Pride & Prejudice's Astonishing Connection to the REAL LIFE Marriage of Two Austen Ancestors

 Congratulations to Ron Dunning for the official unveiling yesterday of his magnum opus…..

http://www.janeaustensfamily.co.uk/

….an Austen genealogy that spreads its threads far and wide over the mists of time, with Jane Austen at the center of the web he has so painstakingly constructed! And special thanks as well to Deb Barnum for her excellent and thorough interview of Ron in this regard:

http://janeausteninvermont.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/an-interview-with-ron-dunning-on-his-jane-austen-genealogy-the-new-and-improved-jane-austen-family-tree/

I wrote the word “official” because it happens that six weeks ago to the day, in the midst of my own research, I came across Ron’s Rootsweb website (in what I now gather must have been in its final stages of completion) entirely by accident. The happy result of the crossing of the paths of our respective obsessions,  as you will read below, was pure synergistic magic! I had not planned to reveal, prior to publication of my book, what I found that day, but…. in the light of the auspicious official debut of Ron’s website, it now seems like a most fitting time to bring this one jewel forward---so read on for something astonishing.

On June 10, I was whiling away 5 hours by myself in an airport with my mini-laptop and the luxury of free wi-fi, but I had no pending “hot lead” to sleuth out at that moment, nor did I have any of my countless Word files with me which are so integral to my ability to effectively process “grist” through my sleuthing “mill”.  

So, as I usually do in such instances, I decided to make the best of those hours by revisiting a prior discovery, to see if anything new had popped up on the Internet with regard to same since the Spring of 2011 when I first made that particular discovery. The Internet is ever growing larger and larger, and so revisiting a topic even after as a short a span as one year has often yielded fresh grist for my mill. I am an obsessive retrace of my steps, because my obsessive retracing has so often been rewarded. And boy did that prove to be so that day in the airport!

Without being specific, that 2011 discovery pertains to the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice,  and it will be one particularly convincing part of my overall argument, but I have never previously written publicly about it, nor do I intend to prior to my book. It’s something really special.

So, I Googled various combinations of searches of certain names and words relating to that discovery, and by this means within only a few minutes, I struck unexpected gold, and stumbled upon a remarkable historical factoid that relates, as will be immediately obvious, to Pride & Prejudice:

I.e., there had been, in Ireland, in the early 14^th century, a “Lord DARCY” who married a “Joan DE BURGH”! That “Lord Darcy” turned out to be one “John Darcy”.

Coincidence, some might say? After all,  “de Burgh” was not “de Bourgh”, “John” was not “Fitzwilliam”, nor was “Joan” “Catherine”. Well, sitting in that airport, I knew it was no coincidence, because I knew that I had been led to that factoid by my 2011 discovery, which, you will have to take my word for now, had absolutely no business leading me to an actual historical marriage between families with surnames virtually identical to the names of the families “Darcy” and “de Bourgh”, whose intermarriage is at the center of the drama in Pride & Prejudice---but it did anyway!

And here’s the best part that brings us to Ron’s genealogy trove, a further discovery, which, on completely independent grounds, reduces the possibility of coincidence in the usage of these surnames by Jane Austen in Pride & Prejudice to zero.  

The very next day, when I was back home seated at my desktop, with all my files at my fingertips, I quickly went into intensive followup on this exciting tidbit, to mine all the rich ore I just knew in my gut (from so many prior experiences) it would contain, but even I was not then prepared for what I found when I Googled “Darcy” and  “De Burgh”.

Here it is:

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=janeausten&id=I6764

It took me a few seconds to process the significance of what I had found, when I saw Ron’s name on the webpage, and realized it was his Austen genealogical database, and then I realized that this meant that my 2011 discovery which led me to the 14^th century marriage of a Darcy to a de Burgh was also connected to Jane Austen’s own ancestry!!!

I.e., if Ron’s scholarship is accurate, and I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise, then it means that Jane Austen, in depicting a marriage between a “Darcy” and a “de Bourgh” in Pride & Prejudice, in significant part was doing so because she was thereby pointing a literary, genealogical laser beam nearly 5 centuries back in time to the marriage of two of her own ancestors of virtually the same surnames!

The explanation of the full significance of the manifold connections between this discovery and my 2011 discovery—which prove that JA’s using names of ancestors in her novels had nothing to do with any sort of Sir Walter Elliot-like obsession with ancestry---will be in my book. But, for now, I conclude with a repetition of my thanks to Ron for being so thorough in his work as to go back five centuries in Jane Austen’s ancestry, and thereby to provide this genealogical connection which validates what I found in 2011!  

Yes, it’s also very very cool that Ron’s research reveals Owen Glendower and several other illustrious figures of English history scattered among Jane Austen’s ancestors, but to me, it does not begin to match the coolness (and importance, as I will show in my book, for understanding the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice) of Jane Austen actually being descended from a marriage of a de Burgh to a Darcy!  ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen & Sex: REDUX

As some of you also surely noticed, there have been not one but two columns published in the online version of The Independent this week pertaining to the new sexploitation line of adaptations of Austen, Bronte, Conan Doyle & other classic novels under the name "Clandestine Classics":

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/oh-mr-darcy-pride-and-prejudice-among-classic-novels-to-receive-erotic-makeover-7946364.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/howard-jacobson/howard-jacobson-if-you-think-theres-no-sex-in-jane-austen-youre-wrong-about-love-sex-and-austen-7962380.html


The latter column was written by Harold Jacobson, recent winner of the Booker Prize, and a man with the audacity (although some might uncharitably call it chutzpah) to refer to himself as "the Jewish Jane Austen":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Jacobson


Here is my reply to two of Mr. Jacobson's comments:


Jacobson: "There are few scenes in literature which are at one and the same time so painful and so thrilling, so precarious and, yes, all right, so arousing, as those in Persuasion in which Captain Wentworth lays hands on Anne Elliot for the first time since their estrangement. In one, he relieves her of the burden of a troublesome child, pulling him off her back, unplucking his hands from around her neck – a tactual performance of consideration that leaves her "perfectly speechless", at the mercy of the "most disordered feelings"; in another, seeing that she is tired, he assists her, again wordlessly, into a carriage. If submission to a man's will is your bag, then here it is – "Yes – he had done it. She was in the carriage and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it." END QUOTE

My only quibble with the above is that Howard Jacobson did not acknowledge that David Lodge, in his 1975 novel Changing Places, has his protagonist Professor Morris Zapp quote that same exact passage from Persuasion to a classful of students, and then finish with the comment: "If that isn't an orgasm, what is it?" Sounds like Lodge was (famously) there first.


JACOBSON: "Among the reasons for Jane Austen's extraordinary popularity with readers of all types is the heat her lovers generate, the unbearable frustrations they suffer when misunderstandings keep them apart, the rhapsodies of happiness they experience when all barriers to their felicity are removed. And if you say, "Ah, yes, but that's just love without the sex," then you are wrong on every count: wrong about the nature of love, wrong about the nature of sex, and wrong about Jane Austen, who knew as well as anybody the havoc desire wreaks on our affections, our loyalties and our intelligences."

And with that comment I am in entire agreement, as illustrated by the following sample of posts from my blog during the past few years:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/jane-austen-sex.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/11/jane-austens-great-chasms-and-dirty.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/rears-and-vices-redux.html

and...particularly relevant to the passage quoted by Lodge (and then, 35 years later) Jacobson:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/05/dear-old-aspgo-to-bottom-together.html

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen the Daughter of Korah

In Janeites, Nancy Mayer posted a link today, the 195^th anniversary of Jane Austen’s tragically premature death, to a post at austenonly.  

I have previously posted my thoughts about Jane Austen’s interment in Winchester Cathedral, mostly in relation to JA’s final (and intensely subversive) poem, Winchester Races….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/07/when-once-we-are-buried-you-think-we.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/henry-austens-biographical-notice.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/194th-anniversary-of-jane-austens.html

…but I had been unaware of the following tidbit revealed in the austenonly blog post Nancy linked to:

“In 1898 a request for donations by way of public subscription, with an individual limit of 5 guineas, was made in a letter to The Times, and it was signed  by the Earl of Selborne, Lord Northbrook, W.W B Beach and Montague G. Knight of Chawton, in order that a memorial window could be erected in Jane Austen’s memory in addition to the two existing memorials. This window  was designed by Charles Ea[m]er Kempe,  and was installed in the north wall directly above Jane Austen’s memorial tablet:

The imagery in the window is astounding, and I should imagine, for many visitors to the Cathedral, difficult to interpret today.  At the head of the window is a figure of St. Augustine, whose name in its abbreviated form is St Austin. It is therefore a visual pun on Jane Austen’s surname. The central figure in the top row of the window is King David playing his harp. Directly under him is St John, who displays his Gospel, opened at the first words: “In the beginning was the Word…”  A Latin inscription to Jane Austen is also included, and this can be  translated as follows: Remember in the Lord Jane Austen who died July 18th A.D. 1817.

The figures in the four remaining lights are the sons of Korah who each carry a scroll upon which are inscribed sentences in Latin which allude to the religious nature of Jane Austen’s character. How interesting that even in this window the references to her genius are oblique by today’s standards. And I do often wonder how many visitors to her grave notice the window, for there is only a small notice to the side of the brass tablet which explains it significance. How fascinating to see how, as her fame rose, the memorials to her got greater in size, but were not necessarily plain acknowledgments of her genius.”

I became curious to know the text of those four “inscribed sentences in Latin which allude to the religious nature of Jane Austen’s character” and Google quickly led me to the following passage in  Geraldine Mitton’s 1905 bio, Jane Austen and Her Times, at p. 321-2, which not only supplied that text, it also _clearly_ was the (completely unacknowledged —tsk tsk) primary source for austenonly’s description:

“In 1900 a memorial window was inserted as the result of a public subscription; it was designed and executed by C. E. Kemp. In the head of the window is a figure of St. Augustine whose name in its abbreviated form is St. Austin. In the centre of the upper row of lights is David with his harp. Below his figure, in Latin, are the words, "Remember in the Lord Jane Austen who died July 18, A.D. 1817." In the centre of the bottom row is the figure of St. John, and the remaining figures are those of the sons of Korah carrying scrolls, with sentences in Latin, indicative of the religious side of Jane Austen's character, namely, " Come ye children, hearken unto me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord." "Them that are meek shall He guide in judgement, and such as are gentle them shall He teach His way." "My mouth shall speak of wisdom and my heart shall muse on understanding." "My mouth shall daily speak of Thy righteousness and Thy salvation."

Some quick  Googling showed that the remaining figures (other than David and “St. Austin”) are holding, respectively, Latin versions of Psalms 34:11, 25:9, 49:3, and 71:15, and still more confirmed to me that the Bible has indeed long ascribed these Psalms (as well some others)  to the four sons of Korah.

The name “Korah” caught my eye from my earliest days of literary sleuthing in 1998-9, when I first read Richard Elliot Friedman’s  Who Wrote the Bible? & The Hidden Book in the Bible, in which Friedman made a (to my mind) compelling argument (adapted from the heyday of the “Documentary Hypothesis” in 19^th century Germany) for the centrality of the Yahwist strand of the Torah.  

Friedman also speculated that the Yahwist might have been a woman, and Harold Bloom took that idea of Friedman’s and ran (wild) with it in The Book of J. So, as I progressed in my Austenian sleuthing, and became aware of more and more veiled Biblical allusions in Jane Austen’s writing, I fancied that JA was aware of the early strands of the Documentary Hypothesis wafting about in the free air of England during her lifetime, and that she intuited that there was a distinctly female and subversive voice hiding in plain sight in the Torah, which the later priestly writers had coopted but had not destroyed. I also believe that she emulated the Yahwist in her own novelistic “Heptateuch”, which, as I have argued countless times, are a kind of female Torah, covertly and highly subversive of the hypocritical Anglican church hierarchy and dogma of her day.

And so…that last thought led me to the Torah tale of the rebellion of Korah in Numbers 16.  Wikipedia’s summary is as good as any:

“The Korah who fought against Israel was the…great-grandson of Levi, the third son of Jacob born to Leah who became the progenitor of the tribe of Levi (Num.16:1; Gen. 29:31-35). …They resisted Moses' leadership and as a result were swallowed by the earth along with many of their households. However the children of Korah were spared and remained alive (Numbers 26:11) and later wrote some Psalms…”

So…why did the designers of 1900 memorial include windows for the 4 Psalmist sons of Korah in addition to the window for the greatest Psalmist of them all, David? Was this suggesting that Jane Austen was a kind of literary Psalmist? Or was this suggesting that Jane Austen was, like the sons of Korah (who got out of Dodge in the nick of time, before the earth moved), a survivor, who was willing to generate superficially conformist writing---but who, unlike those sons, was meticulous in her creation of subversive subtext, challenging religious orthodoxy, like Korah, but subtext that was (safely) accessible only by those who could learn to read off-center?

Now…is it possible that Charles Eamer Kempe, a century ago, might have had any of this in mind as he constructed these windows?  On the anniversary of JA’s death, it is intriguing to speculate about it!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S. I realized as I wrote the above post that the death of Don Juan/Giovanni in the grip of the Stone Guest must have been inspired, in part,  by the tale of Korah, and that in turn reminded me of JA’s comments after seeing a performance  of a Don Juan pantomime in London:

“I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust.”

That is my view of Jane Austen herself, except that she was, unlike Don Juan and Korah, too pragmatic and tricky to so openly rebel—had Korah been like Jane Austen, he’d have created a covert satire of Moses instead of openly challenging him—JA knew that overt rebels tend to get swallowed up in the earth.

P.P.S.: My friend Prof. Diane Capitani, who, as I reported last Fall, gave a brilliant presentation at the Ft. Worth JASNA AGM about allusions to St. Augustine  in S&S, will be interested, I am sure, to hear about the sixth window devoted to “St. Austin”, if Diane did not already know about it…

Part Three of the answers to my Austen-Shakespeare Quiz: Deserving Suitors in The Merchant of Venice and Pride & Prejudice

At the end of my immediately preceding post…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/part-two-of-answers-to-my-austen.html

…I promised one additional interpretive bonus arising out of my discovery of the veiled allusion in three of Jane Austen’s novels to the casket-choice suitors scenes in The Merchant of Venice which I outlined there. Now I will deliver on that promise.

Arragon is the suitor for Portia’s hand in marriage who chooses the silver casket, and here is how that choice plays out:

ARRAGON:

….Why, then to thee, thou silver treasure-house;
Tell me once more what title thou dost bear:
'Who chooseth me shall get as much as he DESERVES:'
And well said too; for who shall go about
To cozen fortune and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit? Let none presume
To wear an UNDESERVED dignity.
O, that estates, degrees and offices
Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover that stand bare!
How many be commanded that command!
How much low peasantry would then be glean'd
From the true seed of honour! and how much honour
Pick'd from the chaff and ruin of the times
To be new-varnish'd! Well, but to my choice:
'Who chooseth me shall get as much as he DESERVES.'
I will assume DESERT. Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

He opens the silver casket

PORTIA

Too long a pause for that which you find there.

ARRAGON

What's here? the portrait of a blinking idiot,
Presenting me a schedule! I will read it.
How much unlike art thou to Portia!
How much unlike my hopes and my DESERVINGS!
'Who chooseth me shall have as much as he DESERVES.'
Did I DESERVE no more than a fool's head?
Is that my prize? are my DESERTS no better?

You will note from my all-caps portions that Shakespeare is having a jolly punny time with the very ambiguous word “deserve”, which can mean two opposite things, depending on the context—i.e., a worthy person can deserve some very positive outcome, whereas an unworthy person can deserve some very negative outcome. That’s what makes “Who chooseth me shall get as much as he DESERVES” such a great riddle, because the chooser will hear in that word what he wants to hear, and thereby will select himself as unworthy, which is exactly what Arragon does.

And guess what! Jane Austen played with this ambiguity of the word “deserve” in all her novels, but most of all in Pride & Prejudice! I could give you ten examples of that ambiguity in the text of P&P, but if you are curious to see them, a global word search on the word “deserve” and its variants in this online text…

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm

…will give you the fun of reading each such passage with new eyes, discerning how so many of them can be read in two very different ways.

I wanted to bring forward the best one, the discovery of the ambiguity of which I cannot take credit for, because I was beaten to the punch by Kishor Kale, who wrote the following several years ago in the article of his which he has written about from time to time in Janeites:

Kishor: “I now present a counterexample: a statement which, like the utterances of Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, and Wickham given above, has a secondary meaning that is unintended by the speaker.  However, in this counterexample the secondary meaning cannot be understood by the reader to be an inadvertent truth.  After Darcy has proposed to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth has convinced Mr. Bennet that she really does love him, Mr Bennet says to her:  "If this be the case, he DESERVES you.  I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to any one less worthy" (377).   Clearly, Mr. Bennet means that nobody less worthy than Darcy would be worthy of Elizabeth.  However, his statement, like the examples given earlier, does formally have a secondary interpretation unintended by him.  The difference between this statement of Mr. Bennet's and the preceding three examples is that in this case, it is clear from the context that the secondary interpretation must also have been unintended by Austen and was caused simply by carelessness of expression on her part. Mr. Bennet's statement, taken literally, could mean that nobody more unworthy than Darcy could be found as a husband for Elizabeth, which in context is of course is a clearly preposterous interpretation.  We could simply dismiss the secondary interpretation of Mr. Bennet's statement as simply an uncharacteristic piece of careless writing on the part of Jane Austen as real author of Pride and Prejudice. However, if we introduce the notion of a constructed author who can be wiser than the fallible real author, it is possible to re-interpret this carelessness by the real author as an element of a coherent narrative strategy formulated by the constructed author.”

However, whereas Kishor believes the above ambiguity in the word “deserve” to be the result of “unintended” “carelessness of expression” on Jane Austen’s part, I believe it is 100% intentional, and is part and parcel of the allusion to the highly salient and ambiguously ironic usages of the word “desert” in the silver casket riddle and elsewhere in the text of  The Merchant of Venice!

Therefore….I believe that in one highly plausible interpretation of Pride & Prejudice, Mr. Bennet does indeed mean to say to Elizabeth that Mr. Darcy is _not_ a worthy suitor, and therefore if Lizzy really does love Darcy, then Darcy’s “deserving” Lizzy is as ironic as Arragon’s just deserts in TMOV!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Part Two of the Answers to my Austen-Shakespeare Quiz: The Suitors of Portia and 3 Austen Heroines

And now, as promised, here are the answers to my quiz, the identity of the three Austen heroines and their respective suitors who are representations of three of Portia's undesirable suitors in The Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 2, when Nerissa asks Portia for Portia's opinion about three of the suitors who have come to Meryto---I mean, Belmont---to seek Portia's hand in marriage:

NERISSA   But what warmth is there in your affection towards any of these princely suitors that are already come?

PORTIA I pray thee, over-name them; and as thou namest them, I will describe them; and, according to my description, level at my affection.

NERISSA First, there is the Neapolitan prince.

PORTIA Ay, that's a colt indeed, for he doth nothing but talk of his horse; and he makes it a great appropriation to his own good parts, that he can shoe him himself. I am much afeard my lady his mother played false with a smith.

OF COURSE, THAT IS JOHN THORPE, WHOSE EQUINE OBSESSION IS THE LEAST OF HIS UNDESIRABLE CHARACTERISTICS, AS HIS IDEA OF COURTSHIP VERGES ON ABDUCTION AND OPPRESSION, AS HE "COURTS" OUR HEROINE CATHERINE MORLAND IN NORTHANGER ABBEY.

AND...PERHAPS JANE AUSTEN MADE A SMALL ADDITIONAL WINK AT "A SMITH" IN THE ABOVE PASSAGE WHEN SHE WROTE THE FOLLOWING:

[Catherine speaking to Eleanor] "That never occurred to me; and of course, not seeing him anywhere, I thought he must be gone. Was not the young lady he danced with on Monday a MISS SMITH?"

SO THAT WAS AUSTEN SUITOR & HEROINE PAIR #1, NOW FOR PAIR #2: 

NERISSA Then there is the County Palatine.

PORTIA He doth nothing but frown, as who should say 'If you will not have me, choose:' he hears merry tales and smiles not: I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth. I had rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth than to either of these. God defend me from these two! 

OF COURSE, THAT IS MR. DARCY, WITH HIS FROWNS, HIS COMMENTS THAT JANE BENNET SMILES TOO MUCH, AND HE CERTAINLY GIVES THE APPEARANCE OF A DEATH'S HEAD WITH A BONE IN HIS MOUTH DURING THE FIRST HALF OF PRIDE & PREJUDICE WHEN HE FIRST COMES TO MERRY-TOWN (I.E., MERYTON) TO BEGIN HIS MERRY WAR WITH ELIZABETH BENNET!

AND THAT WAS AUSTEN SUITOR & HEROINE PAIR #2, NOW FOR THE BEST ONE, PAIR #3:

NERISSA  How say you by the French lord, Monsieur Le Bon?

PORTIA God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker: but, he! why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan's, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palatine; he is every man in no man; if a throstle sing, he falls straight A CAPERING: he will fence with his own shadow: if I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands. If he would despise me I would forgive him, for if he love me to madness, I shall never requite him. 

AND OF COURSE THE PROTEAN MONSIEUR LE BON, WHO SEEMS TO CHANGE IDENTITIES AS OFTEN AS OTHER MEN CHANGE THEIR CLOTHES, IS REPRESENTED IN JANE AUSTEN'S FICTION BY THE PROTEAN HENRY CRAWFORD, WHO MAKES THE FOLLOWING COMMENT ABOUT HIMSELF:

"Oh for the Ecclesford theatre and scenery to try something with." Each sister could echo the wish; and Henry Crawford, to whom, in all the riot of his gratifications it was yet an untasted pleasure, was quite alive at the idea. "I really believe," said he, "I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce in his scarlet coat and cocked hat. I feel as if I could be anything or everything; as if I could rant and storm, or sigh or CUT CAPERS, in any tragedy or comedy in the English language. Let us be doing something. Be it only half a play, an act, a scene; what should prevent us? Not these countenances, I am sure," looking towards the Miss Bertrams; "and for a theatre, what signifies a theatre? We shall be only amusing ourselves. Any room in this house might suffice."

DO YOU NOTICE THAT BOTH OF THESE PASSAGES (IN TMOV AND IN MP) REFER TO PLAYING MULTIPLE ROLES AND TO CAPERING? JANE AUSTEN MADE CERTAIN THAT READERS WHO COMPARED THESE PASSAGES WOULD RECOGNIZE THE BREAD CRUMBS. BUT FANNY PRICE, LIKE PORTIA, IS NOT SUFFICIENTLY ENAMORED OF PROTEAN CHARMS TO BE WILLING TO MARRY THESE SUITORS.

AND THAT WAS AUSTEN SUITOR & HEROINE PAIR #3, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. BUT...I PROMISED ONE OTHER INTERPRETIVE PAYOFF, AND I WILL PROVIDE IT SHORTLY, IN A BLOG POST OF ITS OWN---STAY TUNED! 

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Part One of the answers to my Austen-Shakespeare Quiz

"...there is another short passage---and I really mean short---it consists of less than thirty lines---in The Merchant of Venice, to which Jane Austen has, I claim, covertly alluded via not one, not two, but _three_ different characters from three _different_Austen novels!  Can you find this short passage in The Merchant of Venice? ....these three Austenian allusions...com[e] up bang, bang, bang, in rapid fire sequence in Shakespeare's text, and...the connection to the three Austen characters is salient, not obscure.  I.e., when you  spot the passage, you will know exactly what I mean, it's really hiding in plain sight, a truly bravura game of allusion played by Jane Austen. "


And here is that passage in The Merchant of Venice, in Act 1, Scene 2, when Nerissa asks Portia for Portia's opinion about three of the suitor who have come to Meryto---I mean, Belmont---to seek Portia's hand in marriage:

NERISSA   But what warmth is there in your affection towards any of these princely suitors that are already come?

PORTIA I pray thee, over-name them; and as thou namest them, I will describe them; and, according to my description, level at my affection.
NERISSA First, there is the Neapolitan prince.
PORTIA Ay, that's a colt indeed, for he doth nothing but talk of his horse; and he makes it a great appropriation to his own good parts, that he can shoe him himself. I am much afeard my lady his mother played false with a smith.
NERISSA Then there is the County Palatine.
PORTIA He doth nothing but frown, as who should say 'If you will not have me, choose:' he hears merry tales and smiles not: I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth. I had rather be married to a death's-head with a bone in his mouth than to either of these. God defend me from these two!
NERISSA  How say you by the French lord, Monsieur Le Bon?
PORTIA God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a mocker: but, he! why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan's, a better bad habit of frowning than the Count Palatine; he is every man in no man; if a throstle sing, he falls straight a capering: he will fence with his own shadow: if I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands. If he would despise me I would forgive him, for if he love me to madness, I shall never requite him.

So, now, Part Two of my quiz, which is much easier than Part One---which THREE Austen characters are based, in part, on the Neapolitan prince, the County Palatine, and Monsieur Le Bon, respectively?

If you need another hint, these three Austen characters are all suitors for the hand in marriage of three different Austen heroines!

Unless someone posts them here first, I will post the answers to Part Two tomorrow morning EST, along with a remarkable interpretive bonus payoff that relates to one of those three answers.

 

Cheers, 

Arnie

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Joe Paterno & Sir Thomas Bertram: Birds of a Feather in Mansfield Park and Happy Valley

What with this week's bombshell sickening revelations about the true extent of Joe Paterno's culpability in the overall picture of the Sandusky sexual abuse cases....

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/8159195/report-says-penn-state-senior-officials-disregarded-children-welfare

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/sports/ncaafootball/joe-paterno-got-richer-contract-amid-jerry-sandusky-inquiry.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=sports

....and maybe we still have not heard it all......I have quickly shifted my view of Paterno from a sense of the tragedy of a great man who made one huge error of judgment that caused enormous suffering, to a sense of a profound hypocrite, a powerful man whose grandiosity made him think he was entitled to do, if not anything, at least a lot of things, in order to protect his own power and his own glory, and to hell with those victims thrown under the bus. I am finding it all too easy to revise my image of Paterno to that of  a profoundly clueless moral monster, who was capable of doing many good things in the world, but only, apparently, so long as he was very very well taken care of and his power and prestige were kept sacrosanct.

Again, unless some substantial and convincing rebuttal is made during the coming months to somehow blunt the force of Freeh's and these latest revelations about Joe Paterno, then I must forever alter my view of his legacy from what it had been just prior to the first Sandusky revelations.

And anyone who has read along in this blog over the past few years knows exactly whom Paterno, as we now begin to see his true colors, reminds me of---Sir Thomas Bertram, the closest thing in Jane Austen's moral universe to Joe Paterno.

Here is just a sampling of my prior investigations into the shadow story of Sir Thomas:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/sir-thomass-penetration.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/sir-thomas-bertram-priceless-man-of.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/sir-thomass-desperate-and-despotic_18.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/mousetrap-of-mansfield-park.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/sir-thomas-as-ghost-of-king-hamlet-and.html

What is most chilling is that at the base of both Sir Thomas's and Joe Paterno's twisted morality is the suppression and/or condonation of child abuse, and also monetary greed---so it seems that the old French expression, "Plus ca change..." applies here, as Jane Austen's portrait of a powerful hypocrite (tragically) still applies today as much as it ever did.

The moral rot in the "timbers" of "Mansfield Park" continues, it seems...in "Happy Valley".

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter