for attracting men, or you say they
have other values, intellectual values, etc. But if you're saying all of
the emphasis has to be on looking right, and of course the money, but
that's, we pretend, we don't pretend we're not interested in the money. And
then you say, oh, but look at all these women, they're really vain, they're
only worried about their appearance. And so, you could accuse Pope a little
bit in that, in the first scene, where, if Volpone begins with this idea of
Volpone worshipping at an altar of gold, all the money is accumulated, the
altar, the image that is being venerated by Belinda is her own reflection.
And so, there is very much that idea of vanity. And Pope is in a very
interesting sort of position here, that he creates, for example, the poetic
voice. But he clearly finds this young woman very, very attractive. She is
completely inaccessible, she's a different class. But she's clearly very,
very attractive. But at the same time, he sort of criticises her. So,
there's this sort of double attitude, a very realistic type of double
attitude towards this young woman. But again, what's being described in
that first scene is, in that, what's being described in that first scene is
basically an inventory of products from five continents, or however many
continents there are. You have sort of things that are made out of ivory
from sub-Saharan Africa, and products that are made from wood from India,
and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, what is being suggested here is that you
have this enormous project, which is the British Empire, which is growing
bigger and bigger and bigger. An awful lot of money has been put into this,
an awful lot of effort. It's destroying millions of people's lives. The
people who are the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, obviously, but also
quite a lot of working or lower middle-class English people who have to go
to colonies where they die like flies. I mean, in one sense, the British
Empire is only a very small colony in India, and at this point, that
happens more mid-century. But one of the ideas that had developed in the
17th century was, poor people are a problem because they have a tendency to
be criminals. So, the best solution, we increasingly think it's not very
civilized just to execute people, although we still do. So, the best thing
to do is to get rid of them. How do you get rid of them? You send them as
far away as possible. So, the first solution is to send them to the
Americas. But the American colonists very quickly say, we don't want your
trash, we don't want your prisoners. And so, for about 12 years, around
this set of times, slightly later, they're being sent to West Africa. And
their survival rate is like soldiers on the Somme in the First World War. I
mean, they survive about six weeks on average, because you have Europeans
who have been badly nourished because they're poor, being sent to a
tropical country where there's almost no sanitation, and they just die like
flies. And finally, we come up with the second solution, send them to
Australia, and then we have a solution to the problem. For 70 years, they
get sent to Australia. But there's this huge project of empire going on.
And one of the things that Pope is sort of suggesting subtly is, and for
what? For all of these little luxury things, cones and little decorative
bibles and all of this kind of thing, for this useless parasitic class at
the dressing table of this young woman who gets up at midday, and probably
spends a significant amount of time getting herself made up before going to
life. Her only objective is to find a suitable man. And, you know, is that
really? The Victorians, of course, later can invent a whole reason for
empires, the white man's burden, we're civilising the world, we are
preparing these countries to be independent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But the initial process is to get lots of luxury products for this tiny
parasitic class. And can you justify that if you think about it, come here,
of course, you can't. And so there is quite a lot of social criticism going
on in this poem, apart from, you know, on one level, it's very, very light.
One of the things I think I pointed out to you in one of those mini
tutorials was those four or five lines about the judges, the fact that
judges will... Ah, right. Yeah. No, no, no, yes. No, that's one of the
first names, but Dr. Potts, he's at Oxford University. She has very, very
interesting videos. Last year, she got a new job and she has less time now.
And so she can, she doesn't post as much as she did, but there's a lot of
very good things that she posted about, for example, about Pride and
Prejudice, etc., etc. So it wouldn't be a bad idea to be sort of subscribed
to her page, etc. And I think she talks quite clearly as well. So, yes, I
mean, there's far too much stuff for English literature. If you were
studying almost literature from anywhere else, you'd probably have a
problem, but there's just so much stuff on English literature. The problem
is deciding what's the good stuff. But, yeah, I mean, that should matter
about a good source. So, is there a question on the floor? No, no, but lots
of the things that I guess that I was going to talk about are coming up
anyway, so. They can ask questions if they want to as well. I mean,
maintaining your head, all of those references and sort of, you know, being
able to quote them, etc., etc. Okay, it would be wonderful if you could,
but I mean, I don't think anybody would expect you to do that. You should
be able to say, there are references to the Iliad, to the Odyssey, to
Paradise Lost, and to a few other things. There is a reference in the title
to the Wraith of Euclid by Shakespeare, etc., etc. So, you should be able
to say that they're there, but don't worry about being able to sort of
quote lines or even necessarily say exactly what the references are.
Because, I mean, if the only thing we were studying this year was the
Wraith of the Lost, then it's great. I mean, of course, if it comes up in
the PEC, and you can look at your sources, fine, great, wonderful. You've
only got a small number of words, so you can't quote very much. But the
important thing is that you know by then. But I don't, in terms of sort of
classical references and that sort of thing, I'm not, I don't, in the last
22 years, I haven't got the impression that the Ichigo Dōsente are
particularly interested in that. They're much more likely to be interested
in social references, etc., etc. So, it's probably better to be able to
name three or four of the luxury products on a dressing table rather than
three or four epic poems that are referenced, just because of the sort of
questions they tend to answer. The course book for this course used to be,
now there is no course book as such, but it used to be a book which is
called English Literature in Context, a very, very good book. But, and that
is, if you, to a large extent, the ethos of this course. It's about
literature as a reflection of the social context. And there is really very,
very little, even less interest than in the first year, on formal analysis
and things like that. Yes, okay, fine, it'd be good if you can mention
heroic couplets. But I mean, that's as far as you need to go. Yeah, as long
as you've got the term heroic couplets in your head, that's fine. That's
Pope covered, because Pope only ever writes in heroic couplets. I imagine
my image of Pope is that he talked in heroic couplets when he was talking
to his friends, etc. Or only heroic couplets came out of his mouth. So,
yes. Mr. Piper? No questions? Right, so, what's, this could be a question
from the people of London. What is being satirised in this poem? Right,
okay, so, the important thing is that mock epic is not primarily about
mocking the epic. This is somebody who has a huge respect for epic poetry.
He's translated epic poetry. Obviously, there is an element of him letting
his hair down. I've spent hours and hours, and months and months, and
possibly even a couple of years, translating books one and two, was the
evening, of course. So, he spends a lot of time focused on these poems and
translating them into reasonable English, English which is in, I am with
pens and amateurs, and has a AABB rhyme scheme, heroic couplets, etc. And
so, now he's having a bit of fun, basically. But he's not primarily about
saying, look how ridiculous epic poetry is. It's much more about having a
laugh about this particular class in society, and this particular, the
young people in this particular class in society, and specifically this
particular group of young people that are implicated in the scandal that he
was talking about. And that's right, and another sort of social side to
that, to the whole divine machinery, the superstructure of supernatural
beings. It's just possible, you could argue possibly better if you hedge
it, there may be a little bit of fun being poked at sort of conventional
superstitious religion from a more or less deist perspective. So, deism,
everybody happy about deism? Okay, basically there is the idea that in the
modern world amongst reasonable people, of course you believe in God, of
course God is Christian, of course God is man, male or whatever. But the
idea that God is being, is intervening on a day-to-day level, that if you
pray hard, God will help you to win the lottery, or will even pray, you
know, if somebody's ill, they will intervene to change things in your
interests, is superstitious and effectively childish. So, deism is about,
yes, God created the world, yes, God set things in motion, but basically
what God set in motion is a mechanism which moves towards good, there is
providence, there is divine providence, but God is not making this person
fall over because he's a Muslim, or doing such and such to this person
because he's a Catholic, and helping the good guys and punishing the bad
guys on the day-to-day level in the real world. What God has done is set
the mechanism in motion and he's working on a much bigger scale than
day-to-day stuff. So, that means that the important thing to do, whether it
is a very sophisticated, complicated, erudite form of deism, I'm not going
into the details of the philosophy, pardon me because I can't, but just on
a sort of public level, what deism is about is that what God wants of you
is for you to act logically, for you to use your frontal cortex and be a
reasonable human being and not be a victim to your emotions and try to be
good and have a bit of a sense of humour and use your wit in all of the
different possible meanings of the word wit, your intellectual capacities,
etc. rather than lots of praying, lots of burning of incense, lots of
confession, lots of those little things that the Catholics do. And it's
important to remember that Pope is a Catholic, but he is not a sort of
activist Catholic, he's not a not being asked to go to the Jesuits, the
Jesuits pay my rent. But there's not this idea of a militancy at all.
Almost all his friends are Anglicans. One of his best friends, in terms of
writing, is Jonathan Swift. And Jonathan Swift is a member of the Anglican
hierarchy. But again, Swift is an Anglican, where what he cares about is
people who are sort of intellectually sophisticated. He doesn't really care
that much about whether somebody's a Catholic or a Protestant or whatever.
He's probably equally nasty. I mean, he's supposed to be horribly nasty,
really, really nasty about the sort of the common people in Ireland, the
majority of Catholics in He doesn't really like being in Ireland, because
they're ignorant. But not because they're Catholic. You know, you can be,
if you're intellectual, he's okay with it. He doesn't like people who are
ignorant. He doesn't like people who are superstitious, etc, etc. So,
again, almost everybody, unless they're really sort of close-binded and
sort of, you know, in some type close community, we were talking earlier
about the Armatians, Mormons and the other witnesses, etc. Unless you're in
some type of close community, in actual fact, a lot of the people you come
across on a day-to-day basis are going to be of a different religious
persuasion to you. And probably, a lot of them, you will like more than
people who are of the same religious persuasion to you. So, everything is
much more relativized. There's not the sort of idea that, well, I can only
really, really be friends with somebody who's in my particular
denomination, because that would just be stupid. It's quite, it's patently
stupid in this type of multicultural society. Effectively, London,
especially in Britain, to a large extent, but especially in London, is the
world's first multicultural society, where people are interacting on a
basically equal level. It's a little bit like, I mean, you can say, oh, but
the Catholics aren't allowed to be members of Parliament, or aren't allowed
to go to university, or vote. Most people can't vote. But it's like, I'm
not allowed to, I can't work for the Spanish ministry, because I'm not
Spanish, but I am an equal member of this society. What affects me in terms
of inequality is absolutely nothing poor to my liking. I can't vote in the
community of Madrid, I can't vote in elections. But they're not things that
affect my day-to-day life. On a day-to-day level, I'm absolutely equal to
all of the other people around me. And it's that sort of situation. Yes,
there are little restrictions. You can't be a professor. But I mean, we're
talking about a situation where, for example, in the 1870s, I believe,
Oxford dance, so the academic staff at Oxford, were allowed to get married
for the first time. Until then, they had to be single to be teaching at
university. And so there's all sorts of silly rules that affect all sorts
of people. But it's not like, I mean, quite embarrassing. If you were a
foreign non-Catholic, and you died in Spain at this time, your body would
be taken into a beach at Lone Tide, and you would be buried with your head
above the waterline before the sea came back in, because you could not be
buried as a non-Catholic on sacred Catholic soil, Spain. Then in the 1830s,
more or less, they invented Protestant graveyards. So in Caruana, and in a
place called Siberia, in Extremadura, and different places, you have
Protestant graveyards. So there is little bits of Spain which have been
deconsecrated, and you can actually bury foreigners there. You can bury
non-Catholics there. Yes, there is a difference. Yes, they're not
absolutely equal. But the type of second-class citizens they are is
fundamentally different from a lot of European countries, like for example
Spain. And of course, if you are a Protestant in Spain at this time, and
you're Spanish, you can have serious, serious problems. Whereas if you can
go about your life being a Catholic, and be perfectly successful, it's not
a big problem. To be absolutely fair, there are certain moments where there
are anti-Catholic rights. There are situations where the common people in
London sort of attack Catholics and attack Catholic buildings and things.
Very, very unspirited specific moments. But again, it's not
state-organized. It tends to be quite heavily repressed by the state,
because the state realizes that actually the system they've invented is
quite successful. Not because they're wonderful people, but because it
works in terms of people getting rich and people staying in power. But
there's, I mean, for example, I think in the, I would say the 1770s, but
maybe the 1780s, that sort of thing, there are what are called the Gordon
Rights, which are groups of common people who are having violence,
anti-Catholic demonstrations. But it's not the normal situation that
happens occasionally. But again, I mean, again, this is the sort of, yeah,
yeah, yeah. I think about most of the aristocracies of then. Yeah, what was
that? I think, I hope I shouldn't have to do something. Yeah, but I mean,
but they, or if you understand that this is, I mean, one of the parallels
we can say is the sort of celebrity class. Yeah, so if you're, or I mean,
maybe a generational thing, I don't know, maybe, but if somebody like Paris
Hilton, I mean, somebody like Paris Hilton, again, probably has had
absolutely every opportunity in life. And how are they spending their
lives? Absolutely, it's really those things. And, you know, it doesn't have
to be, you know, it could be anybody, it could be members of the Beckham
family or whatever. But there is that sort of celebrity thing, that
celebrity anti-intellectualism, which, I mean, is quite normal, because if
you get rich and be famous, etc., etc., without having to be particularly
intellectual, and it's difficult for you to be intellectual, why would you
bother being intellectual? And the easiest way of not being intellectual is
to be anti-intellectual. And, you know, in all societies, there is a sort
of an anti-intellectual power, sometimes stronger than the others. For
example, Trump is very anti-intellectual. But there's elements of that in
Britain as well, etc., etc., and everywhere else. Okay. What is the time
frame? What is the time frame here? Right. It's from noon, once you get up,
until evening. Where have we seen that time frame before? The online people
are being very quiet. Where have we seen that time frame before? Think to
the deep, deep past, when you study literature. Like, for example, what we
saw last week. This is the same time frame as the Way of the World. The Way
of the World starts late morning, and it all happens in one day. It's
really lovely, yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. It's basically the same time
frame as The Tempest. It's the same time frame as Epiphamelion, which is
the sort of marriage summits by Edmund Spenser. It's exactly the same time
frame as Voltron. Yeah. So, this time, if you like, this is very much
following the unity of time of, as presented by Aristotle, the idea that
your action is happening in one day. So, that is what it is. So, you could
see that as another reference in terms of contextualisation. OK. We sort of
talked about the other connections with Volponne. We talked about the
reference to the lock. And this is a bit more simple. There is the idea
that this is a storm in a teacup because there are no dire consequences.
Your hair grows back. The only real consequence of this whole process is
that Belinda's beauty is immortalised forever by having a poem written
about how beautiful she is. Yeah. Yeah, but it's sort of, as I was saying
at the beginning of the class, it's funny at the sort intellectual level
without actually being sort of gut level funny. You don't tend to laugh as
much. But yes, I mean, no, it's intellectually very clever. It's certainly
a wonderful example of wit in that sense, that meaning of wit in the sense
that you're showing somebody who is being, at times frivolous, but
incredibly intellectually ingenious in his use of language, etc., etc. But
it's not such fun to read. It has to be said, unfortunately. Where have we
seen the idea of beauty being immortalised by poetry? Yes, which one? Yes,
the immortal lines at the end of Sonic 21, I think it is, or the 18. It's
18 or it's 21. I can't remember which one. It says 21, but I think it's 18.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter. There is this idea of beauty being
immortalised by poetry. Again, we can sort of link that back to the idea of
printing. Before printing, you aren't necessarily going to be immortalised
by having a poem written about you. Poems are lost all the time. A lot of
poems are composed and stay in the oral tradition. Then they're written
down maybe once, five times, or whatever. It's very easy for literature to
disappear until you get printing. Once you get printing, of course, if it's
at all famous, etc., etc., it's far more likely to survive. It's far more
likely that you will be immortalised by having been written about. It's
fascinating, actually, to see. One of the things I'm sure I told you last
year is that you had more books written published in Britain in the 50
years after printing started than in a thousand years before. But by the
early 17th century, you have all sorts of people complaining about the so
many books around. It's really distressing. I don't know what to read. I
don't know. It's impossible to focus and know exactly what's important
because there are just too many books. We, of course, feel that a thousand
times over there are far more books. Everything is on that machine. The
whole of human knowledge is on that machine, to some extent. So it's far
less for us. We've been actually in that process for hundreds of years. But
you can actually see people talking in those sorts of terms for the first
time. There's just too much knowledge around. There's too much information
around. How can we cope with so much knowledge? That only starts in the
17th century. So who belongs to the community? Who is in the in-group? How
can we describe them? But how can we describe that group as a class? The
aristocracy. Everybody else is invisible. Yeah, that's invisible. Exactly.
So we talked about the sword march. We talked about it. Yeah. And there's
some very clear references to the idea that they are dandies, they are
fobs. Yeah. But names like Dapper Wit and Sir Fobling. Yes, that's a good
question. Fobling is a sort of diminutive and fob means dandy. It's just
another way of saying dandy. And we even have a situation where one of the
men faints during the battle scene. And so we have this idea that there's
Dapper, which of course is just a game of cards, but one of them faints,
which of course is what you expect women to do. Yeah, I mean, I don't know
if I mentioned it in the notes, but Clarissa's speech is taken from
Sarfadun talking about his brother Glaucus in the... Yeah, and I mean, of
course, by this time, the British army is populated by working class people
and peasants, the vast majority of who go to fight are the common people,
not the aristocrats. And when the aristocrats go to fight, they're long way
from the battlefield up on a hill. They're in any sort of danger, etc.,
etc. So we talked about that. How did democracy begin? Where does democracy
come from? Yeah, the concept of democracy. Right. Why did democracy start
in the first place? There was a need by the aristocracy of Athens to form a
militia to protect the city. So they went to the common people and said, we
need you to help fight to defend the city. And in return, we are going to
allow you to vote in the mix. So the process of democracy actually, and
Pope is enough of a classist to know that, comes from the idea that the
common people are participating in military affairs. And so I'm sure he is
very much aware of the whole hypocrisy of the concept of the aristocracy
and having these privileges. Blah, blah, blah, blah. What is civilization
in this term? Well, what? How? If you would say to these people, OK, fair
enough, you're the most civilized people in the world. How is that
civilization manifest? Do we see a lot of self-control? But there is the
suggestion that these spirits and things don't really exist. This is a
childish way of thinking. Exactly. So if we say these things don't really
exist because they don't exist practically, they don't affect any of the
action, then we have a situation. Right. Civilization is luxury.
Civilization is empty rituals. It's knowing how to make tea properly,
knowing how to make coffee properly. Coffee is also a hugely important and
very expensive luxury product at this time. So, I mean, and you have a
situation where the popular classes basically drink alcohol with every
meal. Why? Because the British? No. Why? Why would you have beer for
breakfast? And? Possibly. And? So like the Calafigo. Sorry? But possibly.
It's infinitely, infinitely safer than drinking water. In the mid-century,
you have a man called Hugh Middleton. I know about him because when I lived
in London, I lived in Middleton Square, which is named after him, who built
30 miles, so about 50 kilometers, of pipes made out of wood, made out of
oak, from a spring in the countryside, well outside London, into the centre
of London, into a place called Clarke and Watt. And this was one of the few
places where you could actually drink safe water. But the huge epidemic
sweeps through London. I mean, the situation, the democratic situation is
that massive quantities of people are coming largely from the countryside,
but also from abroad, and coming and settling in London, and half of them
die. We have huge typhoid epidemics, cholera epidemics, tuberculosis,
whatever. All sorts of things. It's a really, really dangerous place to
live, and it's a really dangerous place to drink the water. And so people
have beer for breakfast. I mean, somebody like Samuel Pepys, who you insist
on calling Samuel Pepys, who's one of the great diary writers of the middle
17th century, is an intellectual, and he drinks beer for breakfast, because
that's what you do. And of course, it doesn't actually affect you. It's
not, it's on the same time, it's also true, it's not a very strong beer.
It's not like really strong beer. But that sort of alcoholisation of
society is partly because of that. Now there's two ways you can make water
safe. You can ferment it or distill it, turn it into alcohol, or you can
boil it. And so you begin to have a situation in this time where rich
people are drinking chocolate and tea and coffee, and poor people are
drinking gin. But so you, those are luxury goods. You know, again, we're
talking, there's this weird situation where Europeans, including the
British, went into the tropics to get the poisons that were generated by
plants to protect themselves from insects. So tobacco creates nicotine as a
way of protecting itself from the different insects that will attack the
tobacco plant. Tea creates, tea in order it's called, to protect itself
against insects in the tropical climate. The same with coffee, blah, blah,
blah. Same with the sugar produced in chocolate, etc. So Europeans going
into, there is a bizarre way, if you think about it in these terms,
Europeans going to tropical areas to get the poisons generated by plants
because they taste nice, because generally speaking, poisons in small
quantities have an interesting effect on your head. The local poison with
alcohol, but then there are other poisons like caffeine, which is, of
course, in the quantities that people are consuming caffeine, tea and
coffee, it's not very poisonous at all. But the effects on your brain is
because they're very, very diluted poisons. And that is why globalism and
imperialism happened, because we wanted all these products to make boiling
water taste nice. So bizarre way of thinking about the world, but there is
no need of truth in that. And, of course, collaboratively with getting all
of these poisonous plants and bringing them back you have all of these
luxury products like Ivory. This is ultimately the first consumer society,
the first time where people are consuming bought products and there is an
element of conspicuous consumption. You buy things so that you can show
other people that you can have these things. You have like these people who
come out of the Apple stores showing that they bought the new Apple or
whatever. It's about showing other people that you can. Yes, there is a
certain amount of ostentation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period
around the aristocracy, but it's not bought in the same way. This is going
to shops and buying these products that look nice and come from exotic
countries. What is the community's relationship with nature? These are all
my standard questions that we saw last year. So you can ask about any worth
of literature. What is the community's relationship with nature? A quick
question. There is none. Yes. Yeah, but that's not a real person. This is a
completely artificial society. Again, probably for the first time in
history, this is an absolutely urban society. It's basically as living in a
sort of semi-urban type of London. But here these people really never have
any contact with nature at all. Okay, they go up to the Thames and down the
Thames to go and visit palaces, but it's absolutely artificial. One of the
symbols of the artificialness of this culture is getting up at noon. Until
this time, people largely were...their day, their waking day was determined
by sunlight. If you can get up at noon, which presumably means that you are
going to bed very late, etc., then the natural cycles, the circadian
cycles, etc., are not affecting you. You are above nature. And that is an
element of the sort of artificiality of this society. What is the role of
women in society? Well, there's a massive difference between aristocratic
or noble women and the rest. Well, the women that we see here, ladies, are
there in a sort of decorative process and, of course, are there to have
children and maintain aristocratic lines, a little bit like what we were
talking about earlier about royal families. And so, rather like the wife of
Bath, Belinda's job is to get married and to find a suitable husband. But
unlike the wife of Bath, and fortunately, unlike the situation for women
today, this is the most important decision in the person's life, probably
is that as well. But it's also...you only have one chance to get it right.
The wife of Bath, which is the nature of society, people dropping dead
constantly, has five opportunities. And, of course, we live in a society
which is civilised enough to have divorce. But there isn't any divorce. As
we said last time, the only way you can get divorced is by an act of
Parliament. So, it really is not at all common that Parliament stops doing
the country's business to decide that these two people can get divorced.
And, of course, that is an enormous scandal in any sense. And it just isn't
an option. There's a very famous legal case in the 1820s which changes
this. But until the 1820s, the children are their father's property. The
woman, the divorced woman, is basically ruined for life. I mean, it may be
better to be divorced and be socially unacceptable than to continue living
as men, as was the case in this lady in the 1820s. But it's not an option.
You've got to get this choice right. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously,
Parliament is not going to discuss ordinary people's situations. I mean,
the reality was that if people were a little bit civilised, and they just
could not live together, they would just be separate. And they just live
separately. Either live separately under one roof or live separately,
geographically separate. But the idea of actually getting divorced and that
sort of being a public state was, yeah, it wasn't. I mean, it was child's
play to the aristocracy. So ordinary people just didn't know. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, I mean,
idea ultimately is you have the marriage is to ensure that there are the
heir and the spare, as they say about Harry and the other one, William and
Harry. Well, that at least shows that he has a little bit of a sense of
humour. But then, of course, you know, the husband will be having sex with
who he wants to. And sometimes that will be the case of both of them, etc.,
etc. One of the things that we're going to look at in a couple of weeks'
time is the Blue Stockings, which was a movement of intellectual women. And
the sort of founder of the Blue Stockings salon was a woman called
Montague, who was, she basically married a man who was 30 or 40 years
older, who actually they seemed to have had a very reasonable relationship,
but he was only interested in mathematics, purely. And so she basically ran
his businesses and lived her own intellectual life in London. And at this
work, I mean, she had a very fulfilling life. She was, she spent most of
her time with people like Richard Cern and Samuel Johnson, and the
intelligentsia of London's, so I have to have a lot of intellectual women
as well. And yeah, I mean, she probably had one of the most fulfilling
lives of any woman in the 18th century anyway. But that was again, one of
the issues of marriages and convenience in this particular case, because
this man was just only interested in mathematics, which is curious. But
anyway, he had a whole series of coal mines in the north of England. And so
she was partly involved in the strategic running of the coal mines and
otherwise spent money on organising mutual circles. So, you know, fair
enough. Notice the whole concept of Belinda worshipping her reflection goes
back to what? Was that a reference to? Yeah, well, okay, narcissists in
terms of women. In Paradise Lost, we have the situation where Eve's
created, Adam's sort of gone to sleep, and so Eve wanders off and sees her
reflection in the water and she can't, she just falls in love with her own
reflection. And it takes, and again, I'm going to say the angel Gabriel,
because you're not going to contradict me, it takes the archangel who's
nearby a lot of effort to convince her that okay, Adam's not as beautiful
as she is, but he has other qualities and for her to go back and be with
Adam, so just looking at her reflection. So again, there's an epic element
in that of a woman being obsessed by her own reflection. And as I say, this
is, of course, a huge part of the impossible situation that women are in,
in the society where they're expected to be beautiful. The only thing that
really matters is their youth and their looks, their class, obviously. But
simultaneously, they can be criticised for being trivial and
non-intellectual and being only worried about their appearance. Well, if
that's the only thing that is of value that you have, obviously you don't
have to worry about it. If we see that there is a reference to the Wraith
of Lucretia by Shakespeare in the Wraith of the Lock in the Name of the
Power, then there could be a reference to that impossible situation where
women are placed, that this is a completely honourable woman who is raped
in Rome by the Tyre of the Devil, if that's what it's called. But that is a
question of unprovoked male violence in the part of the Roman foundation
myth that you love. It's something which is very much part of Titus
Andromedus as well, the same sort of stories. But this idea of a woman
being a victim of completely unprovoked male violence, and we have some
unprovoked male violence on a trivial level in this poem. Is the poem
misogynist? To what extent? Yeah. One of the things I think we always have
to be careful of is if we don't take any particular male character as
representing all men, is it fair to say that any female character is or is
representing all women? Are there any women who are presented as more
intelligent, less frivolous? There's not necessarily a universalisation
about women, or at least upper-class women are universally frivolous. But
there aren't very many women who are to be an exception. So, again, you
could say that was reflecting the social values and sort of humorising
about the social values. There's a very easy argument that it is sexist, it
is misogynist and... There is an element... You have to get used to it.
I've been listening to that for 20 years and I'm quite happy. Should I have
another one? Yeah, women and... I was going to say... Right, but is anybody
presented in a good light? Yeah, so it's as dismissive about the men. We
have one person who is presented as a moral authority, which is Clarissa.
We have no men who are presented as moral authority. I'm just saying that
this is just a nasty work of misogyny. The fact that the principal
character, the principal focus of the whole poem, is female is, again,
quite important. You don't tend to get poems written with... The only
really memorable character in the whole poem is Belinda, nobody else. I'm
not having interesting weather today. So that is an element to which you
could say... It's not necessarily this idea of othering and silencing
women. She is sort of lovable. She's a little bit ridiculous, but you don't
dislike her. So yeah, I just think that we can have a nuanced position
about that. Okay, well, there's a few other things, but I will post these
notes when I get home. And I will post that on a modest proposal, which is
what we'll do. Next Wednesday is a holiday, then the next Thursday...
Unfortunately, yes, too many Thursdays. So, a modest proposal will take you
about 30 minutes to read, which is the good news. But you should keep going
with Bob Flanders.