Pynchon, CofL49 Look What I found in Shakespeare

[alice wellintown]

Oh, I see, I don't have that Lot49 Companion about, but a quick glance
in the GR and V. Companion, no Nashe. The quote I provided comes from
my _Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare_, Ed. Campbell & Quinn,
wherein, Thomas Nashe, the originator of the picaresque novel in
English,  naturally, is given a few pages, Pierce Penniless, his
collaborations with Bill and so on. The celebrated attack on
Shakespeare...Greene's "Groat-worth of Wit" . . .And, the Nash Family
. . .sorry...nothing more. Pierce Penniless has been cited as the
source of a number of elements in _Hamlet_, including the advice to
the players. So much of Bill's work is lost labor to us, this despite
the dogged research of scholars; the players advice speech reads, to
me, like a cutting room floor strip, grafted on, as my reading of
_Hamlet_, as I've noted here and been laughed at for, is that the play
is a deeply flawed masterpiece, fragmented and slapped together from
left-over parts, poems, speeches too good to be discarded...the stuff
Bill worked with ...and, of course, it, like the other plays, includes
all manner of material we simply can not appreciate, like
Shakespeare's replies to his rivals and the like. The players advice
scene and speech, for example, includes several witty attacks on
Shakespeare's rivals, authors and businessmen, but that Hamlet, a 30
year old student of philosophy or drama or whatever,  gives advice to
the best players, is, well, ridiculous and no scholar has, far as I
know, ever explained why a 30 year old is still going to college. In
Shakespeare's day, Hamlet would have been finished with his school
chums and his Wittenberg a decade or so earlier. It seems Nashe, his
ignorance of Danish culture,  or some existing anachronism in the
play, was never though an issue, so Bill kept it. These kinds of
details fascinate scholars, but the audience didn't much give a skull.



On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> what I was hoping to get an answer to is whether
> Pynchon-writing academics or the Companion cite
> this Nashe source?...Thought I might have remembered it if
> I had read it...............................
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, October 24, 2010 7:50:29 PM
> Subject: Re: Pynchon, CofL49 Look What I found in Shakespeare
>
> The play is more than "a collection of private jokes and satires of
> verbal affectations. It is a lively argument on the popular side of
> the widespread Renaissance conflict between art and nature." H.D
>
> The dense portraits of Shakespeare's contemporaries and the satire of
> their many endeavors, "The School of Atheism" and the like, make this
> play quite Pynchon-like. Of course, to hold a mirror up to Nature is
> art, to usurp her beauty is sin. The heretical Milton might find more
> in common with Pynchon's romantic heretics than Bill of Avon.
>
> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Love's Labour's Lost, Act 4, Scene 2
>>
>> Holofernes:
>> "Master Person, quasi pierce-one" * and if one
>> should be pierced, [pronounced persed] which is the one?
>>
>> *This is sometimes taken as an allusion to Nashe's "Pierce Penniless,
>> His Supplication to the Devil", a fantastic satire in which the author,
>> in the character of Pierce, comments on the vices of the times; also
>> to Harvey's answer "Pierce's Supererogation" in which Pierce is
>> referred to as "the hogshead of wit"...
>>
>> Alice, anyone, anyone who has read more of the academic books than I have,
>> is this in any of them?   (and don't have the Companion to, which I have read
>> much of but cannot remember this.)
>>
>>
>>
>>
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