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Notes
B. Jonson, Poetaster, ed. T. Cain, Manchester and New York, 1995, ll. 88–9 of ‘The Apologetical Dialogue’, p. 266. I would like to thank the anonymous IJCT reviewers for their invaluable assistance with the manuscript and the organizers of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, where I first presented an early version of this essay.
The personalities invited to Ovid’s feast include both recognizable historical figures – such as Ovid himself and Cornelius Gallus – and the men about town and fools who populate Horace’s satires. Several male characters have allegorical equivalents in the London of 1601–1602, when the play was first performed at Blackfriars Theatre by the Children of the Chapel. As a result, Jonson is able to poke fun at his rivals and place his own historical moment in a compelling relationship with the distant past of Augustan Rome. T. Cain presents a convincing argument for the identification of Hermogenes as the composer and singer John Dowland, citing Dowland’s irascibility and, in an ironic twist given Momus’s traditional role as a fault-finder, famously petulant responses to criticism, p. 66.
B. Jonson, Poetaster, 4.5.1-8. When Hermogenes upbraids Crispinus by saying, ‘The crier of the court hath too clarified a voice,’ he probably glances at the uneven voice of the child actor playing Mercury. For the source of Jonson’s depiction of the banquet of the gods, see pp. 16–17 and 185. See also G. B. Jackson’s note in her edition of Poetaster for the Cambridge edition of Jonson’s works, ed. D. Bevington et al., 6 vols, Cambridge, 2012, II, p. 111.
B. Jonson, 4.5.39–40.
G. McClure, Doubting the Divine, Cambridge, 2018, p. vii. Whilst McClure’s study mainly consists of chapters exploring a single text critical to the Momus tradition, two background chapters, on ‘The Classical Tradition’ and ‘Momus and the Reformation’, provide relevant context to the reception of Momus in early modern England. McClure’s work clearly provides inspiration for my essay, as suggested by my attempts to position my analysis within the history of Momus examined in Doubting the Divine.
Momus may exert a previously unknown influence on the evolution of the word ‘criticism’. The OED, whose citations of the words ‘criticism’ and ‘critic’ date from the period under examination here, credits several of the first uses of these words to enthusiasts of Momus mentioned in this essay, including T. Dekker and J. Florio. The OED records two entries for Momus: ‘(a) The Greek god of censure and ridicule, who was banished from Olympus for his criticisms of the gods; (also) a representation of the god. (b) A person who habitually grumbles or finds fault, a carping critic. Now rare’. Future scholarship could reveal how uses of the Momus’s name and reputation contributed to the emergence of poetics and literary criticism as distinct domains of inquiry in the 1590s. For relevant introductions to the topic, see C. Burrow, ‘Combative Criticism: Jonson, Milton, and Classical Literary Criticism in England’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, III: The Renaissance, ed. G. P. Norton, Cambridge, 1999, pp. 487–99, and N. Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters, Oxford, 2017.
This essay follows Momus’s story through 1642, a termination point that marks a new phase in the reception of Momus when he exerts an even larger, and thus more decisive, presence in the printed propaganda that preceded the English Civil War. As I mention at the end of this essay, this fascinating segment of Momus’s history awaits the attention of future scholars who can trace its development across the disruptive decade of the 1650s and through to McClure’s analysis of the echoes of Momus he finds in J. Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).
W. Sherman, ‘On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture,’ in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. S. A. Baron et al, Amherst and Boston, 2007, pp. 67–81 (68).
Ibid., p. 78.
An additional dimension of the Momus myth is how the aggressively masculine god, on account of occupying an outsize role in the paratextual materials of early modern English books, becomes a coded example of the way, according to W. Wall, early modern writers drew ‘on a gendered and sexualized language…when they legitimate publication,’ p. 6. For more details, see Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance, Ithaca and London, 1993, pp. 1–22.
T. Dekker, The Gull’s Horn-Book, 1609, p. 28.
K. Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface, Stanford, 1994, p. x. As Momus became an arbitrator between the intensely mediated, creative labour of the writer and the independence of the reader, we can see how he served to highlight what S. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, Cambridge and New York, 2005, has called the ‘importance of the audience’s interpretive function,’ p. 38.
The Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership database records a total of 1514 uses of the name ‘Momus’ and another 151 appearances of the plural versions of the name, ‘Momi’ and ‘Momes’ in 1015 texts printed in England between 1537 and 1700.
J. Frith, sig. C2r. For more on Luther’s condemnation of the style of his adversary, and for Erasmus’s use of the Momus myth, see McClure, pp. 82–91. For a broader consideration of the controversial place of this type of satire in early modern theological and academic disputes, see C. Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton: The Laughing Philosopher in the Early Modern Period’ in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Condren et al, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 90–112, and R. A. Anselment, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule, Toronto and Buffalo, 1979.
T. Becon, sig. D1r.
J. Bale, sig. A3v.
T. Elyot, sig O1r. Elyot’s dictionary is the second publication in English to mention Momus.
G. McClure, Doubting the Divine, p. vii.
G. McClure, Doubting the Divine, p. vii.
The early modern English tradition of linking Momus with Zoilus, whom G. McClure in Doubting the Divine labels the ‘scourge of Homer’ and Momus’s ‘human counterpart,” further suggests the limited scope of the English Momus (p. 181). Because Zoilus’s targets are human writers rather than, in Momus’s case, divine beings, the penchant for pairing the two suggests that English writers chiefly viewed Momus and Zoilus as co-equal, and sometimes interchangeable, critics of specific texts rather than divine authority. Future scholarship could productively outline the particulars of the Momus–Zoilus relationship and thus offer an even more complete history of their shared reception than the one offered here.
W. Sherman, ‘On the Threshold,’ p. 69.
In addition to these texts, references to Momus may have reached English writers through Plato’s Republic, VI, 487, which briefly though approvingly mentions Momus. The medieval figure known as Walter of England translated and versified over 60 Aesopic fables, but the one featuring Momus was not included in the collection, which circulated widely in the manuscript in the twelfth century. The Momus figure is not mentioned in William Caxton’s 1484 edition of Aesop’s Fables.
In some versions of the fable, Vulcan assumes Zeus’s place as the creator of man.
Apparently, the aphorism had been in circulation in England since the 1560s when T. Becon, for one, in A New Postal (1566) wrote: ‘And that Momus thought to be omitted in the perfect making of man, that is accomplished by the Gospel, even an open place to see into the heart and breast, that the privities of the hearts may be seen, and that nothing, according to the saying of Simeon may be hid,’ p. 54.
Lucian repeats versions of this myth several times, and it was a particular favourite of Renaissance writers and thinkers. See OED for the term ‘Momus-window’, but this particular term does not appear to have been used before 1700. For these monarchs, citing Momus’s criticism helped bolster, during especially charged moments of religious agitation and conflict, their promises not to inquire into the religious affiliation of subjects whose private convictions did not interfere with officially sanctioned – and public – practices of faith.
For the complicated place of Lucian in early modern European culture, see D. Marsh, Lucian and the Latins, Ann Arbor MI, 1998 and C. Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe, Chapel Hill NC, 1979. For more on Lucian’s literary influence on writers of the period, see B. Branham, Unruly Eloquence: Lucian and the Comedy of Traditions, Cambridge, 1989; D. Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition. Cambridge, 1979, rpt. 2017 and C. R. Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More, Ithaca NY, 1940.
Lucian, The works of Lucian, ed. A. M. Harmon, 8 vols, Cambridge, 1913, rpt. 1953, V, p. 431. Another short dialogue, Nigrinus, contains a single reference to Momus (I, p. 97–139).
Ibid., V, p. 421.
More published his translations of four of Lucian’s works in Luciani complura opuscula in Paris (1506): Cynicus, Necromantia, Philopseudes, and the oration on tyrannicide. For a list of the first Latin editions of Lucian’s works, see More’s Translations of Lucian in The Complete Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. C. R. Thompson, 15 vols, New Haven, 1963–1997, III, pp. lv–lxvii.
The first English edition of Lucian’s dialogues was published by Francis Hickes, but the dialogues featuring Momus remained untranslated until 1663. This edition also contains a short biography of Lucian and substantial marginal annotations by the translator. According to the title-page of Part of Lucian Made English from the Original (1663), Jasper Mayne added several translations to Hickes’s anthology.
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. M. Evans, London, 1987, p. 78. See also the introduction to A.D. Imerti’s edition of the Expulsion, Lincoln NE and London, 2004, pp. 3–65. Bruno’s text also retained some relevance in the following century when T. Carew used it as the basis for his court masque, Coelum Britannicum (n. 74 below).
The most recent edition of Alberti’s ambitious text is from The I Tatti Renaissance Library 8 of Harvard University Press. See Momus, ed. S. Knight and V. Brown, transl. S. Knight, Cambridge, 2003. Given his career as a controversialist and political essayist, it is surprising that Milton mentions Momus only once; in Defense of Himself against Alexander More (1655), he puns on the Latin word for fool, morus, and its affinity to the spelling of Momus’s name. According to G. McClure, an allusion to Momus in Latin – as Querela, son of Night – can be found in the early university work, Prolusions (pp. 147–8): ‘While in Italy in 1638–1639, Milton spent considerable time in Florence and Rome. Textual evidence suggests that he may have had occasion to read Alberti’s Momus, whether in one of the two 1520 Latin editions or the 1568 Italian translation’ (p. x).
Like Jonson a century later, Erasmus considers Momus the possessor of special privileges to criticize the gods, writing, ‘Stories like these they ought to be hearing from Momus, and in fact they used to hear them regularly from him until lately they got angry and threw him along with Ate [Discord] down to earth because he interrupted the bliss of the gods with his ill-timed truth-telling….And so, in the absence of Momus, the gods revel much more freely and carelessly, “taking all things lightly,” as Homer says now that they have no censor’ (p. 17). See Norton Critical Edition, ed. and trans. R. M. Adams, New York, 1989.
W. Baldwin, p. 126.
T. Gale, sig. A4r.
The idea of Momus and ‘blasts’ of wind also appear in H. B. Callesian’s English translation of P. Melanchthon’s martyrology of Protestant heroes, A Famous and Godly History (1561).
Wall, Imprint, p. 8, (n. 10 above).
W. Alley, sigs B4r–C1v. In the Italian-English dictionary World of Words (1598), J. Florio defines a Momo as ‘the god of reprehension, he that carpeth at all things and is pleased with nothing’ (p. 230). Florio also employs Momus as a definition for the entries ‘Appuntino’ and ‘Mendatore’.
See also J. Jewel’s A Reply unto M. Hardinge’s Answer (1565). In Alley’s version, Lucian is the source of the story about Momus’s preference for a window into man’s heart, even though as I mentioned earlier, credit for the tale actually belongs to Aesop.
G. Turberville, sig. X2v.
This particular arrangement reappears in Tarlton’s Jests (1599) in which the author asks readers to peruse his book ‘without being satirically peremptory; for Momus will have a mouth full of invectives, and Zoilus should not be Zoilus, if he were not squint eyed. Therefore leaving their humours to the wordmongers of malice, that like the vipers, grew odious to their own kind’ (p. 52). The figuration of Momus as the maternal snake reappears with some frequency in the period. In terms of sheer imaginative fervency, the preface to T. Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn-Book, 1609, is formidable in its condemnation of the serpent Momus: ‘there draw forth this book, read aloud, laugh aloud, and play the Antickes, that all the garlic mouthed stinkards may cry out, Away with the Fool: As for thee Zoilus, go hang thyself: and for thee Momus chew nothing but hemlock, and spit nothing but the syrup of Aloes upon my papers, till thy very rotten lungs come forth for anger. I am Snake-proof’, p. 2.
G. Tuberville, Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets, n.p.
For a comprehensive review of the Marprelate scandal, see the introduction to The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. J. L. Black, Cambridge and New York, 2008, pp. xv–lvi.
T. Cooper, p. 56. Cooper’s Admonition to the People of England repeated and, in some cases, extended the satirical voices first circulated in the Marprelate tracts.
Ibid., p. 45. For King James’s attention to the Momus myth, see Basilicon Doron in King James VI and I: Selected Writings, ed. N. Rhodes et al, Farnham and Burlington VT, 2003, pp. 199–258 (204).
T. Bland, sig. A2r.
H. Estienne, sig. A3r.
For more on the pamphlet wars that followed the Marprelate scandal, see J. L. Black, The Marprelate Tracts, pp. lxxiv–cxii; D. Bruster, ‘The Structural Transformation of Print in Late Elizabethan England’ in Print, Manuscript, & Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol, Columbus, OH: 2000, pp. 49–89 and M. T. M. Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588–1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theatre and Print, Farnham and Burlington VT, 2012, pp. 75–102.
See the work of G. Harvey’s brother, R. Harvey, Philadelphus, or a Defense of Brutes (1593) for still further Momus allusions.
T. Nashe, Terrors of the Night in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 2nd edn, 5 vols, Oxford, 1958–1963, I, p. 343.
G. Harvey, Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, p. 100.
D. Colclough, ‘Freedom of Speech, Libel and the Law in Early Stuart England’ in Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, eds. E. Sheen and L. Hutson, New York, 2005, pp. 170–88 (184).
P. Sidney, The Apology for Poetry, eds. G. Shepherd and R. W. Maslen, Manchester and New York, 2002, p. 117.
T. Lodge, A Fig for Momus in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 5 vols, New York, 1966, III, pp. 1–70 (7).
S. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, p. 37.
T. Lodge, Fig for Momus, p. 7.
The standard scholarly edition of the plays is The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman., London, 1949, ll. 2.209–12 (pp. 105–106). Leishman’s introduction reviews the manuscript versions of the plays, examines questions pertaining to authorship and provides a list of the personal allusions contained in the plays (pp. 3–92).
Ibid., pp. 218–24. The Momus depicted here comes across as incredibly learned and witty, familiar both with the play’s main theme – ‘a scholar’s state, / His scorned fortunes, his unpitied fate’ – and English literary tradition, Prologue ll. 78–9 (p. 224). His claim that the play is ‘an old musty show’ and a ‘Christmas toy’ must be rebutted by the Defensor, who accepts the criticism before offering a reasoned and sympathetic précis of the drama audiences are about to see, Prologue ll. 24, 30 (p. 220).
T. Lodge, Fig for Momus, p. 13.
T. Lodge, Fig for Momus, p. 13.
J. Weever, Faunus and Melliflora, sig. A3r, and Epigrams, sig. A3r and B1r.
T. Bastard, ll. 1–3 of ‘In Momum’ in Chrestoleros, p. 40.
S. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts, Columbia MO, 1991, p. 149.
T. Bastard, Chrestoleros, p. 124. A recent addition to scholarship on the epigram in early modern England is J. Doelman, The Epigram in England, 1590–1640, Manchester and New York, 2016.
H. H. Hoyt, The Epigram in the English Renaissance, New York, 1966. p. 4.
J. Harington, Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. G. Kilroy, Farnham and Burlington VT, 2009.
J. Harington, The New Discourse of a Stale Subject, or the Metamorphosis of Ajax, ed. E. S. Dunno, New York, 1962, p. 206.
Ibid., The New Discourse, p. 206.
J. Harington, The New Discourse, p. 208.
J. Harington, The New Discourse, p. 209. See J. Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift, Oxford, 2001, for more information on the Apologie, pp. 82–98.
W. Gager, ‘Epilogue’ to Hippolytus, William Gager: The Complete Works, 4 vols, ed. and transl. D. F. Sutton, New York and London, 1994, II, pp. 215–29 (217).
Ibid., II, p. 223. Sutton also summarizes W. Gager’s dispute over the utility of academic drama with J. Rainolds, the noted theologian and contributor to the King James Bible, II, pp. vi–x. In short, Rainolds did not appreciate having his opinions broadcast through Momus. In 1599, Rainolds’s The Overthrow of Stage-Plays was published in Middelburg containing not only the author’s response to Gager’s criticism, as expressed through the voice of Momus, but also a series of personal letters Rainolds exchanged with Alberico Gentili over the utility of plays in the academic setting. The Overthrow contains the single highest number of uses of Momus in the period. For more on the debates over acting, Roman law and Gager’s use of the Momus figure, see J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age, Leeds, 1990, pp. 350–4.
J. Altieri, ‘Carew’s Momus: A Caroline Response to Platonic Politics’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 88, 1989, pp. 332–43 (341).
T. Carew, Coelum Britannicum in The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. R. Dunlap, Oxford, 1949, pp. 151–85 (156). For more on Carew’s use of Momus, see R. Dunlap, pp. 275–6, and A.B. Worden, ‘Literature and Political Censorship in Early Modern England’ in Too Mighty to be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. A.C. Duke and C.A. Tamse, Zutphen, 1987, pp. 45–62.
P. Holland, History of the World, sig. A3v. The legal diction of the catalogue emphasizes Carew’s point that the reform measures advocated by Mercury (and by the ministers of the drama’s intended audience, King Charles I) in the masque will not stand up to forensic investigation. As Momus himself says, ‘I have yet a Prerogative of wresting the old to any whatsoever interpretation, whether it be to the behoof, or prejudice, of Jupiter his Crowne and Dignity’, p. 157.
A. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, Madison WI, 1984, p. 110.
J. Tatham, Fancies Theatre, sig. B1r.
Ibid., sig. B1v.
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Navitsky, J. Epithet and Esteem: The Reception of Momus in Early Modern English Culture. Int class trad 27, 531–553 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00526-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00526-2