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The Paradox of Money Imagery in English Renaissance Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Irving D. Blum
Irving D. Blum*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago
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Extract

The standard opinion about poetic images involving money is that they are conventional devices to depict the crass, prosaic details of existence. Robert B. Heilman, for instance, in ‘The Economics of Iago and Others', writes of such words as riches, gold, buy, and gain that these economic terms ‘constitute a precise, unsentimental vocabulary for keeping before us the problem of values, especially in terms of an always possible gain and loss’.

W. L. Clemen, another student of Shakespeare's imagery who examines the figures of speech used by Iago, makes this observation: ‘lago's imagery teems with repulsive animals of a low order; with references to eating and drinking and bodily functions and with technical and commercial terms.’ Here we see the language of commerce placed in a vocabulary of metaphors that shouts of earthy things.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 8 , 1961 , pp. 144 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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References

1 PMLA LXVIII (1953), 555.

2 The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (London, 1951), p. 125.

3 (New York, 1939), p. 145.

4 As quoted by Rugoff, p. 145.

5 The Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London, 1950). All Spenser quotations are from this edition.

6 Complete Works, ed. John W. Cunliffe (London, 1910), II, 162.

7 Gascoigne, 1, 44-45.

8 Collected Poems, ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge, Mass., 1949). P. 186, ll. 47-48. All Wyatt quotations are from this edition.

9 Wyatt, p. 193, 1l. 85-91.

10 Wyatt, p. 127, ll. 15-19.

11 Wyatt, p. 128, ll. 35-39.

12 ‘Sonnet XXVI’ Astrophel and Stella in The Complete Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1922), II, 252. All Sidney quotations are from this edition.

13 Sidney, II, 251.

14 Sidney, II, 257.

15 Sidney, II, 269.

16 Complete Works,ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Spenser Society, 1885), 1, 230, ll. 143-144. All Daniel quotations are from this edition.

17 Daniel, I, 37.

18 Daniel, I, 106, l.701.

19 Daniel, I, 107, l.727.

20 Daniel, I, 109, l.785.

21 The Complete Works, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago, 1951), p. 440, ll. 17-21. The following Shakespeare quotations are from this edition.

22 Shakespeare, ll. 1065-1068.

23 The Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York, 1941), pp. 243-244. All Chapman quotations are from this edition.

24 Chapman, ‘In Seianum … ‘ , pp. 358-359, ll. 1-10.

25 Bartlett, p. 472, n.

26 Rugoff, p. 145.

27 The Poems, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), I, 99, l. 105. The following Donne quotations are from this edition.

28 Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 77. All Herbert quotations are from this edition.

29 Herbert, The Church, pp. 88-89.