William Blake's Comic Vision

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William Blake’s Comic Vision

10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson



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Nick Rawlinson




© Nick Rawlinson 2003

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–74565–5 (outside North America) ISBN 0–312–22064–2 (in North America) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rawlinson, Nick, 1963– William Blake’s comic vision / Nick Rawlinson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22064–2 1. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Humor. 2. Humorous poetry, English— History and criticism. 3. Comic, The, in literature. I. Title PR4148 .C56R39 1999 821′.7—dc21 98–50635 CIP 10 9 8 12 11 10

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Preface

vii

Abbreviations

xiii

1 Songs of Pleasant Glee: William Blake and the Comic Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’ The Comic and Blake’s Vision Old Nobodaddy aloft

1 5 12 15

2 Mirth at the errors of a foe: the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comic World Satire Sentimental comedy The carnivalesque Blake and the Fool It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too

19 19 26 32 40 49

3 Playing the Fool: Blake’s Sense of Humour Absurd tales and strait waistcoats I must Create a System

50 60 66

4 ‘I love the jocund dance’: The Comic in the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel The Sun of loss and the Father of Los The Fool and King Edward the Third ‘Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!’ The Madman and Tiriel

67 68 81 89

5 Talking of Virtuous Cats: An Island in the Moon The lunar landscape ‘I was only making a fool of you’ The map of a small island

98 98 104 108

6 To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience

163

7 A Vision of the Last Judgment: The Comic in Blake’s Designs ‘No man if hee be sober daunceth, except hee be mad’

193 202

v 10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson


Contents

Contents

8 And to conclude: A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees

215

Appendix

226

Notes

228

Bibliography

263

Index

279



vi

One rainy winter’s evening, coming out of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I paused to raise my umbrella to the inclement weather. As I did so, I realized what a foolish but suitable metaphor that action was for writing the preface to a critical work on Blake. Blake enthusiasts invariably find the need to raise umbrellas of one kind or another. Sometimes, like the tour guides here in Oxford, they do so to indicate their position beside a site of Special Interest. More often, it is a vain attempt to fend off the damp fallout that is an inevitable part of entering the critical fray. It is with both aims in mind that I raise mine now. This book started life over ten years ago as a simple hunch: that the reason that I and countless other readers enjoy the work of William Blake is due, in part, to the fact that Blake is a comic writer. Such a claim may seem staggeringly obvious, but believe it or not at that time the weight of serious, critical authority was against such an idea. While it acknowledged that Blake was often satirical, and of the Devil’s party, of course, still – ‘Tyger, Tyger burning bright’ – ‘Little Lamb who made thee’ – ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ – ‘O rose thou art sick’ – not exactly funny, surely? Better to argue over his politics or his madness, the dominant criticism said, to see his work in historicist or psychoanalytic terms, to use it as proof of this or that theory of criticism, rather than pursue the idea he might be deliberately comic. Blake’s abundant and consistent use of humour was then, and often still is, dismissed as little more than a curious character trait. It is seen as a product of his wilful but amusing rebelliousness which, if it has to be explained at all, is categorized as nothing more than the defensive reaction of a neglected and rather petulant genius. His most clearly comic work, An Island in the Moon, is considered merely the tomfool doodles of a distracted youngster. Even the recent critical emphasis on recovering the complexities of the social struggle in which Blake found himself has done little to change this attitude. Despite exciting recent research, such as Jon Mee’s fascinating study of what he calls the ‘Culture of Radicalism’, critical opinion still suggests that Blake’s use of the comic was, at best, nothing more than the sporadic application of a handy tool for destabilizing conventional readings of texts. But Blake has always attracted those who are, or think they are, a little off the beaten track. So despite the prevailing critical wisdom, I pursued vii 10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson


Preface

the idea that Blake was a comic writer and, after years of research and several false starts my hunch began to take shape. In fact, the more I read, the more surprising the tendency to overlook the importance of Blake’s use of comedy became, especially given the long-established critical recognition that Blake was passionately engaged with the world of eighteenth-century ideas. For the eighteenth-century thinker – whether in Parliament or in coffee shops, whether writing for the Gentleman’s Magazine or the cheapest of radical pamphlets – understanding and good behaviour were, essentially, a matter of ‘taste’. Literary and moral discourse demanded a combination of aesthetics, perception, education and the social application of morality. To speak of society was to recognize the complexity of the relationships between self, self-consciousness, language and government. And, as the title of one of the plays by the great eighteenth-century comedian Samuel Foote reminds us, comedy, being of all things a matter of ‘Taste’, occupied a unique and pivotal position in such discourse. Even the briefest of surveys of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century comic theory will show that many of the thinkers with whom Blake engages most closely – Hobbes and John Dennis, for example – expressed strong opinions on the nature of comedy as a natural corollary to their statements on social order, consciousness and aesthetics. Likewise, we know that Blake was deeply interested in Antiquarianism, and many of these popular historians devoted a great deal of energy to uncovering the history of comic pastimes. Blake was, of all things, a Visionary, an artist of the spiritual world, and many eighteenth-century moralists and sermonizers debated hotly on the importance of comedy to faith – deciding whether the joyful should also be jolly and the blessed blithe. And even discussions of art used the language of comedy: Blake himself, while busy refuting the ideas of Sir Joshua Reynolds, called the use of light a ‘witticism’. When taking on the giants of eighteenth-century thought, then, in the fields of perception, spirituality and social organization, it would be extraordinary if an attitude to comedy was not an important part of Blake’s mental armoury. Of course, comedy is a difficult, paradoxical entity, a trickster among literary and social genres that positively defies definition, declaring, as Shakespeare’s arch fool Dogberry reminds us, that ‘comparisons are odorous’. Defining what makes someone a comic writer is, therefore, a challenge in itself. But, that said, starting from the general premise that a comic writer is one who uses humour to convey a positive, life-affirming message, assuming that Blake was a comic writer began to offer a new and exciting perspective to his work. Indeed, it quickly became obvious that the comic provided him with an essential key to his con-



viii Preface

cept of Vision. For the comic is an ideal model – and perhaps, the only model – for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. First, it provides a popular challenge to all forms of cultural and textual authority – a way to give all kings, priests and theorists a swift kick up the backside. Second, while it destabilizes texts, it also offers a positive alternative. The problem with undermining texts is that if you destroy all concepts of authority, then how do you then put over your message of hope in a Universal Humanity? When all forms of art are susceptible to deconstruction, how can you articulate faith? Recent critical thought has sought to answer this by placing considerable emphasis on the importance of ‘play’ and ‘communitas’ in Blake’s work. But these concepts, while important, are rather nebulous, thus contradicting Blake’s insistence on the importance of the minute articulation of ideas. Moreover, both are questioned in Blake’s portrayal of the aged children Har and Heva. Using the language and imagery of comedy, however – especially of social festivities and the carnivalesque – allows Blake to describe faith as a physical, emotional and intellectual experience, a joyful social act that goes beyond the isolating limitations of literary expression. Moreover, in order to ‘see’ the joke, comedy requires that we read the world afresh. In this act of creative perception the comic provides Blake with a poetics of reading, a model of how his Visionary perceptions could survive while being presented in physical media he consistently pointed out were limiting and potentially oppressive. Finally, comedy has a long and intimate connection with faith, particularly in the idea of the divinely inspired fool. It formed part of a Christian tradition that found expression in many of Blake’s major influences – the writings of St Paul, the plays of Shakespeare, even London street life. To employ the comic, then, allows Blake to encourage Vision, to celebrate the madness of inspiration, and to present a positive message in an inherently flawed medium. Recognizing the comic as a key to Vision, as well as providing exciting insights into individual lyrics, also gives a new thematic unity to Blake’s work. Rather than being a juvenile exercise in imitation, the Poetical Sketches can be read as the beginnings of a series of comic images that substantially shape the presentation of ‘play’ in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Likewise An Island in the Moon, rather than being an idle and protracted in-joke, proves to be a significant early draft of the sort of philosophical and spiritual education attempted in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and later in Jerusalem. As a conscious choice, then, Blake’s use of humour is far-reaching in both its scope and implications. As sharp as the satirical thrusts of Swift



Preface ix

Preface

and Gillray and as wryly observant as the social comedy of Austen and Dickens, it also bears comparison to the divinely inspired humanism of Chaucer and Shakespeare. His use of comedy is not only fully consistent with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral and literary debate, it is a vital tool for expressing his Vision of perceptive, inclusive, humanist Christianity. Rich with the scents of both street and cloister, Blake’s comedy shows him to be, on the one hand, the spiritual inheritor of Cervantes, Rabelais and the joyful prophets and preachers of the Bible, and on the other, a writer whose sense of absurdity and dazzling linguistic gymnastics anticipate Monty Python and Spike Milligan by more than a century and a half. Not a conventional comic writer, perhaps. But in his own rude, anti-authoritarian, deeply spiritual way, a great one. Of course, a reader’s hunch is not the same as the ‘proofs’ demanded by literary criticism. There is a hoary old joke that to ‘assume’ is to make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’. It must be acknowledged from the outset that, in the course of writing this book, I have, without wishing to make an ‘ass’ out of anyone but myself, made some fairly sweeping assumptions. For a start, my hypothesis rests on the belief that Blake intended his work to have a critical, educational aspect. I am claiming that he wished to teach the art of Vision, and moreover that this was an aim he strove towards throughout his life. This implies that his work can be read as a whole; that images he uses at different times and in very different works can nevertheless be interpreted (or translated) consistently. This is not to say that I am claiming any image has only one meaning, or even that Blake had the entire system fully formulated from the word go. Rather, his work is accumulative: each time he uses an image it gathers a history, a significance to be carried forward to its next appearance, like a semantic snail’s shell. To support this argument, I have also assumed that biographical and historical information is fair game in building patterns of critical meaning. Perhaps most significantly of all, I have assumed that literature and faith are intimately connected and that Blake’s Visionary aim – to promote the notion of Universal Humanity – is not only possible, it is desirable. As you can no doubt tell from this, my critical approach has been, to say the least, eclectic. It was once fashionable to talk about a book as if it were a body. To use this analogy, I would have to say that this book has such a contorted critical posture it is in danger of getting lumbago. I have not subscribed to any particular critical theory, blithely assuming that one can talk of a ‘poetics of reading’ without spending the obligatory pages, chapters and lifetimes discussing what that means (to me it just means a way of approaching a text). Moreover, many important



x

schools of Blake criticism appear here as no more than the most cursory of tattoos upon the book’s skin. To take one example to demonstrate the whole: when discussing Blake’s use of the term ‘female’, I quite happily assume this is his shorthand for ‘having physical existence’ without discussing the alchemical, philosophical, theological and social background to, or the considerable feminist criticism surrounding, his use of it. This doesn’t mean that I am unaware of Blake’s position as an artist working within a patriarchal system of male power, or that his imagery can sometimes appear gynophobic. Rather, this is outside the scope of my study. For the record, I read Blake’s characters as not either ‘male’ or ‘female’ but as representatives of states of perception and existence. Oothoon, Thel, and the youthful harlot, as well as being part of Blake’s examination of the roles and rights of women in society, are aspects of all of us, of all readers and creators: rational and sensual, abstract and physical. That Blake’s female characters are more associated with the physical is because Blake chose to celebrate the creative power of birth and rebirth (as he does on plate III of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). That such power involves women intimately with the adoption of the potentially limiting mode of physical existence – the essential prelude to the expression and renewal of Universal Humanity – does not mean he assigned any lesser place to women in his creative system. So, in relation to feminist criticism of Blake, all I can say is that there are other books on this topic, like Helen Bruder’s intriguing William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. And as it is for feminist criticism, so it is for many other critical schools and theories. I simply promise that I have done my best not to make any false claims or willfully misrepresent Blake, nor pursue any critical byways that would leave non-academic readers floundering. This study is meant to open up a new area of discussion, and perhaps offer some lesser known sources of information about the comic and Blake’s use of it – for example such splendid tomes as J. Roberts A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; Its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence, With a Word upon Pudding And Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick (London, 1726). Of course, whatever borrowings I have made, all mis-readings and mistakes are all my own. In writing this book and thinking about Blake’s work, I have benefited from the insights of a number of exceptional Blake scholars. I should therefore like to acknowledge the invaluable, scholarly and generous help of Cornelia Cook in shaping not only this book but also, from its earliest beginnings and over a great many cups of coffee, my thinking about Blake’s work. I would also like to thank Andrew Lincoln, Jon Mee, Lucy Newlyn, Nicholas Shrimpton and Edward Larrissy for their



Preface xi

Preface

courteous and perceptive comments on this manuscript over the years, and my editors, Charmian Hearne, Eleanor Birne, Beverley Tarquini and Rebecca Mashayekh, for their infinite patience. I think that’s everything for now. ‘So’, as it says in that classic work of English comedy, Willans and Searle’s superb Down with Skool, ‘okay, come in’. Just remember, as you peruse the following pages, one thing: Stultorum numerus infinitus est* and I’m only one of them. *The number of fools is infinite.



xii

(B**)

(D**)

(E**)

(K**) (L**) An Island The Marriage Songs Innocence Experience

Plate number reference in The Complete Graphic works of William Blake, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978). Plate number reference in Drawings of William Blake: 92 pencil studies, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Dover, 1970). Page number reference in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Page number reference in Blake Complete Writings with variant readings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1972). Plate number reference in The Paintings of William Blake, ed. Raymond Lister (Cambridge University Press, 1986). An Island In The Moon. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience. Songs of Innocence. Songs of Experience.

Textual note For quotations from Blake’s work I have followed the text in David V. Erdman’s The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Just occasionally I have also given a reference to Keynes’ Complete Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1972), because although Keynes alters the punctuation, he does include lines deleted or altered in the original manuscripts and which are not present in Erdman’s edition. References to Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. R. N. Alexander (London: Collins, 1980).

xiii 10.1057/9780230287235 - William Blake's Comic Vision, Nicholas Rawlinson


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Songs of Pleasant Glee: William Blake and the Comic

Since the days of his earliest biographers, critics have always recognized the presence of humour in the work of William Blake. His first formal biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writing in 1868, characterized Blake’s work as a ‘mingling of the sublime with the grotesque’.1 In 1868 A. C. Swinburne praised the ‘harmonious and humorous power’ of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.2 Robin Hamlyn, in the catalogue to the Tate Britain Blake Exhibition 2000–2001, calls Blake ‘a discerning lover of pleasure’.3 Humorous moments abound in Blake’s work. There is the famous print of Newton, for instance, that blows a loud raspberry at whatever ‘science’ the viewer believes threatens their conception of art, intuition and the human spirit. There are the amusingly scurrilous annotations and the guffaw-inducing frankness of his scatological notebooks. There are numerous satirical gibes at the concepts of kingship and priesthood from America to Jerusalem. There are plenty of comic characters, too: the pretentious philosophers in An Island in the Moon, the smart wit of the chimney sweep in Songs of Innocence, the subversive narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In fact, Blake’s work seems to pulse with a comic energy, a mixture of vibrant sensuality and joyful irreverence at all our rigid conventions. Moreover, there is considerable critical recognition of his borrowing from comic sources: Martha England’s great study of An Island, for example, uncovering Blake’s debt to the famous comedian and impressionist Samuel Foote, or Marcus Wood’s comparison of Blake’s imagery and that of eighteenth-century satirical prints. However, give almost anybody a copy of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ or Milton to read, and the last thing you would expect them to do is laugh. Blake has been called many things, from a priori communist to God’s portrait painter, but comic writer is not one of them. In popular modern 1



1


criticism Blake is still seen as only occasionally writing on the side of ‘the Devils party’ (E35). He does it, the argument runs, simply to be devilish, to be contrary, to use whatever tool comes to hand to disrupt our complaisancy. At best he is seen as the great bricoleur, as Jon Mee calls him: deliberately blending material from diverse sources as a way of challenging the hegemony of conventional discourse so as to disrupt the ‘manuscript assumed authority of the dead’, in Tom Paine’s phrase.4 There is good ground for this assumption. Blake’s work is highly eclectic; moreover such a magpie approach was popular with the late eighteenth century radicals and Millenarian visionaries with whom he sympathized. It had even been recommended as a poetic style in Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Blake’s poetry, Mee argues, uses parody deliberately to disturb our sense of allegorical form, and in doing so was part of a wider pattern of radical response to the use of hegemonic allegory as a means of teaching ‘Moral Virtue’.5 He also points out, however, that the aim of such an ‘heterogeneous repertoire’ was to make a ‘complete reorganization of the structures involved’.6 The implication of such an approach – scrupulously fairminded and historically based as it is – is that parody is simply another tool for destabilizing the text. Blake is, in effect, merely borrowing comic structures and imagery like popular trinkets in order to ‘pound [them] into dust & melt [them] in the Furnaces of Affliction’ (E205) and so forge them into fiery arrowheads of prophesy under the heat of his wild, but sober, imagination. As a result, we should no more consider Blake a comedian because he uses comic images than we should call him an alchemist because he borrows terminology from Paracelsus. The fact that he uses the comic to destabilize texts because the comic itself has an intrinsic value, a divine message, is easily overlooked. And as a perception of comic intention is a prerequisite to comic appreciation (a fact that anyone who has ever mouthed an apologetic ‘I was only joking’ knows), our impression of Blake remains the moody bourgeois antihero. He is the cool rebel-of-choice for the Industrial age, the artistpsychologist with a dash of the socio-linguist who goes about his work with the merest trace of a wry smile on his face as he pits himself against any and all forms of oppression. He is an artist who uses comic elements. He is not a comic writer. ‘The Tyger’ is not funny. QED. Of course, the purpose of this book is to argue that, on the contrary, Blake was a subtle, profound and skilled comic writer. His understanding of the comic formed a key component of his concept of Vision, a cornerstone in his attempts to build a New Jerusalem ‘in Englands green and pleasant Land’ (E96). Vision is, above all, a way of reading, of seeing



2

‘Thro’ (E492) the material existence of signs, whether that be written language or one’s own mortal presence, to reveal God – and not God as some far-off judge, but as having existence and authority because He exists in us: ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ (E39). Such a reading requires a twofold response to texts, whether linguistic, visual or physical. First, as Blake does with his parodies, they must be deconstructed – their authority must be challenged, whether that authority is in the form of a king, a code of religious prohibition, or the false impression that because language represents reality, it represents the only form ‘reality’ can take. Deconstruction, however, is a potentially limitless activity, leading to a ‘void boundless’ of meaninglessness (E41). Vision must therefore also be a creative act, an act of building, of prayer, of reorganizing the ‘Architecture’ of perception (E125). It must offer something that, while it can be found in the ‘Minute Particulars’ (E205) of representation, goes beyond it: the promise of the eternal renewal of life and the hope of divine salvation. This twofold process, the degradation that goes hand in hand with a blessing, has long been recognized as the special attribute of the comic. Comedy deflates pretensions, disrupts patterns, and lurks behind the façade of reality to prove that reality to be false. But it goes beyond deconstruction because it insists on a meaning even in meaninglessness – and ‘always meaning’ leads to God. Moreover this meaning is at once both intellectual and emotional; a physical example of the incomprehensible joys of the salvation that awaits us when the physical is no longer our concern. For Blake, the comic formed an ideal pattern for Visionary perception. Its paradoxical nature provided him with a wonderful, accessible and popular poetics of reading, the end of a ball of ‘Golden string’ (E231) that leads to a ‘Last Judgement’ (‘an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science’, E565). Politically sharp and spiritually enlightening, ancient and thoroughly contemporary, arcane and widely accessible, the comic could be both theologically sophisticated and yet linked to simple human experience in a way that simultaneously acknowledges and celebrates its temporal and hegemonic vulnerability. It was a method, conscious of its own flaws and celebrating the possibility of alternatives, of ‘rouz[ing] the faculties to act’ (E702) by accentuating the importance of the reader in creating meaning. It is more than a simple undermining of the concept of authority, it is a relocation of authority to share it with ‘a brother and friend’ (E146). The comic leads from the self into the wider community of humanity and God combined. For Blake, it was a Visionary aesthetic. His work was not just a mingling of the sublime and the grotesque; it was a relocation of the sublime from the polite, fear- and obscurity-dominated aesthetics of



Songs of Pleasant Glee 3


Reynolds, Burke and Addison to a more robust and more human form: the ridiculous, that comic exaggeration that emphasized the interwoven significance of art, humanity and Christ. In a turbulent age of oppression and revolutions, scepticism and prophecy, Blake found Faith in Foolery, and from the Fools in King Edward the Third to the carnival rhythms of Jerusalem, from the smallest engraving to the grandest watercolour, Blake’s work became, essentially, comic. Painting a red nose on to our accepted portrait of Blake will require several coats, of course. Comedy is a highly contentious issue: we will need to attempt a definition of ‘comic vision’ that defends its positive aspects from those who claim laughter is merely a symbol of bitter triumph. Then we will need to prove that the structure and function of such a comic vision would indeed be vital to Blake’s artistic and spiritual Vision. This will require a brief look at what might be called the mechanics of comedy (being the two-stage pattern of our comic perception rather than the six buffoons of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Clearly we will also have to place Blake within the theory and practice of the comic world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to see what sort of comic inspiration might have been available to him. As the idea of Blake the comedian is an unusual one, it might also be appropriate to offer a quick summary of the biographical evidence that Blake’s use of the comic was indeed deliberate and not simply the accidental outpourings of a ‘wild enthusiast’.7 Only having established this connection between comic vision and Visionary Art, will it be possible to turn our attention to individual works. This book will concentrate primarily on his early work, from the Poetical Sketches to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Such a focus will allow us to examine how Blake’s ideas about the comic developed, so that by the time of The Marriage they have become thematically embedded into his concept of Vision. I will, of course, be including many examples from his later work, both to elucidate ideas found, but not always fully expressed, in the earlier poetry and design, and to endeavour to demonstrate the consistency of his application of comic imagery. But I leave it to the reader to discover these images in the longer prophetic books in any detail. In this first chapter I will explore the grounds of Blake’s comic vision. Chapter 2 looks at Blake’s contemporary comic world and establishes what influences will have been available to him. Chapter 3 discusses examples of biographical and unpublished material that give a clear indication of Blake’s comic purpose, as well as suggesting the reasons why we no longer see the joke of his mythopoetics. Chapter 4 explores Blake’s use of the comic and particularly the character of the Fool in the



4

Poetical Sketches and Tiriel. Chapter 5 demonstrates the hitherto neglected significance of An Island in the Moon as Blake’s statement of a comic Visionary manifesto. Chapter 6 investigates the comic as an alternative sublime in The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and chapter 7 looks at the surprising way the comic influences some of Blake’s designs. Chapter 8 reviews Blake’s use of the comic, as well as suggesting how its thematic use influences his later prophetic books. First, then, remembering that ‘Roses are planted where thorns grow’ (E33), let us begin our examination of what ‘comic vision’ might mean by addressing the difficult and perennially thorny problem of defining comedy.

Comedy: ‘For Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life’ (E54) We all know what we find funny, but defining comedy is not easy. As a term it is used to describe such an immense range of human activity that its meaning becomes blunted ‘Comedy’ encompasses anything that makes us laugh, from bodily noises to the subtlest literary bons mots, from formulaic presentations of comic material to sudden accidents. In addition, as Northrop Frye reminds us, Dante even gave the name commedià to the grand scheme of redemption and resurrection that is the pattern of both regenerating life and Christian salvation. Although some would argue this is not strictly speaking ‘comedy’, laughter has a long and respectable history in religious practice. In fact, comedy is claimed to fulfil many widely differing functions in our society. It is used as a mark of linguistic and emotional development, a political weapon, a survival mechanism, a social lubricant, ‘a subsidiary language’,8 a seduction technique, even a parable of earthly existence. It is generally agreed to have a specific purpose: laughter, we are told, is the best medicine – but whether this is to cure social ills (as argued by Aristotle, Jonson, Foote) or to provide psychic relief (Plautus, Lamb, Freud) or spiritual enlightenment (Erasmus, Fry, the Bible) is open to debate. Moreover, defining comedy is exceptionally difficult. This is partly because of its encompassing nature, which is so expansive no two critics ever agree even on the names of its constituent parts, using terms such as ‘ridiculous’, ‘risible’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘wit’ and ‘humour’ interchangeably. To make matters worse, comedy thrives on defying, flouting and subverting the tools of definition. It is not chaos, although it is often to be found there. It delights in mischance, but loves happy endings. Its traditional opponents are law and reason, yet its principal allies are





structure and intelligence. It thrives on rules, particularly when borrowed or ransacked from the respectable worlds of physics and linguistics, but only when they can be abused, stretched, or pursued to absurdity. Of course, it is precisely this slipperiness, this status as an accompanying counter-culture, reflecting and challenging the prevailing modes of order that makes the comic such an attractive model for the kind of creative reading Blake’s Vision demands. But Edward Galligan’s lament is typical of every comic theorist from Aristotle onwards when he writes that the comic defies definition, preferring double meanings, gestures and dances.9 The comic theorist, almost inevitably, must do the same, performing an elaborate and suggestive dance to convey their meaning. To paraphrase Dr Johnson, no one but a fool ever writes about folly. Most theories of comedy follow a familiar pattern and few, if any, are a practical demonstration that the soul of wit is brevity. First comes the apology: for example, Caesar, in Cicero’s De Oratore, admitting that comedy is ‘exceedingly difficult to summarize’, or Dr Johnson, in his turn, noting that ‘Comedy has been unpropitious to definers’, or Morton Gurewitch claiming that it is positively ‘hazardous to declare that comedy has a single meaning’.10 Then the theorist proposes an origin for comedy, usually locating it in the plays that developed from ancient Greek religious festivals (while ignoring the fact that this involves an unseemly conflation of comic drama with the generally risible). Many critics, from the sixteenth-century writer Evanthius to the twentieth century’s F. M. Cornford have made this connection, although lately there have been a number of studies suggesting the plays of Aristophanes, so pivotal to this theory, do not, in true comic fashion, conform to the definitions they are purported to have engendered.11 The theorist then feels obliged to point out that in any case, comedy is highly subjective (often quoting Molière’s ‘we do not laugh alike’).12 Moreover, they say, the desire to produce a single definition of comedy is like trying to create a single punchline to fit all jokes. (Or as Blake might say, ‘One Law for the Ox and the Lion is Oppression’, E44). Nevertheless, the hapless critic finally attempts to approximate a definition by calling up snippets from a huge supporting cast of names that are, in this field, as familiar as household words, and all of whom disagree: Bahktin and Baudelaire, Arnold and Nietzsche, Jonson and Johnson.13 Many writers bring illumination to the subject, like Freud (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 1905), uncovering the hostility of the joker, or Bergson (Laughter, 1900) tabulating the mechanical inelasticity of the comic victim, only for their brilliance to reveal darker shadows elsewhere, notably failing to accommodate within their theories



6

the spiritual significance of laughter. Sensitive, then, to the inevitable disappointment of their readers, most would-be theorists finally add the coda that comic theories are never as amusing as comic practice. The most elegant formulation of this is undoubtedly the novelist Peter DeVries’ wry comment that listening to a lecture on comedy is about as funny as being struck in the face with a recipe for custard pie.14 Of course, there is little reason why theories of comedy should be funny: theories of tragedy would gain little by attempting to be tragic (‘Hamlet! Dead!’). However, there is a sense of incompleteness about the definition process which is all the more frustrating because the comic often ends happily: marriage, escape, celebration, understanding, resolution. And yet this ending is also a beginning, the brink of the next chapter, a restart in an ongoing journey, rather than the neat finality of the tragic journey. A joke is seldom alone; it begs others. To define comedy completely would be to kill the joke. As a result, definitions of comedy tend to be somewhat broad. For our purposes, however, the version offered in the 1973 A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms is as succinct and apposite as any. This states that ‘comedy’ is simply that which ‘arouses and vicariously satisfies the human instinct for mischief’ and in itself is ‘neither morally useful or immoral’.15 Having accepted this general chortle of human mischief as a starting point, it is possible then to identify and separate certain elements of comic expression as having a particular purpose. To borrow a literary term, the phrase ‘the comic’ can be used to distinguish those aspects of comedy which involve ‘a sense of triumph over whatever is inimical to human or social good, however that ideal is defined.’16 That triumph can come in many forms. It may be the deflation and degradation of pomposity and authority, including the authority of the controlling ego. It may be social control exerted over those whose folly or vice runs against the social grain: by extension, it can therefore be a political weapon. It can hold up a pattern of good behaviour, celebrate the uniqueness of having a good heart, or rejoice in marriage, birth and even death as part of the process of constantly renewing youth and energy. It may also be the triumph of life over death itself: both through fecundity and, in the Christian tradition within which Blake worked, the rejoicing brought by the knowledge of our salvation through God’s infinite love. Comic vision, then, may be defined as a writer’s ‘particular insight and sense of the world that allows him or her to find or ‘excite’ mirth, to justify life, and to imagine the means of its benevolent regeneration in the future’.17 Moreover, as has already been suggested, the comic does





this by means of an extraordinary two-stage process. It is at once both ‘triumphant and deflationary’,18 generating a ‘double attitude of both sympathy and criticism’.19 The key to this dual nature lies in the comic’s property of stimulating and celebrating the imaginations of both the joker and their audience by means of its unique structure. While admitting that there are anomalies (such as tickling), most theorists try to explain the structure of comedy by focusing on what makes us laugh. Inevitably, most do this by extrapolating backward from their beliefs about comic function. For example, those who see it as primarily a civilizing force will explain laughter as a cackle of triumph over an enemy, a view famously espoused by Hobbes (On Human Nature, 1650). Psychic relief theorists, on the other hand, will point to the sudden exposure of hidden aggression. Nearly all theorists, however, state that laughter is a result of surprise. A good example of this can be found in the work of the sixteenth-century writer Madius. His On the Ridiculous (1550) is particularly suitable for our purpose in that it contains the seeds of three major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of comedy. On the one hand, drawing on much earlier comic theory, he states his belief that comedy deals with characters of low type and is to provide moral lessons. In this, his work is a clearly part of a theory that would influence Jonson, Dryden and the early eighteenth-century critic John Dennis. This is the credo of that would-be social reformer, a satirist, and satire was a powerful comic force in the eighteenth century. Madius also gives us the beginnings of what will become the psychic relief theory of comedy. Earlier theorists had noted the importance of comedy in diffusing social tensions, likening it to a safety valve on a wine barrel ‘that must be opened from time to time to prevent [it] from bursting’.20 Madius goes further: in tracing the origin of the low subject matter of comedy back to Aristotle, he extends this idea to claim that comedy frequently contains a sense of trespass onto the lower end of the social and the emotional scale. Dirt, greed, hate and lust were, he felt, as much the motivation of comedy as its proper object (a point later amplified by Freud). In addition, what makes his contribution truly remarkable, is that he also begins to identify another source of laughter in ‘incongruity’. This is also important to eighteenth-century comic theory, in that it offered a basis for an explanation of the origin of laughter in something other than triumph. Ridicule, Madius warned, could be cruel, and he makes a point of listing objects improper for satire: serious accidents, deformity and poverty. To find humour in the incongruous opened the way for later theorists to claim the function of laughter was a more sympathetic activity, built on mutual recognition and respect of



8

differences. Comedy became, for them, a matter of eccentric good nature rather than savagely witty humour. Madius’ keywords, then, were novelty, incongruity and surprise. The best jokes, he theorized, thus came from the sudden exposure of something forbidden, ungainly or absurd, in a creative and witty manner. This wit was often achieved by a reversal of expectation, associating the high with the low and thus finding value in the worthless. This definition covers one part of the comic process, but there is a second important element to be considered. In order for us to find something funny, the comic has to appeal to something within us, which delights in the creative transgression of boundaries and the disturbance of rules. If that delight were not there, we would simply find such transgression odd, not funny. Our delight in that transgression is increased when our sense of the importance of following rules – social, linguistic or behavioural – is heightened. It will appeal even further if a rule is broken by a triumph of the simplest over the most sophisticated, the most human over the most stern. In a sense, Hobbes was right, laughter is about triumph, but not over others, or over our former selves, but over all those things which oppose the organic effulgence of life itself. To take a simple example: imagine someone sawing through a branch on which they sit. They are obeying simple rules – like the laws of tool use – but unexpectedly disregarding much more serious rules, like the laws of gravity and the instinct for survival. In order for this to be a comedy rather than a potential tragedy, the person must take on a symbolic function.21 They may do this by exhibiting certain sexual or racial characteristics, social status or a famous public identity, in which case they become an object of politically aggressive humour. But this symbolic function can be achieved simply by doing something ordinarily human – foolish, vulnerable, accidentally untoward. This symbolic identity can be made even clearer by nuances that identify the person as a public performer, a clown. In the example of our clown on a branch, by deliberately (as a performer) and involuntarily (as a character) ignoring her own safety, she is symbolically taking on those things that cause us pain – our stupidity or the immutable laws of physics – and by enduring and triumphing over the consequences in some way lessening them. The clowning scenario is often enough to produce laughter in itself; the childish pleasure brought on by the clash of experiences in the anticipated fall; the seriousness of gravity ameliorated by the established durability of clowns. The first stage of comedy then, often involves degradation. And what is being exposed – our clown’s foolishness – is also criticized by the




exposure. This is the comedy of satire, and it often relies on comparison: the stupidity of the person on the branch suggests that all those sharing such characteristics are stupid. In this sense, Hobbes’ definition is right: we laugh at others, or at former selves who would have been similarly stupid. There is a problem with satire, however, and that is it offers a very limited range of possibilities. The satirist is always right, occasionally if only because they are clever to have made their observation: the victim is always wrong. To take an eighteenth-century example, several of Gillray’s cartoons show Prime Minister Pitt farting in the face of his opponents. Depending on which political party you support, this could be an attack on Pitt, on his opponents, or on the whole political system that sees such heated debate as no better than an exchange of bad air. The satirist, and by extension the viewer, think themselves in some way better than the politicians, despite or perhaps especially because they suffer their tyranny while being cleverer than those depicted. Although insightful and capable of exposing the corrupt inner workings of society, this aspect of the comic offers no alternative. We have noted that the comic is properly a two-stage process and to be truly comic, a joke must lead to something greater than politics and division. It must appeal to our sense of life, of unity, of Divine Inspiration. Any transgression should also be a blessing, a revelation of a greater truth. To use a rather crude example, a clown farting in a polite social setting will have, if you’ll forgive the expression, a greater resonance than that achieved by Pitt, for it reminds us that, despite our attempts to deny the fact, we all partake of a frail human body. In the case of our branch-sawing clown, if the sawn-off branch acts as a balloon, and the clown floats away, it reminds us that meaning is not necessarily fixed or predetermined: the result lies in the creativity of our reading of the situation. If the camera pans back to reveal our clown is just one in an entire world of clowns sawing through branches, what seemed like personal stupidity could now perhaps be forgiven as human frailty; by association we are asked to understand and forgive ourselves. It could also, perhaps, be seen as proof of a grand plan for all clowns. This more positive side of the comic – imaginative, inclusive and creative – is often called the carnivalesque. This is a critically loaded term that must be used carefully and to which we will return later. But for now it will serve as a term to identify that part of the comic that offers a pleasurable, unifying experience of law-defying life, opening the possibility of the presentation of something bigger than ourselves while avoiding the fears of isolation, insignificance and destruction that usually attend such contemplation. Many critics have argued that comic



10 William Blake’s Comic Vision

modes grew out of religious celebrations, and part of the special significance of the carnivalesque is its capacity to express spirituality uninhibited by dogma and priest craft – to offer, in Christopher Fry’s famous phrase, ‘a narrow escape’ from tragedy ‘into faith’.22 Humanity has been called both homo ludens and homo festivus: the comic and spiritual impulses are not only deep-seated, but share attributes: joy, playfulness, unself-consciousness, awareness of being part of a greater whole.23 In many ways, the creativity, novelty, incongruity and surprise at the heart of Madius’ definition help to connect comedy with faith. The way that the comic does this is, by making us aware of our own creativity, it reminds us that we share in the creativity of God. Christ is the word made flesh: he shared our physicality with us. To understand Him, we must also joy in our physicality.24 The comic turns the word into flesh too, in the muscularity of laughing. Blake believed that, by partaking in a joyful physical existence, we can become aware that we are all part of the divine ‘Eternal Body of Man’, that is ‘The Imagination’ God himself that is The Divine Body

}

[. . .] Jesus: we are his Members (E273)

Joking has often been called a creative act25 and creativity rests as much in the joke’s recipient as in the joke teller. As Shakespeare put it: A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it. (Love’s Labours Lost, V.ii.849–51) Whether presented in terms of a recognizable structure, a variation on a known formula26 that invites resolution, or in the opportunity to view an event in more than one way, a joke will succeed only if the recipient ‘sees’ it. That may mean sharing a prejudice, but it may also empower them to reshape their world, because to see a joke requires recognition that all perception is an act of interpretation, of reading the world. It is this act of creative re-reading that makes the comic so important to Blake’s Vision. At its most obvious it can be seen in the operation of a simple pun (although even the simplest require the listener to hold several ideas in their head at once). Again, to take a facile example: ‘A man walked into a bar. Ouch. It was an iron bar.’ The accepted linearity of the storytelling mode has been disrupted and the comic has revealed a




stagnation of interpretation, a formulaic expectation of what is to come next – ‘it was a noisy / crowded / empty bar’. Of course this process is possible because ‘bar’ has more than one meaning. Arthur Koestler, following Baudelaire, uses the term ‘bisociate’ to describe this intersection of ‘matrices of thought’, the activity that make jokes, especially puns, not only possible but enjoyable.27 Like Wittgenstein’s famous Duck-Rabbit, the fun is partly in the fact that you can see both meanings at once. As well as recognizing and co-operating in the semantic play, however, the listener / reader is also asked to register, even if for a brief moment, their own power to re-order the world creatively. Alongside the breakdown of their usual assumption that language is a logical progression of rule and order there is the possibility of recognizing that social institutions based on linguistic absolutes, the ‘Thou Shalt Not’ of Religion and Law, are themselves neither fixed nor absolute. The comic, even when not very funny, is always side-splitting, a teasing revelation of static views; not so much a counter-culture as an under-the-counter-culture. Moreover, the graphic ‘Ouch’ also asks the joke’s recipients to imagine themselves as, and so sympathize with, the bar-walker.28 Thus even a simple verbal joke offers the recipient a chance both to recognize their usual interpretation of the world as an act of subservience to convention and to re-vision it with a potentially revolutionary empathy and creativity. It is brief, of course, and in the majority of cases these thoughts will not have been articulated in the indulgent and slightly wearied grin that marks the ‘I get it’ moment. Nevertheless, they were present, rewarded by pleasure and significantly, empowered the individual while using the same language that served as a vehicle for dogmatism. It could, of course, be argued that the recipient is only rewarded for making the connection expected of them. However, all cultures treasure the uncontrolled creativity that joking unleashes in the recipient: if we value wit, we set a premium on the capping rejoinder, the fine retort, the unexpected riposte. Even in its simplest form, then, the comic offers a model of creative, empathetic re-reading. It exposes a false conception of reality and empowers the recipient to create a new vision based on an experience of shared humanity and creativity that ultimately suggests the joy of divine salvation. And this empowering of the reader is a cornerstone of Blake’s concept of Vision, as even a brief exploration of it will show.

The Comic and Blake’s Vision Whole libraries of books have been devoted to elucidating what Blake meant by ‘Vision’, and it would be presumptuous of me to offer more




than the simplest of outlines here. However, the repetition of a few significant (and if for that reason overused) quotations should be sufficient to establish that creative interpretation and reader-empowerment are indeed its basic tenets. At its simplest, Vision is a matter of seeing beyond material existence to eternal truths. Those who do so are ‘Poets & Prophets’ (E554) and this is a state attainable by anyone: ‘Every honest man is a Prophet’ (E617) when he utters his true opinion. In The Marriage Blake has the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah explain the nature of prophecy as ‘firm perswasion’ based upon an act of ‘imagination’ that transforms ‘human perception’ to discover the ‘infinite in every thing’ (E38). It is important that this act of ‘Imagination’ is not passive: Blake told Crabb Robinson that imagination must be actively ‘work[ed] up’ to become Vision.29 A Visionary imagination is one that actively interprets the text – literary, visual or social – that is presented to it. Indeed, all texts require such interpretation for there is a danger inherent in the very act of reading itself; of surrendering meaning to the Other. We are prone to make this mistake simply because we partake of a physical existence. As a result, it is ‘impossible’ for us ‘to think without images of somewhat on earth’ (E600). And because the world or text can only be experienced through the senses, we mistakenly believe it must exist ‘outside’ our consciousness. The result is that we can all too easily assume that creative power also resides outside ourselves, either within the physical realm (the world, the text) itself, or in a mysterious ordering deity behind it (society, Jehovah, the artist). We mistake text for reality; language for a set of symbols which conveys an absolute authority: the ‘stones of Law’ and ‘bricks of Religion’, a ‘system’ that ‘some [may take] advantage of & enslav[e] the vulgar’ (E38). Thus all social exchange can result in the oppression of the recipient (‘In every voice, in every ban / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear’ E27). If we reject this possibility, then we are faced with the idea that language is merely an arbitrary system of signs. This suggests that there is ultimately no meaning behind our existence, a state that can also be used to justify the exertion of power and manipulation of society. In either case, our reading reduces us to dependent subservience: either struggling to elucidate meaning already given by a single controlling consciousness or vainly attempting to impose order on that which is essentially meaningless. This is the origin of the ‘Abstract . . . Reasoning Power’ that has at its heart ‘the Abomination of Desolation’ (E150). It convinces us that human life is nothing more than a cycle of struggling against a force majeure, an endless pattern of reaction and revolution where ‘The iron hand’ that ‘crush[es] the Tyrants head [and] bec[o]me[s] a Tyrant in his stead’





The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man & when separated From Imagination and closing itself as in steel, in a Ratio Of the Things of Memory. It Thence frames Laws and Moralities To destroy Imagination! The Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars. (E229) It is the job of the Visionary artist, therefore, to teach us that ‘Man’s perceptions are not bounded by the organs of . . . sense’ (E2) and to show us how to ‘see with, not thro’ / The Eye’ (E520). Of course, the Visionary artist too must use the ‘text’ of physical signs to convey their ideas, the ‘Drapery’ which alone reveals ‘the Shape of the Naked’ (E650). There is a danger that this will lead to a ‘stain[ing of] the water clear’ (E7), but Visionary art teaches us to recognize the world as an ‘Allegory’ (E544) that has to be read creatively. Blake constantly insists that every act of perception is an act of interpretation: ‘All that we see is Vision’ (E273), and that the power of interpretation lies within us: ‘As a man is So he Sees’ (E702). ‘The Writings of the Prophets illustrate . . . the Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine images as seen in the Worlds of Vision’ (E555, my italics). By recognizing that creative power, and hence meaning, rests both in us and in others (‘Every body does not see alike’ E702) we can come to recognize ourselves as part of the Divine creative power: ‘whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’ (E562). While this suggests that all readings are merely interpretations, and hence all readings are equally valid, it also avoids the potential meaninglessness inherent in that position by also suggesting that all readers are valuable. All readers, by being creative, are part of God; we are interpretations of God and God exists because we interpret Him: ‘God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men’ (E40). Although this brief description of Blake’s concept of Vision uses the broadest of brushstrokes, it should be possible already to see why the comic might have appealed to Blake by offering an attractive model for the kind of creative reading Vision requires. We can explore this in more detail by examining a simple, practical expression of his comic vision: his notebook ditty, ‘When Klopstock England defied’ (E500–1, see appendix).



(E490), a pattern that afflicts all areas of human experience: ‘A Tyrant is the Worst disease & the Cause of all others’ (E625).


This rather scurrilous fragment, written in a jaunty, nursery rhyme style, was composed around 1793, a prolific time for Blake in which he produced The Marriage, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, some of the Songs of Experience and America. Clearly, here is a comic deflation of religious, literary and social authority, achieved by the simple comic expedient of reversal – the surprise of associating what is high, important and abstract with what it claims to despise, the low and bodily. God, pictured here in the terms of the religious doctrines of polite society, of fear and prohibition, is an almighty and judgmental Jehovah. Blake has re-christened him ‘Nobodaddy’, a comic baptism that reveals His true nature – he is both ‘No-body’ – abstract and worthless – and ‘daddy’, a comic deflation of the stern ‘father’. This Jehovah’s awful edicts of absolute law are mocked by being likened to the lowest bodily pronouncements – farts, belches and coughs. His solemnity is mocked by his ‘oath’ that makes heaven quake, not from admiration of His divine wisdom and awful power, but recoiling in the face of bad language and immoderate temper. Blake is challenging our idea of God as a protective father simply by extending the idea that, if His control over us is to be represented in physical terms (fear of the father), then we had better accept the consequences of that physicality (farts and temper). In true comic fashion, opposition to this domineering God on His almighty throne comes from the lowest possible source – Blake picturing himself as being on the humblest sort of throne there is: the lavatory.30 This both pokes fun at Nobodaddy’s throne and establishes an alternative kind of authority. Blake describes himself as being beneath the ‘poplar’ trees, a lovely image that carries three pictures for us: the first of trees standing tall and solemn around Blake, natural courtiers with more dignity than the abstract roaring deity; the second of Blake as being a tribune of the London citizenry, Poplar being a dockyard area in that great city; and third, with a deft gag on a London accent, of what is ‘pop[u]lar’. He sits as the representative of us all, a Rabelaisian figure unstoppable in its need to eat, excrete and live. The conventional picture of God’s authority, Blake suggests, is based on physical discomfort, embarrassment and denial, while being perceived and maintained in purely physical terms – dominion and threat. In response, Blake starts up from his seat and performs ‘a brief ritual of scatological magic’.31 His turning round ‘three times three’ and the devils’ answering ‘ninefold yell’ echoes rituals to raise the Devil. This is not just to set himself against God. It is both to show the absurdity of



Old Nobodaddy aloft

the ceremonies of the conventional church and to comment on the ways that church and the rest of polite society have sought to demonize the ordinary and human. To challenge them, Blake is aligning himself with the tradition of the devilish Fool, a tradition we will trace more fully later. His rebellious action, mooning the Moon, brings a wide reaching series of consequences. The Moon blushes ‘scarlet red’, an image which both reveals the embarrassment of polite society (in An Island in the Moon the Moon is the home of a society ‘so much’ like England ‘you would think you was among your friends’, E440) and gives Blake an authority over the universe which defies conventional religious and scientific thinking. Blake’s power then extends to the literary world, tying Klopstock, a man known as the German Milton and with whose ideas of God as a stern, unforgiving father Blake disagreed, in knots. Appropriately, as Klopstock’s view of God is expressed in terms of physical domination, reducing the soul to little more than a gas trapped in the body, Blake’s triumph is to give him wind. Generating guilt at bodily existence, Blake suggests, is the weapon of those who seek to control us. Klopstock’s ‘soul’ is ‘lockd’ in his body by his ‘bowels’ and cannot be separated except by death, an image for the oppressions of polite religion that reappears in There is No Natural Religion and ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Songs of Innocence. Blake makes clear elsewhere in his work that this imposition of guilt, especially on our sexual drive, is used to control us by perverting our energy into war: ‘I am drunk with unsatiated love, / I must rush again to War: for the Virgin has frownd & refus’d’ (E222). War can mean either international or internecine conflict: ‘Then old Nobodaddy aloft . . . said I love hanging & drawing & quartering / Every bit as well as war & slaughtering . . . / To kill the people I am loth, / But If they rebel they must go to hell’ (E499). ‘Hanging & drawing & quartering’ was the fate of Guy Fawkes and the punishment of ‘traitors’: the British government is, by implication, setting itself up as Jehovah and attacking the liberty of the individual. That Nobodaddy is failing to respond to the creative possibilities of existence is shown by his reaction to seeing Blake’s bottom. He recalls the moments from Biblical history when humanity was at its most vulnerable: Noah locked up in the ark or Eve becoming aware of her nakedness. These are moments of potential regeneration and fertility, when the biblical God made deals with humanity, but Nobodaddy sees them only as shameful. In the line ‘since the old anything was created’ Blake suggests that this imposition of guilt is a consequence of taking on a physical form in the first place. But, true to the ribald carnivalesque style that he has adopted, Blake’s work is creative and constructive. He has,




literally, taken on the divine creativity, remaking ‘Blake’ as the narrator of his poem. And his action of mooning Nobodaddy, the bodiless deity, has made Nobodaddy human, making him aware of his ‘feeling[s]’ and, as a result, of his fallen status. The positions are reversed: it is now Jehovah who must beg for help from Blake. By stressing their common physicality, Blake debunks the idea of an all-powerful Nobodaddy and demonstrates the potential of a common uprising. Moreover, his joking, crude ditty is successful without access to polite literary form: ‘If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite / What might he not do if he sat down to write’. The excremental references are only offensive to an ideology that denies shared humanity. In saying that he can rebut Nobodaddy’s claims even when engaging him in forms of expression that Nobodaddy would class as impolite, Blake is championing the lowest form of human experience over the sterility of polite restraint. And if Blake’s ‘shite’ is better than Nobodaddy’s world-view, the poem implies, how much the better Blake’s writing, which can transform matter into an expression of the spiritual: the power to see heaven in a grain of sand. ‘Shite’ has been both degradation and blessing, a pattern common in comedy. Blake uses it to condemn bad art and bad religion, an accusation he repeats elsewhere in his work. In his Annotations to Reynolds (c.1808) he notes that ‘To My Eye Rubens’s Colouring is most Contemptible His Shadows are of a Filthy Brown somewhat of the Colour of Excrement’ (E655) and in the Note-book 1793 he rebukes those who use the Bible to support the system of prohibitive law necessary to maintain the capitalist economy with the couplet ‘The Hebrew Nation did not write it / Avarice & Chastity did shite it’, (E516). This is not mere namecalling – in comparison to the history of eighteenth-century jibes at authority, Blake’s language is mild32 – but the comic use of a symbol of human equality that uses the basest form of creativity to defeat the prohibitive and repressive image of Nobodaddy. The Blake-narrator is, to borrow Henderson’s term, an ‘obscene hero’ who brings creativity and justice.33 Here we can see, then, how the two-stage movement of the comic has not just criticized the idea of Jehovah, it has posited a positive, popular alternative. Of course, excremental references, jibes at authority and the assertion of new belief systems were all part and parcel of eighteenthcentury political satire. What is noticeably different about Blake’s comic vision, however, is the empowering inclusiveness of his ribald and rebellious jests and his attempt to use them to create a new understanding of our divine nature. He was, you could say, justifying the ways of Man to God. Such creative reading was not unknown in the late eighteenth




century. It was implicit in the debates surrounding the Millenarian pronouncements of ‘prophets’ such as Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, Sarah Flaxmer, Ann Lee and others. These prophets insisted that ‘views of futurity’ were not confined ‘to any particular rank, age, sex or condition’ (Brothers, Wonderful Prophecies, 1794), but while the idea of equality was dearly held in many radical spheres, these prophets believed that the power of prophecy lies in the interpretation. Unlike political enlightenment, which was invariably ‘given’, spiritual enlightenment depended on the reader. W. Sales, in Truth or Not Truth; or A Discourse on Prophets (London, 1795), describes prophetic writing as a ‘light’ that falls onto the hitherto dark, ‘Worldly’ mind of the reader, but it is up to the reader to judge for themselves the ‘wisdom’ of that light. Blake’s comic vision operates in the same way, but unlike these other prophets, he felt the best medium to convey his message was not in the sublime of fear and beauty, light and darkness, but in a ridiculous enlightenment that challenges the authority of light itself. In this chapter I have offered a definition of both the structure and function of the comic and suggested that it would be a useful tool for Blake to convey his concept of Vision. Now it is time to look at the eighteenth-century comic world as a whole, to assess what sort of inspiration and influence it might have offered to shape that vision.




Mirth at the errors of a foe: the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comic World

Fielding warned in the Covent-Garden Journal that ‘Of all Kinds of Writing there is none on which . . . Variety of Opinions is so common as in those of Humour’,1 and it would of course be a mistake to assume that the eighteenth-century comic world was any less rich or complex than our own, or that we can do more than point to general trends and themes of development.2 Nevertheless, while recognizing that such distinctions are inevitably arbitrary, it will help our understanding of Blake’s comedy to classify his sources of humorous influence into a number of distinct types. The most obvious starting point is in the humour that was inherited from the classical authors, shaped by Ben Jonson, and was arguably the defining literary mode of the age: satire.

Satire The eighteenth century teems with satirists, from Dryden to Gillray, Swift to Fielding, and a whole host of political scribblers in between. At its most obvious satire is, as Brown wrote in 1751, ‘that Species of Writing [or drawing] which excites Contempt with Laughter’.3 It had a long and honourable tradition, justified by Aristotle’s supposed opinion that the purpose of comedy was to expose vice as a form of moral instruction. John Dennis expresses this idea succinctly in his Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter (1722): comedy ‘should expose Persons to our View . . . whose follies we may despise; and by shewing us what is done upon the Comick Stage, to shew us what ought never to be done upon the Stage of the World’. In similar mood, the great stage comedian Samuel Foote, in 19



2

his introduction to The Comic Theatre, being a Free Translation of all the Best French Comedies (1762), insists that the ‘original purpose of comedy was to expose particular follies for the punishment of individuals, and as an example to the whole community’. Like many satirists, Foote used the image of satire as an ‘important medicine’, purging vice from those who saw it. This image was a development of the medieval concept of the bodily ‘humours’ and had been famously espoused by Ben Jonson: ‘wholesome remedies’ and ‘fair correctives’ for the ‘diseased’.4 As I mentioned in the last chapter, eighteenth-century satirical theory often cited the work of Thomas Hobbes to justify its programme of ridicule and chastisement. (This was only to be expected, of course: virtually everyone who contended that social relations were based solely on power used Hobbes as a kind of noumenal gunslinger to support their cause.) Hobbes had claimed that laughter was provoked by the ‘new and unexpected’. Such triumphing could be painful, but while the satirists might exempt certain groups from censure (the poor, sick, evil and virtuous), they nevertheless saw its socially abrasive nature as a proof of its worth. Dryden claimed that ‘there’s a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even when it hurts’.5 It was also, with its rebellious mocking of official restrictions and the sudden reversal of social norms, an extremely useful political weapon. In 1729 Anthony Collins argued that satire was the only recourse of the oppressed;6 in The Rights of Man (1791), Tom Paine identified the power of laughter in effecting social change.7 It made an ideal vehicle for the emerging political consciousness of the artisan class and Blake’s radical sympathies brought him into contact with many dissenting movements that, in their pamphlets, sermons and meetings used satire as a means for political challenge and education. Among others, David V. Erdman and Heather Glen have made invaluable contributions towards establishing the similarities between Blake’s Songs and the language of contemporary satirical radical writing, with its parodies of adverts, political statements and nursery rhymes for ‘Children Six Feet High’.8 It is a major feature of Blake’s notebook jottings and marginalia, where he tried his hand at both personal and political invective. One example of this is an epigram in the Note-book 1793 that attacks the hypocritical capitalist interests of orthodox Christianity: Why of the sheep do you not learn peace Because I dont want you to shear my fleece. (E469) The parson wants his flock to be literally ovine: stupid, passive and peaceful in submission. Against this, Blake offers an epigram that, in




usual satiric fashion, parodies the language of his opponent to expose the hypocrisy of the motives behind it, and offers an alternative that appeals to the reader as a glimpse of truth. It creates a sense of rightthinking by juxtaposing the parson’s sterile, archaic, apolitical and pastoral imagery with the modern, urban vocabulary of Piggot’s Political Dictionary (1795) and contemporary slang such as might be found in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), where ‘to be fleeced’ meant to be cheated or robbed, in the style of a witty and populist proverb – a folk or biblical saying. Sharp as it is, this epigram also demonstrates the difficulty of separating eighteenth-century comedy into different strands. The kind of association it plays upon – sheep, fleece, fleeced – could be cited as a good example of the sort of incongruous humour recommended by Francis Hutcheson in 1729, and to which we will turn shortly. But Blake had clearly observed the structures of his satiric forebears. The parodying of well-known texts (what might be described as forging, in both senses, cultural coinage) was a feature of the socialist movements of the Interregnum in the late 1640s and 1650s whose output greatly influenced eighteenth-century radicalism. One example is the Lord’s Prayer of 1647: ‘Our fathers, which think the Houses of Parliament to be Heaven . . . you lead us into rebellion and all other mischiefs, but cannot deliver us from evil’.9 Blake recognized this tradition when he produced his parody of Dr Thornton’s new translation of The Lord’s Prayer: Jesus our Father . . . Thy Kingdom on Earth is Not nor thy Will done but Satans . . . Give us This Eternal Day our own right Bread & take away Money or Debt or Tax a Value or Price as we have all things common among us . . . Leave us not in Parsimony . . . For thine is the Kingdom & the Power & the Glory & not Caesars or Satans Amen. (E668–9) These are just a couple of simple examples, but they show Blake using satire to make political and moral statements, a style Blake continues to employ in his longer works, including America, An Island, The Marriage and The First Book of Urizen, as I will discuss later. Another part of Blake’s work where satire can be seen to exert its influence is in his designs. The period from the 1760s to the 1790s saw the growth of an unprecedented public obsession with satiric prints.10 The earliest of these were largely emblematic, almost cabalistic. Another descendant of the Interregnum, they were allegorical and prophetic, a chance to offer levelling ideas in a turbulent political climate. Like



Mirth at the errors of a foe 21

epigrams, they were the sort of thing that, according to Addison, might appeal to the ‘Upper Gallery Audience in a Play-house’.11 They brought a new kind of political and iconographic literacy to the population of London and their development coincided with, and to a certain extent inspired the popularity of the Anti-Jacobin and ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ movements. Over time, the caricatures grew increasingly sophisticated, showing a complex interplay of style, content and imagery that was both familiar and de-familiarizing, at once re-visioning classical art, contemporary politics and street language. Ironic and informed, they relied on a constant referentiality as a source of meaning. For example, Fuseli’s ‘Nightmare’ is reworked in Rowlandson’s ‘The Covent Garden Nightmare’ (1784). By making the female subject of Fuseli’s original a voluptuous denizen of Covent Garden with the face of Charles James Fox, Rowlandson is suggesting that while Fox takes his politics seriously, his attitude is as pretentious as ‘high’ art, his opinions are as disturbed as a nightmare and his political morals little better than an expensive and dramatic version of prostitution, which may end up revisiting him like an avenging ghost.12 There was also a great deal of crossover between caricature images and satirical writing. In Piggot’s Dictionary the entry for ‘pig’ suggests the populace was held in contempt by political masters who regarded them as the ‘swinish multitude’. In Gillray’s print ‘Presages of the Millennium’ (1795), Pitt is shown running down a herd of pigs. These pigs may be the cowering French revolutionaries, the cannibalistic destroyers of freedom and liberty, in which case the print is sympathetic to Pitt. However, his skeletal, threatening figure, with the serpent-like King trailing in a cloud like a bad fart behind him, also presents him as a threat to the British underclass.13 As a youthful collector and professional engraver, tavern-dwelling radical thinker, one-time owner of a print shop and even as a London pedestrian, Blake was constantly surrounded by such prints. They were everywhere from shop windows to magazines, on playing cards, pottery, even on handkerchiefs. They graced the walls of private libraries and public inns, art galleries and street corners and formed the backdrop to the puppet and live theatres. Blake clearly responded to them by adopting elements of this radical language into his own work. Among others, Jon Mee, Marcus Wood and Vincent Carretta have found satirical elements in many of Blake’s designs and, again, more will be said of this in a later chapter. If satire could place society under the microscope, however, it often proved to be a distorting lens. It was certainly not a medium to spread a gospel in. The ‘sacred Weapon’ was double-edged: as Tillotson put it in




1696, ‘as apt for mischief as for good purposes’.14 It could either be completely misunderstood – as happened in the famous case of Swift’s cannibalistic The Shortest Way with Dissenters – or it could be used as a form of repression. It relied on the implicit claim that the satirist was ‘holier than others’ (E201). While the satirist’s stated target was ‘Affectation’ – Swift defended satirizing personal deformity by claiming he ‘spare[d] a hump, or crooked nose / Whose owners set not up for beaux’15 – it is always down to the satirist to decide what was affectation, what natural beauty. Fielding likewise claimed that ‘natural imperfections’ should not be objects of derision; ‘but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness aims to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth’.16 Those who admit they are ugly get pity (and Blake often questions the motives of such a reaction) and those who do not are laughed at, with the intention of separating them from the crowd and controlling them. The satirist claims to be representing a ‘widely-held norm’ to which all ‘right-thinking’ readers would subscribe, clearing the air of obfuscation and providing a glimpse of the truth, but in fact that truth ‘exists nowhere but in language’.17 Satire operates in a fictional, stereotyped world, usually contrasting an amoral urban culture with a stupididyllic, often almost pornographic pastoral, all manipulated by a false logic based on sleight of hand. For example, in the graphic prints of the 1780s, if a satirical victim could be caricatured as a large person, he could therefore be represented as an elephant and therefore he was slowwitted. Of course, the satirist would argue that the victim had had plentiful, even unfair amounts of representation in another discourse, in the dominant commercial or social sphere, for example. But satire’s essential mode was that of the ‘Hypocrite’. Blake felt that such hypocrisy was the way of the ‘Pharisees’ and ‘Moral Law’ and was opposed to ‘the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin’ (E201). Despite his own frequent use of satire, he is quick to criticize its limitations. He complained that ‘Aristotle says Characters are either Good or Bad: now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character’ (E269) – rather, he felt, goodness and badness are conditions imposed by society. Satire, in trying to impose a unity of view, produces ‘a Moral like a sting in the tail’ (E269), akin to having to undergo a second fall. Later Blake would remark that ‘Caricature Prints’ could ‘Pervert’ the eye so that one could only ‘See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity’ (E702).18 The chief problem, he felt, was that satire could not convey any sense of the divine. Picking up the idea of a sword as an image for satire and the traditional acknowledgement of the Greeks and Romans as masters of satire, he likens the




‘Grecian Mocks & Roman sword’ (E202) to the sword that spilled the blood of Jesus and tried to deny the doctrine of forgiveness for sins. The limitations of satire were, of course, well rehearsed in the eighteenth century. Addison noted in The Spectator of December 1711: ‘If the Talent of Ridicule were employed to laugh Men out of Vice and Folly, it might be of some use . . . but instead . . . we find that it is generally made use of to laugh Men out of Virtue and good Sense . . . attacking every thing that is . . . Decent and Praise-worthy in Human Life.’19 As the century progressed many comic theorists and practitioners turned their backs on the divisive nature of satire. By the 1760s Lord Kames was attacking satirists for showing a lack of taste and by 1776 James Beattie, distinguishing between the ludicrous (the amusing) and the ridiculous (satire), was calling the latter ‘unnatural’.20 In the 1780s a whole host of voices was raised against satire. Hugh Blair, in his famous Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, while admitting that the ‘general idea of Comedy, as a satyrical exhibition of the improprieties and follies of mankind, is an idea very moral and useful’ at the same time confesses ‘that ridicule is an instrument of such a nature that . . . there is hazard of its doing mischief . . . to society’.21 Knox, in his Essays Moral and Literary (1782) went further, to declare that ‘Ridicule . . . seems to become a weapon in the hands of the wicked, destructive of taste, feeling, morality and religion’.22 This theoretical disdain was matched in the literary field. While Richard Steele, in his epilogue to The Lying Lover (1704) could dismiss it as the bitter art form of rival playwrights – ‘Laughter’s a distorted passion, born / Of sudden self-esteem and sudden scorn; / Which, when ‘tis o’er, the men in pleasure wise / Both him that moved it and themselves despise’ – at the other end of the century, William Cowper felt able to condemn it to the dustbin of history, stating in his poem ‘Table Talk’ (1782) that satire ‘has long since done his best’. The problem was, in the satiric world there were no moral absolutes. In many ways the great satirical artist Gillray personified this ambivalence: a radical in the pay of conservatives, his satiric thrusts lent power to their victims by confirming their status as worthy of caricature. It is reported that even the Royal family he so scabrously portrayed eagerly awaited each new offering. If the reforming power of the poet-satirist had become tainted, then one resolution was to change to the poetironist. Of course, it is impossible to separate the terms irony and satire23 and they were often used together in the eighteenth century.24 But irony came to be seen as a more knowing, more restrained form than the bellicose burlesque. In its sense of undercutting meaning, rather than positing a ‘norm’, irony undercut satiric superiority by opposing the idea of




superiority in itself. Certainly a number of the end lines of Blake’s lyrics seem to use irony in this way, for example in An Island (‘Good English Hospitality O then it did not fail’, E461) and the Songs (‘So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm’, E10). However, the trouble with irony is that its moral absolutes are even less certain than those of satire. At least satire claims the moral high ground, however divisively: irony is often a matter of tone and invites the possibility that, ultimately, no absolute moral meaning exists. Pursued to an end ‘an ironic temper can dissolve everything, in an infinite chain of solvents’.25 And as Kierkegaard notes, if nothing has any meaning and everything is open to question, then the self is unable to perceive any consciousness higher than itself and is thus unable to receive God’s benediction.26 Blake agreed: ‘sin and the destruction of order are the same’ (E584). As with satire, the effect on the conscious self is once more to create a sense of isolation and fear, leaving it ripe for the exploitative superstitions so profitable to the rule of law and commercial interests. What was to be the alternative? A clue comes in John Dryden’s preface to An Evening’s Love: or, The Mock Astrologer (1671). While citing the usual satirist’s creed that comedy deals with ‘human imperfections’ and prompts laughter at the ridiculous to ‘reform’ the laughers, Dryden nevertheless feels that some objects are too low for comedy. He calls it ‘farce’ and derides those authors who would write ‘so ill as to please their audience’. Here is the voice of an emergent middle class, objecting on the one hand to the po-faced Puritanism of the Interregnum and on the other to the excesses of the Restoration rake.27 Instead of vulgarity, Dryden suggests, it is ‘things unexpected’ that makes us laugh, because the fancy has a strange appetite, ‘like that of a longing woman’. In 1729 Francis Hutcheson took that argument a step further, criticizing Hobbes’ view of ‘superiority’ and, picking up on the term Madius had used, stating that laughter arose from the bringing together of incongruous ideas.28 Incongruity, uniqueness and eccentricity came to be something to be cherished, the origin of a gentle humour that could make ‘every body smile, and no body blush’.29 This new type of gentle joviality, adopting Falstaff as its hero, appealed to a class of Englishmen content to forgive themselves small foibles because they believed in civility, tolerance and consideration, facing life’s difficulties with ‘Chearfulness & Good Humour’ (E710) for all ‘and no objection to the pudding’.30 Addison, writing in The Free-Holder magazine, encouraged his readers to prefer the cheerfulness of a good nature to the sharp wit of a good humour, arguing that comedy, while still instructive, should also be innocent.31 Steele went further to claim such humour was an English




birthright, like Liberty; Sterne called it a national characteristic, like the weather; Leigh Hunt summed it up as ‘a Merry England, Christmas-andfireside sort of thing’.32 Throughout the eighteenth century this goodnatured idea of comedy gained considerable influence. Corbyn Morris, in his An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule (1744), marked this change by preferring the imagination and sympathy of Shakespeare to the satirical gibes of Jonson. While noting that Jonson drew the ‘Humour in his characters’ with ‘Skill and Judgement’ and in his comic scenes ‘expos’d and ridicul’d Folly and Vice’, Shakespeare ‘has usher’d in Joy, Frolic and Happiness . . . with Johnson you are confin’d and instructed, with Shakespear unbent and dissolv’d in Joy’.33 Hobbes’ triumphant cackle was increasingly out of favour and in its place came the laughter of benevolence, innocent and childlike.34 Thus the second of our strands of the eighteenth-century comic world, sentimental humour, came into being.

Sentimental comedy Sentimental comedy would certainly have found favour with Blake in some respects, especially in that it approved of genius, inspiration and eccentricity. Warton, writing on Pope in 1756, offered ‘a creative and glowing imagination’ as the only true quality of a poet, ‘Wit and Satire’ being ‘transitory and perishable’.35 It also held as a central doctrine that ‘each is foolish in his own way, and all must be respected’.36 It was, clearly, an attractive style for Blake to follow. It acts as a source of visionary inspiration, both through childish joy – in ‘Infant Joy’ of the Songs, infant pleasure prompts the poet’s song: ‘Thou dost smile, / I sing the while’ (E16) – and through eccentricity – the strange antics of the narrator and prophets of The Marriage, walking barefoot, eating dung and lying on only one side, hold the potential for raising humanity into ‘a perception of the infinite’ (E39). Even the most cursory glance at Blake’s work shows that many of his poems accord with this amiable comic theme but, like satire, it had to be used carefully. Although apparent opposites, satire and sentimental humour often existed alongside each other, even in the work of one author.37 However, they also shared a certain inability to articulate a vision of God behind the moral values they claimed to be promoting. It was but a short step from the sentimental to sentimentality, an insipid world where lack of moral certainty was made worse by an obsession with nature and a general air of melancholy. Sentimental comedy, inviting its audience to weep as well as laugh, rapidly became the art of smug self-congratulation, the expression of a




society content with itself and only supporting those who adopted its (largely middle-class) values. A correspondent identified only as ‘IWLB’ epitomizes this desire to see society reflect his own image when voicing a concern about the sentimental comedy, John Bull. In a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1803, he remarks that ‘being, like the justly celebrated Sir Roger de Coverley, inclined to patronize and to enjoy innocent amusement’ he decided to take his family to see the new play ‘with the hope of having all our old English prejudices gratified, by seeing the national character exhibited in a respectable point of view’ in a ‘good Church of England comedy’. However, the play disappoints him, largely due to a speech that tries to separate ‘Charity from the sterner virtues . . . Truth, Justice, Prudence and Chastity’. Throughout his work Blake questioned the value of such ‘virtues’: for example one of his Proverbs of Hell remarks that ‘Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity’ (E35) and in Milton he asserts that it is one of the ‘four pillars of tyranny’ (E128). In his criticism of the heroine of the great sentimental comedy Clarissa, he complains that sentimental comedy represented human existence as nothing more than a set of ‘Historical combinations & Moral Sentiments’ (E633) and ‘Moral laws’ were part of the ‘cruel punishments’ of ‘Jehovah’ (E103). He also disliked the pastoral obsession sentimentalism implied, poking fun at it in An Island in the sorrowful Mrs Gittipin, a character whose name was perhaps inspired by that of the Reverend William Gilpin, author of Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1792). So it is not surprising that, while he enjoyed both the radical power of satire and the inclusive forgiveness of sentimental comedy, he criticized both in his famous letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799 (see appendix), one that is worth commenting on at some length. Trusler had produced a volume entitled The Distinction Between Words Esteemed Synonymous in the English Language in 1783. In it he made the classic sentimentalist’s distinction between good-humour (a satirical wit) and good-nature (a cheerful deportment), and offered definitions of wit as something intellectual and potentially painful, humour as vulgar and harmlessly popular, mirth as a transient flash of rapture in a mind disposed to gloom and happiness as the fortunate possession of worldly wealth. Blake’s letter, prompted by his belief that Trusler had ‘fall’n out with the Spiritual World’, both makes an interesting response to Trusler’s definitions and serves as an indication of how Blake saw the comic and vision as connected. First, Blake admits that he enjoys the ‘Fun’ of satiric scurrility, but then remarks that too much fun can become ‘loathsom’. Satire can quickly move from deconstruction to denigration, an insight Blake later repeats: ‘A point of light is a




Witticism; many are destructive of all Art’ (E579). He then notes that ‘Mirth’ is better than ‘Fun’, both picking up on the sentimental preference for good-humour and the hint in Trusler’s definition of the connection between Mirth and inspiration, the sudden flash of poetic insight. In these terms, Mirth is a sublime moment of revelation and in his print ‘Mirth’ (B601a/b, L54), to which we will return in chapter 7, Blake suggests that this might lead to divine revelation. At the top of his humorous heap, Blake places ‘happiness’. He contrasts it with Trusler’s views of material possession, which can soon be lost, like a miser’s gold, and with the conventional religious idea of ‘bliss’, something only obtainable after death, by stating that happiness can be found in this world if one has imagination and vision. His examples of vision, trees and grapes, both appear elsewhere in his work to be closely associated with the comic, and he links vision with an ability to read the world: ‘Nature is Imagination itself’. Trusler’s lack of spiritual insight, Blake suggests, comes from his lack of comic understanding. In his letter Blake makes a comparison between the miser’s guinea and the sun, and yeas later he returned to this in his description of ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement’. ‘What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty’ (E566). The sun was an important image for Blake, a potent symbol of the necessity and benefit of Visionary perception. It can be seen either as purely physical, the natural ‘dead sun . . . a phantasy of evil Man’ (E605), a ‘glowing illusion’ (E94) subject to the laws of oppressive rational thought, or as an inspirational sign of divine creativity. He makes this point in a famous comment to Crabb Robinson: ‘I have conversed with the Spiritual Sun – I saw him on Primrose-hill. He said, “Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?” “No,” I said, “that [and Blake pointed to the sky] “that is the Greek Apollo. He is Satan.”’ 38 He repeats this idea in his designs. The frontispiece of The Song of Los shows Urizen worshipping the sun (B270). We only see his backside: if we believe Urizen’s phantasm, we will be stuck like Moses inn the rock, waiting for divine laws to be given to us. The final plate of The Song of Los shows Los resting on his hammer, admiring the sun as a spiritual work of art (B277). A correct perception of the sun was also an image at the heart of contemporary debate on the sublime. In his influential The Grounds for Criticism in Poetry (1704), John Dennis had contrasted the sun of ordinary conversation, ‘a flat shining body, of about two foot diameter’ with the sun as seen in meditation, ‘a vast and glorious Body, and the top of




all visible Creation, and the brightest material Image of the Divinity’.39 In Blake’s view, Dennis’ relationship to this material Image was questionable. For Dennis the most sublimely terrible idea was that of an angry god and to experience the sublime was to desire engulfment, ‘a pleasing rape upon the very Soul of the Reader’. Dennis’ image of the top of all Creation carries with it the sense of domination, of colonization by an imperious Other. By representing God as the sun, Dennis has confused God’s attributes with those of the physical sun, a confusion Blake highlights in the character of the little black boy in the Songs who feels God’s ‘love’ has ‘burnt’ him. Dennis’ comment on the sun, and the aesthetic of beauty and fear it represents, is important to our discussion because, in his critical work, he was also a highly influential writer on comedy. He is not unique in this, of course. To eighteenth-century theorists both comedy and the sublime were matters of ‘taste’ and systems of moral instruction.40 Many, like Addison, noted that the ‘surprise’ of the burlesque and the sublime operated in the same way.41 Most, however, thought that the sublime and the ridiculous were in opposition: Lord Monboddo (Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 1776) characterized the ridiculous as the very opposite of beauty.42 Dennis too, while asserting that the purpose of both the comic and the sublime was ‘to instruct and reform the World, that is, to bring Mankind from Irregularity, Extravagance and Confusion’43 by arousing our passions, felt that of the two the comic was the lesser force. It was associated with the ‘Vulgar Passions’: those aroused by our immediate perception of an event. The sublime, on the other hand, dealt with the ‘Enthusiastic Passions’, which were ‘thoughts in meditation.’44 The sublime was most apparent in an image of a ‘Terrible Object . . . in Violent Action or Motion’, and when the soul (what we might call consciousness) felt the delightful horror of perceiving its utter helplessness in front of this object, it would recognize the awful wonder of God. At the same time, Dennis pointed out, it would also be ‘utterly incapable’ of recognizing any difference ‘between the Images and the things themselves’.45 Dennis saw such instruction as the ‘Design of True Religion’,46 a conclusion with which many sublime theorists agreed. Throughout the eighteenth century the Bible was cited as the brightest and best source of sublime imagery. Melmoth’s The Sublime and Beautiful of Scripture (1777) is typical in its assessment of the Bible as giving us the perfect image of the sublime, contrasting the terrible authority of the Creator with the beauty of his creation. Despite the theoretical protestations to the contrary, Dennis’ sublime is what underlies Trusler’s spirituality and understanding of comedy. The




problem with both, Blake felt, was the problem with virtually all conventional sublime theories. Longinus, Burke, Priestley and Blair, to name but a few, had all, in the words of the Gentleman’s Magazine, reviewing the Reverend George Miller’s An essay on the origin and nature of our idea of the Sublime (1796), attempted to apply the ‘regularity of scientific method’ to the ‘doubtful phaenomena of taste’.47 They had assumed that meaning lay beyond themselves, that truth was a given to be experienced through the senses. In focusing on the impact images had upon them, they neglected their own part in investing those images with significance – indeed, Burke went so far as to maintain that sublimity arose from such a profusion of images that the mind is dazzled, thus abnegating all responsibility for reading. While his poetry is full of both natural beauty and howling terror, Blake’s conception of the sublime differs from one like Burke’s or Kant’s. The twin pillars of conventional sublime aesthetics were beauty and fear: on the one hand, the material world, and on the other, divine vengeance or absolute nothingness. Blake is clear that ‘Burkes Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful is founded on the Opinions of Newton & Locke’ (E660) and these authorities he categorically refutes. His own idea of the sublime is not dazzling or distant; it is distinct, particular, significant only when the reader recognizes their part in creating meaning.48 Many writers have noted that throughout Blake’s work, both verbal and as visual,49 he insists upon great accuracy of expression: ‘Without Minute Neatness of Execution. The. Sublime cannot Exist! Grandeur of Ideas is founded on Precision of Ideas’ (E646). What is less commonly recognized is why he does this, especially as it seems to go against another of his much-quoted sentiments, from the letter to Dr Trusler previously discussed: ‘what is not too Explicit is fittest for Instruction, because it rouzes the faculties to act’. Blake realized in order to produce ‘the Most Sublime Poetry’ (E730) he had to ‘Create a System’ (E153) that would stimulate awareness in the reader that it is they who create meaning. When he states that ‘General Knowledge is Remote Knowledge it is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too’ (E560) he wants the reader to be wary of accepting the ‘Metaphysical Jargon’ (E576) of conventional readings and to recognize their responsibility in the reading process. There is obscurity in his work, but it is part of his determination to rouse the faculties of his readers to recognize the significance of their acts of reading by making sure that there are many possible meanings for them from which to choose. It is what de Luca calls the ‘overdeterminate clarity of presence’ in Blake’s work; such a great condensation of meaning that the reader is invited to throw away the idea that signifiers are self-effacing ‘servants of referentiality’.50




This dual movement, of revelation and creation, this revealing of that which was ‘hid’ (E39), is precisely what we have found in the comic.51 That which Dennis and other conventional sublime theorists had discarded as a lesser form – the amusing, the ridiculous, the grotesque – contained the seeds of a truer understanding of God than they could possibly have envisaged: human, imaginative, constantly creative, equal, happy. Dennis had claimed that poetry was superior to philosophy and that the sublime was only to be found in the grandest poetry, which has a morally uplifting effect on the reader. In response, Blake’s definition of the ‘grandest poetry’ is comically immoral: ‘the grandest Poetry is Immoral the Grandest characters Wicked. Very Satan . . . Jesus a wine bibber . . . Cunning & Morality are not Poetry but Philosophy the Poet is Independent & Wicked the Philosopher is Dependent & Good’. (E634) Dennis was, in many ways, at the start of the movement that would elevate the study of poetry to that of a new religion.52 Accusing Jesus of being a ‘wine bibber’ pokes fun at Dennis’ stuffy convention, points out his misunderstanding of true Christianity and highlights Christ’s individuality, his real existence among the poor in a world of shared bodily sensation that does not allow for the elevation of one man above another. Seeing Jesus as a drinker, Blake implies, may lead us to a more profitable relationship with landlord God than to revere and distance him as part of a sham aesthetic order which is shown, in The Marriage for example, to perpetuate the Yahoo culture it pretends to disparage. Many eighteenth-century artists used the comic to mock conventional ideas of the sublime. Even the simple imagery of satiric comic prints, a ‘universal language of pictures’ that spoke to the ‘common people’, offered a radical alternative to the polite aesthetics of Burke, Locke and Reynolds.53 In their own way, both Rowlandson’s ‘The Covent Garden Nightmare’ and Gillray’s ‘Presages of the Millennium’ parody conventional ideas of the sublime, showing the grotesque revelation of the corruption of ‘high’ reality.54 Blake often uses grotesque images in his work, from the beast on the title-page of Night Thoughts to the floating heads and chimera that adorn his longer manuscripts. But this was more than a simple disruption of convention, a chance to indulge in the licentious aspects of satiric humour. For Blake, the comic was not just a criticism of the sublime; it was an alternative form. Gillray has been called the embodiment of the carnival spirit in the eighteenth century,55 and in his determination to relocate the sublime in the ridiculous, Blake was actively participating in that aspect of the comic that constitutes the next major feature in our portrait of the eighteenth-century comic world – the carnivalesque.





Carnival is a fundamental form of human activity, appearing in many guises in different cultures: the ancient ‘Saturnalias’, the Jewish ‘Purim’ and the Indian ‘Holi’.56 The ‘carnivalesque’, in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, embraces a wide range of experience, including ritual spectacles such as fairs, popular feasts and wakes, processions and competitions . . . comic shows, mummery and dancing, open-air amusements with costumes and masks, giants, dwarfs, monsters [and] trained animals . . . comic verbal compositions, both oral and written [satires, puns], parodies, travesties, farce . . . oaths, slang, humour, popular tricks and jokes, scatalogical forms, in fact all the ‘low’ and ‘dirty’ sorts of folk humour.57 It is frequently marked by the grotesque, the representation of the body in terms normally considered offensive by the established order: consumption, defecation, copulation, deformity, protrusion and death. Carnival is ‘a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled’.58 It is a ritualized form of transgression, a trope for both demystification and reconstruction. It is anti-taxonomic to the point of preferring multiplicity to singularity, the unity of all to the authority of one. It is also a place where the linguistic codes of decorum and enormity exist side by side, offering practitioners of both a new ‘mode of understanding’ the world.59 To come into contact with carnival is in some sense to be degraded, but in a special sense that prompts a return from hell to heaven by reaffirming our common humanity and social equality. Whatever threatens becomes a blessing: the custard pie turns into the communion wafer. At a carnival we eat, drink, laugh, converse with our social superiors on equal terms, re-establish communal bonds and find new ways of understanding the world. This includes learning to accept the limitations of our physical existence. In the carnivalesque a tomb becomes a womb (an image that often appears in Blake’s work). It not only celebrates ‘the defeat of power, of earthly kings, of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts’ but ultimately our triumph over the ‘mystic terror of God [and] death’.60 Through its transgression of aesthetic boundaries, emphasizing those elements outside the conventional structures of society and taste – the mad, the prophetic, the grand sweep of life and death – carnival has a spiritual



The carnivalesque

message. It puts humanity back at the centre of the universe, where we recognize that ‘all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various)’ (E2) and enjoy a world, however briefly, based on the good-humoured provision of want and the implicit promise of reunion with a forgiving, restoring God. Of course, for the modern reader the term ‘carnivalesque’ is closely associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Although not the inventor of the term, he used it to identify certain aspects of popular festivals and their literary equivalents which, he felt, represented the anti-authoritarian triumph of the people against repression. His writings on Rabelais and the medieval attitude to comedy provided a landmark criticism that restored the bawdy and amusingly disruptive to the forefront of social and religious expression. Recently, however, Bakhtin’s theories have been subject to a great deal of adverse critical scrutiny. While it is hard not to be charmed by a man who, when he ran out of cigarette papers, calmly smoked every page of the only copy of his manuscript on Goethe, many modern theorists have called his idea of the carnivalesque inherently flawed. They see it as a selective and politically motivated back projection of Renaissance literature onto an assumed proto-socialist marketplace.61 Rather than being the democratic free exchange he claimed, they say, carnival is a ‘licensed’ form (Terry Eagleton) that at best reminds us of the laws it flouts (Umberto Eco). Other commentators on Bakhtin’s ‘groaningly familiar’62 concept have stressed the destructiveness of carnival experience throughout history, citing various murderous riots, suicide-provoking charivari, skimmington rides, racist pogroms and the persistent criminal behaviour that still dogs modern street festivals from Brazil’s Rio to London’s Notting Hill. Martin Buzacott is not alone in calling carnival ‘ritualized acts of aggression’ and stating that it coexists with ‘oppressive devices for social control’.63 In the words of Twelfth Night it is no more than the work of an ‘allow’d fool’, a method of leaching off revolutionary fervour and reinforcing, by means of abuse, the social norms. It may be, of course, that in most people’s experience the carnivalesque is indeed at best a ‘malleable’ space, to use Dentith’s term, where laughter is ambivalent, both mocking and triumphant. The satisfaction of bodily impulses, rather than leading to spiritual enlightenment, may only show you the limitations of your own body or, if you are lucky, the possibilities of someone else’s. Indeed, while the laugh of cruelty has nothing to do with comedy, the violent satire that dogs carnival experience makes Bakhtin’s work at best ‘a vision, not a programme’.64 Whatever the limitations of Bakhtin’s definitions, however, it should not be forgotten that the real value of Bakhtin’s theory is in highlighting the




carnivalesque’s refusal ‘to understand any fixed or final allocation of authority’65 except the celebration of all-humanity. In doing so he reminds us that the carnivalesque is not just animal spirits, crude social rebellion or even, as Arthur Lindley puts it, the ‘interrogation of distopias’,66 but an integral part of religious experience. From the ancient Saturnalia to the Medieval ‘festa stultorum’, carnivals are closely linked to the ecclesiastical calendar and reminded their participants of the ‘foolishness of preaching’ (I Corinthians 1: 22). Carnival, Lent and Easter were not in opposition but, as Bruegel reminds us, part of the same picture. Bakhtin expresses this as carnival’s power to embrace ‘all people [in the] return of Saturn’s golden age . . . the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance [where people are] reborn for new, purely human relations’.67 The carnivalesque would have been a tremendously attractive comic style for Blake to practice. He gives us a hint to that end when a claim that his work was visionary ends with the assertion that it ‘is an Endeavour to Restore <what the Ancients calld> the Golden Age’ (E555). Carnival was an ancient, traditional form and in the eighteenth-century comic world there would have been two interconnected sources of the carnivalesque for him to draw upon. One was the traditional festive practices, attitudes and customs that surrounded the fairs, theatres, entertainments and temporal and church festivals of London and the neighbouring countryside. The other was the writings and investigations of the antiquarian movement that achieved widespread popularity and aesthetic significance in the late eighteenth century. The festive life of London’s streets was extensive. One of the most obvious expressions of it was the capital’s many fairs. Several of the most important were in locations Blake cited as significant in his poetry. Tottenham Court, Paddington, Hampstead, Highgate and Wandsworth regularly became filled with the ‘Tumultuous Crowd’ of carnival. The Public Advertiser of 5 September 1785, reviewing the recent Smithfield fair, gives a picture of the kind of delights that awaited the average fairgoer: There [are] wild beasts from all parts of the world roaring, puppets squeaking, sausages frying, Kings and Queens raving, pickpockets diving, round-abouts twirling, hackney coaches and poor horses driving, and all Smithfield alive-o! The Learned Horse paid his obedience to the company, as did about a score of monkeys, several beautiful young ladies of about forty, Punches, Pantaloons, Harlequins, Columbine, three giants, a dwarf, and a giantess. These were not all





There were other delights, too: a fair was a place where a simple citizen could come face to face with riches gathered from the booths and markets of the furthest reaches of the known world. There were menageries of stuffed animals, including a famous tiger, on tour from Hall’s City Road museum; Ambroise’s Ombres Chinoises displays; Yankee clowns, Chinese Harlequins and Botany Bay natives. You could see plays and burlesques in live and puppet theatres; tumblers and conjurors; bird imitators, equestrian displays or Brunn’s daredevil balancing act. For those with a taste for the exotic, there were numerous animal acts, like Rossignol’s performing birds, who used to stage a pageant of the shooting of a deserter just around the corner from Hercules Buildings, Blake’s Lambeth home. The fairs also attracted a number of freak shows, which were enduringly popular. We may find such things distasteful now but, significantly, contemporary reports of these shows stress the wonder inspired by the extremes of human experience, rather than merely disparaging imperfections. Powell, the human salamander who could keep burning coals in his mouth, or O’Brien, the eight-foot Irish giant, or the boy whose eye showed the words ‘Deus Meus’ written in the pattern of his iris were treated with awe, not ridicule. It is clear that Blake was familiar with this fairground world. He makes direct reference to several famous sideshow attractions. In a Notebook 1808–11 jotting he mentions the Learned Pig and the Hare playing on a Tabor. Tuneful hares were something of a tradition at London fairs: Jonson mentions one in his Bartholomew Fair, but in 1783 Blake would have been able to see both the hare and the pig together in the booth of a showman called Bisset, a man whose performing ensemble also stretched to a troupe of opera-singing cats. These famous felines also make an appearance in Blake’s work, in the mention of ‘virtuous cats’ in the conversations of An Island. When in Lambeth, Blake lived just around the corner from two notable places of public entertainment: Apollo Gardens and Astley’s ‘Amphitheatre of the Arts’. Astley, a retired soldier and Blake’s landlord, started out as the star of a daring equestrian display, but increased his troupe to include a loose touring collection of dancers, singers and a performing monkey called General Jacko. The Amphitheatre’s spectacle seems to have made quite an impression on Blake. Jacko ‘appears’ in An Island; monkeys, machines and wild beasts



who came to Smithfield to gratify the public: there were sleight of hand men and fire-eaters; the last, however, were not quite so numerous as those who eat of the deliciously flavoured sausages and oysters with which the fair abounded.68

are arguably the source for much of the chaotic imagery in The Marriage and at the time Blake was considering ‘The Dance of Albion’ comic dancing was on the bill. Fairs are by definition temporary and a bit ramshackle, providing nothing like the neat chains of events required for historical determinism, but although the eighteenth-century fairs were largely places of pleasure and trade, in their organic development they embodied a long history of folk experience. Antiquarian investigation, conducted in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine and in the many publications and pamphlets with which Blake, as an apprentice to the Society of Antiquaries’ engraver, Basire, would have been familiar, had done much to uncover the medieval origins of such festivals. The London fairs were the descendants of the festa stultorum and the abbé de malegouverne, celebrations that had parodied the important religious occasions of the year: Holy Innocents Day, the Feast of Fools and the feasts of the dead. Much of the medieval tradition, such as the crowning of the boy bishops, throwing ordure and money at the watching crowds or the burning of shoes as mock-incense, had disappeared under the stern disapproval of the Puritan church. But eighteenth-century fairs were still closely tied to the rhythms of the agricultural and ecclesiastical calendars and maintained traditions of abundant food, the disruption of the usual hierarchy and a sense of communal enjoyment. St Bartholomew’s Fair is a good example of this evolving nature. Popularly connected to the ecclesiastical and jocular traditions of the Middle Ages – it was thought to have been founded by Rahere, a jester turned monk – in Blake’s time it was hugely popular, attracting hundreds of booths and sideshows and boasting productions by many of the leading actors of the day. It was also a place where the lower orders of society could establish a sense of unity, ownership and collective action.69 Although officially started with a Lord Mayor’s banquet, St Bart’s traditionally had many booths presenting drolls and puppet shows that satirized the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen. Blake’s jaunty song in An Island, ‘Good English hospitality’, is a fair example of the sort of jibe they produced. These itinerant theatres, often family businesses passing stories and properties from generation to generation, also acted as the newsreels of their day, reporting events by means of ingenious machines and marvellous spectacles. Thus they also served as a way of disseminating political ideas and information and this people’s news theatre was mainly on the side of revolution and change. For example, in the Greyhound Theatre, in 1789, there was a company depicting a grand procession of the French Court and soldiers swearing to the Revolutionary laws.70




If the spiritual unity once provoked by carnival had been suppressed, the feeling of communal solidarity re-emerged in more aggressive, political action. When, in 1764, the May Fair was squeezed out of St James’, London, by the Earl of Coventry, who didn’t want the din of people enjoying themselves spoiling his new house in Piccadilly, it caused a great deal of public protest. When attempts were made in 1776 to prohibit the larger and older St Bart’s Fair, the resulting riots caused many broken windows and saved the fair. Even as simple places of entertainment, fairs could become the focus of feeling among working people over their treatment by the better off. In the 1760s, popular entertainments such as football matches became a way to gather people together to protest about enclosures.71 This was not simply a matter of drunkenness spilling out into street fighting under the excuse of political grievance. Many of Blake’s contemporaries saw fairs and carnivals as models of democracy. Rousseau had praised the collective courtesy of festivals, in which the ‘spectators . . . make actors of themselves’ and ‘each person see[s] himself and love[s] himself [sic] in the others’ and as a result the people become ‘more closely united’.72 The result of this heady atmosphere of politics and sausages made fairs the subject of considerable suspicion and occasional bloody government action. In 1772 Josiah Tucker had condemned the fair-going working class as being ‘drunk with the cup of liberty’.73 In 1817, on fear of a seditious uprising, St Bart’s Fair was attacked by four regiments of horse.74 Fairs have always attracted condemnation from those who feel threatened by public unity, however, usually expressed in puritanical complaints against carnival’s idleness and enjoyment. Hall, in his famous commentary on May-games in 1661, had complained that they had attracted ‘Ignorants, Atheists, Drunkards, Swearers, Swash-bucklers, May-pole stealers, Health-drinkers, Lewd-men, Light-women, Contemners of Magistracy, affronters of Ministery, rebellious to Masters, disobedient to Parents [and] mis-spenders of time’. Such sentiments were echoed by eighteenth-century writers like Hannah More and R. C. Dillon, who preached a sermon on the evils of St Bart’s Fair in 1830.75 More particularly, though, in the new Industrialized era, the demands of the workplace put considerable pressure on the old festival customs. The holidays associated with the festival calendar did not sit well with the demands of the new commercial world. Many carnival processions were bowdlerized into a more acceptable form, like the official Lord Mayor’s show. Others, like May Day, managed to survive, translating the joy of the original pastoral celebration into an urban setting. As late as 1718 there had been a maypole in the Strand, until Sir Isaac Newton bought it as a support for a




telescope.76 May Day in the city was a chance for commercially pressed groups, like chimney sweeps, to assert themselves, and in doing so they inherited much of the traditional mantle of country superstitions. In many ways they became the carnival Fools of the urban world, bringing in their sooty footsteps luck, fertility and licence. They acquired many of the names and trappings of their country cousins, whitening their hair and wearing garlands and ribbons. Their May dances were even referred to as ‘Jack in the Green’, Jack being a nickname for a Fool and ‘green’ signifying the traditional site of rural carnival, the village green. Blake seems also to have been aware of these customs. He engraved Samuel Collings’ illustration of the sweeps’ May Day jollity in 1784 and refers to their traditional disguises in the ‘Chimney Sweeper’ in Songs of Innocence. Other representations of the carnival spirit were present in London’s streets. Gargoyles and grotesques adorned Westminster Abbey, where Blake spent much of his time learning to draw. On his way home he would have come across the many clowns, comic crossing-sweepers and ballad singers who worked the streets and outlying towns. One notable figure was an Afro-English retired sailor-cum-entertainer called Black Joe, who had a model of the ship ‘Nelson’ in his hat, which he would give ‘sea motion’ by bowing and nodding as he sang his way along.77 Besides these wandering minstrels, there were many pubs across the city that acted as more or less permanent homes to fairground sports and games. There were semi-permanent show booths in Blue Maid Alley and Queen Anne’s Tavern Yard. In 1782 the Norwich acting company turned an old paper factory on Pye Corner into a comedy theatre. Wrestling and boxing took place at the Sun in Tottenham Court Rd. Further out towards Finchley, the Farthing-Pie-House held the Tottenham Court Fair with its Jack Pudding clowns, cudgelling contests, operatic puppet shows and annual smock race ‘for women of a more than usually developed physique’.78 Then there were the more genteel pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh, both mentioned in An Island, where comic songs, new and traditional, were sung. Such ditties were often published in collections such as the 1780 Ranelagh Songbook and along with chapbooks full of bons mots and simple jokes they enjoyed great popularity. For the most part they are notable chiefly for the areas of humour Blake avoided: appalling jokes about dour Yorkshiremen and prudent Scots, nagging wives and overamorous Ladies, booby Lords and clumsy Oirish (‘Blunder O’Whack of Kilkanney’). There were many cloying, sentimental ballads, too, and of course jaunty jingoistic jingles on the triumphs




of the gallant British tars over that bounder, Buonoparte. Still, there are many similarities and echoes to be found between these comic songs and Blake’s own lyrical work in the Poetical Sketches and Songs. Ditties such as ‘Great A, little a’, ‘Maggotty pie’, ‘John Grouse and Molly Dumpkin’ and ‘Suppose it the first of May’ all find resonance in the songs of An Island, ‘Fair Elenor’ and ‘The Ecchoing Green’ – of which more later. Such chapbooks, like The New London City Jester (1797), also maintained the tradition of wit being a great equalizer, with ostlers defeating Oxford scholars and sexually confident orange-sellers outjesting government tax-collectors. Another form of carnival expression popular in the eighteenth century was the masquerade. ‘Antiquarius’ writing in the Lady’s Magazine of 1775 noted the origins of masquerades in ‘Christmas gambols’ and the mummery at the court of Edward III.79 Although it had no overtly political aspect and was seen as a diffuser of the desire for liberty, the masquerade was nevertheless an opportunity to break down social, linguistic and sexual barriers. With its profusion of confusing disguises and characters it was a living refutation of Burke’s theory of obscurity leading to a sublime based on pain.80 Something like the confusion of the masquerade appears in both An Island and The Marriage and at least one of Blake’s paintings shows a masquerade influence. ‘Jane Shore’ was a popular subject for fairground theatre booths and it is not surprising that Blake’s ‘The Penance of Jane Shore’ (1790) has a theatrical feel, but the three central characters bear a resemblance to the central figures in Parr’s ‘The Jubilee Ball after the Venetian Manner’ (1749).81 Jane Shore is, of course, being made to do penance for sexual licence and masquerades were notorious for their relaxation of sexual codes. The ‘Spy’ of the Weekly Journal, 18 April 1724, describes attending a masquerade disguised as a woman in order to smuggle in a male friend hidden in his ‘pocket . . . hole’. Blake makes the connection between a ‘pocket hole’ and covert sexuality in another Notebook 1808–11 jotting (E516): the ‘Spy’ story is presented in a very arch fashion, and homosexual encounters were, apparently, commonplace at masquerades.82 Masquerades remained a popular form of activity in England until the 1790s, when they began succumb to the civilizing pressure of polite disapproval. Commercially squeezed and politically unpopular with a growing moral majority, with several purpose-built venues ‘accidentally’ burning down, masquerade turned private or went underground. Pierce Egan the Elder in his Life of London (1821) writes of the contrast between the polite Grand Carnival masquerade at the Opera House and the plethora of other, more risqué masquerades in the back slums. These less





Blake and the Fool From his earliest days in Soho Blake was surrounded by a wide variety of theatres offering every kind of performance. His apprenticeship was served just around the corner from Drury Lane and he lived within easy walking distance of ‘Reynold’s Booth’ where carnivalesque plays were performed. It is clear from his work that he at least ‘Saunter[ed] about the Playhouses’ occasionally (E736), displaying a knowledge of plays and theatrical conventions and strong opinions about the nature of ‘Real Acting’ (E764).84 Early in his career Blake experimented with conventional dramatic forms. Fragments of three history plays, all with strong comic elements, appear in his Poetical Sketches and another early work, the story of the old blind king Tiriel, is clearly influenced by King Lear.85 An Island uses much of the madcap style of an eighteenth-century theatrical afterpiece or mock lecture and much of his later epic poetry is also constructed on dramatic lines. Many of his grand mythological figures are given the position and voice of an actor in soliloquy, while adversaries meet in sonorous dialogues and narrators turn to us in moving choruses. Indeed, in his attempts to capture an eternal moment in art, Blake’s artistic concerns come close to an actor’s. 86 In the eighteenth century there was considerable crossover between the fairs and the formal theatre. Many leading theatre performers like Garrick, Foote, Shuter, Dibdin and Harris worked in fairground booths, presenting burlesques and cut-down classics, often making more money there than on the conventional stages. In return, carnival made its presence felt in all aspects of conventional London theatre life – playwriting, playgoing and performance. Even to attend the theatre would have been to experience a boisterous, carnival occasion. Michael Bristol, in his interesting book Carnival and Theater, suggests that in Elizabethan England theatre and popular festivity were closely related. The energy and initiative of the carnivalesque, he argues, were manifested in texts whose authorship, in the sense of authority, rested in the collective body of the audience as much as in the solitary consciousness of the playwright. It was a popular art-form in the sense of belonging to the people, the producing, artisan class who otherwise had few methods of selfrepresentation outside official structures – except perhaps, criminality



than salubrious meetings, the subject of illustrations by I. R. and George Cruikshank, were also a vibrant part of the carnival life of London.83 But there was another, more mainstream source of carnival imagery for Blake to draw on.

and madness. This populist background was reflected in a theatre which depicted the ‘sacred’ as a shared social being and in which the ‘merely natural’ was rejected in favour of a wider understanding of human relationships. For their part, eighteenth-century theatre audiences (with the possible exception of those attending the pretentious Italian opera) could be every bit as noisy, populist and riotous as their medieval counterparts. They came to see themselves as much as the play and were very much involved in shaping the event: psychologically and sometimes physically present on the stage – once, while playing Juliet, even the famous Mrs Cibber had to push her way through crowds to get to the tomb.87 And if this connection to the medieval and Elizabethan theatre was present in general play going, it was even more pronounced in the popularity of one playwright whose work linked carnival practice, satirical and sentimental comic styles and antiquarian study: Shakespeare. Shakespeare was extremely popular in the eighteenth century. His plays account for almost a quarter of the London theatre programme from 1737–77.88 There were several new editions of Shakespeare’s work and enthusiasm for the bard took a variety of forms, from David Garrick’s 1767 Stratford-based bicentennial celebrations to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, opened in 1789 and devoted to pictures on Shakespearean themes. One reason for such a proliferation of Shakespeare was, of course, commercial shrewdness. But his work had a profound impact on eighteenth-century comic theory and practice. For example, John O’Keefe’s comedy Wild Oats (1791) in which the characters live, breathe and quote his verse was a huge success. Samuel Foote praised Shakespeare for producing more ‘elegant, pleasing, and interesting Entertainment’ than anyone else89 and in his play The Maid of Bath he made the character he played, Sir Christopher Cripple, allude to ‘Plump Jack’ Falstaff to make him more appealing. But there was one particular aspect of his work that also excited the contemporary passion for Antiquarian scholarship, because it combined many strands of ancient British carnival activity – free speech, an Everyman persona, pagan superstition and Christian insight. That aspect was the character of the Fool. As I have already mentioned, the vogue for Antiquarian study enjoyed huge popularity in Blake’s time. Antiquarians went to great lengths in their efforts to uncover the roots of British pastimes and cultures, even at the risk of being turned into a ditch by country folk who, protective of their customs and wary of strangers, did not appreciate being studied. The period between the 1770s and early 1800s saw the publication of several interesting works on comic traditions, including Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), Thornton’s Survey of the Cities




of London and Westminster (1784) and Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes (1801) as well as numerous magazine articles by interested enthusiasts. (One example of this is the contribution to the December 1780 edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine by ‘Ignotus’, offering to share with other devotees some designs of ‘Roman Comedians’ first printed in 1650.) One important figure in this field was Joseph Ritson, who gathered together an impressive collection of vulgar ballads, of which Blake was certainly aware, having engraved designs for Ritson’s A select collection of English Songs in three volumes (1793). It is possible that Blake used characters from these songs, like cold-hearted Myra or the short-lived fly, in his own work. Ritson’s public aim was to ‘afford innocent mirth to the gay’.90 His private aim was much more overtly political, even carnivalesque. According to Jon Mee, Ritson ‘celebrated the incorrectness of the vulgar ballad as a facet of the popular rejection of received authority’.91 ‘I abominate all refinements and restrictions’, Ritson wrote, ‘and wish every one at full liberty to adopt the language of Rabelais . . . In short I detest every species of aristocracy, and would be tout-à-fait sans culotte’.92 Of Ritson’s influence on Blake, Mee goes so far as to say that the ‘riotous spirit of popular tradition’ embodied in Ritson’s collections ‘presides over’ Blake’s poem Europe.93 One of the most interesting Antiquarian scholars, however, is Francis Douce. Douce trained as a lawyer, but he was also an indefatigable collector who created a vast library of information on popular culture and ended up working in the department of manuscripts in the British Museum. His considerable research led him to copious manuscripts and much other original material, as well as many previous compilations, including Phillip Stubbes’ The Anatomie of Abuses in Ailgna (1583).94 Douce is particularly interesting because, like Ritson, he almost certainly met Blake. Undoubtedly they had acquaintances in common, including the Cosways, Nollekens and friends of Fuseli. Douce had work that had been engraved by Blake’s old engraving master, Basire, and even purchased some of Blake’s own work, including a copy of The Book of Thel (1789) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which he bought from a third party in 1821. Intriguingly, Douce’s copy has the same two lines scratched out as Thomas Dibdin’s: it is tempting to speculate Blake made these corrections himself. Equally tempting is the desire to suggest that Douce’s known habits of having huge quarto-sized coat pockets stuffed with papers and spending years arranging knowledge ‘in libraries’ appear in An Island and The Marriage respectively. While this is no proof that they met and Douce’s published work comes late enough to be a confirmation, rather than an inspiration, for Blake’s comic theories,




nevertheless a great deal of what Douce must have been writing and discussing in the 1780s and 90s appears in Blake’s work. In his Some Remarks on the ancient Ceremony of the Feast of Fools (1804), Douce lists a great deal of information on early church festivals, many aspects of which appear in the Songs. Douce also speculates that these ceremonies were first appropriated by civil and ecclesiastical authorities from older forms, and then suspended as being potentially too challenging, a pattern of adoption and prohibition Blake reproduces in The Marriage. The idea of the appropriation of poetic tales to form priestcraft was common in eighteenth-century mythography, such as Towne’s Dissertation on the Ancient Pagan Mysteries (1766):95 what is significant is Douce locating those poetic tales in the carnival expressions of ancient societies. Douce may also have had a significant influence on Blake’s choice of designs, a point to which I will return in a later chapter. But as an example, Douce collected several examples of old comic tales known as the Gesta Romanorum, one of which, the story of emperor Gauterus and the ladder, is a possible source for the Gates of Paradise plate 9, ‘I want! I want!’. There was one particular area of Douce’s investigation, however, that, had he known of it, would have had tremendous appeal for Blake. In the later eighteenth-century there was a great deal of speculation surrounding the idea of prophecy. This manifested itself in a revival of interest in the sayings of idiots savants such as ‘Poor-Helps’ of Shoreditch workhouse96 or the seventeenth-century Robert Nixon, whose sayings were reproduced by Douce in the 1780s and were mentioned by Brothers.97 At the same time, the growing interest in sentimental humour, praising the work of Rabelais and Cervantes, was placing increased emphasis on the productions of the eccentric genius. Don Quixote was perceived as having ‘an inner light that shone through his seemingly cracked head, an imagination that opened a more immediate glimpse of the possibilities of human greatness’.98 This interest marked the return to prominence of an idea popular in the medieval period: the old concept of the natural fool, the idiot who could yet be the mouthpiece of God. Naturally, this interest extended to his knowing stage counterpart. Douce was tremendously interested in the character of the Fool. His collection included a fabulous array of manuscript illustrations and collected stories about them, and he was an expert on the origins of the Morris dance, a folk dance closely associated with early carnival festivals. He also produced a famous ‘Dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’ (1807) in which he traced the origin of the fool ‘to very remote times’. He classified them into nine different types: domestic




and female fools (generally idiots or satirical wits), clowns (witty rustics or shrewd servants), the corporate fool (an employed jester), tavern fools (tapsters and bawds), the fool of the ancient theatrical mysteries and moralities (the Vice, a bitter enemy to the devil), the dumbshow fool (who symbolically wrestled with Death at fairs), the Merry Andrew (companion of charlatans and mountebanks) and the fool of the Morris (associated with church festivals). In considering how the character of the Fool had developed from its earliest manifestations as idiot savant to accomplished stage trickster, Douce registered many of their chief characteristics. Fools were simpletons, yet they were also great wits. They were Everyman, a spokesperson for the people, against all authority and yet connected to God. They were figures of energy and liberty and great linguistic dexterity, disrupting the authority of the text by ad libbing and extemporizing in quite extraordinary ways: Douce cites a French example where a play was brought to a halt by a ‘Pause pour pisser le fol’. He also notes that the office of the Fool was a representative of the carnival in the everyday: a fool ‘on stage’ is ‘nearly the same as in reality’.99 The development of the Fool, like that of comedy itself, is a complex, organic process, but Douce captures the essential duality of the character: the great linguistic and social deconstructor who maintains a simple but all-encompassing faith. This duality was present at the Fool’s origin, in the natural ‘innocents’ who held a special position in medieval society. Their speech and actions may have been nonsense, derogatory and worth derision. But this simple fool could also be the empty vessel through whom God spoke. Indeed, it was thought that perhaps only through the mad logic of faith and truly Christian behaviour could one achieve an understanding of God. Thus the medieval innocent was supported by and within the community as a symbolic figure, an affirmation of the value of reversing the established world order and proclaiming a foolish, common existence under God. The stage Fool, aping the innocent’s dress and customary habits,100 also took on their symbolic function.101 Their presence in a performance, in which the audience was often engaged in ‘actively . . . egging on the clown . . . to disrupt the orderly progress of the narrative’,102 meant that a distinction could be made between the fool-character and fool-performer. The fool-performer could therefore manipulate the foolcharacter:103 it could therefore be read as a sign.104 From its earliest days the stage Fool was being used as a sign of Christian belief: the foolish wisdom of accepting Christ, the stupid knavery of rejecting Him. The Old Testament prophets had ‘commended mirth’ (Ecclesiastes 8: 15) and




cited it as a reason for believing in the value of life.105 Many of the Old Testament stories of faith triumphing over adversity – Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Jonah, Esther and Job – were presented as comic narratives.106 The comic was seen as a pattern for the New Testament miracles and the act of resurrection. One of Blake’s favourite themes is redemption107 and St Paul, one of his major influences, notes that Christians should ‘Rejoice in the Lord always’ (Phillippians. 4: 4) and be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’ (I Corinthians 4: 10), because no matter what happens we are saved by God’s grace.108 Blake clearly agreed with this idea of foolishness. He questions Bacon’s self-seeking concept of ‘wisdom’ by asking ‘Is it True or is it False that the Wisdom of this World is Foolishness with God[?]’, adding ‘If what Bacon says Is True, what Christ says Is False’ (E609). Christ took on our fallible earthly frame, at once embodying the best and worst in us, and throughout the Gospels He is given the attributes of the Fool. He is a wandering parodist and story-teller who defies custom and religious law, takes on the position of the slave, is mocked, suffers Himself to be crowned with thorns in a parody of earthly authority and is then sacrificed.109 The early Church emphasized the connection between Christ and the Fool, with Fools often appearing in Psalters and Bibles, and Christ himself is sometimes depicted as bare-bottomed or with an Ass’s head.110 In the York Mystery Plays Herod mistakes Christ first for a professional entertainer and then for an idiot: he is also the subject of physical comedy as the soldiers try to haul him onto the wrong holes on the cross.111 Bakhtin notes that ‘The gospel, too, is carnival’ and describes the Fool as carnival’s representative in the everyday world: Christ is a literal embodiment of the foolishness of the divine, ‘the universe’s prime fool and its carnival king’.112 Fools thus formed a major part of the transgressive celebrations of the early Church and Thomas à Kempis, Nicholas de Cusa, Desiderius Erasmus in his Praise of Folly (1511) and later Sir Thomas More in his Utopia all point out the value of foolishness in expounding Christian faith. With their licence to speak, as that great Shakespearean Fool Kemp put it, ‘rude and plain’ with ‘blunt mirth’,113 the stage Fool was also an ideal character to play the Devil and Vice figures of Mystery and Morality plays.114 In addition, they also absorbed many of the mischievous attributes of the sprites associated with the folklore surrounding pagan agricultural festivals. This blending of characteristics was so thorough that, in 1612, the historian Warner could claim that Robin Goodfellow, a traditional pagan imp of British folklore, must, in fact, have been a Catholic.115 This mixture gave the Fool an extraordinary breadth of meaning. The freedom of speech turned the Fool into a brilliant social




satirist. Disrespect for authority of the text allowed he or she to play with language, exposing its social implications. Appealing to the audience created a sense of communal responsibility for meaning and that meaning could be a foolish, harmonious relationship with God. Each of the aspects of the Fool appears in Shakespeare’s work. Puck, the sprite of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is both the mischievous Robin Goodfellow and the character who pronounces the blessing at the end of the play. Feste, in Twelfth Night, is the arch satirist, respecting neither persons nor language, remarking that ‘A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn’d outward! . . . I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words’ (III.i.10, 34).116 The clown in Antony and Cleopatra, bringing in the asp that will kill the Queen, enters into a Pauline debate on justification by faith or deeds. In the Shakespearean Fool, then, Blake would have found a significant mixture of prophecy, semantic awareness, creativity and social rebellion, presented in a carnival style that connected contemporary experience with ancient British spirituality. Of course, even in Shakespeare’s day the clown was far from being seen as a straightforward folk hero. He was often an ambivalent figure. On the one hand he had divine insight, on the other a vicious heritage of satiric humour that could be used to reinforce the bigotry of the dominant order. Shakespearean Fools often show this ambiguous quality, both in character (Feste) and in actor: in 1600 Armin produced a sharply satirical pamphlet entitled ‘Foole Upon Foole’ that sought in a series of savage vignettes to address ‘man’s imperfections’.117 And even a reputation as divine mouthpieces did not protect them if they dared to question the dominant order too closely: in 1574 there was an attempt to ban them from the stage.118 The cultural mainstream also had another weapon to silence the Fool: absorbing his attributes and redirecting them. This process, too, can be seen in Shakespeare’s plays, with other characters usurping the Fool’s traits and so giving an impression of questioning officialdom while actually sanctioning their own concerns and thus recreating the sense of ‘popular’ in their own image. Benedick and Beatrice, for example, as players with words, intrude upon the Fool’s domain. Benedick is ‘the Prince’s jester, a very dull fool’ (II.i.120); Beatrice describes wooing as a ‘jig’ (II.i.62), and they justify each other’s usurpation of the name: Beatrice describes Benedick to himself as a kept Fool who must jest for his supper (II.i.126–31). Dogberry is the real clown’s part, yet he has to insist on it: ‘But, masters, remember that I am an ass’ (IV.ii.72). Such obfuscation of the Fool’s divine nature only intensified throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So while Blake’s




contemporaries could have seen many types of clowns and Fools – mountebanks and their zanies, whose entertaining demonstrations turned over the course of the century from medicine to all branches of science; madcap Merry Andrews and bumpkin Peter Pickleherrings both on and off stage; acrobatic and sly Jack Puddings (a character that came to embody the ordinary ‘Englishman’); mimes, standup comedians, Harlequins, Pierrots; Grimaldi pantomimes who were the beginnings of what we would now recognize by the name ‘clown’; mummers and Morris men; amiable fat parsons and eccentric Middle Englanders – Puritan severity and Augustan sneering had done much to disguise their origins as spokespeople of a divinely inspired community.119 Therefore, while some eighteenth-century writers noted the connection between cheerfulness and faith – for example, Addison, writing in The Spectator, 26 September 1712, insisting that mirth was a necessary attribute of God’s votaries, and that the truly religious man is cheerful;120 or any of the increasing number of writers who quoted the sermons of Isaac Barrow, published posthumously in 1678, that suggested Christians should be ‘jocund, blith and gay’;121 or John Brand, writing his history of popular antiquities in 1777, affirming that ‘Cheerfulness is no inconsiderable Part of Devotion’122 – it rarely occurred to them to use the Fool as a symbol of such joyful devotion. Indeed, it could be argued that the growing popularity of the sentimental comic theory of the wise eccentric and a widespread interest in the works of Shakespeare were a reaction to the loss of a clear Fool–God–humanity connection. Certainly antiquarian research was invaluable in recovering this carnival aspect.123 It would, of course, be wrong to suggest this connection was apparent to everyone. Coleridge, after all, was to assert that Shakespeare did not write the comic parts of his plays. But the revived interest in the Shakespearean Fool seems to have made a strong impression on Blake. Shakespeare’s influence on Blake is well documented. R. F. Gleckner remarks that for Shakespearean references, ‘Blake’s verbal memory was unusually acute’ and Garnett notes ‘few have so thoroughly assimilated Shakespeare’ as Blake.124 Bate reviews Blake’s considerable number of borrowings from Shakespeare and also notes Blake’s emphasis on the importance of his influence: ‘Shakespeare in riper years gave me his hand’ (E707), ‘let our Bible be Virgil & Shakspeare’ (E669).125 This was not just Shakespeare the poet: Blake was clearly interested in performance. Of the witches in Macbeth he writes ‘Those who dress for the stage, consider them as wretched old women, and not as Shakespeare intended, the Goddesses of Destiny’ (E535). While he produced a number of derivative, journeyman illustrations of Shakespeare in an attempt to




find a commercial market, his ‘Richard III and the Ghosts’ has a look of a director’s vision and Pity (1795), his imaginative response to lines from Macbeth, came in the same year that the play enjoyed a revival, being performed nine times. For Blake, Shakespeare’s work was visionary in that his reading of the world was imaginative and transformational. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play full of transformations and the healing power of carnival, Shakespeare has Duke Theseus dismiss the imagination as the poet’s tendency to give ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’ (V.i.16). Blake repeats this line in Milton (E125) to show the sons of Los surrounding the ‘Passions . . . with bounds to the Infinite putting off the Indefinite / Into most holy forms of thought’. The transforming power of the comic imagination has led to ‘holy thought’. Shakespeare’s Fools, therefore, will have a special significance as the embodiment of this comic imagination. Bate notes: ‘In the Notebook there is an equivocal little pair of couplets, apparently written in the early 1790s, entitled ‘Merlin’s Prophecy’ . . . they serve as a reminder that Lear’s Fool, the topsy-turvy prophet with his jingling paradoxes, is as considerable an influence on Blake as the grander prophets, Ezekiel and Milton.’126 Certainly Shakespearean fools and madmen, from the Fool in King Lear, the clowns in Henry V and Dogberry in Much Ado to the fairies in Dream, appear throughout Blake’s work. Blake is also interested in characters that are not strictly the Fool but share foolish characteristics, such as Edgar in King Lear and Jacques and Orlando from As You Like It, as we will discover when looking at the comic in Blake’s pictorial work. As challengers of social and linguistic convention, possessors of devilish and fruitful energy, encouragers of creative reading and examples of faith in a divinity of shared humanity, Fools were an ideal template for Blake’s visionary bards. Their traditional homes, the churchyard and the village green, provide the settings for many of Blake’s songs. Their linguistic dexterity and absurd imaginative transformations are the habits of his narrators. Their childish delight, simple faith and capacity to suffer and yet be reborn illuminate his prophetic books. And their disparagement for hypocrites who usurp their function by pretending to be emissaries of God and Vision fills Blake’s notebooks and annotations. He even quotes the Fool and the foolish Poor Tom127 from King Lear when rebuking Reynolds and Bacon, the great hypocrites of art and language. He says of Reynolds’ pictures that ‘The Symmetry of Deformity is a Pretty Foolery’ (E648; I.iv.190 and I.v.35) and of Bacon: ‘The Prince of darkness is a Gentleman & not a Man he is a Lord Chancellor’ (E622 and III.iv.140).





In the Antinomian tradition, with which Blake was so familiar, to transgress was the only way to know the real meaning of forgiveness.128 The Antinomians approved of ‘popular pastimes and sports’ on the Sabbath and saw enjoyment as a way to get to know God. For Blake, the comic was not just a theoretical approach to life, or the apposite illustration of Vision, to be used when a whimsical mood took him. It was an active programme, a way of reading the world, an alternative gospel and a bible of hell. In this chapter I have outlined the comic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show that it would have provided Blake with models for the kind of transgression his Vision requires. The benefit of satire in demystifying social and linguistic constructs, the sentimental possibility of building a comic world based on inclusion and respect and the foolish inspiration to link these ideas to a creative reunion with the divine were all available to him. In the examples I have already given it is possible to see Blake using the comic in a Visionary sense and yet, as I said at the very beginning of this book, Blake is not thought of as a comic writer. In order to establish that his use of the comic is deliberate, therefore, it will be useful to turn our attention to this puzzling lack of recognition, and this is what I will address in the next chapter.



It is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too

Playing the Fool: Blake’s Sense of Humour

When measured by our definitions of comedy and comic vision – the triumphant celebration of humanity, defeating whatever is inimical towards it and looking forward to its benevolent regeneration and spiritual salvation – Blake’s work seems full of comedy. His constant assertion that ‘everything that lives is holy’ (E324), his insistence on the joy of life (E77), his affirmation of praise and faith over empiricist science (E565), his belief in the happiness we can find in this world (E702), the importance of creativity (E273) and our existence as part of a Divine Brotherhood (E256) all point to Vision as being a comic experience. Even a simple comparison of his work against a handy checklist of the attributes of comic literature, such as that compiled by Northrop Frye for example,1 shows the majority of Blake’s work to follow a comic pattern. Most of his poems exhibit what Frye calls the classic rhythm of the comic, where energy, hope and life triumph over sterility and law.2 Likewise the basic ‘U’ shape plot line of comedy, where the hero(ine) undertakes a journey through great trial and confusion to a happy ending, can be found throughout his work, from the ‘lost’ and ‘found’ pairing in the Songs to the rifts and redemption in The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. The characters that those narrator hero(in)es encounter on their way are variations on certain stock comic types: buffoons, idiots, fools, madmen, clowns, grotesques, pompous masters and quick-witted servants, angry old men who must be defeated by energetic young challengers and brilliant women who take charge of their sexual destinies. The landscape through which they travel, of wombs and tombs, courts and caves, mills and wrestling matches, adheres closely to classic comic topology. Finally, all of this is presented in the linguistic style of the comic, which delights in verbal artifice, puns, parodies, allusions, satires, paradoxes, inversions, flytings, redundancy, hyperbole, mar50



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riages, ritual uncrownings and rebirths. As several critics, notably Robert N. Essick and Nelson Hilton, have remarked, Blake was deeply interested in theories of the development of language, brought to his attention by contemporary Antiquarian investigation and his own studies of the art of translation. Many of his works refer to the importance of codes, of naming and of poetic tales (The Marriage being a prominent example) and passages of The Four Zoas and The First Book of Urizen can be read as his plotting of the struggle of our consciousness towards articulation. Throughout his work, he continually adopts the comic style of heteroglossia, ‘another’s speech in another’s language’,3 contrasting the dialects of high and low society, Newtons’ Principia Mathematica against Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, to reveal the structures that control both. Blake’s choice of poetical forebears also shows a marked preference for the comic. He produced designs for many great comic works, including The Book of Job, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he found ‘full’ of ‘Vision’ (E554);4 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Although he found Dante too concerned with ‘Nature’ instead of the ‘Holy Ghost’ of ‘Imagination’ (E689), he ranked him alongside Shakespeare (E43). As G. M. Harper and others have shown, Blake was also extremely interested in the works of the neoPlatonist Thomas Taylor, who stressed the importance of ‘serious humour’ (E464) as a way of understanding the divine. Taylor explains: ‘It was the custom of Pythagoras and his followers, amongst whom Plato holds the most distinguished rank, to . . . joke seriously, and sport in earnest’.5 Significantly, at a time when the term ‘sports’ was used to denote youthful exuberance, humorous activity and festival play, Blake stressed that an understanding of Christ-in-all-humanity could be achieved through the action of the ‘Divine Vision / And . . . the sports of Wisdom in the Human Imagination’ which are ‘your eternal salvation’ (E96). He even makes one of his clearest statements on Vision in the form of a sophisticated pun: ‘The Nature of my Work is Visionary’ (E555). Blake is saying that his work is at once visionary in aim and inspired by visions and that his imagery (‘Nature’, the ‘green and pleasant land’ of his art-poetry) and indeed the physical existence of his ‘Work’ must be read in a visionary fashion. Jerusalem is to be built by reading, and it will be the place where all people joyfully recognize their existence as part of the ‘Divine Body’ (E211). So far we have looked at the reasons why the comic would have been valuable to Blake’s Vision and examined the various possible sources of comic influence upon him. It remains to be established that he was



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consciously using the comic in this way – that he perceived himself to be a comic writer. As I mentioned right at the start of this book, recent criticism of Blake has tended to read even his most obviously comic moments as little more than ‘tomfoolery’ and ‘comical attempts at oneupmanship’.6 Biographies, anecdotes and unpublished material may be inadmissible evidence in the strict court of modern literary criticism, but they become important in establishing Blake’s comic credentials when one of the reasons we fail to recognize his fundamentally comic nature is a shift in our own perceptions of comedy. This process of change, marked by the separation of the comic, the mad and the spiritual, was one of which Blake himself was aware and commented upon. He suspected that, with regard to his own work, within a few years of his death the world would be left with a critical tradition that saw his comedy as a combination of madness, absurdity and wilful enthusiasm. Examining the reaction of his contemporaries and the way he used the comic in his own criticism will, therefore, help to redress the picture and allow us to appreciate the extent his comic Vision influenced his everyday life. Throughout his life, Blake stressed the importance of ‘kiss[ing] the joy as it flies’ (E474), of uniting the pleasures of perception, understanding and creativity in the exuberance of laughter. Early biographical sketches, before the weight of expectation had a chance to revise them, paint the picture of a man who ‘love[d] laughing’ (E585). He was, for a time, a very close friend (almost, we are told, to the point of ‘mimicry’) of the acerbically witty and perennially joking Henry Fuseli.7 His early biographers consistently note his combination of good nature and good humour. Frederic Tatham portrays Blake as a ‘cheerful and lively’ raconteur, ‘entertaining and pleasant, possessing such novel thoughts and such eccentric notions, together with such jocose hilarity and amiable demeanour, that he frequently found himself asked to stay to dinner’. In an age when amusing conversation was so highly prized and professional comic actors were among the most sought-after dinner guests, this is praise indeed.8 Although we have now come to ascribe many of Blake’s famous dinnertable stories, like the time he claimed to have seen a fairy’s funeral, to his visionary madness, or to assume they were merely the wry assertions of the lone genius thrown into company almost against his will, his contemporaries were more certain of his comic intent. Samuel Palmer’s first-hand account calls Blake’s conversation ‘nervous and brilliant’ and recounts Blake’s habit of teasingly answering a disputant ‘according to his folly’ which would ‘amuse those who were in the secret’.9 Tatham’s version, although colourful,10 accords with




Palmer’s, noting that ‘many anecdotes could be related’ which ‘prove that [Blake’s] eccentric speeches were thrown forth more as a piece of sarcasm upon the inquirer than from his real opinion’.11 One way for the modern reader to understand how those stories might have appeared to Blake’s contemporaries would be to imagine them told by Spike Milligan. However unusual they may seem, his stories have a common theme: they challenge stale readings of the world with creativity and wit. Frequently, his reported pieces of raillery show him using the comic to convey ideas that his listeners may have found unconventional or disturbing. Pointedly, Tatham notes that, when asked questions about his odd behaviour, Blake replies ‘with his usual fun’.12 To Crabb Robinson Blake asserted that ‘careless, gay people are better than those who think’ and when questioned about his spiritual beliefs teased Crabb Robinson with an absurd humour that allowed him to answer truthfully despite giving replies that Crabb Robinson would have found difficult, unpalatable or even blasphemous: ‘I was Socrates’. And then, as if correcting himself, ‘A sort of brother’ . . . on my asking in what light he viewed the great question concerning the Divinity of Jesus Christ, [Blake] said – ‘He is the only God’. But then added – ‘And so am I and so are you’ . . . ‘I do not believe that the world is round. I believe it is quite flat.’13 The religious truth is hidden in a comic paradox: Blake was Socrates, and he is Christ, as was Crabb Robinson. Christ may be the ‘only’ God, but not ‘only’ in the sense of being an individual, part of the faroff judgemental Three-in-One Father. Instead He ‘only’ exists in this world in all of us, in the idea of Him which sees us all as expressions of Him. To return to such an idea is to return to the thinking of an age that believed the world was flat. And for Blake it is flat, in that what Crabb Robinson takes to be the world, a place of reason and ratio and law, is merely a canvas, a vegetable representation of divine creativity, an idea Blake represents using the surprising juxtapositions of a comic style. Of course, many of the stories attributed to Blake may indicate nothing more than the biographer’s desire not to waste good material. In Blake’s lifetime, collections of jests, bons mots and amusing stories were extremely popular and his biographers may be simply attempting to make their subject more interesting. However, enough of these ‘laughable fancies [related with] the most amusing wildness’14 exist in firsthand reports to suggest that this was indeed a representative habit of



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Blake’s speech. They are also consistent in their underlying theme: to celebrate the power of the comic imagination in transforming our view of the world, particularly of spiritual and social attitudes, through puns, jokes and other comic formulations. For example, Gilchrist claims he was told that ‘down to his latest days Blake always avowed himself a Liberty Boy’ and in jocular self-defence would urge that the shape of his forehead made him a republican. ‘I can’t help being one,’ he would assure Tory friends, ‘any more than you can help being a Tory: your forehead is larger above; mine on the contrary, over the eyes.’15 There is, of course, no proof of the accuracy of this report. We know that Blake was an avid reader on psychology, annotating the works of both Lavater and Spurzheim, and he would certainly have been familiar with the ideas behind the ‘school’ of phrenology, founded around 1800: he wrote in a letter to Butts on 16 August 1803, that he had been ‘done . . . much mischief’ by his ‘too passive manner. Inconsistent with [his] active physiognomy’ (E733). What is most notable about this account, however, is the way the ‘Tory friends’ may be being teased about their lack of vision. Vision is both action and understanding, something which Blake defends as natural and human even while gently mocking his opponents with their own logic: Toryism, like phrenology, is formed on a dubious highbrow pseudo-empiricism that places thought above the evidence of their own eyes. One of the Proverbs of Hell reads ‘What is now proved was once, only imagind’ (E36) and much of Blake’s reported humour revolves around the possibilities of the comic imagination. When confounding a companion by bowing to St Paul walking down a London street, or producing ‘The Ghost of a Flea’,16 or complaining to Varley that his ghostly visitors are jostling each other so much in their eagerness to have their portrait taken that he cannot reproduce any of them, Blake is playfully demonstrating the art of seeing ‘Thro’ and not just ‘with’ the eye. (E492). Physical reality is an allegory, a language that is just as open to imaginative transformation as the words used to describe it, and puns and jokes are possible because so much of language is metaphorical, simile, approximation. Ben Jonson disapproved of such linguistic anarchy, complaining that the ‘beastlie’ multitude delighted in men who would ‘Measure, how many foote a Flea could skip Geometrically, by a just scale, and edifie the people by the ingine’. As if in reply Blake’s biographer Smith reports:




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With a slight twist of the wording (‘were that lively little fellow the size of an elephant’) the impossible becomes highly probable, with another gentle mocking of the ‘proofs’ of scientific method to boot. He is reading the world as if it were a joke that could be subject to the same imaginative transformation and he is clear that such power rests in the reader. He asserted to Charles Lamb ‘that all the while he was engaged on his water paintings, Titian was disturbing him – Titian, the evil genius of oil painting!’18 Blake saw Titian as part of the canon of an Art Establishment that ‘Blotted & Blurred’ (E636) instead of producing Visionary art. Blake was aware that he too was ‘molested continually by blotting and blurring demons’ (E546).19 The influence of the heritage of oil painters has to be resisted and Blake ‘sees’ that influence amusingly personified as Titian himself, jostling Blake like an irritating busybody. There are, of course, signs that some of Blake’s joking was prompted by the need to defend himself against those who did not want their perceptual world to be challenged. In part his humour was used to sublimate feelings of disappointment or depression. Since the days of his teasing by his fellow apprentices at Basire’s Blake had recognized that humour was a potent way to do this – he noted that ‘imbecile attempts to depress Me deserve only laughter’ (E731). Such ‘Mirth at the Errors of a Foe’ (E504) produces some amusing attacks on Blake’s bugbears, like his onetime patronizing patron Hayley – I write the Rascal Thanks till he & I With Thanks & Compliments are quite drawn dry. (E506) – his crooked commissioning bookseller Cromek – A Petty sneaking Knave I knew – Mr Cr——how do ye do. (E509) – and even all of polite society: The only Man that eer I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuesli he was both Turk & Jew And so dear Christian Friends how do you do. (E507)



Blake said of the flea, that were that lively little fellow the size of an elephant, he was . . . sure, from the calculations he had made . . . that he could bound from Dover to Calais in one leap.17

That the hypocrisy of the society to which he objects is based on a false system of reading is shown by the juxtaposition of two different languages. Picking up on the foreign sound of Fuseli’s name, Blake uses a pattern of rhymes that links the guttural ‘knew’, ‘spew’ and ‘Jew’ and contrasts it with the muted ‘oo’ sound of the genteel ‘how do you do’. The outsiders, the ‘foreigners’, are subject to the kind of social rejection shown towards swear words and vomit, yet that very swear word implies a sincerity of feeling (a gut reaction to hypocrisy) unavailable to those who shun it. The foreigners’ degraded position, however, gives them insight and understanding beyond their social ‘superiors’, an ability Blake ascribes to them by the word ‘knew’. This is cleverly contrasted with the clichéd greeting, a piece of social coinage that attempts to modify and hide our physical nature – even making the words ‘how do you do’ cramps the face into an insincere grin. The inappropriateness the reader senses in Blake’s speaker’s use of this greeting, a cover for feelings of anger, also suggests that the phrase is frequently misused in this way. It has become a social mask, hiding real opinions and no longer conveying any interest in the person of whom it is asked. Blake is pointing out that the polite reading of society has sacrificed the true Christian meaning of friend to an elitist, social usage based on discrimination. Many of Blake’s puns seem to exhibit what Freud would describe as an aggressive response to threat. They range from a comparatively simple wordplay about his own situation – ‘I am at Present in a Bustle to defend myself against a very unwarrantable warrant’ (E732) – to exposing failure in others – ‘His eye is on the Many or rather on the Money’ (E655) – to more amusing religious commentaries: ‘Irving is a highly gifted man – he is a sent man; but they who are sent sometimes go further than they ought.’20 In a similar way he uses a play on the word ‘spirit’ in his Annotations to Thornton to express his anger at the poverty of Thornton’s view of God. Blake points out that Thornton’s understanding is limited because he reads the universe in purely physical terms. To Thornton, ‘Heaven’ is nothing more than one can see with a ‘Telescope’ and our relationship to God no greater than paying tax to an earthly king. Because he is being obedient to the laws of physics and the dominion of power Thornton feels he is justified (‘Lawful’) in his belief. Blake remarks that in Thornton’s view ‘Spirits are Lawful but not Ghosts especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit No Smuggling real British Spirit & Truth’ (E668). He is suggesting Thornton’s view of the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit is little better than the intoxication of gin. He opposes this by linking the Holy Spirit with all those things of which Thornton




would disapprove – smuggling, an unsophisticated idea of the supernatural, the true Britishness of folk heroes and Christ. However, as with his stories, Blake’s use of puns goes beyond mere pointscoring to offer teasing hints about the nature of Vision. Significantly he chooses to use a simple pun when explaining the difference between true artistic insight and false mimetic ‘blotting and blurring’: no one can ever Design till he has learnd the Language of Art by making many Finishd Copies of Nature & Art . . . The difference between a bad Artist & a Good One Is: the Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great deal: The Good one Really Does Copy a Great Deal. (E645) The good artist will have learnt the forms or ‘Language of Art’ by diligent reproduction; only having done so will the artist be able to articulate Vision accurately. The bad artist copies too; but his work is concerned only with the imitation of nature and not with imagination. As such his art is nothing but smears on canvas and Blake frequently dismisses these in the robust manner apparent in his ‘Nobodaddy’ jibes. With a Fool’s logic, Blake uses scatological humour to emphasize that the genteel aesthetic of the bad artist, while abhorring excrement, can produce nothing better because it is obsessed with matter, a point Blake makes in a barbed dig at Hayley: Hayley on his Toilette seeing the sope Cries Homer is very much improvd by Pope. (E505) Blake disapproved of the ‘Monotonous Sing Song’ of Pope (E581), believing that he ‘did not understand Verse’ (E575). To challenge him, he adopted another meaning of the word ‘copy’, producing at least two amusing parodies of Pope’s style, including a fragmentary dig at the Rape of the Lock (E481). It was Sir Joshua Reynolds, however, who, for Blake, was the epitome of such unimaginative copying. He attacks Reynolds’ innate misunderstanding of artistic practice, his misperceptions of the nature of mental activity, his inaccurate view of society and his lack of scruples neatly in one simple wordplay: ‘The Man . . . must be a Fool & Knave. Having no Con-Science’ (E648). Blake’s use of the word ‘Fool’ here is interesting. As was discussed in the last chapter, there were two sides to the Shakespearean Fool – as Lear’s Fool puts it, there is ‘a bitter fool and a sweet one’ (I.iv.137). The



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sweet fool embodies all the positive side of the carnivalesque. The bitter fool is a satirical force of repression and mockery, a hypocrite who pretends to bring insight in order to justify an unjust status quo. His acts are folly, his reading of the world distorted and he has nothing to do with humour or wit – at one point Blake asserts that the witty Goldsmith should not be associated with the bitter ‘Fool’ Reynolds (E640). In fact, in his Annotations to Reynolds Blake calls Reynolds a bitter ‘Fool’ nearly thirty times. Reynolds’ foolishness lies in his lack of vision: he sees natural images with ‘A Fools Eye’ (E638) that denies Vision and the existence of God: ‘The Artifice of the Epicurean Philosophers is to Call all other Opinions Unsolid & Unsubstantial than those which are Derived from Earth’ (E659). This act of ‘Generalizing’ or relying on abstract Knowledge makes man ‘a Fool but a Cunning Fool’ (E649); the same kind of cunning which exploits and rules through ‘Priesthood’ in The Marriage (E38). This cunning is used to control England by preventing any challenging voices being raised. Reynolds is the ‘President of Fools’ (E647) who has been ‘Hired to Depress . . . To Destroy Art’ (E635, E642). His method is that of a ‘Hypocrite’ teacher (E642), who takes on the appearance of a dissenting voice in order to quell any real dissent: ‘He makes little Concessions, that he may take Great Advantages’ (E657); ‘This Whole Book was Written to serve Political Purposes’ (E641). As Blake notes elsewhere, both ‘Folly’ (E36) and ‘Goodness’ (E269) are ‘the cloke of Knavery’. Reynolds is a tool of the rich, ‘a Virtuous Ass . . . obedient to Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science’ (E644). He is their court jester, their Ass, and his crime is all the worse because while ‘knowing himself to be a Fool’ (E644) he fails to live up to the true vocation of that sweet Fool, the artist, by not challenge the laws of the dominant culture. Instead, his championship of the dominant, fear-based aesthetic makes him part of the repressive social and religious structure of contemporary society. At one point Blake refers to him as ‘Sir Jehoshuan’, his own personality subsumed in the vindictive wrath of Jehovah. Like Reynolds, Francis Bacon is also vociferously attacked as a bitter Fool. Bacon too sees the world in terms of Epicurean philosophy, with a ‘Mind of the Natural Frame’ (E625). He has been taught by ‘Coxcombs’ (E630) and uses ‘Politic Foolery’ (E623) to ‘fool . . . us’ (E626) with a ‘Philosophy makes both Statesmen and Artists [bitter] Fools & Knaves’ (E649). He imposes his views through hypocrisy, a ‘Pretence to Religion to destroy Religion’ (E621): he is ‘An Atheist pretending to talk against Atheism’ (E626). Another term Blake uses for such bitter foolery is ‘Knavery’. He notes that Bacon accounts knavery as ‘Wisdom’ (E620) but contrasts this bitter wisdom with the true, sweet Foolishness of belief in Christ (E619). Blake




found a precedent for this distinction between the sweet Fool and the bitter Knave in the work of Chaucer. Blake ranked Chaucer as one of the three greatest English poets (E257) and insisted on the accuracy of his Vision, commending, with a slight wordplay, the universality of Chaucer’s Pilgrims: ‘Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage’ (E536).21 For Blake, Chaucer demonstrated that the comic was the language of the divine (‘For goddes speken in amphibologies’)22 and would help us to differentiate between what was truly Christian and what was merely worldly: in Chaucer’s House of Fame the appearance of bell-decked fools presages the trump of Doom. Blake’s comments on Chaucer’s use of humour in the Canterbury Tales are worth repeating at some length: It is necessary here to . . . set certain mistaken critics right in their conception of the humour and fun that occurs on the journey. Chaucer is himself the great poetical observer of men, who in every age is born to record and eternize its acts . . . who looks down on their little follies from the Emperor to the Miller; sometimes with severity, oftener with joke and sport . . . the Host . . . is a first rate character, and his jokes are no trifles; they are always, though uttered with audacity, and equally free with the Lord and the Peasant, they are always substantially and weightily expressive of knowledge and experience. (E534) Significantly, the ‘Host is the Silenus’ (E536), the satyr-god of Comedy. The comic Host is both a democratic joker and a social satirist whose humour is aimed at revealing the ‘Age’s Knave’ who ‘is sent in every age for a rod and scourge . . . to divide the classes of men’ (E535). The Knave is one way of dividing humanity, Christ is another (E40). The Knave uses wit self-seekingly, but the Host, the Parson and Chaucer himself, use it to divide humanity the way Christ did: they reveal faults, but instead of condemning they recognize we are all fallible and celebrate our existence as part of the Divine Body. If the ‘rich and powerful’ were to obey the Wise Fool’s counsel, ‘then shall the golden age return: But alas! you will not easily distinguish him from the Friar or the Pardoner’ (E535). Parson and Friar are ‘not easily distinguished’ because both use the same language: ‘names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive to humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the masters of man, or of society’ (E536, my italics). Blake’s ‘Indignation & Resentment’ at the Knave’s folly prompts him to ‘return . . . Scorn for Scorn’ (E661) by using wordplay ripostes to reveal the limitations of the Knave’s view: Bacon is called ‘Little Bacon’



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Absurd tales and strait waistcoats I mentioned at the start of this chapter that part of the reason Blake is not seen as a comic writer is because of shift in our understanding of what comedy is, and in many ways Blake’s humour is a victim of history. There is an old gag that, in true comic fashion, subverts a rule even while proposing one, telling us that the fundamental secret of comedy is ‘timing’. Humour has an intimate and complex relationship with time. While some jokes seem timeless (particularly those that are variations on idiots, explosives and falling anvils), others can grow old so quickly they seem to pass their sell-by date between the time you tell them and that moment when the room goes quiet. Some of Blake’s material rests on such a fine lattice of contemporary reference that for the modern reader it is not only barely comprehensible, but seems to lack the spontaneity and surprise we associate with humour. To some extent this can be overcome with research, but time also brings fundamental changes to what might be called the architecture of comedy, and these are harder to uncover. The result is that while some features remain relatively constant, like the mechanics of puns and pratfalls, our perceptions of what is a suitable subject for the comic alters. For example, the building of a cathedral, that grand statement of belief, was to our medieval forebears both a majestic and a comic process: grandeur and gargoyles both having a place in the construction. Some modern ‘cathedral’ builders – architects like Gaudi, scientists like Hawking and a growing number of theologians – are also aware of the power and significance of humour. However, thanks largely to the emphatic shifts in comic and literary thought that took place in the nineteenth century, humour and spirituality are now considered separate, with humour at best a decoration or illustration to a spiritual theme, like a trendy vicar’s joke at the start of a sermon. Humour is a highly attractive medium, but one considered inappropriate for expressing deeply held political or religious beliefs, especially if they are of a dissident nature. There are always exceptions to the rule, but by and large our understanding of faith is dominated by considerations of worthy actions and political correctness, while our celebrations of diversity are too often tepid and mealy-mouthed. On the other hand, our mainstream comedy is more or less confined to the



(E648), ‘a small fry’, beneath the ‘swinish multitude’ he seeks to govern.23 However, while Blake may have attacked Bacon and Reynolds as deluded, as ‘Idiot[s]’ opposed to ‘Men of Sense’ (E620), throughout his life he was the one to be charged with madness.

facial twitches of politicians and celebrities and the (witting) embarrassment of the ordinary citizen. There has always been, in what sociologists call the dominant culture, a desire to licence, censor and control the disruptive threat of the comic. This desire has shaped the whole history of comedy, played out in the struggle between Old Comedy and New Comedy, the rude rebel and the social reformer. From the ancient civilizations to the present day, there have been attempts to ban popular fairs and entertainments, outlaw the work of certain comedians, even to control what people think of as funny. Even Hamlet tells his tragicomic actors not to deviate from the text that is set down for them. At first sight, this proscriptive habit is not unreasonable. After all, comedy can be a dangerous thing. Carnival can be a violent affair, racist and sexist humour an instrument of oppression. But it is also possible to go too far: in seeking to eradicate what is undesirable, aspects of comedy can be lost. The sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century seemed to value the eccentric and the inclusive, but it was still founded on the idea that comedy should reform character. Where, under the Augustans, such correction had happened in the social field, for the sentimentalists reform became internalized. Exterior mechanisms of social control turned into psychic ones. Where Goldsmith notes the general applicability of the comic, ‘that natural portrait of Human Folly and Frailty, of which all are judges, because all have sat for picture’,24 by the nineteenth century Hazlitt saw it as a comparison between the individual’s self-picture and that created for them by society: ‘the proper object of ridicule is egotism’. Satire no longer need exert its control in the social sphere: it had become a means of producing self-restraint through linguistic control and reinforced by ridicule. Hazlitt’s language of social control (‘our sharp points wear off; we are no longer rigid in absurdity’) is a foretaste of Bergson’s twentieth-century comment that the comic is part of a ‘utilitarian aim of general improvement . . . a sort of social gesture [which] softens . . . whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity’.25 With the pressures of the industrial world forcing an end to old comic festivals, a growing interest in psychology that tended to see man as machine (which, by seeing comedy in terms of repression and release, inherited the traditional language of those who had denied any spiritual aspect to carnival) and the reforming zeal of an increasingly sober religious establishment, the old idea of comedy as a collective expression of the madness of faith became lost. The ribald humour Blake had seen fit to assert a true picture of God was deemed unacceptable in this new outlook. It was banished to the edges of polite culture, to the seaside and the end of the working week; its stock characters forced to live in



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the boarding house of peek-a-boo erotica, only occasionally sending a (naughty) postcard home.26 In our own time the pendulum has swung back into an age of increasing licence and licentiousness, but some aspects of the comic are still lost to us. While the more outrageous elements of the comic, the so-called adult cartoons of Viz magazine for example, gleefully transgress the boundaries of moral and social taste, they entirely lack any sense of spirituality: the bishop and the actress are lewd but impotent bedfellows. The idea that had been perfectly acceptable from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance – that the folly of comedy could be connected on the one hand to madness and the other to divine revelation – has come to look like blasphemy against both religion and science, particularly the emergent science of psychoanalysis. The best Fools of our current era – Rowan Atkinson, Jim Carrey – still carry a sense of the flaws and the possibilities of Everyman. But the Fool’s symbolic value is being diluted in the modern vogue for turning everyone into a Fool, and doing so badly. In the smugness of our politically correct, oneworld focus on the value of the individual, we celebrate our attempts to eradicate the unworthy comic habit of exaggerating difference based on sex, race or class, but we also now triumph in the exposure of the foibles of a group of people made ‘Other’ simply by the intruding eye of a camera. The fact that they are on TV both justifies and pardons their humiliation in a way that being the ‘wrong’ genetic type once did and the result is that, while we deride the humour of difference, we enjoy a proliferation of revenge- and humiliation-based talk and game shows and fly-on-thewall mock-umentaries. Even the Fool’s once shocking vocabulary is now repeated so often that it has become the commonplace invective of the surly and dull. The other side of the Fool’s activity – celebrating fecundity, providing a sense of unity and reaffirming hope – has likewise been usurped, with fecundity and unity drafted into the army of global advertising and our experience of hope at best a lottery win or having our house (garishly) refurnished by a rabble of celebrity strangers. The story of comedy is, of course, one of constant evolution, or perhaps revolution, and plot is never clear-cut. The spiritual side of the comic survived in writers like Dickens, Fry, Cary, Carroll and Joyce, trying to make an expression of faith that will ‘fit the age’.27 However, in an age when religious fervour has become the subject of psychiatric case studies, Blake’s visionary habits, his avowed prophetic aims and the early critical charges of madness laid at his door, have conspired to make the aim of his apocalyptic sense of humour almost entirely hidden from us. The charge of madness was most famously laid by Robert Hunt in The Examiner (17 September 1809), suggesting Blake’s work was ‘absurd’, the




‘offspring of a morbid fancy’ and that his friends ought to ‘restrain his [poetic] wanderings with a strait waistcoat’.28 While Blake’s psychic processes are undoubtedly unusual, in the Millenarian circles of the 1780s and 1790s they were by no means uncommon – and moreover they bear a striking resemblance to those of many acknowledged comedians.29 However, the critical charges made by Hunt, Southey and others, coupled with the early biographers’ attempts to defend Blake as a misunderstood artist, began a tradition of reading his work as ‘gifted insanity’30 which, in various forms, has persisted. The role his socially and morally challenging humour plays in forwarding the cause of his radical Christian vision has become a mere adjunct of his general eccentricity, which in itself is reported for no better reasons than to provide amusement, excuse his radicalism and at a stretch, provide collateral proof of his artistic genius. The machinations of this process can be seen even in his earliest biographers. Malkin, writing his account of Blake in 1806, while admittedly concerned with offering to his ‘readers of taste and feeling’ a picture of Blake as a worthy illustrator, felt able to defend Blake against those whose ‘jealousy’ made them describe him as ‘mad’,31 but Cunningham, writing in 1830, a mere three years after Blake’s death, felt it necessary to present him as a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure: During the day he was a man of sagacity and sense, who handled his graver wisely, and conversed in a wholesome and pleasant manner: in the evening, when he had done his prescribed task, he gave a [sic] loose to his imagination.32 The aim of this seems to be to make Blake a man to be trusted (at least during daylight hours) because if he did see through society, he didn’t do it knowingly, so his imaginative, mad-comic outburst could be ignored. This ‘institutionalizing’ of Blake was so widespread it even effected those with first-hand knowledge. Crabb Robinson, for example, in his Diary entry, 17 December 1825, states that although he found the Blakes ‘worthy people’, he has his reservations about their lifestyle and work: Nothing could exceed the squalid air both of the apartment and his dress . . . I found [him] at work on Dante . . . He shewed me his designs, of which I have nothing to say . . . Yet by 1852 the account has subtly changed. Blake’s room is still squalid, but now, writing of the same visit, Crabb Robinson notes ‘his linen was clean, his hand white’, Mrs Blake has been elevated from a



Playing the Fool 63

‘worthy’ person to the status of a wife ‘formed on the Miltonic model’, and of Blake’s designs of Dante of which formally he had ‘nothing to say’, he now notes ‘I do not presume to speak’.33 So Blake became distanced, held in awe, not to be laughed at. Even Samuel Palmer, a selfconfessed Blake disciple, felt it necessary to urge Alexander Gilchrist to ‘hide’ Blake’s ‘indecencies’ concerning God.34 To his credit, when Gilchrist penned his biography of Blake in the 1850s, he firmly declared that Blake wasn’t mad, but he too felt it necessary to reproduce stories of Blake’s eccentricity to account for some of his comic activities: willful reasoning, individualism, wildness of speech. And in allowing Blake to be a little mad, yet still worth attention, Gilchrist was aligning himself with the view taken by Wordsworth in his reported belief, ‘There is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott’.35 To follow Wordsworth is to adopt a respectable position: the ex-Poet Laureate is both a guide to critical sensibility and prefers Blake’s ‘madness’ to other socially unacceptable faces of the poet – the licentious or, worse, the commercial. The concept that Blake may have been a comic poet does not enter Gilchrist’s mind. Over time, then, the biographical portrait of Blake changed from that of an ‘highly esteemed’ and witty man to a wild ‘enthusiast’36 and then a saintly eccentric genius. His latest incarnation is in danger of being as unfunny as its predecessors: the iconoclast’s poster boy, the official rebel in a British Art establishment that, while lauding his uniqueness, has never really forgotten that he drank porter in the Royal Academy. It does little to invite us to see this popular Godillustrator as in fact God’s Fool. Blake came to realise that his radical notions would be received in this way. As he notes in his engraving ‘The Laocoon’, ‘There are States in which all Visionary Men are accounted Mad Men such are Greece & Rome Such is Empire or Tax See Luke Ch 2 v 1’ (E274). Significantly he chooses to answer his critics using comic methods. As he wryly remarks in his Notebook 1808–11, it takes this kind of institutionalization to demonstrate the correctness of his point of view: My title as [an] [Artist del.] Genius thus is provd Not Praisd by Hayley nor by Flaxman lovd. (E505) Other epigrams suggest that Blake understood the marginal position of the madman was a valuable one, allowing great social freedom and insight.




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Madman I have been called Fool they call thee I wonder which they Envy Thee or Me.

Blake is not simply rebuffing his critics with humour: he is claiming their aggression stems from an awareness of their sense of psychic loss at having to conform to social expectation. At the heart of Hunt’s ‘strait waistcoat’ criticism is the feeling that Blake’s work was anti-social in that it challenged the aesthetic and hence the social order. Blake replies by pointing out that madness and humour may be the only redress available against an oppressive ideology. This point is expressed repeatedly through a series of puns and wordplay. ‘ “Opression makes the Wise Man Mad” Solomon’ (E658): oppression not only angers the wise man, it condemns his view by proclaiming it to be madness. Only by using the language and style of the outsider can the Visionary artist either reply or know they are on the right track: You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter Im Glad This is one of the best compliments he ever had. (E505) Blake notes that you should ‘At a Friends Errors Anger shew / Mirth at the Errors of a Foe’ (E504). When your visionary work is not understood, the comic is the best way to show the folly of the polite aesthetic which values the mimetic style over visionary art: The Sussex Men are Noted Fools And weak is their brain pan I wonder if H——the painter Is not a Sussex Man. (E506) The humour of the playground is used to challenge the polite aesthetic, all the more powerfully because, in its ‘deduction’ of H’s birthplace, it mocks the very empirical reasoning that underlies and praises the production of mimetic art while failing to recognize the importance of Vision. If the style of Blake’s riposte is childish, how better to challenge the ‘teacherly’ mode of the dominant aesthetic, with its claims that ‘Taste & Genius’ are a matter of ratio and hence ‘Teachable’ and ‘Acquirable’ (E659).



(E507)

For Blake, then, there was a sense in which the comic was the only way to present his Vision to a society which would otherwise fail to understand it and Blake was prepared for this to be a lengthy process: ‘It is very true what you have said for these thirty two Years I am Mad or Else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses Posterity will judge by our Works’ (E573). Moreover, Blake clearly associated this comic-madness with the magnificent absurdity of faith in the face of a relentlessly empirical society. Cowper came to me and said. O that I were insane always I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane. I will never rest until I am so. O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain your health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon Newton and Locke. (E663) It seems unlikely that for his example of ‘unbelief’ Cowper should have chosen to name Blake’s favourite trilogy of scientists in just the same way that Blake himself always did. Here Blake is either reconstructing an actual comment by Cowper or acknowledging Cowper’s indirect influence on his thought (perhaps ‘Cowper came to’ Blake in the same way that Milton and Shakespeare did, as he reported in his letter to Flaxman, 12 September 1800). Whichever, the terminology is Blake’s, but what emerges is not only his admiration for Cowper but his belief that the ‘torments of insanity’ may hold a key not only to faith, but describing that faith to others: Hes a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he Can’t Percieve And he’s a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe. (E507)

I must Create a System Blake famously noted in Jerusalem that ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans’ (E153). ‘To make such a Blockhead believe’ he chose to use a comic vision in his poetry and designs, although aware that this may be misunderstood as madness. This comic vision developed gradually, beginning with his growing awareness of the potential seduction of the senses by the physical world and the contrast between the carnival Fool and the hypocritical Knave. It is to the development of this vision that we now turn, starting with the Poetical Sketches.




‘I love the jocund dance’: The Comic in the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel

For avid Blake readers the Poetical Sketches seem almost shockingly conventional. Pale imitations of, among others, Spenser, Gray, Thomson and Shakespeare, they are full of hackneyed pastoral settings and neo-Gothic frights: dewy hills, black-ey’d maids, thrilling veins and hollow groans. Indeed, they teeter on the edge of parody. Even in 1777 John Aiken had complained about such chronic over-use of conventional tropes: An ordinary versifier seems no more able to conceive of the Morn without rosy fingers and dewy locks, or Spring without flowers and showers, loves and groves, than any of the heathen deities without their useful attributes.1 It seems unlikely that a poet as sensitive to language as Blake would have been unaware of this. Even such a respectable expression as ‘buskin’d’, which Blake uses in ‘To Morning’, was already seriously démodé.2 As early as 1731 Fielding uses the expression ‘buskin tragedy’ as a send-up of ham acting in his play Tom Thumb (a play which Blake could well have seen, being performed at Drury Lane in 1775).3 Although often beautiful and witty, these poems are burdened with the earnestness of juvenile emulation and an obsession with the idea of thwarted passion. It would, therefore, be unwise to claim too much deliberation in his choice of images and themes. What cannot be denied, however, is how many of these images return in his later work. Many commentators have noted that the Poetical Sketches mark the beginning of what Beer has called Blake’s ‘habitual self-quotation’ of words and images, a device he uses to create patterns of allusion that build into a ‘concise shorthand for 67



4

complicated [trains of] thought’.4 It is an organic process of accumulation: images not only carry coded information forward from one imaginative context to another, each new appearance is part of an imaginative exploration of the original image. Blake’s work is structured on such chains of meaning and it is an important part of the process of Vision: a re-envisioning rather than a simple lineal aggregation of readings. Blake’s manipulation of strong natural images, like the brilliance of the sun or the coldness of winter, are good examples of this. The icy elements of the Poetical Sketches lyric ‘To Winter’ (E410) re-emerge in The First Book of Urizen (E70), where they illustrate Urizen’s frozen attitude to life and help to expose the tyranny of kingship and dominance. Forty years later, when Blake paints ‘Winter’ (L65) as an illustration to Cowper’s The Task, the similarities between the figure of Winter and that of Urizen suggests that tyranny may be in part a result of our aesthetic reactions to wintry images. Given the youthful exuberance and accompanying lack of discrimination in these early sketches, the temptation to read too much into them should be acknowledged and avoided if possible. What is interesting for the comic theorist, however, is that they show how Blake was already fascinated with the tension between the image and the poetic voice: that which allows expression may also stifle it. An examination of this, with particular reference to the early lyrics and ‘Fair Elenor’, forms the first part of this chapter. Blake’s response to this potential loss of Vision and poetic voice was to explore images of carnival and the second part of this chapter looks at the significance of the fooling in ‘BlindMan’s Buff’. The close link between carnival expression and moral experience makes the role of the Fool a significant and attractive one. The third part of this chapter will concentrate on the different fools present in King Edward the Third and the attempt of the bitter Knavish fools to usurp the symbolic role of the natural, sweet Fools. Given this threat, Blake then explores the potential in the foolery of madness in the world of Tiriel, and this forms the chapter’s final section.

The Sun of loss and the Father of Los The first six lyrics found in the Poetical Sketches, the poems addressed to the seasons, to morning and evening, are a good demonstration of the potential loss of the poetic voice. As befits the work of a Visionary, they emphasize the presence and quality of light in each of those seasonal moments. The importance of the sun as an image by which to judge one’s aesthetics of reading – seeing it as either ‘a flat shining body, of




about two foot diameter’ or as a fierce burning judge or as an inspirational sign of creativity, ‘an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy’ (E566) – was discussed in chapter 2. The danger of misreading images by confusing their physical and emblematic realities underlies these six ‘temporal’ lyrics. Spring is described as having ‘angel eyes’ that look through the ‘clear windows of the morning’, an image which anticipates the ‘angels of the morning’ who sing at creation (see Job, B639, for example). The poetic voice and nature seem in harmony: ‘The hills tell each other and the list’ ning / Vallies hear’, and ‘longing eyes’ look forward to the promise that ‘holy feet’ will soon walk in ‘our clime’, suggesting the return of the ‘holy Lamb of God’ envisioned at the start of Milton. The narrator asks the Spring to place the ‘golden crown’ upon the maiden land’s head, a phrase which seems to unite both natural flowers and the imaginative golden age and Christ’s crown. But the narrator’s response to Spring moves from articulation to sensation: from sight to kisses and tastes, from voice to ‘breath’. The land is pictured as ‘love-sick’ and ‘languish[ing]’. A concentration on the sensual, rather than the imaginative, has left the speaker obsessed with the natural images at the expense of their visionary potential. To put it another way, where sexual love should have provided a way of understanding the sacred, it has become obsessive and profane. In its fixation on another it has in fact produced an obsession with the sensory self. The consequences of this misperception are played out in the following seasons. Summer, with his ‘ruddy limbs and flourishing hair’, brings a great deal of erotic energy. Even the landscape succumbs to his conquest: ‘Our vallies love the Summer in his pride’. But this sexual love leads to a betrayal. In the last stanza of ‘To Summer’ there is an echo of The Fairie Queene (III.x.44), where Hellenore proves false in love. A similar betrayal is played out in the song ‘How sweet I roam’d’, where the speaker is mocked in a manner that seems to comment adversely upon Hobbes’ view that laughter is a sudden triumph over an enemy. The poem is set in ‘summer’s pride’, and the speaker is seduced by the ‘lilies’ and ‘gardens fair’ of the ‘prince of love’. However, these natural images betray the speaker: ‘With sweet May dews my wings were wet, / And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage; / He caught me in his silken net, / And shut me in his golden cage’. The use of the term ‘Phoebus’ reminds the reader that the speaker is failing to read images in a visionary manner. Instead of seeing the sun a symbolic of the divine love of a Christian, creative God, the speaker makes the same mistake as Dennis, seeing the world in terms of ratio and law and oppression: Blake later links Phoebus to Pharaoh and thus to repressive kingship and commerce. The images of



‘I love the jocund dance’ 69

the ‘silken net’ and the ‘golden cage’ reappear in Blake’s work connected to the idea of the oppressions of institutionalized religion (see E67, for example). Summer is also described as throwing his ‘Silk draperies off’ and rushing into ‘the river clear’. In the song ‘Memory, hither come’, the image of a stream is associated with reduction of the power of the imagination to the concerns of memory and the ‘fancies’ of unfulfilled love. The stream of ‘fancies’ that obsesses and reflects the lover is later described by Blake as ‘the Sea of Time & Space’ (E337), the dwelling place of Newton. In ‘Memory, hither come’ it leads to self-obsession, ‘Melancholy’ and the diminution of the poetic voice into the twittering of birdsong – an image that will have resonance in Blake’s later work. Although in ‘To Summer’, the Summer has brought a great deal of energy – bold youths, maidens in ‘sprightly dance’, ‘songs’ and ‘instruments of joy’ played by ‘fam’d’ bards-it requires a Visionary reading to appreciate its beauty: ‘laurel wreaths’ (a traditional emblem of the poethero and hence indicating visionary capability) to protect us from its ‘sultry heat’. While the descriptions of the energetic response to Summer would seem to be signs of positive, carnival activity, we are also told that the Summer ‘oft / Beneath our oaks has slept’. To be beneath the oak is, as I shall discuss later, to be in the traditional site of carnival. In other Sketches the oak suggests village harmony and celebration, but summer’s plunge into the river suggests there is a danger of this harmony being lost. In the image of the ‘river clear’ there is perhaps a hint of Blake’s later image of the ‘water clear’ in the ‘Introduction’ to Songs of Innocence, where the ‘stain[ing]’ of the water carries both the possibility of poetic expression and the potential limitation of the bardic voice, reducing its audience from all those who can listen to a piped song to those who can afford to buy, read and understand the (English) poem. The image of Summer is not misleading per se, but in its intensity the physical experience can lead to a misreading of the image and a subsequent loss of Visionary ability. This idea is developed in ‘To Autumn’. The divine imagination present in the ‘thrilling veins’ of Spring has been given physical expression as the ‘fruit’ created when ‘clustr’ing Summer breaks forth into singing’. The Autumn, like a bard, raises his ‘jolly voice’ to the speaker’s ‘fresh pipe’ in a carnivalesque celebration of a good harvest, the dance of ‘all the daughters of the year’. In fulfilment of the promise of the two earlier poems, the ‘spirits of the air’ now ‘live on the smells’ and ‘sit singing in the trees’. However, having sung and brought joy, Autumn has ‘fled from our sight’ (E409), a pattern of action repeated by the child in the ‘Introduction’ to the Songs of Innocence. The




term ‘fled’ is used in ‘The Angel’ in the Songs of Experience to indicate loss of innocence and the arrival of the ‘grey hairs’ of trammelled experience. Autumn has left his ‘golden load’ behind, including the memory of his song, but now he has left, Winter will approach. Placing too much emphasis on the physical presence of the harvest has exposed the speaker to the dangers of being confused by the cyclical nature of that world and thus losing sight of the everlasting, ever renewing divine creativity manifest in it. Instead the ‘Natural Objects’ have ‘obliterate[d] Imagination’ (E665), and so the speaker, unable to read the natural world as symbolic of God’s existence, seeks to explain its cyclical nature as the product of an invisible, psychologically threatening, exterior force. In ‘To Winter’ this force is shown as a judgemental figure who must be pleaded with but ‘hears me not’ (E410), who blights vision (‘I dare not lift up mine eyes’) and ‘silence[s]’ expression. The ‘doors’ and ‘pillars’ of Winter’s habitation, his ‘sceptre’ and ‘ribbed steel’ all suggest the oppressive institutions of kingship and religion, and his ‘cliffs’ and ‘groaning rocks’ indicate the literal ‘astonishment’ of sublime terror. This will only disappear when ‘heaven smiles’. In the context of the poems, this would suggest the return of Spring, but it could also mean the Last Judgement, when the ‘Error’ of ‘Creation’ (and symbolism) will be ‘burnt up’ to reveal the ‘Truth’ (E565). This pattern of potential and loss is repeated throughout the shorter lyrics of the Poetical Sketches. In ‘To The Evening Star’ the arrival of night leads to the speaker beseeching protection from the ‘influence’ of a star who ‘speak[s] silence’ with its ‘glimmering eyes’. In ‘To Morning’ there seem to be positive elements in the arrival of day: the appearance of dawn and huntsman. However, the later use of these images in ‘The School Boy’ in Songs of Innocence indicates that they too need careful Visionary reading; otherwise ‘blasts of winter’ will bring the fear of mortality and thus provoke the potentially harmful dependence on controlling deities and the exploitations of ‘Priesthood’ (E38). In other songs this danger of misreading nature is characterized as the frustration of an obsessive lover. A good example of this is the pairing of ‘Fresh from the dewy hill’ and ‘when early morn’. At first the lover, his feet ‘wing’d’ and his eyes shaded by a laurel wreath, is protected from the full natural force of summer and thus able to recognize that nature should be read symbolically. His use of simile certainly suggests that he does not mistake the symbol for the meaning: the maiden’s feet are only ‘like angel’s feet’, ‘Each field’ only ‘seems Eden’, and the lover’s song is ‘inspire[d]’ by ‘more than mortal fire’. However, although there is the possibility of a time of ‘innocence and joy’ when the ‘shepherd’s song’




will give way to the divine expression of the ‘angel’s tongue’, it remains only a possibility. ‘So when she speaks, the voice of Heaven I hear’ is a potentially double-edged line. The speaker may hear the voice of Heaven through the beloved’s, or may mistake the beloved’s voice for that of Heaven. The shading of the speaker’s eyes by the inherited poetic laurel wreath may enable Vision, or it may put the speaker into a misleading pastoral tradition. Such a distraction into physical and aesthetic considerations happens in the companion song, ‘When early morn walks forth’. The day is now ‘sober grey’ and the village bell sounds the ‘alarm’ at the approach of night, an image that Blake later links to our fear of death and subsequent reliance upon institutionalized religion, with its inherent dangers of oppression and repression. The lover’s inability to read the situation except in crudely physical terms (‘O should she e’er prove false’) provokes a jealousy that makes him abandon self-determination (‘I curse my stars’) and contemplate murder, savagely ending any hope of recognizing the divine that exists through and in us all. As with the previous song, the final stanza has to be read carefully. O should she e’er prove false, his limbs I’d tear, And throw all pity to the burning air; I’d curse bright fortune for my mixed lot, And then I’d die in peace, and be forgot. (E417) Some readers have found the juxtaposition of psychopathic rage with the pedestrian banality of rhyming ‘lot’ with ‘forgot’ uncomfortable. There is a temptation to laugh at this line and Gleckner considers it ‘may be Blake’s way of underlining the equally hackneyed unreality of pastoral Edens and delicious melancholy’.5 Blake himself may comment upon it in his rhyming of ‘grot’ and ‘trot’ in Steelyard’s song in An Island, where the Lawgiver himself paces around the company like the murderous lover. But rhyming ‘lot’ and ‘forgot’ is positively skilled compared to many of the combinations that occur in contemporary serious lyrics. It seems more likely that Blake is drawing attention to the peace his speaker seeks as the mere oblivion of corporeal dissolution that lacks all sense of spiritual salvation: ‘and be forgot’. The speaker lacks the carnival understanding of the poetic Visionary: ‘Summer sleeps’, the joy of poetic utterance is gone, or rather it is perverted into self-destructiveness, for the death of the Other precipitates the death of subject self, a pattern found in the sublime conflict. Even the grandeur of tragedy is denied him.




There is, then, a sense of implicit failure in the bardic voice itself. In ‘To Summer’ the speaker boasts that ‘Our bards are fam’d who strike the silver wire’, but this is undercut in ‘To The Muses’: ‘The languid strings do scarcely move! / The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!’ (E417). The very fact that energy is being expressed through natural images – ‘Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard / Thy voice’ – clouds the purity of expression. This tension between singer and song is pictured in ‘How sweet I roam’d’, where the speaker is mocked by the prince of love who ‘loves to sit and hear [him] sing’, and is the precursor of a struggle Blake will examine repeatedly – in the characters of Hela and Tiriel, Urizen and Los, and Los and Orc. But from where does this bardic failure stem? Simply having a mortal existence may present the opportunity for confusion, but Blake constantly asserted the divinity of existence: ‘every thing that lives is holy’ (E51). The problem, he suggests, lies in the perceptions of the reader, which need to go beyond the vision of ‘mortal and perishing nature’ (E541) and this is something he explores in a poem full of the horror of death: ‘Fair Elenor’. At first reading, ‘Fair Elenor’ (E411), with its castle, ghosts and talking head, seems to be a rather patchy attempt at Gothic horror. Such grim ditties were popular, often with a Welsh backdrop, and there are a number of similar contemporary poems and plays, including The Castle Spectre, set in Conway Castle.6 The action of the poem is quite simple. Elenor is walking near the ‘cold walls’ and ‘dreary vaults’ of a castle when a man rushes up to her, gives her a ‘wet napkin’ and runs away. She follows, sees the man leap to his death and then returns home. The napkin opens up and reveals her husband’s head, warning her against a murderous duke who hired an assassin to kill him and now seeks to wed Elenor. She kisses the head and, not surprisingly, dies. The whole poem is suffused with chills, sickly smells and death. So far it seems straightforward, if teetering on the edge of comedy – as any camp horror story does. However, on closer reading what emerges quite unexpectedly is Elenor’s culpability in her own situation. She is described in terms of someone experiencing a loss of Visionary capacity. The first image encountered in the poem is a bell, striking one and shaking the ‘silent tower’. Immediately this raises the possibility of the loss of voice and the beginnings of superstitious religion we encountered earlier. Elenor herself is described as being like something risen from the dead: ‘The graves give up their dead: fair Elenor / Walk’d . . . like a ghost’. She is also made to seem responsible for the world she sees; it is at her look that a ‘hollow groan’ runs through the ‘dreary vaults’, her ‘Fancy’ that supplies the images of ‘bones, / And grinning




skulls, and corruptible death’ that she ‘hears’ and ‘sees’. Her fancy even removes her power of self-determination and from the viewpoint of her fearful sublime aesthetic she herself becomes an object: ‘Amaz’d, she finds herself upon her feet’. She becomes, literally, astonished, ‘froze to stone with fear’, an image that will be later used to link such a fearful aesthetic to the restrictions of the Urizenic view. She becomes almost complicit in her lord’s murder; alone in the duke’s castle she receives his head and runs with the assassin out of the gates. The assassin describes the murder as ‘my life’; action, personality and perception have become fused, and along with his powers of discrimination he also loses the power of speech, leaping into the moat and ‘stifling in mud’, a strong image of the choking of the soul caused by seeing the world as merely physical. When Elenor arrives home, she falls on her bed and describes her lord in a series of images that all suggest the loss of Visionary and carnival perception: he ‘was like a flower upon the brows / Of lusty May’ but ‘frail’, like ‘the opening eyes of day’ but ‘darken’d’, like ‘summer’s noon, / Clouded’, like ‘the stately tree, cut down’. This loss of Vision is confirmed by the line ‘Her eyes were fixed’. It is her speech that provokes the stern utterance by the severed head. Her reaction is again a literal astonishment and the loss of all powers of communication, even tears. Her apparent obsession with physicality, shown by the many references to the sounds, smells and touch of mortality, has precipitated her loss of Visionary ability and her own death. Her lord’s speech recalls that of Old Hamlet, but Elenor is no Hamlet and merely collapses under its weight.7 Various elements of this poem, including Elenor’s name, the castle and the curse of death all recall Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1755–7). In Gray’s poem the last Welsh Bard, standing on ‘Arvon’s shore’, calls up the spirits of previous, murdered Welsh bards to help him curse their oppressor, King Edward I of England. The Bard prophesies the ruination of Edward’s line and the death of his Queen, Elenor. Having completed his curse, the Bard then kills himself by jumping to his death from Conway’s cliffs. The real Conway castle, built to subdue the Welsh, is sited beneath a cliff and over the muddy shore of a river, making it a suitable location for ‘Fair Elenor’. If ‘Fair Elenor’ is indeed in part a reworking of ‘The Bard’ then it raises some intriguing possibilities. First, Blake seems to question the validity of Gray’s Bard’s aims. What we find in Blake’s poem is the consequence of Gray’s Bard’s curse: the king and queen both die. But the bard’s prophecy is unsuccessful in as much as it merely replaces one tyranny with another: a murderous ‘villain’ in the ‘night’ working for a ‘duke’. Similarly Elenor’s fate of being ‘stiffen’d to




stone’ calls to mind the effigy of Queen Eleanor in Westminster Abbey that Blake drew in 1774: she will still become part of the royal establishment. Interestingly, near that effigy is an inscription that has ‘learn to die’ as its last line.8 By failing to read physical images properly, mistaking the destruction of the symbol of tyranny for the destruction of tyranny itself, the bard has become a mere hired assassin, linked by his violent action to the lord he kills, and losing his bardic voice ‘in mud’. Blake returns to the imagery of Gray’s poem in Vala or the Four Zoas, again associating it with the need to cast off the fear of death. In Gray’s ‘The Bard’, the bards on Arvon’s shore are weaving the warp and woof of the ‘winding sheet of Edward’s race’. In The Four Zoas it is Enitharmon who, at the Cathedron looms, weaves bodies for the ‘poor wandering spectres . . . of the dead’ (E372), ‘terrors’ that ‘put on their sweet clothing by the banks of Arnon’ (E376). The spectres can see ‘the Saviour beyond the Pit of death & destruction’ but must ‘plunge into the river of space for a period till / The dread Sleep of Ulro is past’ (E376). But Satan perverts their sleeping visions into dreams of the undiscovered country of ‘the Wonders of the Grave’ (E377), and recalling the phrasing in ‘The Bard’, Blake writes ‘All futurity / Seems teeming with endless destruction’. This can only be redeemed by the ‘Universal Humanity’, the ‘Lamb of God’ who overcomes Eternal Death, despite the efforts of Satan and the ‘shadowy female’ Vala who seek to execute him as a ‘murderer’. Satan’s power comes from Urizen, who is described as the ‘King of Light’ (Elenor had mourned her ‘lord . . . like a star’), with eyes ‘like the Sun’ and giving off light from his scales ‘like windows of the morning’. This later passage suggests that what Blake was beginning to examine in the Poetical Sketches was the connection between the misreading of physical images, the fear of death, a fearful sublime aesthetic and a subsequent loss of Vision that ultimately leads to a loss of faith. So where does the comic come in to all this? If the comic was indeed Blake’s model for an alternative, creative reading, shouldn’t it be present even in these early poems? The answer is, of course, that it is, but only obliquely. Some critics have seen the heavy-handedness of these early lyrics as indicative of parody and there are moments in ‘Fair Elenor’ that could prompt laughter: for example, Gleckner describes the murderer’s jump into the moat as ‘a Peter Sellers-like manoeuvre’.9 Certainly the ghostly setting was seen by many other contemporary ballad writers as a rich mine of comic potential. The New Comic Songster collection of the 1780s contains two prime examples. In ‘John Grouse and Molly Dumpkin’, in an episode that mirrors the lord’s head’s fatal conversation with Elenor, John Grouse’s ghost, ‘tall as a May-pole’, appears to





Soon as she heard her true love speak, She clasp’d her hands, jump’d out of bed, She squeak’d and squall’d (ah how she bawl’d) She shut her mouth, and drop’d down dead. Similarly, in the ballad ‘Honey and Mustard; or, Lady Go-Nimble’s Ghost’, another ghost apparates before a trembling lover; in this case, Lady Go-Nimble to her husband. She, too, quotes Old Hamlet (‘List, O List’), although her approach to revenge is rather different: after charging her husband with perfidy she throws him out of the window. It is possible, then, that some of the lines in ‘Fair Elenor’ might suggest an attempt to deflate the pretentiousness of Gothic melodrama, were they not apparently all unintentional. Indeed there seems to be evidence that someone was concerned to remove the humorous potential from ‘Fair Elenor’. Corrections have been made in pen in some copies, so that, for example, the ludicrously pompous statement ‘O Elenor, I am thy husband’s head’ is altered to the less amusing ‘O Elenor, behold thy husband’s head’. Elenor’s sinking ‘upon . . . her pale cheeks’ is changed to ‘cheek’ because ‘cheeks’ invites the suggestion of ‘buttocks’. There are, however, rather subtler references to the comic in the poem. When she runs home she is described as a ‘deer wounded’. The wounded deer was the subject of the melancholy and ‘moralis[ing]’ of Jaques, the cynical court wit in As You Like It who is contrasted with and outjested by the clown / Fool figures of Touchstone and Rosalind. The deer, panting and sighing, is taken by Jaques as an example of the fragility of life and self-centredness of the populace: Elenor’s vision is limited to the frailty of life and restricted to a self-centred aesthetic. In the same stanza, the grammar allows the possibility that Elenor is like ‘arrows that fly / By night’, an image that returns in ‘The Sick Rose’ and is linked to Addison’s famous description of the evils of satire. There is a hint here that Elenor’s viewpoint is linked to a lack of comic understanding. Such hints appear in other of the shorter Poetical Sketches. In the song ‘My silks and fine array’, a frustrated lover again looks towards death. Once again there is the suggestion that the speaker is not using her Visionary capability. The silks are ‘Drapery’ (E650): the speaker is concentrating on physical existence, rather than reading such matter in a Visionary way – the speaker has a ‘languish’d air’ and ‘love’ drives away



Dumpkin (fat and four feet high) and tells her how, in the flower of youth, he fell down a well and died. Like Elenor, Molly reacts badly to the news:

smiles rather than being a reminder of divine joy. Again, this confusion leads to a loss of faith. The beloved is seen as ‘heav’n’, but his heart is ‘wintry cold’, and the speaker has become a ‘pilgrim’ to ‘love’s . . . tomb’ rather than salvation. Again, the speaker is isolated and subject to the rule of the Other, whether that be the lover or the deity who has ‘giv’n’ him power over her. In the final stanza, the speaker asks for a ‘winding sheet’. As well as making a possible connection to Gray’s Bard – and female bards were not uncommon10 – the grave and the winding sheet reappear frequently in Blake’s work, often associated with entering the realm of physical existence: in For the Sexes the birth of Man into physical existence is described as entering the grave. The speaker seems to be trapped in the same kind of misreading of the world that hampers the other speakers in Poetical Sketches. However, in a collection that contains many echoes of Shakespeare, the line ‘Bring me an axe and spade, / Bring me a winding sheet; / When I my grave have made, / Let winds and tempests beat’ surely brings to mind the gravedigger in Hamlet (V.i.91–2). In the play, the gravedigger (a clown) is digging a new grave for a spurned maiden (Ophelia) in the old grave of a clown (Yorick) and this action sets Hamlet to muse on mortality. The speaker of ‘My silks and fine array’ apparently resigns herself to fate (‘Let winds and tempests beat’) but this is contrasted with Hamlet’s storm-tossed return to Denmark and his calmer acceptance of divine providence. The ‘My silks’ speaker’s self-positioning in a lonely grave is contrasted with a communal memory of happiness (Yorick’s jokes) that transcends death: as the gravedigger jokingly points out, his houses last till Doomsday. A more certain contrast to the comic world is made in ‘I love the jocund dance’. I love the laughing vale, I love the echoing hill, Where mirth does never fail, And the jolly swain laughs his fill . . . I love the oaken seat, Beneath the oaken tree, Where all the old villagers meet, And laugh our sports to see. (E 406) Here we seem to have a true carnival moment: a festive dance on a village green, with the landscape, people and speaker all in echoing harmony. Such an ideal moment will occur later in the Songs of Innocence, and




here too we find a vision of the world where natural existence, social harmony and poetic understanding seem to exist side by side – the social seat and the natural tree are both ‘oaken’. However, the ‘mirth’ is potentially under threat. This sense of communitas, ‘I love our neighbours all’ has, it seems, been inspired by the speaker’s love for ‘Kitty’, but is in danger of becoming obsessive: ‘But thou art all to me’. There is clearly a tension between love for the community and desire for the individual, just as in carnival itself there is a tension between the universal celebration of life and the bodily desires that prompt life. And it is the relationship between these two forces and the consequent creation and influence of morality upon the society that is the subject of another of the Poetical Sketches, ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’ (E421-3). ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’ shows a community of young people involved in the sort of ‘rural gambol’ that can be found in Thomson’s poem, ‘Winter’. Such midwinter or Christmas gaming had a long tradition. A symbolic celebration of renewed life, it was usually accompanied by a ritualized reversal of normal world order that allowed the re-establishment of social ties thorough play. The Lord of Misrule or the Abbé de Malegouverne are good examples of this, and while some critics have argued that these figures were occasionally little more than party organizers, there was also a tradition of these games being the opportunity for the testing and reassessment of personal and civic morality – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight being a good example. Once again, at first glance, the poem appears straightforward. With its passing reference to the ‘nut-brown ale’ of Milton’s L’Allegro, it seems a simple tale of country folk used to demonstrate the need for ‘laws . . . made to keep fair play’. True, the didactic moral does seem to sit rather uncomfortably on the end, appearing rather suddenly out of the story and, hinting as it does of the revenge law of the Old Testament, rather at odds with what we might expect from the young Blake.11 However, it is tempting to assume that the poem was just the product of a fit of adolescent moral-mindedness, written to emulate Gray’s Ode to Adversity and published in 1783 because it had an autobiographical element (‘Will’ Blake had ‘pen’d up . . . Kate’ in marriage the previous year). Gray’s poem begins with the birth of ‘adversity’ the ‘Daughter of Jove’. Adversity is sent to promote virtue by making men ‘bound’ (as Roger is) to ‘taste . . . pain’. This ‘virtue’ induces ‘Charity’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Pity’ and Virtue’s ‘chast’ning hand’ falls on the ‘Suppliant’s Head’ to teach forgiveness and scare away ‘Self-pleasing Folly’s idle brood, / Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless joy’. This, the speaker of Gray’s poem asserts, is supposed to teach him to ‘know myself a Man’. This seems to




be the pattern of ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’; the young seem ‘idle’ and ‘pain’ brings law to curb the ‘fortunes of the game’. But given what we know of Blake’s later severe questioning of ‘moral’ law, it is hard to believe he meant the poem to be read in this way. And yet, where is the challenge within the poem to the moral didacticism of Gray’s original? As with ‘Fair Elenor’, reading the poem again with a comic vision in mind may provide an answer. In ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, Blake’s imagery suggests the sexual energy of the young poeple, instead of finding expression in carnival celebration, is being symbolically sublimated at every opportunity. The poem shows us that such sublimation leads to the discomfort of the moral ending. The title of ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, the first line that speaks of ‘Snow’ on ‘cloaths’ and the image of the blinding ‘silken ‘kerchief’ all suggest that, once again, we are being confronted with the dangers of a loss of Vision. Certainly this is not a community at peace: ‘The oaken log lay on the fire’ and the reason for this seems to be frustrated sexual desire, a suggestion heightened by the wintry setting, the concentration on young people and the echo of the frozen shepherd from Love’s Labours Lost. Although things appear ordered on the surface – the ‘well-wash’d stools’ in a ‘circling row’ – passions are running high: an unidentified voice demands the fire be heaped ‘higher’. Like the other thwarted lovers of the Poetical Sketches, these people are solely concentrated on the physical (‘how fair the show!’). Instead of being a celebration of fertility, the birth of Christ and the return to life, the ‘laughing jest’ is linked with the ‘love-sick tale’. There is a great deal of flirtation in the poem, but all unsuccessful: their blindness seems to mock Cupid’s and their passion is not allowed direct expression. Here, as happens again in a passage of Jerusalem (E222), thwarted sexual desire is forced to emerge as suppressed violence. ‘The lasses prick the lads with pins’, Dolly’s bottom bruisingly ‘kiss[es] the ground’ when she falls, ‘titt’ring Kate / Is pen’d up’ (with all the double entendres those words provoke) and ‘Sukey is tumbled on the ground’. Tumbled, as a sexual euphemism, would have been readily apparent to anyone as well-versed in Hamlet as Blake. Dick’s passion too is frustrated: he ‘griev[es] the chance’ to kiss ‘fall[en]’ Dolly, who hits the ground when her seat is stolen by Roger. Both Roger and Dick (whose names are also sexually suggestive) resort to cheating and mischief and it ends in Roger’s fall, nosebleed and the tacked on moral warning. This moral is not very Christian, however. It seems to promote the Old Testament ‘laws’ of revenge as ‘wholesome’, sees carnival as no more than the temporary release of subversive expression before law is re-established and wants to ‘stop the game’. This freezing of humanity is seen as a necessary part of civilization: all those




Who on the blinded man impose Stand in his stead; as, long a-gone, When men were first a nation grown, Lawless they liv’d – till wantonness And liberty began t’increase, And one man lay in another’s way; Then laws were made to keep fair play. The term ‘impose’ reappears in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to describe the competing Visions of the enlightened speaker and the rational angel. Here too, there is a sense of competing interpretations. The grammar of these lines suggests that there was a state of savage innocence in which people lived ‘lawless’ (or without the need for laws) but humanity is now too corrupt to exist without them. Blake argues against that idea, later noting that morality is innate, not taught: [some] simple country Hinds are Moral Enthusiasts Indignant against Knavery without a Moral criterion other than Native Honesty untaught while other country Hinds are as indignant against honesty & Enthusiasts for Cunning & Artifice. (E635) The ‘wantonness’ and ‘liberty’ to which the moral warning seems to object could also be read as the passion and expression necessary to life. Later Blake notes that ‘Excess in Youth is Necessary to Life’ (E530) and annotates Lavater’s aphorism 601 (‘Forwardness nips affection in the bud’): ‘The more is the pity’ (E598). Moreover, standing in the blind man’s stead has demonstrably not taught the players anything: the loss of vision has only confused them. Will ‘thought his face was t’other way’ and Roger experiences ‘hood-wink’d chance’. It only teaches them the obvious point that ‘Where cheating is, there’s mischief there’ and the sublimation of passion required by the moral is what lead to the mischief in the first place. Even the cure for the nosebleed points out the fallibility of the moral code. The key cure for nosebleeds was traditional; one must be careful of not reading too much into it, but using locks and keys as sexual imagery is also long-standing, as exemplified by the drunken devil-porter’s clowning in Macbeth (II.iii.27–34). The energy of the more overtly sexual movements in the poem is channelled into the symbolically cold key put down Roger’s back. The ‘blood is stayed’, no longer coming out of Roger’s ‘nose’ so he can ‘hold up his head’. Blake later makes a connection between this sort of sublimation and the philosophy of Bacon, which he strongly associated with matter-confused




vision. In his Annotations to Reynolds Blake notes that many artists are ‘Dissipated & Wild’ (E644) and that expressing energy is an essential part of creativity, and hence art and hence faith. ‘Meer enthusiasm is the All in All!’ he states, but then adds that ‘Bacons Philosophy has Ruind England’ (E645). Blake felt that Bacon’s empirical philosophy suggested one could benefit at another’s expense, which Blake refutes: ‘Man is not Improved by the hurt of another’ (E625). For society to exist, of course, Bacon wishes aggression to be sublimated. In doing so, Blake believed, he was denying ‘a Conscience in Man’ (E251) and worshipping the ‘hidden Harlot’ (E138) of organized religion. The hidden harlot appears here in the form of the cold key: what the loss of vision entails is a repeating round of repression and oppression. The moral offered by such an interpretation, Blake proposes, will also be limited. Once again, as with ‘Fair Elenor’, the importance of a comic vision is hinted at by its absence. What should be an opportunity for carnival fooling has been turned into a game of ‘Cunning & Artifice’ which the ‘benevolent . . . will never win’ (E511). Instead of mutual understanding, there is oppression. In ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, if one accepts Blake’s allusions to fooling as deliberate, then a strong challenge from within the poem is made to the obvious, moralistic reading available at first sight. Carnival foolery is not only important, it must be undertaken in the right way, the Visionary way. The porter / clown in Macbeth reminds the audience that even the best equivocator can ‘not equivocate to heaven’:12 gaming and fooling will only be beneficial if they recognize that ‘human nature is the image of God’ (E597). However, the appearance of conveying divine truths about the nature of humanity, justice and equality makes the Fool’s social position a very attractive one. Indeed, as with the oppressive moral warning of ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, the dominant class / culture may seek to usurp the elements of carnival to lend apparent justification to their own ends. It is this danger, and the Fool’s response to it, that is examined in the dramatic Poetical Sketches.

The Fool and King Edward the Third he has danc’d in the field Of battle, like the youth at morrice play. (E428) Christmas games were not the only form of carnival that could be appropriated by blind moralizing. In the dramatic Poetical Sketches Blake turns his attention to the complicated question of the misappropriation of the




sweet Fool’s place by a manipulative social hierarchy through adoption of the Fool’s symbolic traits, and he does this in part by inviting comparison with Shakespeare’s Henry V. There are many thematic and verbal echoes between the play and the dramatic sketches. The opening of the Prologue to King Henry the Fourth, for example – ‘O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue / To drown the throat of war!’ – is clearly influenced by Shakespeare’s Chorus: ‘O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention’. In King Edward the Third, Edward’s words frequently echo those of Shakespeare’s play, and especially Henry V himself. Henry’s injunction at Harfleur – ‘Stiffen the sinews . . . For there is none of you so mean and base / That hath not noble lustre in your eyes’ (III.i.6, 29–30) – is echoed in Edward’s comment that the ‘most obscure at home, that scarce were seen / To twinkle in their sphere’ will shine with ‘splendor’ (1: 38–9, 42). Henry’s messenger Exeter threatens a ‘tempest’ of ‘widows’ tears . . . orphans’ cries . . . dead men’s blood’ (II.iv.99, 106–7). Edward promises a ‘fiery whirlwind of swift war’ (1: 48). Henry’s offer, ‘he which hath no stomach to this fight / Let him depart’ (IV.iii.35–6), is mirrored by Dagworth’s request to be sent home by Edward: ‘my courage shrunk and wither’d / My sinews slacken’d . . . I beg I may return to England’ (3: 102–4). The many other similarities, such as the raggedness of the English army before battle, the ‘joke’ indomitable Welshman and the King walking the camp in disguise, are all well rehearsed by Lowery.13 One thing absent from Shakespeare’s play is any real criticism of the King’s actions by a Fool. Falstaff is dead and all his potential replacements – Nym, Pistol, Fluellen, even the jesting French – are beaten into submission to English patriotism. The Chorus, occupying the mediating position between the play and the audience, seems to take on some of the familiar attributes of the Fool, insisting that the audience be actively involved in the play: ‘let us . . . On your imaginary forces work’, and defying temporal and spatial reality ‘Turning th’ accomplishment of many years / into an hourglass’, ‘to Southampton . . . is the playhouse now’. But he questions only to affirm: he claims to offer a ‘little touch of Harry in the night’ (Prologue to IV. 47). Williams and Bates, the common men (IV.i.86–226), offer a dissenting voice, but then succumb to Henry’s rhetorical trickery, sugared with a pseudo-biblical, pseudo-proverbial coating. Indeed, it is Henry himself who assumes the role of jester, cheering on his men and wooing his bride – although he soon abandons wordplay for the words of a ‘plain soldier’ (V.ii.152). This appropriation of the Fool’s role is made more explicit in Blake’s King Edward the Third. First, Edward’s lack of Vision is emphasized by his appeal to God to support his aggression, telling his troops that those who




‘stand’ (in the light of I Samuel 6: 20 possibly meaning those who set themselves against God’s judgement) will be ‘enerve[d]’ he hopes, by the thought of ‘Liberty, the charter’d right of Englishmen’ (1:9). Blake’s doubt about charters can be seen in ‘London’,14 a poem which seems to borrow heavily from the language of this passage. Although Edward claims of his enemies that ‘Their mind are fetter’d’, it is he who is suffering from ‘mindforg’d manacles’ (E27). The blindness and poverty of Edward’s view is hinted at by a half-reference to Lear’s Fool. Edward promises that his men will ‘beam forth lustre on a darkling world’ (1: 36); Lear’s Fool likens Lear to a candle that has gone out so ‘we were left darkling’ (I.iv.216). That this carnal Kingship is linked to imperialist and mercantilist ambitions is made clear in the following scene, where the Bishop, described by another noble as a ‘worship’d oak’, claims that ‘Commerce, tho’ the child of Agriculture, / Fosters his parent’ (2: 31–2). This was not true to the experience either of the Elizabethan or late eighteenth-century agricultural labourer displaced into the town, who instead ‘sweat and toil, / And gain but scanty fare’. Edward wants his men to shine like stars: the imagery of stars reappears in Europe, where they bring forth ‘all devouring fiery kings’ (E61). There, Los, the spirit of prophecy and ‘possessor of the moon’ stands against such destruction. He calls upon his sons to sing, ‘drink the sparkling wine of Los / And let us laugh at war’ (E62). Edward, who wishes to outshine ‘the moon’, seeks to appropriate the right to laugh at war himself as a means to justify his own ends, and in this is he soon supported by his nobles. The role of Chorus is taken over by Chandos, who claims imaginative control over the action: ‘Welcome to the fields of Cressy’ (3: 44), ‘Here comes the King’ (3: 67). He claims to be able to see into men’s characters as if they had windows in their breast (3: 186) and the man he claims to know best is Dagworth – and it is Dagworth who usurps the Fool’s role with the most disastrous consequences. Dagworth is introduced immediately as a joker. The first thing he says appears to question Edward’s courage, but another courtier, Audley, replies ‘you but joke’ (3: 9). Dagworth is claimed to represent the most obviously beneficial face of clowning: honesty and plain speaking under disguise. He even makes a jest of the King: Chandos: Here comes the King himself; tell him your thoughts / Plainly, Sir Thomas. Dagworth: I’ve told him before [that ‘retreating / Too often, takes away a soldier’s courage’] but his disorder [that he retreats] Makes him deaf. (3: 66–70)





Sir Thomas, now I understand your mirth, Which often plays with Wisdom for its pastime, And brings good counsel from the breast of laughter. (3: 133–5) He is authorizing Dagworth’s good sense to question what he, the King, is doing, and Dagworth’s questioning only leads to confirmation of the King’s wishes. Similarly, Dagworth is called a ‘genuine Englishman’ by the Prince (3: 189). The Prince is supposedly trustworthy because he is the bravest man on the field: but the reader has only Dagworth’s authority for that. Dagworth, for all his amiability, is perverting the true comic function. His praise of the Prince is that he kills as if he were a ‘youth at morrice play’ (3: 31), which should be a symbol of creativity. Even Dagworth’s own humour becomes a weapon of destruction: the King remarks that if threatened by the enemy ‘Dagworth would ‘laugh his fury into nerveless shame!’ (3: 177) and adds: Sir Thomas Dagworth, you must have your joke, And shall, while you can fight as you did at The Ford. (3: 92) Dagworth is supposed to be fighting on the side of liberty, but his only offer of freedom for the common soldier is through death: Thousands of souls must leave this prison-house To be exalted to those heavenly fields, Where songs of triumph, palms of victory, Where peace, and joy, and love, and calm content, Sit singing in the azure clouds (5: 27–31) This is similar to the unobtainable carrot dangled in front of Tom in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Songs of Innocence. That happiness which should be available to Tom as a right of life is made conditional on his death and



But while apparently questioning the King’s intentions, he is in fact attempting to deflect any unease the reader may have about the jingoistic, destructive war. By providing a minor rebellion, Dagworth prevents a major one. The King says of him:

on his renouncing his claim to it while alive: ‘And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, / He’d have God for his father, & never want joy’ (E10). Having this conventional ‘God for a father’ may mean Tom losing even the desire for joy. Dagworth is operating a similar coercive strategy of preferring one reading of terms to another. In accepting his vision of glory in death the soldiers will become part of the false world he weaves from words, the ‘songs of triumph’. It is a distortion of the prophetic task. Dagworth tells Manny to ‘Bind ardent Hope upon your feet like shoes’ (5: 33). In Milton, binding sandals onto his feet helps Blake’s narrator achieve understanding through reason (the left foot) and poetic inspiration (the right) (E114–16)15 but Dagworth’s vision is a corruption of the resurrection: ‘those that fall shall rise in victory’ (5: 38). Manny’s title and Christian name (‘Sir Walter’) may call to mind the valiant Sir Walter Blunt in Shakespeare’s I Henry IV whose viewpoint is challenged by the foolish Falstaff in his hopes to be a live coward rather than a dead hero. Dagworth’s joking about his own cowardice is meant to emphasize the importance of courage to the English, but in fact it is an attempt to hide the real objection to the war: that it is not just, in either political or moral terms. As the King himself says, ‘when English courage fails, / Down goes our right to France’ (3: 71–2); it is only bravado and land-lust that takes them there. Dagworth legitimizes his initial plea of cowardice by the fact that one ‘whom [he is] bound to obey’ (3: 101) bids him not to spill blood. This prohibition comes from God. But God is quickly forgotten in a welter of natural images (3: 111–32), one of which, the snake that turns and bites ‘the padding foot’, links the English army with Satan. When he is convinced the King will fight, Dagworth switches his images to celebratory ones: ‘the young bridegroom going to be married’, ‘we will sing, like the young housewives busied / In the dairy’, and ‘minds that . . . leap and dance to hear the trumpet sound’ (3: 145, 149, 171). These images, normally associated with the celebration of community and creativity, renewal and plenty, are diverted from a symbolic religious function to a political image of earthly gain through destruction and death. Given Raine’s suggestion that Blake admired Norse myths,16 where soldiers are glad to fall in battle because they will cast off selfhood and go to Valhalla, it might be possible to read Dagworth’s willingness to fight as spiritual unworldliness. However, it is not the spiritual aspect of such valour that is stressed. Chandos’s praise of liberty, for example (3: 195–204), has nothing to do with the rights of man, only with imperialist capitalism: gaining and defending a piece of land. What both Chandos and Dagworth do for the King is provide motives for his




actions which seem to justify them in terms of liberty and humanitarianism. It is a false use of reason, a kind of folly that is the cloak of knavery, and it is divorced from physical reality. So, too, is Chandos’s speech on conscience (3: 282–94). His first sentence recalls the teachings of St Paul, but his is the voice of ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Ephesians 6: 12). Chandos’s ‘Conscience’ only listens to its own bird-like (and hence, in Blakean shorthand, naturalistic and undivine) sounds: ‘warbling’ and ‘trilling’. The angels which surround its chair are also ‘feather’d’, part of the natural world. The popular Elizabethan puns on religious and monetary angels remind the reader that this ‘Conscience’ is dominated by worldly considerations. Like the Mayor in An Island’s ‘Good English hospitality’ song (E452), the King and Chandos have little concern for the community of human existence as represented by the shared experience of the senses that ‘sing and dance’ around ‘Reason’s fine-wrought throne’ and keep reason from abstraction. Pointedly, this speech on conscience comes just before the introduction of the real clown characters. William and Peter, in their common-sense perspective, are champions of humanity against social oppression. Lowery notes of William that his ‘artlessness suggests the Shakespearean fools, and his remarks remind one of Touchstone in particular’. Peter Blunt, too, ‘through his inconsequent, breathless narrative, is akin to the comic, witless knave bearing his name in Romeo and Juliet’.17 Even their names have significance. Montaigne, whose work was sufficiently well known to Shakespeare to admit a pun on his name in Love’s Labours Lost (V.i.71), believed that words lacked any inherent meaning. He saw proper names as a good example of this, particularly mentioning Peter and William as examples of names that could belong to anyone: ‘they are dashes, and tricks of the pen common unto a thousand men’.18 Montaigne’s argument is that words, being so inherently valueless, cannot bring true knowledge; only an act of faith could. With his typical insistence that knowledge must be grounded in particulars or it becomes abstract and mystifying, Blake is making those names specific to two people who will actually suffer death and injury if Dagworth’s jingoistic war goes ahead. Everybody likes Dagworth except William and Peter. The whole of scene 4 is a conversation between William, Peter and Dagworth, between sweet and bitter Fools. William’s challenge to Dagworth’s attitude proves it to be an artifice of reason. Thou dost not understand me, William . . . Now, William, thou dost thrust the question home . . . Thou art a natural philosopher, and





William’s ability to play with words exposes Dagworth’s sophistry, revealing the naked ambition of the English oaks in falsely supplanting the French vines in their own country. Dagworth tries to insist that ‘guilt’ is only ‘an act of the mind’ and although the King was ambitious, any who followed him to France without ambition were themselves not guilty of any wrong. With clownish tenacity, William applies Dagworth’s logic to propose that no one should cede self-determination to another power unthinkingly. Dagworth calls him an ‘endless moralist’ and tries to keep him quiet, rejecting William’s ambition ‘to know every thing and ‘telling him it is ‘best to know [but] little’ and not listening to the story that has just ‘come into [William’s] head’. Stories were the Platonic way of disseminating knowledge and were after all the basis of the parables used by Christ. Blake later notes that ‘Knowledge is not by deduction but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once’ (E664) and that ‘Christ addresses himself to the Man not to his Reason’ (E664). Instead, as Peter reminds us, Dagworth only ‘love[s] to hear war-songs’ (4: 52). Peter too serves as a reminder of Dagworth’s linguistic slipperiness. Peter praises Chandos as wise and is rebuked by Dagworth as a flatterer, yet Dagworth flatters Chandos with similes both more flattering than Peter’s plain speech and which also distract from the idea of wisdom by likening Chandos to an imperial (and perhaps Papal) ring. Flattery, this time of the Earl of Warwick, is also at the root of Dagworth’s second argument with William. William: Why you know, Sir, when we were in England at the tournament at Windsor, and the Earl of Warwick tumbled over, you ask’d me if he did not look well when he fell? and I said, No, he look’d very foolish; and you was very angry with me for not flattering you. (4: 68–72) William has perceived that Dagworth is attempting to control his vision of the world through his use of language, wishing William to accept the claim that the Earl of Warwick looked well when he fell as reality itself. In refusing to see Warwick looking stupid when he fell, Dagworth is trying to avoid the socially deflating aspect of Warwick’s tumble. William, insisting that, even though Warwick is an earl and fell at Windsor (a seat of kingly power), he looked ‘foolish’, is reminding the reader of the



knowest truth by instinct, while reason runs aground, as we have run our argument (4: 12, 28, 33–4)

Fool’s physical appeal; all men are equally human, restricted by physicality, prone to accidents and falls. This is a literal version of the Biblical proverb ‘Pride comes before a fall’, and the revealing tumble is one of the classic motifs of the carnivalesque. William trusts the judgement of his own eyes and is reproved. The problem with this clowning challenge, however, is it is not successful. What follows is a conversation between Manny and Dagworth, where Manny weeps over the souls that are to die in battle, but offers no alternative to Dagworth’s seizing the claim of prophetic inspiration. This in turn is followed by the ‘war-song’ which, instead of naming those that are to fall, as Peter believed it would, recapitulates what has been established throughout the play: the Trojan Britons’ destructiveness. They are implicated in a loss of Vision (they are described as ‘muffling the sun’ and their ‘oaks’ are ‘Spoil’d’) and Brutus takes over the habit of a prophet: ‘my heart labours with futurity’ only to predict further war: ‘Our sons shall rule the empire of the sea’ (6: 41–2). Under the name of Liberty they encourage imperialism and ‘Morning / Shall be prevented by their swords gleaming’ (6: 51). Liberty, instead of bringing hope, threatens both England and all other lands with violence. This failure to achieve true liberty is borne out in the other dramatic sketches. The notion of a popular protest against warmongering monarchy – ‘Every Body hates a King’ (E623) – appears in the Prologue to King John (E430–1). In response to ‘Tyranny[’s]’ (and even, perhaps, ‘Justice [’s]’) plunging a sword into Albion’s breast, a country once divided into separate groups – ‘widowed virgins . . . aged fathers . . . sucking infant’ – becomes a community of ‘citizens’, a ‘Patriot’ who rejects the false Law of Kings and ‘joy . . . in the morning’. To do this, however, they still have to resort to the weapons of Nobodaddy – war and slaughter. It seems that to defeat tyranny truly a different approach is needed. In the Prologue to King Edward the Fourth (E439) the cause of war is seen as the ‘Kings and Nobles of the Land’, the hypocritical ‘Ministers’ of heaven. The battlefield they create is presided over by Sin and Death, wife and son of Satan, and the ‘souls of the oppressed’ are ‘torn to everlasting fire’. To oppose them, the speaker of the prologue asks for a ‘voice like thunder’, a reference to Revelations 14: 2 that aligns him with a prophetic tradition, with which to ‘drown the throat of war’. The speaker also asks the question ‘who can stand’ against such a voice, also suggesting God’s Day of Judgement. However, this will only happen for ‘the oppressed’ when the ‘senses / Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness’. In the lyrical Poetical Sketches there is a poem entitled ‘Mad Song’. In it the speaker has a complex relationship with light, apparently trying to avoid it, but the




morning keeps intruding and driving the speaker’s ‘notes’ to ‘heaven’. In some copies, the influence of the dawn has been altered from affecting the ‘birds’ to ‘beds’, a strange emendation that makes more sense if one remembers Blake’s later equating of birds with limited vision. One of the speaker’s lines recalls both Hamlet’s soliloquy on the player and the insight of King Lear upon the heath (‘make mad the roaring winds, / And with the tempests play’). It also looks forward to the energetic child-prophets of the Songs: ‘a fiend in a cloud’. If the dominant forces of society could appropriate the position of the sweet Fool, then perhaps a more allusive, madly radical position of protest is needed. The Fool as madman is a connection Blake frequently made in his notebook jottings, and it is an alternative he now explores in Tiriel.

‘Listen to the fool’s reproach! it is a kingly title!’ The Madman and Tiriel Like Fair Elenor, Tiriel concentrates on themes of madness and the loss of Vision from delusion and fear. It is an epic tale of a blind, vengeful king cast out by his sons to wander the world, who suffers the death of his wife, confronts three apparently demented parent figures, gets tormented by his brothers, curses his offspring and finally, with somewhat disconcerting abruptness, dies. At first sight, therefore, it seems fairly unpromising material for evidence of Blake’s comic vision. While there have been suggestions that the poem is, like America, a satire on the madness of George III, as G. E. Bentley points out this leaves so many elements of the story unaccounted for that it seems at best a tenuous explanation inspired by the desire to find a political reading to all of Blake’s work. The style, content and date of the poem (around 1789) create such a host of conflicting associations in the mind of the reader – King Lear, Oedipus, Moses, Joseph, Louis XIV and the occult world of Cornelius Agrippa to name but a few – that it seems like a rather unfocussed attack on tyranny. Further, like An Island and The Four Zoas, Tiriel is one of Blake’s ‘unpublished’ works, existing only in a manuscript version. For the modern reader it has the appearance of a preliminary draft whose ideas reappear elsewhere in Europe, The First Book of Urizen and Jerusalem. Tiriel is of course unlike any of Blake’s other manuscript poems in that he prepared twelve highly finished pen and grey wash illuminations to accompany it, but again this is seen as merely a point of departure: Martin Myrone describes Blake’s abandonment of their distinctive style as a ‘recognition that the conventional means of integrating text and engraved image did not fulfil his artistic or literary ambitions’.19




When reading Tiriel, therefore, it is tempting to assume that, while it may be ‘allegorizing Blake’s fierce and enduring opposition to materialism and rationalism’,20 it is a form of experimentation valuable only as source material, with Tiriel, ‘king of the West’ later emerging as Urizen, Har as Los, Ijim as Tharmas and Zazel as Luvah.21 The result of this reading however is to detract from the possible alternatives to Tiriel’s viewpoint that are contained in the dynamic of the relationships within the poem. For Tiriel is not just a generalized attack on tyranny but Blake’s next attempt to offer a comic alternative to materialist aesthetics. From its opening stanza, Tiriel is clearly about Vision. Tiriel is found standing in front of the ‘Gates’ of his palace, and throughout Blake’s work gates and doors are linked to sensory perception and understanding. We are told immediately that Tiriel has lost his Visionary capacity: ‘his eyes were dark’ned’ and his wife is ‘fading in death’ – the connection between the loved female, death and the limitation of Vision caused by an obsessively materialist reading of the world was made in the Poetical Sketches. This loss of Vision affects his sense of the divine, so that his ‘Voice’, which should be filled with praise, is instead wasted in curses which are a perversion of the prophetic task: instead of bringing spiritual understanding they bring physical harm. He is unable to see the comic cycle of life as an opportunity for regeneration, seeing both birth and death as producing ‘groans’ and calling his children ‘serpents’ (1: 22) and ‘sons of the Curse’ (1: 10) in phrases that evoke the Fall. To Tiriel, his wife Myratana was ‘Soul . . . Spirit . . . fire’; in his misreading of the physical world he is spiritually blind. His journey is indeed ‘pathless’ (1: 52), and lacking insight he reads everything as an image of himself (‘Earth, thus I stamp your bosom’, 5: 4) which produces tyranny (he is linked to Edward III by the description of his journey as ‘darkling’). Like Pharaoh he tries to command (3: 36, 6: 12) but his words only bring plagues on the physical realm. As ‘subtil as a serpent in paradise’ (8: 24) he believes only in Law, not the spirit. Like the law-bearing Moses he has hidden in the cleft of a rock to see the wonder of God: I dwelt with Myratana five years in the desolate rock And all that time we waited for the fire to fall from heaven Or for the torments of the sea to overwhelm you all But now my wife is dead & all the time of grace is past You see the parents curse. (6: 8–12)




This is an allusion to Exodus 33: 20–3, where the Lord lets Moses see only his ‘back parts’, for no man may see his face and live. Tiriel, however, only wants to see the coarsest physical manifestation of God’s presence, not divine light but destructive fire and the ‘torments’ (a word that links him to the rational angel of The Marriage) of the sea of time and space. His position in the rock is later echoed by the blind Urizen in The First Book of Urizen (plate 15), who also fails to see the fiery backside of the spirit of prophesy that is shown to the reader on plate 3. Both Tiriel and Urizen are placed, as Blake later suggests of Sir Joshua Reynolds, like ‘the devil’s servant, ready to Kiss any one’s Arse’. In his comments on Reynolds, Blake alludes to the satirical print ‘The Birth of Sir Bugaboo’ in which Pitt is shown being born from the devil’s arse into the arms of the Treasury. By placing Tiriel, too, in a ‘cleft’, Blake is linking spiritual blindness with matter-obsessed capitlism. It is a parody of birth that shows how Tiriel’s denial of an afterlife to both his children (‘your remembrance shall perish’, 1:48) and himself (‘my voice is past’, 8: 42) leads to earthly tyranny. There are three main alternatives to Tiriel’s vision: the world of Har and Heva, his children and his brothers. The most obvious challenge is made by Har and Heva, repeatedly described as being ‘not like’ Tiriel. Har and Heva live in a seemingly Edenic pastoral landscape of fruits and flowers, and ‘like children’ they sit ‘beneath the Oak’ (2: 5), thus offering the possibility of carnival understanding. However, they are now in the seventh age of mankind as described in Jaques’ famous speech of As You Like It, dependent on the aged Mnetha to look after them. Mnetha’s name suggests ‘memory’, and Har and Heva no longer make an active, carnival reading of the world around them: . . . they were as the shadow of Har. & as the years forgotten Playing with flowers & running after birds they spent the day And in the night like infants slept delighted with infant dreams (2: 7–9) Heva’s name brings to mind Eve’s, itself a Hebraic pun on life-giving. But it is Har and Heva who are the children, and this is not true innocence, but a sublime based on beauty and fear: they are ‘like frighted infants’ (2: 11), ‘trembling like infants’ (2: 18) who never learn, ‘they soon forgot their tears’ (3: 36). They can find comfort only in oblivion, sleep and the protection of their guardian, Mnetha: ‘Har & Heva slept fearless as babes. on loving breasts’ (7: 21). Their loss of Vision is emphasized in the illuminations, where Blake shows Har and Heva asleep, or looking directly into each other’s eyes while bathing in the waters of materialism,




as Urizen does later (The First Book of Urizen, plate 10). They still sport and sing, but do so trapped in the ‘great cage’ (3: 21) like the speaker of ‘How sweet I roam’d’, trapped by the Prince of Love. Their inability to read the world except through the mediation of Mnetha makes them easily deceived: she calls Tiriel ‘an innocent old man & hungry with his travel’ (2: 30) and the limitation of her viewpoint is made sharper by the slight reference to Miranda in The Tempest: ‘O Lord! . . . how I tremble! are there then more people / More human creatures on this earth besides the sons of Har?’ (2: 54–5).22 Har and Heva spend their days catching ‘singing birds’ and gathering ‘ripe cherries’ (3: 13), a fact that suggests the images of the smiling children (‘Infant Joy’, E16), playing with ‘painted birds’ and eating ‘cherries’ (‘Laughing Song’, E11) and helped by benign wood-wanderers (‘The Little Boy found’, E11) that appear in the approximately contemporary Songs of Innocence (c.1789), must be read very carefully. In fact Mnetha, in trying to preserve her mistaken vision of Innocence, is described in terms reminiscent of the speaker of Experience in ‘The Angel’ (E24), arming herself against any challenge: ‘she took her bow / And chose her arrows’ (7: 23–4). Har initially recognizes Tiriel as ‘the king of rotten wood & of the bones of death’ (2: 23), but his limited pseudo-innocence can only produce pity justified by a claim of divine sanction (‘God bless thy bald pate’). Although Har and Heva ape Christian forgiveness (Hela describes them as being ‘holy & forgiving, fill’d with loving mercy/Forgetting the offences of their most rebellious children’ 6: 26–7), it is only the assertion of superiority and feigned ignorance. In The Song of Los (1795) Blake describes how Har and Heva ‘fled. / Because their brethren & sisters liv’d in War & Lust’ (E68) and this has led to a loss of Vision: they have ‘shrunken eyes’. The result is they mistake symbols for laws: Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave Laws & Religion to the sons of Har binding them more And more to the Earth: closing and restraining: Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke. (E68) Mnetha offers Har and Heva to be Tiriel’s eyes (3: 34), but their lack of Vision does not provide a suitable alternative to Tiriel’s own blindness. The mention of the ‘true path’ (6: 5) in the poem suggests that Blake is exploring responses to faith and a different kind of Christian response is present in Tiriel’s sons. Their reaction to Tiriel’s demands for obedience




is first revolution, then ‘charity’. The Bible makes it clear that it is not mere obedience to law that leads to God, it is also faith and empathy. ‘No one can be justified in the sight of God by keeping the Law: all that Law does is tell us what is sinful’ (Romans 3: 20). Obedience to the Law is only a sign (Romans 4: 11) that a man has good faith; likewise a man cannot profess to be faithful without some good works. ‘The upright man will live by his faithfulness’ (Habbakuk 2: 5); as Blake puts it, ‘The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all’ (E605). The sons’ response to Tiriel’s cursing is an attempt at a carnival response, trying to turn his curse into a ‘blessing’ by offering to bury their mother and supply him with clothes, bed and housing. However, they too see the world only in material terms: for them Tiriel is a figure of mortality, a remorseless fate. Unresistingly they suffer death and their tongues, once ‘eloquent’ (4: 47) like Tiriel’s, become ‘silent’ (5: 31). Of his other children, Tiriel’s youngest daughter, Hela, at first offers a more positive response, leading ‘her father from the noisom place’ (5: 26). But she seeks too seeks to destroy Tiriel, returning curse for curse. Her name suggests several things, including the goddess of death found in Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (1770). Her name could also stem from Hecla, an Icelandic mountain thought to be the gates of Purgatory, figured as a cave in ‘To Winter’.23 This accords both with the critic S. Foster Damon’s assessment of her as representing touch or sex and Lear’s view of the female cave: ‘But to the girdle do the gods inherit, / Beneath is all the fiends’; / There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit’ (IV.vi.126–8). Tiriel’s curse upon her, turning her into a Medusa-like figure with snakes on her head, also links her to sexuality: the serpents were Medusa’s punishment for sexual activity. Tiriel’s curse is also accompanied by an attempt to make Hela feel guilty, and a comparable charge of guilt is laid by the father to suppress the girl’s sexuality in ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (E29–30). Sex offers some redemption, some idea of the possibility of surpassing the barrier of subject / object in physical unity, but its value is denied by Tiriel, whose lack of Vision is now shown to be the model of the failure of the parent / child and hence all other social relationships. It will also be self-perpetuating: the Medusa’s glance could petrify, literally astonish those who saw in it a fearful sublime. Many critics have noticed parallels between the language and imagery of Tiriel and King Lear.24 There are so many verbal similarities it is clear Blake knew the play well:25 even where there are not direct quotations there is an astonishing sympathy between them. Tiriel’s first conversation with his sons recalls Lear’s mock pleading with his daughters for raiment, bed and food. Har’s conversation with Tiriel about eyesight and




children (3: 17–18) contains hints of the Fool, Gloucester and Lear when mad. One of the significant features of Lear is the insight offered by the foolish and the mad. All of the ‘good’ characters share the name and some of the attributes of the Fool: the Fool himself, Kent (‘Where learnt you this, fool?’ / ‘Not i’ th’ stocks, fool’ (II.iv.84–5)), Albany (‘My fool usurps my body’ (IV.ii.28)), Cordelia (‘And my poor fool is hang’d!’ (V.iii.305)), Edgar and Lear. Edgar, as Poor Tom, has a number of the stage Fool’s traits: obsessions with food, lechery, laziness and his servant’s position, all of which are outlined when he describes his life as an adulterous serving-man (III.iv.84–96). When he becomes naked and mad, with a grimed and fouled face, a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (III.iv.107), Lear calls him a ‘philosopher’ (III.iv.150). Lear also takes on the mad persona when he enters dressed ‘fantastically’ with weeds (not unlike Tarlton’s ‘bumpkin’ costume). Lear comments upon social injustice, plays with words (‘Reason in madness’ (IV.vi.176)), forgives copulation and points out the artifice both of the play (‘I am the King himself . . . Nature’s above art in that respect’, IV.vi.84, 86) and life itself (‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’, IV.vi.183–4). To be effective, the foolish perspective may have to become so extreme that it takes on the appearance of madness, challenging social and aesthetic hierarchies much as Blake had done with his ‘mad’ exhibition. There are two mad outsiders present in Tiriel: Ijim and Zazel. Both names have some significance. Erdman and Bentley both trace Ijim’s name to Isaiah 13: 21 and the satyrs who dance before the destruction of the tyrant,26 and Damon proposes that the name ‘Zazel’ comes from Azazel, the first devil to fall, and that the name suggests an old rite overtaken by Christianity.27 Ijim could be a corruption of a Hebraic word for ‘filthy’; it could also be a version of ‘Ischim’. In the cabala the Ischim are the beautiful souls of just men, and their leader is Azazel. Azazel is also the name of the evil rider on the serpent, a figure who appears in Blake’s graphic work (B158) and the Miltonic standard bearer of Satan, sometimes called Satan himself.28 Azazel is also the name of an angel in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, for which Blake prepared some drawings in 1822. This Azazel teaches men metalwork and adornment (and perhaps, therefore, engraving). He also teaches them the secrets of Heaven (Enoch 9: 6), and for this a vengeful God punishes him: ascribing to him ‘all sin’ (10: 9) he tells his angels to ‘Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert . . . and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there for ever, and cover his face that he may not see light’ (10: 4–7).29 God also tells Azazel he




shall have no peace (13: 1). In Tiriel it is Tiriel who has no peace, and in The First Book of Urizen it is Urizen who is found in this trapped position: a limited vision of God creates a doctrine of vengeance that becomes self-inflicted. To oppose this, Blake sets the devil/Fools free. The composite picture that arises of both Ijim and Zazel is of madmen, fools, demonic figures in the possession of an infernal reading of the Bible to contrast with the ersatz Christianity spouted by the other characters. Both Ijim and Zazel are given attributes of the Fool. Ijim is a wild man of the woods, whose language is reminiscent of Poor Tom’s. In his madness he recognizes Tiriel’s self-deception (‘Thou hast the form of Tiriel, but I know thee well enough’ 4: 7) and like a Fool he ‘mean[s] to sport’ with Tiriel, scoffing at his blindness while using Tiriel kindly, bearing him on his shoulders like St Christopher carrying Christ and returning him to his palace. In Ijim’s company Tiriel has the chance to read the world symbolically, shielded from the distractions of materialism. In the description of Ijim’s vanquishing the lion and snake he is like As You Like It’s Orlando and he too understands that nature speaks sermons to man. Ijim tells Tiriel to ‘hold thy glib & eloquent tongue’ and they travel beneath the ‘pleasant Moon’, ‘Blind to the pleasures of sight & deaf to warbling birds’ – but he fails to understand the lesson, craving ‘a little water from the brook’ and not wishing to confront his common humanity (he does not want to ‘discover that I am a mortal man’). Several of the descriptions of Tiriel liken him to Job. Har calls him ‘rotten wood’ (2: 24) and Job describes his life as such (Job 13: 28). Job describes himself ‘measuring [his] footprints’ (13: 28); Tiriel as ‘number[ing his] footsteps’ (8: 32). Both refer to themselves as innocent but afflicted. When Yahweh answers Job, he shows him examples of His great strength by describing things only He can control. One of these is Leviathan and the description of the monster’s invulnerability is repeated in the ‘terrible strength of Ijim’ (Job 41: 18ff, Tiriel 4: 70ff). Ijim is a force of God and also a Fool. But neither Tiriel nor his sons learn from the encounter with Ijim. When Ijim learns that the sons have left Tiriel ‘to be the sport of wintry winds’, he turns his back on them, describing himself as ‘a tree torn by the wind’ (4: 85). Given the relationship that Blake makes elsewhere between trees and a carnival vision, Ijim seems to be accepting they have not understood his meaning, and he leaves them. The second foolish challenge to Tiriel comes from Zazel. He and his sons have been forced to live in caves like the outcast ballad singers who laugh at Job (Job 30: 8). Zazel’s mockery is not simply abusive, however. Zazel not only challenges Tiriel’s authority, but he makes it clear Tiriel is




responsible for his marginal position in society. The cave, in The Marriage, is, among many other associations, the site of book production (E39). Tiriel has neglected the Fool’s way of reading, (‘chain’d Zazel’), so he has lost insight (‘where are now thine eyes?’) and become enslaved to prohibitive Law. Zazel’s language is reminiscent of the prophet Isaiah (‘Shout ... thou singest a sweet song’), mad Tom and the Fool: Where are you going. come & eat some roots & drink some water Thy crown is bald old man. the sun will dry thy brains away. And thou wilt be as foolish as thy brother Zazel (7: 3–13) Tom drinks ‘the green mantle of the standing pool’ (III.iv.131). The Fool tells Lear ‘Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away’ and tells him ‘thou wouldst make a good fool’ (I.iv.162, v.36). The sons of Zazel are gravediggers, the job of the clowns in Hamlet. They throw dirt at Tiriel, an act that could be a carnival gesture of blessing. The effect of this is to begin some form of regeneration on Tiriel. The ‘blind man hear[s]’ and starts to recognize himself, smiting his breast and going to a wood, a potential site of re-reading his situation, like the shady places in ‘To Summer’ and ‘Love and harmony combine’. Hela’s attempts to kill herself are thwarted, just as Gloucester’s were in Lear. They return to Har’s tents ‘at Noon’ in the full light of the sun. But Har and Heva sleep on, unable to offer Tiriel any new insight into his situation; instead he remarks that ‘Thy laws, O Har, & Tiriel’s wisdom, end together in a curse’. There then follows an interesting passage in which Tiriel’s speech is suggestive of both Lear’s and a passage in Job. Tiriel asks: Can wisdom be put in a silver rod, or love in a golden bowl? Is the son of a king warmed without wool? or does he cry with a voice Of thunder?’ (8: 19–20) When Lear is beginning to gain insight in madness he remarks ‘When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ‘em, there I smelt ‘em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words’ (IV.vi.100–4). In Job, Zophar, asking ‘where does wisdom come from?’ claims ‘It cannot be bought with solid gold, not paid for with any weight of silver’ (28: 15). It seems after his encounter with Zazel, Tiriel is on the verge of self-




knowledge. But this passage is deleted, and instead Tiriel reverts to Job’s pre-enlightenment belief about the life of man being that of a worm, and of the parents’ neglect of the child leading to a new generation of unhappiness. This is both a fulfilment of Har and Heva’s negligence and the outcome of his own limited vision. At the end of his story, Tiriel, with a speech that looks back to Rousseau and forward to Shelley’s Ozymandias, dies. The mad Lear understood that ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes’ (IV.vi.150), but this is beyond Tiriel. Again, as with King Edward the Third, there is a danger that the Fool’s insight will not be effective. As well as dirt, some of Zazel’s sons have thrown stones. As stones ‘of night’, stones are a symbol of druidic vengeance against the man who would burst out of his cell (E52). They could also be a reference to Jesus’ question to the crowd about who should cast of the first stone at the woman taken in adultery (John 8: 3–11). The woman, like the figure of guiltridden Hela, is condemned by the Law of Moses. In John’s gospel, when Jesus encounters the scene, He is described as writing on the ground with his finger, telling the crowd that he without sin must cast the first stone, and then writing again. This act of writing implies that one must translate Law creatively, literally write it anew each time that one considers it. Significantly, this moment of writing in the sand is the subject of Blake’s painting ‘Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery’.30 The stones thrown by Zazel’s sons, if they are read as simply aggressive, will be stones of vengeance. If they prompt Tiriel to question his idea of Law, they will help translate that Law anew. What Blake has examined in these early poems is both the importance of the comic as a challenge to the lack of Vision present in the prevailing thought of the dominant social structures, and the difficulty of doing so. In the lyrical Poetical Sketches he uses comic images to highlight and offer an alternative to the limitations of materialism. In the dramatic sketches he uses the comic to explore the problems of making Visionary statements in a culture which persistently marginalizes the comic, the prophetic and the mad. In Tiriel, he offers a comic challenge to authority, but shows that it will not be successful unless it is matched by a comic ability in the recipient. What his Visionary comic needs is an audience who knows how to read it. This will be a process of education, and it is this that he begins in An Island in the Moon.




Talking of Virtuous Cats: An Island in the Moon

The lunar landscape An Island in the Moon, Blake’s most obviously comic work, has not found critical favour. Keynes called it ‘an incomplete burlesque novel’; Damon assumed much of it was simply ‘nonsensical and ignorant chatter’, Webster called it a mix of ‘scatalogical filth and pure lyrics used for defensive purposes’, and even Martha England, who, in her excellent essay ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket’, argued that in An Island Blake was imitating the work of Samuel Foote, a highly popular eighteenthcentury comedian, still dismissed it as a youthful, one-off stab at comic writing penned merely so Blake could ‘flex . . . his vocal chords . . . while he is making up his mind what William Blake shall take seriously’.1 So too Michael Phillips, in his facsimile edition of the manuscript, while appreciating that An Island ‘derives much of its character and vitality from a particular development of that tradition, the burlesque play’ nevertheless suggests it is merely ‘a form of distraction . . . intended [only] for a few friends who would share the delight of recognizing . . . themselves’.2 The general critical consensus is that the eleven surviving chapters of this unpublished manuscript form little more than Blake’s whimsical attempt to satirize his friends, neighbours and fellow attendees of 27 Rathbone Place, the intellectual salon of the Reverend and Mrs A. S. Mathew; a kind of pleasing cartoon wallpaper on which he couldn’t resist scrawling a few grotesque caricatures of his favourite scientific and philosophic bugbears. Apart from the fun of trying to identify the originals of these caricatures, for many readers An Island’s only notable feature seems to be the appearance of the first drafts of some of the Songs of Innocence. Damon goes so far as to suggest that Blake felt such ‘awe’ at this ‘new spirit of poetic creation’ he had, almost subcon98



5

sciously, discovered, that he readily abandoned his flippant comedy to turn his attention to the serious work of the Songs.3 Such is our admiration for irony in general and the Songs in particular that most readers have assumed likewise, and An Island remains no more than a curio in the cabinet of Blakean delights. If you start from the idea that Blake was a dedicated comic writer, however, An Island becomes a very different prospect. For inside this apparently random concoction of prose, song and slapstick, with its eccentric mix of real and imaginary characters that read like the cast list of an absurd farce, lies an extraordinary, almost dazzling examination of the relationship between our habits of reading and the society they produce. The mere use of satire would, for Blake’s contemporary readers, immediately have invoked a long-established debate on the relationship of literature and society; and indeed, at times An Island is as much an examination of Augustan ideas of satire as Poetical Sketches was of Elizabethan poetic forms. Indeed, with its conversations, personal portraits and mixture of different songs in different metres, An Island is virtually a masterclass in the development of the satirical style. But, by juxtaposing the satire with dramatic and often absurd dialogue and an omniscient but unreliable narrator, Blake consistently and consciously foregrounds how our understanding of our society, our voices and even our perceptions are governed by our (variable) habits of reading. And, whenever that reading seems doomed to produce a shadow of its materialist repression across the face of society, Blake provides a comic alternative. Like Vision, it is an ongoing process, but one that seems to lead to increased poetic creativity and the tantalizing promise of Visionary prophecy, thwarted, sadly, for the modern reader by the loss of one or more manuscript pages. An Island parodies a whole range of reading experiences: of nursery rhymes, opera, street cries, news sheets, religious texts, scientific theses, Acts of Parliament, bawdy doggerel, Last Testaments, Shakespeare and sentimental verse, of history, mathematics, literature, morality, fame, philosophy, the origins of religion and social order, the development of language and the essence of self. Its characters are a panoply of professional readers that includes philosophers, historians, scientists, artists and entertainers, a mathematician, an anatomist, a lexicographer, a priest, a musician, an astronomer, a printer, a lawmaker – all readers and teachers whose understanding of language shapes the commonwealth. Even the setting of the tale reflects this preoccupation. The Island, we are told quite definitely, is on the ‘moon’. This not only places An Island into the humanist literary tradition of Utopias and their parodies, but



Talking of Virtuous Cats 99

also into the scientific sphere of Joseph Priestley and the socio-religious writings of Swedenborg. The moon is, of course, visible to us only by the reflected light of the sun, that potent Blakean image for the creative genius: this is a picture of a society’s reflection of divine creativity, endeavouring to explain and create itself through its reading of its surroundings. Rather than being a one-off, An Island is in fact a development of Blake’s earlier comic practice. In the Poetical Sketches he had examined the relationship between Vision and our tendency to place the material above the imaginative and the spiritual, and had noted the importance of the comic in challenging that tendency. In the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel he had also recognized the difficulty in presenting a truly Foolish perspective, because of the dominant ideology’s proclivity for appropriating some aspects of the Fool and dismissing others as madness. Behind its apparently random structure, An Island contains a deliberate and careful plan to challenge those misreadings by teaching us how to read the world comically. It is nothing less than a degree course in comic Vision. Much of the work imitates the style of philosophical teachings, especially the serio-comic Socratic dialogue, with clowns and simpleminded protagonists thrown in to test ideas and attitudes. This was a form used by Lucian, Erasmus and Nicholas de Cusa, whose religious writings include an idiot who challenges a philosopher in the market place and shows the latter’s reading to have blinded him to common humanity, a pattern repeated often in An Island.4 More strikingly, in a text full of examples of the education of children and the works of philosophy, the structure of An Island accords to an astonishing degree with the plan for teaching Philosophy at Cambridge University, as laid out in a 1707 pamphlet entitled A Method of Instructing Pupils. Blake may not have read this pamphlet, but he could certainly have found out about the structure of the course at the Mathews’ salon: Mathew himself had been at Peterhouse. The Cambridge course begins with the teaching of Latin and Greek, including such writers as Pindar and Homer and the work of historians and masters of rhetoric. An Island opens with references to Pliny and Voltaire, discusses the work of Plutarch and Pythagoras, mentions Pindar and Homer and makes a show of the importance of ‘Queries in Philosophy’ and scientific classification. On the Cambridge course, in the following terms the students are to be given a knowledge of Scripture (the Islanders discuss the origins of religion and the Bible, listen to a preacher and squabble about the doctrine of justification), the work of Locke and Euclid (the Islanders quibble about Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding and toy




with verbal logic, mathematics and geometry), the work of Newton and the study of optics (the Islanders play with a quadrant, a camera obscura and sun dials), of natural history (the Islanders watch swallows, study insects and gases), of anatomy (the Islanders talk of physic and surgery) and the organization of society (which obsesses An Island’s characters). Finally the Cambridge pamphlet states that Poetry is the ‘last Qualification to the making a great and considerable Man’ and An Island responds with a wide variety of poetic voices, from Hamlet to bawdy doggerel, showing how an attitude to reading can liberate or stifle the poetic voice. Having decided to create this philosoparody, Blake then chooses to present it by reproducing, as closely as he can, the theatrical experience of the Fool at work. The fragmented style, crammed with bits of old songs, conforms to one of Douce’s definitions of a ‘stage fool’, 5 and Blake’s decision to imitate the work of Samuel Foote, one of the few of his near contemporaries to receive such an honour, was highly significant. True, Foote’s popularity was enormous: even though he died in 1777, his appeal was still strong enough to make Cooke’s Memoirs of . . . Foote . . . with a collection of his Genuine Bon-mots a best-seller as late as 1805. But this was not the mere mimicry of a commercially attractive subject.6 While Foote’s theoretical statements on the comic (which would have led him to consider An Island more ‘farce’ than ‘comedy’)7 were largely those of an orthodox Augustan satirist – claiming ‘affectation . . . to be the true comic object’,8 and the chief aim of his work to ‘drag objects of vice and folly individually before the public, and . . . to punish delinquents’9 – in his comic practice Foote was the inheritor of the tradition of the Shakespearean Fool. While stating that he wished to ‘Amend the Heart, improve the Understanding, and at the same Time, please the Imagination’,10 Foote’s performances straddled the worlds of theatre, fair and marketplace in a kaleidoscope of carnival. His satires were sharp, but they often delighted the victim: Sir William Browne sent Foote his muff so that Foote’s impersonation of him, as Doctor Hellebore in The Devil Upon Two Sticks, might be more accurate. Cooke, in his Memoirs, calls Foote the ‘old character of court fool’,11 and his performances were full of ad-libs, wordplay, impersonations and improvisations. He was famous for deflating polite culture, for dodging the legal restrictions that tried to limit where plays could be performed, for taking on two or three roles in each show and ‘arguing’ with his audience.12 He was indeed, as Bevis says, ‘in theory and practice . . . the Garrick era’s staunchest upholder of the oldest western comic tradition’.13 In choosing to imitate this contemporary clown,




Blake was choosing to invoke a whole tradition of comic egalitarian practice.14 Part of Foote’s special appeal for Blake was that, like the medieval and Shakespearean Fools, and in more recent time Monty Python and Dario Fo, his clowning thrived on the parody of various forms of official language, ‘deriding those who took their language seriously’.15 His satiric portraits are of social manipulators, the preachers, teachers and those institutionalized artists who speak the acceptable, commercially sanctioned view. Through his impersonations, Foote demonstrated that all philosophies, all dogma, all speech that did not hold human equality as their central theme were suspect. His characters dramatized the tension between language as a perceived reality (they believed their words conveyed a single, fixed meaning) and its actual indeterminance (their Malapropitious effect on the audience). Language, Foote demonstrated clearly, was not a fixed system of law and order but a slippery and funny social commodity, open to all. In his comic heteroglossia he set parole against langue and found both vulnerable. In The Minor for example, he acted the part of Mother Cole, a reformed prostitute, in whose character he then impersonates ‘Dr Squintum’, a thinly veiled attack on the preacher Whitefield. This allowed him to show that polite language, while endeavouring to convey an elevated moral status, is in itself corrupt. Even though Squintum has converted Cole to a Christian missionary, her old prostitute’s language is just as applicable to her new ‘profess’-ion as her old one: ‘jumbl[ing] together the carnal and the spiritual; with what ease she reconciles her new birth to her old calling!’16 Foote defended his attack on Whitefield and other preachers by pointing out that: I consider these gentlemen in the light of public performers, like myself . . . Nay, more, I must beg leave to assert, that ridicule is the only antidote to this pernicious poison. This is a madness that argument can never cure; and should a little wholesome severity be applied, persecution would be the immediate cry; where can we have recourse, but to the comic muse? perhaps the archness and severity of her smile may redress an evil, that the laws cannot reach, or reason reclaim.17 Foote suggests that if one is to avoid being caught up in the dominant mode of discourse, then there are some subjects that can only be approached through humour. The hypocrisy of the dominant mode prevents all other rhetorical redress: ‘argument can never cure . . . or reason reclaim’. Blake criticized Foote in Jerusalem:





He also felt ‘burlesque’ was the very opposite of the ‘sublime Artist’ (E544). Yet his criticism only strengthens the importance of Foote’s carnivalesque comic practice. If the moral superiority assumed by satire (the ‘Hypocrite’ who is ‘holier than others’) is untenable, then the need to contrast satire with irony and have both undercut by the carnivalesque just at the moment when the establishment of a new, more equal society is threatened by satiric oppression or ironic instability, and to have all this presented through a wide range of comic social voices, may be the only way to offer the kind of inspirational, non-didactic moral and poetic guide to reading that Vision requires. In Foote, Blake would have found both the satirical writer who demanded social change and a carnivalesque performer who challenged the satirist’s assumed superiority, the sort of combination the Poetical Sketches had begun to suggest. But Foote is not the only theatrical influence on An Island. It is, like Caliban’s enchanted home, a very theatrical place: it is full of noises, arguments and confused speech, fantastical events, strange sounds and sweet airs. There are references not only to Foote’s flamboyant Teas at the Haymarket but also Restoration comedies, music hall, festivals, pantomime, sermons, rehearsals, orations, masquerades, clowning and Commedia. The narration of An Island, reminiscent of the banter of the Fool, full of ad libs, impersonations, stage directions and asides that attempt to include the audience, combines carnivalesque drama, satirical novel and ironic lyric in a manner that suggests an attempt to present an actual theatrical experience in a way that a playscript would not. It is a performance in which the audience find themselves playing a part and as such it is an extension of the self-consciousness notable in many eighteenth-century plays. They often contained actors and managers as characters in their own right, moving in and out of the plot and expecting the audience to join in: The principle of free speech and action [was] considered as the natural right of all Englishmen when they became members of an audience at a theatre royal . . . the most significant characteristic of the eighteenth-century spectator [was] his consideration of himself [sic] as part of a night’s performance.18



Foote in calling Whitefield, Hypocrite: was himself one: for Whitefield pretended not to be holier than others: but confessed his Sins before all the World. (E201)

This may have taken the form of showing off, like Boswell’s imitating a cow at a Drury Lane performance he attended with none other than Dr Hugh Blair, the expert on rhetoric and belles lettres.19 But to attend the eighteenth-century theatre was, in part, to experience a community watching itself, expressing itself and in some way creating itself in a manner similar to the experience of carnival. If in reality the audience never fully articulated this possibility for egalitarianism, nevertheless there remained a palpable potential for a playhouse to give its audience the experience of a new social structure, whether that be of equality or of chaos. Playhouses could become the centre of riots and immorality, or vehicles of patriotic national identity, but they were places in which the audience had the experience of being actively and equally involved in creating a moral structure in a way almost unknown to the modern theatre-goer, except perhaps in Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. An Island, then, is Blake’s attempt to produce a theatrical experience, a comic education in how to read. This marvellous text is so dense that perhaps the best way to approach it is to treat it as if it were a carnival procession; first having a look at the cast and then discussing each episode sequentially, before summarising the action as a whole. It will be helpful for the reader to have a copy of the text nearby, although I shall try not to make that necessary.

‘I was only making a fool of you’ One of the reasons that An Island is often taken to be parochial and rather unimportant is that many of the characters seem to be identifiable as members of Blake’s immediate circle. A great deal of energy, ingenuity and scholarship has gone into discovering the originals and has provided some fascinating parallels. For example, while most critics work on the (unarticulated) assumption that Blake is the narrator, they also point to Quid, the wit and cynic who damns religious and political ministers, as Blake’s self-portrait, backed up by a supporting cast of guest stars including Thomas Taylor as Obtuse Angle, Richard Cosway as Mr Jacko, Mrs Charlotte Lennox as Mrs Gimblet, and so on.20 However, while there are undoubtedly elements of Blake’s acquaintances, friends and enemies in the characters, to assume that their sole purpose is a kind of elaborate in-joke limits the scope of the work to little more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of a scurrilous office e-mail. Blake spent a long time working on this text – some estimates suggest the best part of a decade, which seems a long time to pursue an in-joke. While it may be fascinating to consider the possibility, therefore, that, in




Mrs Nannicantipot, Blake is giving us an intriguing biographical sketch of Catherine Blake, it would also be reasonable to assume that the various characters stand for something more than just amusing personality sketches. Attempts at identifying the originals are helpful in establishing a range of nuances behind particular incidents and statements, but it is the composite picture that is most important, the examination of how readings build into an aesthetic that controls social organization and religious understanding. It may be more helpful to see the characters as Footean impersonations: a reflection not just of a real person but also of an attitude Blake wishes to question, to poke fun at, to juxtapose with other similarly embodied ideas. The fact that they can be partially identified only increases the sense that An Island is a dramatic interaction of a genuine, carnivalesque kind, rooted in real experience. Follies of selfdeception are revealed and the normal world order is subverted, but not only to denigrate but to restore common humanity as well. Above all this is to be a dramatic process in which the reader is made to feel every bit as significant as the bard / narrator / character / performer. The names of the characters often indicate a failure of visionary reading. To start with Quid again: his name may be a simple, selfexplanatory and appropriate name for a Cynic: ‘what?’21 To the eighteenth-century reader ‘Quid’ may have brought to mind a popular quotation from Juvenal’s Satire 1: Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. This appeared in an abbreviated form as the motto of The Tatler and was ‘considered most suitable for describing the intention and subjectmatter of the satirical commentator at large in society’.22 ‘Quid’ was also in popular use as a name for a witty banterer: ‘Mr Quidnunc’ is a laconic, newspaper reading wag in The New City Jester (1797). England points out ‘there is no bigger fool on stage than Quid’23 and so far this would seem to suggest Quid is indeed a portrait of Blake himself. Moreover, Quid also claims that he will ‘hollow and stamp . . . & show . . . what truth is’. This sentence is often taken to refer to Blake’s passionate and mischievous temper,24 but there is a pun here: hollow and stamp are also the activities of someone who ‘would have all the writing Engraved instead of Printed’ (E465). Yet if Blake did base Quid on himself, it is a selfparodying portrait: Quid is the character who claims Shakespeare is ‘too wild’, is gently mocked for not being true to his philosophy, apparently approves of Rousseau and silences the company with his songs. Given




Blake’s interest in Chatterton, his attention may have been drawn to a pertinent motto from Horace’s Satire I that appeared in Bryant and Miles’ Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782): ‘Ridentem dicere Verum / Quid vetat’. An Island often demonstrates the importance of ‘Truth speaking through laughter’, and ‘Quid’ was also the start of many proverbial phrases that carried a special sense of enquiry into duty, social and Christian. The Last Will and Testament of Thomas Sutton, which will become important in understanding one of the songs in An Island, includes the phrase ‘Quid oportet me facere . . .’ which is translated as ‘what must I doe, to attaine euerlasting life?’ In this light, the portrait of Quid seems less personal and more an examination of the duty of humanity. Another argument against the idea that An Island is simply a matter of private portraits is that so many of the caricatures seem composite. Obtuse Angle, whose inoffensive scattiness is brilliant drawn in one line, would also seem to be a reasonable candidate for representing Blake. He is first seen emptying his pockets ‘of a vast number of papers’, and in a humorous moment of the Annotations to Lavater Blake notes his own pockets are ‘generally full of paper’ instead of money (E599). Obtuse Angle’s attitude in the early chapters is very distinctively Blakean (‘Whenever you think, you must always think for yourself!’, E453) and it is he, despite his status as a Mathematician, who sings the important and complex ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘Upon a holy Thursday’ songs. Many of Obtuse Angle’s other characteristics, however, would seem to point to this being a portrait of George Cumberland. Like Obtuse Angle, Cumberland was irascible and impatient. His wide range of interests, including Chatterton and Egyptian deities, are parodied in Obtuse Angle’s comments. He famously wrote on marriage and was interested in helping the poor,25 and Blake initially gave the ‘Hail Matrimony’ song to Obtuse Angle, then changed his text to have him sing ‘To be or not to be’ instead, a song about the founding of a charity school. Obtuse’s ‘vast number of papers’ and the lengthy list of sciences of which he claims Phebus is the god may also be poking fun at Cumberland’s extensive list of publications. Interestingly, An Island is a carnival text and Cumberland had also produced a fragment in the manner of Rabelais in 1779.26 Yet, in another light, Obtuse Angle bears a passing resemblance to the antiquarian Francis Douce: reserved yet irritable, neurotic, with a coat with special quarto-sized pockets.27 Douce may also lend characteristics to Etruscan Column, but Harper’s suggestion that this is a caricature of John Brand strengthens the idea that Blake knew his Observations on




Popular Antiquities and thus a good deal about carnival customs. Other characters too show evidence of being composite pictures. Suction is suggested by Erdman to be Robert Blake, but his language (‘Hang philosophy . . . Do all by your feelings’) is reminiscent of the print-seller Jemmy Whittle.28 Inflammable Gass, as has been credibly suggested by Phillips, Rodney and Mary Baine, Nancy Bogen and others, could be in part a portrait of William Nicholson, himself a ‘windfinder’ of renown. Yet the setting of An Island in the ‘moon’ may have something to do with that other scientific experimenter, Joseph Priestley, and his membership of the Society of the Moon. Moreover, Blake’s near neighbour, Sir Joseph Banks, was also famous for his near disastrous gaseous experiments and interest in the minutiae of the natural world (Inflammable Gass has slides of ‘a louse’ and ‘a flea’).29 Moreover, ‘Inflammable Air’ was a common comic term. The satiric print ‘The Air Balloon or a Trip to the Moon’ (1783) shows a witch suckling a cat being powered towards the moon by an expulsion of ‘Inflammable Air’ from her posterior. The print contains many of the pseudo-scientific, mock social-diary and other satiric elements present in An Island. It shows three observers (one of whom is called ‘ASS’ as the narrator of An Island asks to be), who remark how blue the witch’s ‘air’ burns, note that her adventures will soon produce a ‘Lunatick journal’ and ask the witch to deliver a card to Uranus, the planet recently named after George III, who was also known to produce hot air. Other names also suggest a wider significance. Grose’s A classical dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue shows ‘Shilly Shally’ as a popular term for an irresolute person, while the OED reveals that ‘Tilly Vally’ is an expression for nonsense, ‘Tilly’ an alternative for clay and ‘Lallation’ the act of speaking childishly. Tilly Lally’s speech may not only be the simplistic questions of a vacillator: he is caught in a childishly materialistic reading of the world. Likewise the jaunty Scopprell may owe his name to a ‘scopperil’ or spinning-top. This, like the description of Har and Heva’s ignorant innocence in Tiriel, questions the critically popular reading of the Songs that would have children’s play idealized as the epitome of divine expression. The dictionary also sheds light on the conversation between Mrs Nannicantipot and Mrs Sistagatist. Mrs Nannicantipot does not go to church; her name can be translated as ‘one who disapproves of bawdyhouse singing’ (‘Nanny-house’ = ‘bawdy-house’, ‘canti’ = singing / hypocrisy and ‘pot’ = ‘nonsense’).30 Mrs Sistagatist, on the other hand, the blindly devout, has a name comprised of an injunction to stop (‘sist’) and a suggestion of one who believes that everything tends to




ultimate good (‘Agathism’). Even the characters’ names, then, require an act of reading that must encompass dextrous lexicography and local history: they should not necessarily be seen as simple caricatures, and this becomes even more apparent when we see them in the context of the piece as a whole.

The map of a small island An Island contains a number of topical references that seem to place it in the mid- to late 1780s.31 The opening lines of An Island invite the reader to expect a straightforward satire on contemporary England: In the Moon is a certain Island near by a mighty continent, which small island seems to have some affinity to England, & what is more extraordinary, the people are so much alike, & their language so much the same, that you would think you was among your friends. (E449) The satire is aimed at ‘friends’, a self-centred group with no claim to their addition of an ‘improving company’, particularly in the sense that they do not learn from each other. They are contrasted unfavourably with the ‘mighty continent’ nearby, and even in 1783 one could find, both East and West, a continent with a growing sense of a more equal, revolutionary society. The island with ‘some affinity to England’ is the motif of Gulliver’s Travels, although Swift is never this direct, and it is indeed this very directness that offers the first clue to Blake’s intention. He is both invoking and poking gentle fun at that humanist literary tradition he seems to be joining. Attention is drawn not just to ‘the people’ but specifically ‘their language’ and ‘the vanities’ of their thought. The mention of the Moon also brings to mind a carnival, fairground experience: passageways to fairground booths, in taverns and elsewhere, were often illuminated by globular lamps called ‘moons’.32 We are being invited to enter the province of the Fool. The first characters we meet are the three Philosophers. Philosophers are natural comic targets, often associated, as these Islanders are, with drinking, a connection made throughout the ages: from Greek to Elizabethan drama, from a humorous pamphlet of 1719 to a famous Monty Python sketch.33 These philosophers are specified as being of certain schools, however: ‘Suction. the Epicurean, Quid the Cynic, & Sipsop the Pythagorean’. Moreover the narrator notes that he ‘call[s] them by the names of those sects tho the sects are not ever mentiond




there as being quite out of date’. Blake is simultaneously maintaining the tradition of presenting a world that is not ours, yet we may read it as a version of our own, and also suggesting that the assumptions that underlie our ability to read both such a parody and our own world, embodied in these philosophical schools, are ‘out of date’ and worse, ‘not ever mentiond’: never criticized, even though ‘the things still remain, and the vanities are the same’. It is notable that these three immediately introduced schools represent dramatically different approaches to reading the world. Blake’s interest in language and its relation to understanding society has long been noted. For example, Northrope Frye in Stubborn Structure acknowledges the ‘critic as teacher’ aspect of Blake’s art, and Gleckner makes the sweeping statement that ‘everything Blake says about Man, the Universe, society, imagination and the sense . . . is translatable into a comment upon the language, words, the poet’s task, poetry’. Recent criticism, however, has stressed the importance of Blake’s interest in linguistic theories. Robert N. Essick’s William Blake and the Language of Adam, taking some of Gleckner’s ideas as its basis, provides a review of two major eighteenthand nineteenth-century linguistic theories and how they may be applied to Blake’s work. The ‘Aristotelian’ theory saw language as arbitrary, abstract, developed from grunts and subject to a set of rules governed by convention. The ‘neo-Platonic’ theory, which held the basis of language to be ‘Adamic naming’, related words directly to the essence of the thing named: the named object was behind, within, in some way incarnate in the name. These theories are referred to in the presence of the Philosophers. ‘Suction’, a name that suggests both a potentially fatal scientific experiment and a leech-like draining, is an Epicurean. Epicurean philosophy was associated by Blake with Bacon, one of Blake’s favourite evil trio of scientists. ‘Bacon was a Contemplative Atheist Evidently an Epicurean’ (E626) he states, and calls Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political the work of ‘Epicurus and Lucretius’ (E620). Lucretius was a Roman poet (c.95–c.55 BC) who, in De rerum natura, tried to make sense of the universe without a divinity. Lucretius rejected deities, but invoked Venus and Mars to personify the forces that move the universe. Epicurus proceeded logically from a materialistic system of metaphysics to a hedonistic code of ethics that relied on abstinence for tranquillity of mind.34 Like Bacon, they claimed to be dispelling the superstition of religion and placing Humanity back at the centre of the universe, but only succeeded in creating new gods out of the dark recesses of the mind. Bacon saw language as a mechanism for controlling the universe and our perceptions of it. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) he states:




the first distemper of learning [is] when men study words and not matter . . . Words are but the current tokens or marks of popular notions of things . . . and though we think we govern words . . . yet certain it is that words, as a tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest and mightily entangle and pervert the judgement.35 At first reading this seems like the clownish view of words as slippery and funny. But there is no sense in Bacon’s thesis that there is anything divine or immanent in language, or that it is in any sense egalitarian; words are economic ‘tokens’ that can be controlled and ‘governed’. Epicurean thought owed something to Aristotle, and his theory of language is similarly disembodied: ‘By a noun [or name] we mean a sound significant by convention, which has no reference to time, and of which no part is significant apart from the rest.’36 When Blake stated that ‘Bacon is only Epicurus over again’ (E645) he is classifying Bacon as a thinker whose view of language and of God defies the possibility of the One being present in the Other. For Bacon, language is merely a means of oppression rather than insight and hope. Both Newton and Locke, the other parts of Blake’s infernal scientific trio, also proposed empirical universal languages,37 and met with a similar response from Blake: ‘Lockes Opinions of Words & their Fallaciousness are Artful Opinions and Fallacious also’ (E659). What these ‘language projectors’ were attempting to do was to iron out of language their ‘Equivocals’, (that is, words that have ‘several significations’), their ‘ambiguity of words by reason of Metaphors’, their ‘Synonymous words, which make the Language tedious’, and their ‘Anomalisms and Irregularities in Grammatical construction’.38 In other words, everything that made up the poetic or humorous. Bacon claimed to be eradicating confusion and the possibility, as Elam puts it, of the very real power of linguistic representation to establish its own order of things and then seduce the enquirer into accepting this universe of discourse as the actual economy of perceptible prima materia.39 Again, this would seem to accord with Blake’s warning in the Poetical Sketches that the reader can be seduced into believing in an ersatz reality.




But Bacon’s remedy for this is to remove phrases, like ‘primum mobile’, that were the ‘idol of the market place’. In other words he wanted to remove the popular influence on language and create a static, single vision hierarchy of meaning. Blake’s joking comment, ‘King James was Bacons Primum Mobile’ (E622), shows that Bacon’s apparent demystification of language was at best confused and at worst hypocritical: he wished to ‘put an End to Faith’ (E611) and create his own false reality based on the rule of a suspicious and superstitious earthly King. The result of this combination of the elevation of physical experience and the denigration of the imagination is the development of an aesthetic based on beauty and fear. The opposite linguistic view is embodied in Sipsop the Pythagorean. Pythagoras was popularly supposed to have taught Plato and he was considered to be part of a long line of teachers that included Adam, Moses, Orpheus and Christ. What distinguished these teachers was their use of parables, mysteries and theories of incarnate meaning, including ‘Adamic naming’. Essick suggests the importance Blake accorded to Adamic naming is illustrated in a polyptych of frescoes from 1810: ‘Adam naming the beasts’, ‘Eve listening to the birds’, ‘The Virgin and Child in Egypt’ and ‘Christ Blessing the Little Children’40 and this demonstrates Blake’s belief that ‘All had originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel’ (E543). This Adamic language was the expression of eternal Inspiration and, Blake felt, could still be glimpsed in some Poetry, in the various remains of the ancient authors, Music, in old tunes or melodies, Painting and Sculpture in the remains of Antiquity and in the works of more modern genius (E544). To see language as Adamic, imaginatively perceiving an ‘essence’ within it, was to adopt a belief in the possibility of Christ made manifest through the Word. Reading becomes Visionary, visions take on reality. Blake wrote in his Annotations to Reynolds (c.1808): The Ancients did not mean to Impose when they affirmd their belief in Vision & Revelation Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believd that God did Visit Man Really & Truly & not as Reynolds pretends. (E658) Once again, the word ‘impose’ may well be a conscious evocation of his earlier usage. In The Marriage the narrator and the Angel ‘impose’ on each other by presenting their perceptions through language, but it is




‘lost time’ to converse with the angel because his works ‘are only Analytics’. The analytical, Aristotelian view saw language as having been derived from the imitation of the grunts and calls of animals, and in ‘Eve listening to the birds’ Eve is shown to be listening to just such a twittering, meaningless chorus, already used by Blake as shorthand for a limited perception. The presence of the bird in the left of this picture may cast new light on what Erdman has identified as the ‘bird of innocence’: this may well be a bird of misreading. Eve’s listening to animal noise (in the form of the serpent’s speech) led to the Fall: if Aristotelian theory brings the downfall of language, the neoPlatonic theory may restore the possibility of Christ. Blake was not uncritical of neo-Platonic thought, however. He disagreed with Plato’s belief that poets were intuitive but ‘do not know or Understand what they write’ (E554). A reliance on mystery leads to subservience. Sipsop, a name that suggests milky weakness, is shown to be self-absorbed, controlled by his father and squeamish in the operating room: unable to effect present, physical change. But if neither of these two readings proves effective, then simply deconstructing them will not help. Between these two opposing philosophies lies the third, Quid the Cynic, who sings many of the satirical songs in the piece, including ‘Old corruption’, which can be read as a history of satire itself. Questioning alone is not enough: instead the reader of An Island is invited to partake in an act of Vision, in the form of a creative comic reading of all three. This is signalled in the very next line: ‘the three Philosophers sat together thinking of nothing’. Their thought is unproductive, but in his description of them Blake is offering a comic alternative to their sterility in the double pun on the word ‘nothing’, both challenging the commonplace assumption that philosophers are wise men, not idlers, and also making a philosophical joke: ‘nothing’ is an abstract concept which threatens to swallow up all their knowledge. To demonstrate the effect of the philosophers’ limited vision on society, Blake then introduces into the story new characters that personify the results of the philosophers’ poor reading habits. The first is Etruscan Column, an Antiquarian (and therefore one of those chiefly responsible for discovering old languages with a view to uncovering the Adamic urlanguage),41 but we are told straightaway he has made ‘an abundance of Enquiries to no purpose’ and this leads to a failure of communication: he describes ‘something that nobody listend to’. Such failure has produced a society which cannot communicate meaningfully and relies only on surface appearances, and the next character to be introduced is offered as both an example and a consequence of this: ‘Mrs Gimblet




came in’. Her name again emphasizes a lack of vision: ‘Gimblet eyed’ was a popular expression meaning to have a squint.42 The description of her – ‘the corners of her mouth seemd I dont know how. but very odd as if she hoped you had not an ill opinion of her’ – demonstrates a judgemental social isolation plagued by obfuscation and a lack of true knowledge. Blake astutely deleted the epithet ‘tipsy’ from his description of her, sensitive to the growing social pretensions of the chattering class she epitomizes. The narratorial style here, reminiscent of Foote’s impersonations, also anticipates the comedy of Dickens, where a character’s own speech patterns are imitated in the description of them and reinforces the connection between social language and personality. Her interaction with Etruscan Column highlights this social fragmentation: ‘seemd to listen . . . seemd to be talking . . . but it was not so’. Their conversation purports to be of virtuous cats (a combination of the three philosophies?) but the two characters are obsessed with their own thoughts (‘the shape of her eyes & mouth . . . his eternal fame’), a development of the kind of aesthetic and psychological delusion noted in the Poetical Sketches. The Philosophers, who ought to be able to help, do not, and instead are shown to be wasting both comic and imaginary impulses that might have brought enlightenment: ‘endeavouring to conceal . . . his laughter (not at them but) at his own imaginations’. Instead of establishing identity and community, the ‘utopian realm’ of ‘purely human relations’,43 conversation becomes abstract and divorced from empathetic connections, a phenomenon Blake neatly pinpoints in the ensuing exchange between Inflammable Gass and Etruscan Column. The scientist and historian ought to bring knowledge: they have ‘fixd their eyes on each other’. But all they see is a reflection of themselves: ‘their tongues went in question & answer. but their thoughts were otherwise employd.’ This is not only social isolation but a fragmentation of the self: the tongue ‘goes’ independently, no longer belongs to the mouth, and the thoughts are ‘employd’, which suggests they are hired by others; the characters no longer think for themselves (in both senses). It leads to a loss of understanding of alternative viewpoints (‘I dont like his eyes’) and to social manipulation through the ‘smil[e]’ of deceit. The choice of the word ‘vanities’ to describe this behaviour is interesting: as we will discuss later, Blake chose to quote Ecclesiastes on vanity on the back of his illustration ‘Mirth’ (E686). The philosophical vanities are being contrasted with the vision available through Mirth. A lack of mirth plagues the Island, a point that is reinforced ironically throughout the text: ‘these happy Islanders . . . Another merry meeting . . . they playd at forfeits & tryd every method to get good humour’ (E462).




The rupture between perception, thought and speech leads to incessant arguments and once again the philosophers are implicated in this failure. Each displays behaviour inappropriate to his own professed beliefs, emphasizing both their obsession with and misreading of the physical world: ‘the three Philosophers . . . the Cynic [supposedly virtuous and self-controlled] smiling, the Epicurean [the avoider of pain] seeming studying the flame of the candle & the Pythagorean [believing in the transmigration of souls] playing with the cat’.44 There is an interesting adjunct to the image of the Epicurean’s staring at the candle. Blake later defines Epicurean philosophy as thinking ‘Imagination not to be above the Mortal & Perishing Nature’ (E660). In The Marriage he uses the image of a candle in sunshine to compare what a ‘man of mechanical talents’ may create when considered next to the power of Shakespeare. The failure of the Island’s philosophers to share in comic vision and carnival experience (the Cynic is smiling to himself) is based on a lack of Vision (the candle) and leads to a misunderstanding of spiritual matters (playing with the cat). That this failure is one of reading is stressed when the three philosophers are then described as ‘listen[ing] with open mouths to the edifying discourses’. ‘Discourse’ was Shakespeare’s own preferred word for language in use,45 but these dialogues, which are not ‘edifying’ or building anything, ignore the imaginative potential within language to create new social bonds and instead reinforce the blinkered, materialist view of the universe. That this habit of poor reading affects whatever is looked at, whether that be a text or the physical world, is demonstrated in the next exchange between the Windfinder and the Antiquarian. They discuss written ‘works’ (possibly Voltaire’s, which are mentioned later) and then digress on to the subject of swallows. First, the Antiquarian denounces the written works as ‘paltry flimsy stuff’, again seeing them as merely material to be examined, not the product of imagination. Then, when challenged to provide a reason for his belief, he shows that he can misread the world just as he has misread the word. His ‘reason’ has nothing to do with the written works at all; instead it is a kind of perverted parable. He says he was ‘walking in the street’ (and therefore in the social sphere) and sees a ‘vast number of swallows’ on the ‘rails of an old Gothic square’. Blake originally wrote ‘on the top of a house’ but replaced this image with a square of ‘rails’ to give the idea of birds in a cage, an image that harks back to the limited vision of Har and Heva. It is also likely that the Antiquarian mistakes the birds themselves, calling them ‘swallows’ instead of housemartins, suggesting that his reading of Pliny has influenced his ability to see reality.46 When asked by a fellow




citizen ‘who do all [the swallows] belong to’ he ignores the biblical reference in the question and can only react with ‘contempt’. Contempt is the subject of one of the comical ‘Proverbs of Hell’ in The Marriage that shows how one can create a world in one’s own image. Swallows also have other connotations. They were considered as augurs of Spring and so of resurrection, and a stone from the belly of a swallow tied to the arm was supposed to cure madness.47 The Antiquarian, who should have known these old superstitions, instead ignores the tug on his sleeve, calling his interlocutor a ‘Fool’ while missing the comic point. This argument between the Antiquarian and the Windfinder also demonstrates the richness of Blake’s comic text, calling on philosophical gags, Shakespeare and even Freemasonry, to show the ramifications poor reading can have. Sir said the Antiquarian. according to my opinion. the author is an errant blockhead. – Your reason Your reason said Inflammable Gass – why why I think it very abominable to call a man a blockhead you know nothing of. The several possible meanings of ‘nothing’ show both that the Windfinder has found Etruscan Column’s opinions to be hot air and that the Antiquarian can ‘know nothing’ of the writer because his reason has blinded him to the work’s imaginative merit. The historian has also missed the significance of the birds being gathered in a ‘Gothic square’. Many Millenarians described themselves as ‘mystical Masons’,48 and there is a considerable amount of Masonic imagery in Blake’s work, with careful attention paid to the use of compasses, levels and shapes. The square represents, broadly, matter, earth, the earthly aspect of humanity, moral rightness and hence God.49 Blake also later notes that ‘Gothic is Living Form’ (E270): the Antiquarian should be translating the birds into symbols of divine presence and responding better to the ‘civil’ question posed by his fellow man. The dialogue between the two also has the immediacy of a stage conversation. The phrase ‘Your reason Your reason’, as well as anticipating the name of Blake’s empiricist oppressor, is also an allusion to a foolish exchange between Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch: ‘thy reason, dear venom, give thy reason’ (Twelfth Night, III.ii.2). Certainly the Antiquarian suffers from Aguecheek’s cowardliness: confronted by the ‘little outre’ fellow’ he whines ‘I had a great mind to have thrashed the fellow only he was bigger than I’. The Antiquarian cannot escape the




reality of the physicality to which he has allied his ‘great mind’: for all its pretensions his reading of the world leads him to a sublime moment of fear. What he assumed was powerless is actually more potent than himself in a real, Rabelaisian sense. The story also gives Inflammable Gass the chance for a weak pun: ‘I donot think the man was a fool for he seems to me to have been desirous of enquiring into the works of nature.’ Enquiring into nature is the function of philosophy, but again the philosophers fail to help: Sipsop’s laughter, instead of restoring equality, only provokes Inflammable Gass’ divisive guffaw and nearly causes a fight. The characters’ close and mistaken equation between linguistic and physical realities leads to Etruscan Column’s ‘formal answer’ with ‘both his fists’. This altercation is interrupted by Obtuse Angle the Mathematician. Blake later asserts that ‘God is not a Mathematical diagram’ (E664) and that mathematics cannot be used to describe faith: ‘God forbid that Truth should be Confined to Mathematical Demonstration’ (E659). ‘Mathematic Form’ is connected with the ‘Reasoning Memory’ and is the abstract opposite of the ‘Eternal Existence’ of God (E270): a mathematician understands the universe by rule and logic rather than imagination. We can expect, therefore, that Obtuse Angle will also show considerable misreading skills, and this indeed proves the case. Even his name neatly summarizes the blinkered view of the abstract thinker. He has a ‘vast number of papers’ in his pockets, but his reading only blinds him to the world and limits his thought: ‘shutting his eyes [he] began to scratch his head’. His deliberation is potentially beneficial: his first question is to ask ‘what is the cause of strife’. The wording is careful: although apparently addressed to the Windfinder and Antiquarian, the question is a potentially far-reaching query about the human condition. However, the three thinkers, supposed to be concerned with such questions, can only answer according to the distorting lens of their own perceptions: the cynic. answerd. they are only quarreling about Voltaire – Yes said the epicurean & having a bit of fun with him. And said the Pythagorean endeavouring to incorporate their souls with their bodies.50 In The Marriage the narrator will assert that to see body and soul as two separate entities is incorrect, for ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul’; instead the body is that portion of the soul perceived by the senses. In the ensuing discussion between the Islanders, Blake suggests that a




carnival, rather than satirical reading is better for creating our understanding of God. He does so by reintroducing the satirist Voltaire into their argument. Blake appreciated Voltaire’s lampooning attacks on all forms of oppression and told Crabb Robinson that Voltaire had been sent to ‘expose’ the literal sense of the Bible. Indeed, Voltaire was one of the figures in ‘The Temple of Mirth’ that Blake engraved for The Wit’s Magazine in 1784. But he also called Voltaire’s satirical wit ‘a wracking wheel’ and, in the same passage in which he comments on Foote, accuses Voltaire of hypocrisy: ‘constantly talking of the Virtues of the Human Heart and particularly of your own . . . that you may accuse others . . . whose errors you, by this display of pretended Virtue, chiefly design to expose’ (E201). A satirical vision of society only produces the kind of quibbling so evident in the Islanders’ behaviour. True Vision is married to a belief in the divine, a point comically made by Obtuse Angle. He remarks (notably ‘with a grin’) that Voltaire ‘understood nothing of the Mathematics’ and that ‘a man must be a fool ifaith not to understand the Mathematics’. This suggests both a criticism of Voltaire (both that the logic of satire is frequently flawed and it is nihilistic, the ‘nothing of Mathematics’) and points out that the true opposite of the ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ of mathematical thought is to become a ‘fool ifaith’ – meaning both a fool indeed and a fool in faith, a believer in Christ. And on balance Blake has the Epicurean pronounce Voltaire ‘a fool’, but only after they have had a ‘bit of fun with him’. As with much of An Island, meaning is comically condensed within the text. Obtuse Angle’s statements on Voltaire provoke Inflammable Gass, who responds by ‘turning round hastily in his chair’ (which, with the implication of professorial chair, suggests the malleability of his opinion) and claiming that Voltaire ‘found out a number of Queries in Philosophy’. There is another wordplay here (to find out being both to reveal and to solve), but one which Obtuse Angle overlooks. To emphasize his lack of Vision, he is described as closing his eyes, claiming he can understand ‘better’ that way, before announcing: In the first place it is of no use for a man to make Queries but to solve them, for a man may be a ‘ fool & make Queries but a man must have good sound sense to solve them. a query & an answer are as different as a strait line & a crooked one. On the surface, Obtuse Angle’s comment seems logical: anyone can question; only the clever can answer. However, this is also potentially the language of oppression, for it both refutes the value of Voltaire’s




questioning of society and suggests that those who commit such questioning are ‘crooked’ – at best confused and at worst criminal, like the little boy lost of Experience who is burnt for attempting to question Man’s relationship with God. But then again, with yet another reference to Vision, if Obtuse Angle’s comment is read imaginatively it offers an alternative both to his oppressive view and the pseudo-science of Voltaire’s satire. The crooked and straight lines call to mind Isaiah 40: 4, the coming of the Messiah who makes the crooked way straight. A ‘fool’ can make queries and, although deemed mad by society, may prove a strait line to an understanding of God: as it says in another ‘Proverb of Hell’, ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’ (E36). (Isaiah also speaks of ‘leviathan, the crooked serpent’ (27: 1) and the leviathan appears in The Marriage as an example of the dangers of a limited word-view.) ‘Strait’ and ‘crooked’ are also technical names for parts of a quadrant.51 An important description of a quadrant had been published in 1785, around the time this passage is thought to have been written, and a quadrant is mentioned directly in Chapter 5, just after Obtuse Angle has scolded someone not to be ‘a fool’. If a quadrant is thought of as a quarter of a circle, the straight lines are those that lead out from the centre and the crooked line is that part of the circumference between them. Blake’s thoughts on the relation of these two lines can be seen in his ditty ‘Blake’s apology for his Catalogue’ in his Notebook 1808–11. There he associates the ‘Skumference’ with the Newtonian single vision of Hayley, Pope, Dryden and others who use art as a means for profit. Thus Hayley on his Toilette seeing the sope Says Homer is very much improved by Pope . . . Flaxman & Stothard smelling a sweet savour Cry Blakified drawing spoils painter & Engraver While I . . . / Resolved to be a very contrary fellow Cry looking up from Skumference to Center No one can finish so high as the original inventor By implication his adversaries are both obsessed with materialist view and also disdain matter, using art as a form of ‘sope’ to disguise the physicality of defecation, decay and death. But the straight line of comic vision, unafraid of physical existence because it sees beyond it, if taken by the ‘Lunatic’ and the ‘Contrary Fellow’, will find the sun, the imagination, God. This image of God at the centre of two straight lines is repeated in the frontispiece to Europe, also known as the ‘Ancient of




Days’, which will be discussed later. This is an image that is also linked to Voltaire, as in Candide Voltaire had famously suggested that God could not use compasses. Blake’s imagery consistently suggests that the way to find God in this world is through the imagination, puns, humour and the comic, but it must be read correctly. Obtuse Angle has claimed ‘good sound sense’; the next pun in the text is pointedly an aural one, where ‘I’ and ‘aye’, self-centredness and social agreement, are confused. These complex arguments are then neatly summarized in the other characters’ reactions as they each present their own misreading of the situation. The Mathematician dismisses Voltaire with the exclamation ‘Pooh’, a potentially scatological expression that shows the limit of his outlook. The Antiquarian develops this image, claiming Voltaire was ‘immersed in matter. & seems to have understood very little but what he saw before his eyes. like the Animal upon the Pythagoreans lap always playing with its own tail’, and finally Inflammable Gass calls him the ‘Glory of France’ before talking of a ‘bottle of wind’ (the product of the boghouse) ‘that would spread a plague’. Satire can be useful, but it has to be read carefully. The result of this argument is that the Antiquarian, who should remind the Islanders of the lessons of history, falls silent, and Inflammable Gass starts talking. The self-centredness and limited reading shown by the characters has already been linked, through the Epicurean, to Bacon, who demanded a one-to-one connection between signifier and signified. The result of this attempt to limit language, Blake claimed, is Law: ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression’ (E44), and the very next event in the story is the entrance of Steelyard the lawgiver. As one might expect, Steelyard’s name carries several connotations, including a measuring device (thus linking him to a Newtonian viewpoint, as a steelyard measuring the sun could be seen on Newton’s tomb in Westminster Abbey) and an area of London given over to the warehouses of Anzeatic merchants (thus linking that viewpoint with capitalist opportunism).52 He comes in ‘stalking’, adding an air of menace, and ‘with an act of parliament in his hand said that it was a shameful thing that acts of parliament should be in a free state’. Blake is poking fun in two ways here. For a lawgiver to despise an act of parliament suggests short-sightedness, hypocrisy, a disrespect for democracy and a willingness to spout the kind of laissez-faire capitalism which can cause a good deal of social misery. In addition, there are other meanings of the phrase ‘Acts of Parliament’ which also mark Steelyard out as a hypocrite. It was used as a term for abstracts published ‘against Drinking, Swearing, and all manner of Prophaneness’ and it was military slang for beer.53 The




inference that Steelyard is drinking on the job is heightened by the added remark that Mrs Gimblet, from whose description Blake had deleted the word ‘tipsy’, perhaps to show her disapproval of appearing intoxicated, ‘drew her mouth downwards’ at the sight. This simple description not only notes Steelyard’s failure as a lawgiver – the beer or his work ‘so ingrosse[s] his mind’ that he does not ‘salute the company’: (implying that he does not ‘salute’ the idea of social cohesion) – it also measures the impact of his actions on society: the ill-informed, pettyminded Mrs Gimblet is depressed and losing her social voice. In response to this, Blake immediately contrasts this destructive round of satirical questioning and sham politics with the carnivalesque nonsense of the peculiar ‘Chap 2d’. The whole chapter is a character list which ends ‘(If I have not presented you with every character in the piece call me [ass]* Arse) Ass’. The Fieldingesque intrusiveness of the narration highlights the text as fiction, which is further pointed up by the final digression that makes the chapter meaningless. Blake is reminding the reader that it is their imagination which invests the characters with ‘life’ and the text with ‘meaning’, thus placing the reader at the heart of creating both this lunar society and, by implication, their own. The characters’ elaborate names and descriptions also invite a comic rereading of the world, and their being ‘presented’ to us is both a social introduction and a stage direction: the narrator is like a clown mediating between the audience and the play-reality. Asking us to call him ‘Ass’ not ‘Arse’ was not prudishness on Blake’s part: an ‘Ass’ brings to mind a whole host of clown / fools who bring both class disorder and social and spiritual harmony: Dogberry, Bottom, Robin Goodfellow, even Christ.54 ‘Chap 3d’, begins, as England points out, with more contemporary references, this time to ‘oriental Gardening’. As well as centring the story in his reader’s experience, however, Blake is also introducing a variation to the main theme: the manipulation of matter to produce Art. The name of the gardener, ‘Phebus’, is significant because it was the name given to Apollo, genius of poetry, when represented as a sun god. Such a heathen view of the sun invests it with mythological power, but only that power which might be abstracted from the natural phenomenon: burning, destruction, an all powerful distant Other. This is the process of ‘abstract[ing] the mental deities from their objects’ that is described in The Marriage as the heart of ‘Priesthood’. The ‘orient’ is the place where the sun (or creative power) rises and ‘Gardening’ is the manipulation of nature, so for Phebus to be oriental gardening could be thought of as suggesting the production of Art by the materialist thinker. Certainly, the next incident is the first ‘song’ in the piece:





The mistaken vision embodied in the mention of Phebus makes the Cynic’s artistic impulse go awry. It produces an odd, scatological ditty that heightens this sense of failed vision. The mention of a trumpeter calls to mind the arrival of the Last Judgement, a popular image in contemporary Millenarian thought, but the Epicurean’s materialism can only see this divine impulse in terms of matter and the Pythagorean’s response merely confuses two meanings of ‘hat’ (trumpet mute and headgear) with an unpleasant result.55 Having the three philosophers all contribute to the same ditty demonstrates both that they are all equally responsible for the current state of affairs and that a clear division between the three disciplines may not be easy to find.56 (A similar point is made later when, with a kind of blasphemous wit, the Pythagorean says ‘Hang names’). Viewed from a clownish perspective, however, a more positive reading emerges. The demystification of rhetorical or ‘serious’ (often wooing) language, reducing it to ‘flatus vocis’ or ‘foul wind’, is common in Shakespeare. Here the pompous ‘trumpet’ is turned into a scatological performance within a typical clown routine, and Bakhtin would see such an unholy baptism as a blessing in disguise.57 But this idea is unavailable to the characters, and the Cynic’s renewed attempt at a song points out how poor reading has led to many of society’s ills. Phebus becomes a fat-bellied capitalist: ‘Ho Ho I wont let it go at only so & so’. This in turn leads to further social problems: Mrs Gimblet’s confused self-centredness and Tilly Lally’s laugh being likened to that of a ‘cherry clapper’, the street cry of an agrarian worker trying to trade in an urban world. The close association between the production of art and social organization is then highlighted in Obtuse Angle’s list of the many disciplines of which Phebus is the ‘God’. Phillips, following Erdman, notes that some of the skills listed are textbook requirements for history painting,58 and this would suggest Blake is once more connecting a materialist vision with poor artistic practice. (History painting was often the product of commercial mass production, and in his A Descriptive Catalogue entry for ‘The Bard, from Gray’ Blake warns against the ‘sordid drudgery of facsimile representations’ (E541), later noting that such facsimile artists often ran painting factories of ‘Journeymen’.) The list also provides examples of the way mathematics is used in society and as well as being funny in itself (juxtaposing ‘Cookery’ and ‘Chymistry’) it emphasizes the scientific tendency to separate the world into areas of



Ill sing you a song said the Cynic, the trumpeter shit in his hat said the Epicurean & clapt it on his head said the Pythagorean.

narrow focus. By mixing Astronomy with Astrology it also suggest that science is not very far from superstition in its attempts to decode the universe, and elsewhere Blake defended honest belief against what he called ‘superstition’: scientific and religious ‘hipocrisy’ (E591, E598). A reference to ‘Conjunctives’ is deleted from the list, as Blake was being careful that Phebus was not seen as a god of inclusive communication, but rather as the god of ‘Phraseology’ or select interpretations of language. The list proceeds from ‘Theology’ via ‘Mythology’ to ‘Astrology’, a progression which may call to mind Edmund’s description in King Lear: in a scene which begins with his declaration that ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess’ he remarks on the ‘admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay [our] goatish disposition on the charge of a star’ (I.ii.120). Such a view of humanity not surprisingly leads to a loss of understanding of our spiritual nature, something that reduces our thoughts about ourselves to ‘Osteology’ and ‘Somatology’: the study of bones and human evolution as measured in purely physical terms. This fatal poverty of thought is summed up in the description of Phebus’ sciences adorning him ‘as beads round his neck’, which suggests a pompous chain of office, a superstitious view of the world, things of a low value for which the New World was sold and a hangman’s noose. Aradobo reacts to this list of sciences by asking if Phebus was the god of ‘Engraving’ and asserting that, if he was, he was as great as Chatterton. Besides humorously suggesting his own discipline is the foremost science, Blake links the art of engraving (revealing the ‘surface . . . which was hid’) with the poetry of Chatterton and thus with the triumph of imagination over literalism. The elevation of Chatterton to a near-deity by comparing him to a ‘God’ also pokes fun at our habit of over-inflating the significance of topical chattering debate and failing to examine the truly important issues that lie behind them, of spirituality and existence. That the Islanders lack such insight is immediately exemplified in the comic exchange which follows, a series of questions about Quid’s song which show how the supposed certainties of scientific enquiry can lead to confusion. Who was Phebus . . . he was as great as Chatterton . . . who was it that was as great as Chatterton . . . how should I know . . . who was it . . . the Gentleman the song was about . . . it was Phebus . . . who was Phebus? The comic twistings (a style of humour reminiscent of Morecombe and Wise or Abbott and Costello), unnoticed by the characters, lead them





the heathens in the old ages usd to have Gods that they worshipd & they usd to sacrifice to them you have read about that in the bible This is followed by Aradobo’s confused claim that he had read of ‘Phebus’ in the Bible and Tilly Lally’s laughing correction that he means ‘Pharoah’. Misreading the Bible has led to Pharoah, the repressive rule of law. Obtuse Angle also admonishes Aradobo by telling him to think before he speaks, implying that the dominant ideology also seeks to create internal mechanisms for self-repression. This is immediately played out in Mrs Sistagatist’s comment ‘I am ashamd of you making use of the names in the Bible’, an attitude that leads to both law and its covert operating mechanism, guilt: she is immediately referred to as ‘Mrs Sinagain’. Although Tilly Lally claims ‘I dont think theres any harm in it’, Inflammable Gass takes the opportunity to boast of his ‘camera obscura’, a scientific device for observing microscopic natural objects which also suitably describes his own lack of vision.59 In Jerusalem ‘Pharoh in his iron Court’ appears when the ‘Minute Particulars’ are ‘Disorganizd’ (E248): loss of Vision, poor reading and social and psychological repression set up a cycle of misunderstanding. Inflammable Gass asks ‘what was it you was talking about’ and the question is answered by Tilly Lally’s appropriate comic exclamation ‘Law’, a pun that links the legal process with the lightly blasphemous eighteenth-century version of ‘Lord’ God. Tilly Lally’s following comment, ‘what has that to do with Pharaoh’ brings the conversation full circle, and for those readers alive to late eighteenth-century slang it also returns us to the hypocrisy of the drunken lawgiver: ‘Pharaoh’ was a name for strong malt liquor.60 Erdman notes that Blake may have picked up the term ‘Pharaoh’ to mean grasping commercialism at odds with spirituality from Paine.61 Blake’s quip of placing the phrase ‘hang Pharoh & all his host’ in the mouth of the Sipsop shows, in its variant spelling of the name ‘Pharoh’, the Pythagorean’s freedom from a sense that signifiers are fixed, but also suggests that the struggle of the dominant and the oppressed will be ‘the same dull round over again’ (E3) unless a new vision is achieved. The Pythagorean then demands a song from the Cynic and gets the sort of poetry his reading deserves: a song which exposes in the three philosophers the same self-centredness for which they condemn others: ‘Honour & Genius is all I ask / And I ask the Gods no more’. ‘No more’,



irritably back to their starting point: a materialist view of language (‘Pooh said [Obtuse Angle] Nonsense’). Obtuse Angle then goes on to define Phebus again

as well as indicating the paucity of their view, may also show that they believe they have enough: Aradobo, scolded for being stupid and told to think for himself, sucks his under lip in what may be a sulk, or silent doubt. The song, with its side reference to Harris’ ‘Daphne and Amaryllis’, set to music by Handel, reinforces the idea that the philosopher’s misreading is shaping contemporary society. Chapter 4 continues the debate on how to read the Bible with an argument between Mrs Nannicantipot, a dissenter, and Mrs Sistagatist / Sinagain, a conformist. Mrs Sinagain wishes to repress any other forms of religious expression: Im sure you ought to hold your tongue. for you never say any thing about the scriptures & you hinder your husband from going to church. That this church is responsible for the commercial conditions of society is made clear in Inflammable Gass’s complaint that ‘If I had not a place of profit that forces me to go to church’ he would ‘see all the parsons hangd’. In a description of her tough childhood that is reminiscent of a Monty Python sketch, Mrs Sistagatist then explains the chief attraction of the church for her is Parson Huffcap’s sermons, in which he shouts at his congregation ‘all for the good of their souls’ and destroys the symbols of his office in a fiery ‘Passion’. But this is no Christ-like suffering and the amusing description of Mr Huffcap (possibly a snipe at Whitefield, whose own recently constructed chapel had a prodigious pulpit), shows him to be more an entertainer than a minister of God.62 Mrs Sistagatist has run like ‘the dickins’ to church (a slang term for the devil that had become absorbed into polite culture and diminished in meaning), and her reaction to the sermon is to be ready to ‘sink into the earth’: the grave of the earth-bound vision of polite religion. However, neither is Mrs Nannicantipot’s version of religion any better: she merely sits at home and dreams of a violent response she has not the courage to put into action: ‘If I was a man Id wait at the bottom of the pulpit stairs & knock him down & run away.’ They are both spiritually ‘Ignorant’ and need to have their ‘ears boxed’ with prophecy. Their argument has overtones of the Christian debate over justification by faith or good works: that they both lack both and that their version of theology is no more than neighbourly bickering is shown in the nicely judged final over-thefence comment ‘I am sure this is not religion’. But Blake does not let this become a straightforward attack on religious debate; that would be too dogmatic. Just as the story appears to have reached an impasse the nar-





Then Mr Inflammable Gass ran & shovd his head into the fire & set his hair all in a flame & ran about the room – No No he did not I was only making a fool of you. The narrator mocks and at the same time celebrates the reader’s imaginative capacity to create the Islanders’ world in response to the text. Again the comment is like a stage direction and in contrasting Inflammable Gass’ hair with the parson’s wig Blake is accenting the nature of the text as a social performance. Further, in his assertion that he is making a ‘fool’ of the reader, he is both calling to mind the usual sense of fool (one who, as he notes in the Annotations to Bacon, is too literal in understanding) and remarking on the reader’s comic complicity in creating the mental image of the scientist flambé. So far, then, An Island has looked at how our reading of texts and nature effects our productions of law, art and religion. In chapter five the debate moves to philosophy and, in the linguistic sparring between Aradobo and Obtuse Angle, playing on the illogicality in polite speech of using ‘I thought’ for ‘I suspected’, Blake satirizes Descartes’ attempts in Discourse on Method to define the essence of self. Aradobo, distrusting his own intuition (‘It came into my head’), is bullied by Obtuse Angle’s Cartesian pseudo-logic into a position of mental sterility that creates the conditions for a repressive society. Their argument explores the relationship between thought and language, showing Obtuse Angle’s belief that they are the same as wrong-headed, but powerful. Aradobo finds Obtuse’s argument, with his clever use of grammar, negatives and manipulation of the idea of the Other, overwhelming (‘I did not think I said that – Did not he said Obtuse Angle Yes said Scopprell’). Aradobo’s sense of isolation, submission to law and divorce of meaning from imagination is all neatly summed up in the phrase ‘But I meant said Aradobo III cant think Law Sir I wish youd tell me’. Descartes’ proposition only proves ‘I think therefore I am thinking’, but Aradobo’s attempt, with another clever change of grammar, to express this comically – ‘Whenever I think I must think myself [into existence] – I think I do –’ is wasted on the mathematician, who is so immersed in the world of matter that he literally ‘Poo Poo[s]’ the idea of humorous imagination and tells Aradobo not to be ‘a fool’. The inability to understand oneself as an individual is linked to the misreading of the self as being separate from the divine imagination



rator disrupts it with the same flamboyant disregard for structural integrity shown in Chapter 2d:

which is all humanity. The language of science and philosophy, the narration proposes, is in part responsible for this. To ignore the possibility that ‘One thought. fills immensity’ (E36) and to restrict thought to the purely physical is the great mistake of the scientific method and one which can be seen in the next apparently non-sequitorial exchange among the Islanders: Then Tilly Lally took up a Quadrant & askd. [what is this gim crack for del.] Is not this a sun dial. yes said Scopprell but its broke. The correct use of a quadrant and the act of visionary perception have already been linked in Obtuse Angle’s earlier allusion to crooked and straight lines. A quadrant can be thought of as an instrument that measures distance as expressed in terms of time. A sundial is an instrument that measures time as expressed in terms of distance. Both use the sun as a guide. To mistake one for the other is to confuse a spatial activity (like measuring location or observing nature) with a lineal activity (like measuring time or reading). If Tilly Lally attempts to use the quadrant as a sundial he will make a mistake in his ‘reading’ of the sun, just as Descartes trying to read the significance of thought as ‘the self’ misses the creative link to the divine. Once again, Blake is hinting that misapplied science leads to a confusion of the natural world and language and thus a misreading of symbolic elements that could provide an understanding of the divine imagination. Scopprell describes the (reading) instrument as ‘broke’ and to emphasize the point ‘at this moment’ the three philosophers enter the room, bringing ‘lowring dark ness’ instead of enlightenment to the ‘assembly’ (a word with social, religious and political resonance). Again, the challenge to this state of misperception comes from the comic. The Epicurean calls for ‘rum & water & hang the mathematics’. Under the influence of these irreverent and celebratory forces Aradobo produces a delightful and slightly drunken list of pseudo-sciences. The list is presented as if with a hint for an actor: to be drunk, play up the letter ‘H’: ‘Hogamy, Hatomy. & hall that’, and this foregrounding of a person in performance heightens the contrast with the sterile dismemberment of experience represented by the scientific disciplines. Aradobo is speaking of the accomplishments of Chatterton, the great forger, and his list, mimicking Obtuse Angle’s, both carries the implication that science is also a forgery of a kind and pinpoints its weaknesses: it is derivative (‘Follogy’), it is inhumanly dry (‘Aridology’), mechanical (‘Pistinology’), spiritually mistaken (‘Transmography’), concerned only




with appearances (‘Phizography’), insufferably pompous (‘Arsdology’ hints at a cross between Arse and Ideology), and it ends with something that even science, with all its ‘Fissic or somethink’ (my italics) and ‘Pathology’ cannot answer – ‘& so died’ – a fact which silences ‘all the people in the book’.63 This marks a hiatus for the characters: ‘they could not talk any more to the present purpose’. If science and logic has failed them, they must turn elsewhere. Appropriately, then, chapter 6 opens with a renewed discussion of the production and perception of art and its relation to literary and moral development. This is begun by the Epicurean’s question ‘if Pindar was not a better Poet than Ghiotto was a Painter’. This apparently simple phrase again demonstrates how richly layered this text can be. On one level, Blake is poking fun at those who seek to ‘Reason & Compare’ instead of ‘Create’ (E153): poetry and painting are not easily comparable in this way (perhaps calling to mind Dogberry’s admonition against ‘Comparisons’ in Much Ado, III.v.16). In attempting to compare them, Suction is also missing an important point. In ‘The Laocoon’ Blake claims that ‘A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man [Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian’ (E274)]. In trying to decide which is best, Suction is failing to see the unifying Christian act of imagination in their work. On another level, making the material-minded Epicurean raise this question allows Blake to have another amused dig at the aesthetic of terror and beauty that he disliked so much. Comparing poetry and painting in this way is typical of eighteenth-century debates on the sublime, and the mention of Pindar calls to mind the work of John Dennis, the respected critic, failed playwright and occasional poet who had produced some verses in the Pindaric style. Pindar was a Greek poet known for his triumphal odes, his use of metricality and ‘the licentious exuberancy of his lyricks’.64 In 1782 his work was being widely discussed as a possible source of influence upon Rowley, therefore denying Chatterton’s authorship, and the Islander’s earlier discussion of Chatterton makes it even more likely that Dennis is being invoked here. As was discussed earlier, while Blake may have thought Dennis’ verse bordered on the ridiculous – ‘What divine Rapture shakes my Soul / . . . What makes my sparkling Eye-balls rowl?’65 – he disapproved of his theories of both comedy and the sublime. The shape of Suction’s question suggests that he thinks Pindar, flanked by the ghosts of rationality, materiality, empiricism, and a terrible sublime that reads natural images as containing the essential property of the divine force that created them (the sun burns so God does too) is better than ‘Ghiotto’.




Giotto di Bondone was an Italian painter whose work Blake cited as an example of the imaginative genius, contrasting it to Newtonian ‘Calculation’, the ‘City Clarks . . . Fashion’ and ‘the Work of Sketchers drunk with Wine’ (E512). Boccacio in the Decameron celebrated Giotto as the artist who restored the act of perceptive imagination as the central feature of Art, rescuing it from becoming mere mechanical drudgery, reviving ‘that art which had been buried for centuries by the errors of some who painted more for the eyes of the ignorant than the intellect of the wise’. An architect and fresco painter, Giotto was also a renowned joker who was deeply interested in real human experience: in other words, the sublime of the ridiculous. In just a passing sentence, Blake has conjured a debate between two entirely opposing aesthetic views, and found heavily in favour of the comic, humanist and carnival sublime. There is a possibility, admittedly faint, that this argument is even more extraordinarily condensed. ‘Peter Pindar’ was also a nom-de-plume of a contemporary satirical writer who, among other things, attacked targets familiar to the reader of An Island, including Dr Johnson, the desire to have black servants and Sir Joseph Banks. By possibly invoking the satirist, Blake may be challenging the idea that satire is an appropriate guide to morality by linking it to the limitations of the Epicurean’s world view. Sipsop the Pythagorean answers Suction’s question with the response that ‘Plutarch has not the life of Ghiotto’, and once again a simple line combines two possible readings: both a moral statement and its comic opposite. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, republished in Dryden’s edition of 1683, compares the lives of Roman and Greek worthies and draws conclusions about the essence of humanity. If Plutarch, the socio-moral historian of the ancient world, did not write about Giotto (‘has not [his] life’) then, Sipsop implies, Giotto is not important; the implication being that Pindar’s terrible, material-oriented sublime art was the more important when considering moral issues. On the other hand, Quid’s rejoinder (‘no . . . to be sure he was an Italian’), while being absurd in itself (drawing an artificial distinction between Roman and Italian subjects) emphasizes Giotto’s liveliness and creativity – the comic reputation of an Italian being, in part, one possessed of life and spirit to an almost rambunctious degree. In contrast, Plutarch, although a major source of influence on post-Renaissance thinking, comes to seem like the dead weight of classical bookish convention when compared to Giotto’s humanity. Blake elsewhere states that the work of ‘reasoning’ historians should be rejected (E543), and Suction’s rejoinder that




Giotto’s Italian identity ‘is not any proof’ further damns Plutarch as a limited vision empiricist. In Towne’s A Dissertation on the Ancient Pagan Mysteries (1766), Towne had declared Plutarch ‘believed, that the knowledge of the human [origin] of the national gods was unfavourable to their worship’ and that ‘Mysteries’ should be ‘invented, established and supported by Lawgivers’ to provide a ‘vehicle of physical, moral and divine truths’.66 Plutarch was the priest of Apollo at Delphi and had a vested interest in denying that ‘proof’ of morality could be found in the merely human, wishing rather to keep the origin of divinity a mystery. But if comparative morality and Mystery are rejected (‘Plutarch was a nasty ignorant puppy said Quid’), how are people to be educated? The question is raised in a quickfire exchange between the three philosophers, initiated by Quid: theres Aradobo ‘in ten or twelve years will be a far superior genius. Ah. said the Pythagorean Aradobo will make a very clever fellow. why said Quid I think that any natural fool would make a clever fellow if he was properly brought up. There is a reference here to the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke that humans are a natural tabula rasa, an opinion Blake consistently refuted as denying the divine spirit in man (‘I say in the Contrary that Man Brings All that he [sic] has or can have Into the World with him. Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown This World is too poor to produce one Seed’ (E656). The paucity of Quid’s attitude to education is demonstrated in the confused inconsistency in the Epicurean’s frustrated response: ‘Ah hang your reasoning . . . I hate reasoning I do every thing by my feelings’. Once again, the alternative is to be found in the comic: the possibility that the study of a ‘natural fool’ could make one a ‘very clever fellow’. The response to the three philosophers’ musings comes from Sipsop, who wishes ‘Jack [Hunter] Tearguts had had the cutting of Plutarch’. The study of the ‘human’ has led us to another area of the Cambridge degree: medicine. Dr John Hunter was a surgeon and anatomist who thought himself ‘a far greater man than Newton’. Among his many interests, he was renowned for his attempts to revive the dead and his involvement in the display of human exhibits as fairground curiosities.67 To ‘cut’ Plutarch suggests both that one could learn about Plutarch (and hence about morality, history and the nature of man) from an examination of the very physical matter of his guts. It also suggests the act of ‘reading’ Plutarch. Surgeons implied examination, deconstruction and disease, so




were often linked to literary criticism, politics and satire: one of Foote’s surgeons, Dr Squib in The Devil Upon two Sticks (1768), has pretensions to politics and literature, dispensing broadsheets and political cartoons. As Sipsop claims Tearguts ‘understands the anatomy better than any of the Ancients’, we are being invited to believe Tearguts’ reading of Plutarch and society is to be preferred to all others. In Milton Blake maintains that ‘Surgery’ is the manifestation of ‘Painting’ in the world of ‘Time & Space’, to keep humanity alive until ‘the time of . . . awaking’ (E125), but this surgeon is brutal. He ‘does not mind’ his patients’ ‘crying’, he keeps them down with his ‘fist’ (like the tyrant’s ‘iron hand’ E490) and warns his victims ‘that hell scrape their bones’ (with the sense of both ‘he’ll’ and ‘Hell’) ‘if they dont lay still & be quiet’ (they are to submit to religious and physical repression). Plutarch’s work had, of course, been famously ‘examined’ by Shakespeare, but Tearguts’ view, unlike Hamlet’s, sees humanity as ‘a piece of work’ who should be ‘done for nothing’ – treated gratuitously and valued as worthless. Suction then demands a song, and the ideas of medicine, satire and society come together in the form of the ‘When old corruption’ song. England notes that ‘When old corruption’ has a literary precedent in Paradise Lost.68 Bodily and moral corruption were both a product of the fall and it was common for satirists to use the analogy of medicine, ‘harsh Remedies to an inveterate Disease’,69 to justify their work. Foote claimed that the function of comedy is ‘to render wholesome physic of reproof palatable to the squeamish patient’ and asserted that ‘if it does not cure those already distempered, it may be a means of stopping the infection’.70 The satirist’s pen was frequently seen as a ‘knife’ with which to cure society,71 and like Tearguts’ surgery, the satirist felt his observations, though so close to the bone they ‘scrape’, should not be objected to because they are ‘done for nothing’, free. Not everyone agreed: Allestree, in The Government of the Tongue (1674) observed that ‘the dissecting of putrid Bodies may cast such pestilential fumes, as all the benefits of the scrutiny will not recompence’.72 ‘When old corruption’, then, may suggest that for Tearguts to cut a ‘body’ (or text or society) is to create a satirical view of the world that perpetuates the sort of misreading illustrated in the previous comments on Pindar, Giotto, Plutarch and Locke. Certainly the song can be read as a kind of ‘Satirist’s Progress’. ‘When old corruption’ begins with the satirist’s assumption of a pompous moral superiority to the rest of humanity, ‘flesh’. He is ‘Adornd in yellow vest’: according to Bancroft’s Epigrams (1639),73 yellow is the colour of a ‘foole’, but he is merely adopting the trappings of foolery for his own




ends which will be exposed, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night. His ‘whoredom’ is his act of misreading the world, which causes him to commit a ‘Prostitut[ion]’ of the ‘Mechanical Power’ of words (E652) and produces the ‘callow babe’ of satire. Old Corruption then smiles ‘To think his race should never end’: satirical pamphlets were notorious for engendering long pamphlet wars. What follows is a perversion of the carnivalesque grotesque: instead of growth the satirist’s medicine produces ‘dropsy’. Satire, while exposing the society’s disease, simultaneously recreates the conditions for such disease to exist. The babe, Surgery, ever after seeks ‘his mothers life’ with a ‘crooked knife’: the creative impulse, when coupled with a fixation on a physical view of language (the ‘dead woman’) reproduces the mental conditions for a continuous cycle of cynicism and misreading. Surgery’s falling in love and marrying the dead woman is described as a ‘deed which is not common’; the humour of understatement reminding us of its antipathy to a vision of ‘common’ carnival celebration. Their union brings forth a direful genealogy of disease and suffering, interestingly similar to that found in Blake’s earlier fragment then She bore Pale desire, where Pride gives birth to Envy and hence Satire, ‘foul Contagion from which none are free’ (E446).74 The surgeon’s materialist view of the world is allied to the blindness of the scientist, and like one of Swift’s Lagado academics, ‘Surgery’ tries ‘experiments’ on his children and ‘stop[s] up all [their] vents’ to ‘do the world more good’: He took up fever by the neck And cut out all its spots And through the holes that he had made He first discovered guts. The satirical laugh – surgery has killed the patient – hides another truth: surgery has exposed the workings of both society and itself, its guts, its language. But it takes an act of imagination to perceive this: without it, satire will blight society. If Tearguts is indeed based on the contemporary surgeon Hunter, then there is a further connection between a materialist view of language, satire, disease and social ills. Hunter was famous for his work on venereal disease, publishing a treatise on it in 1786. The connection between language, loss of sight and VD is made in ‘London’, where the speaker’s negative marking of faces ends in a harlot’s ‘curse’ that blasts future generations. Sipsop’s following comment, ‘you think we are rascals & we think you are rascals’ shows the perpetual moral stagnation of the satirical conflict. It leaves Sipsop trapped into a subjective view: ‘I do as I chuse what is it




to any body what I do’ (although, of course, as an apprentice surgeon what he does is very important to the ‘body’ of the patient, society, the text). Such isolation of the self leads to depression (‘I am always unhappy too’) and confusion (‘When I think of Surgery – I dont know’). This even extends to his relationship with his father and, by extension, with the Other, with God: ‘My father does what he likes & so do I’. This could mean that Sipsop has freewill, or it could mean that he simply has the illusion of freewill while he does what his father wants him to do. There is a slight reference here to a contemporary nursery rhyme that includes the line ‘Round about, round about, Maggoty pie, My father loves good ale, and so do I’,75 painting a vivid picture of Tearguts’ similarity to the beer drinking lawgiver and his disregard of human life as being no more than food for worms. In Sipsop’s experience, the benefits of satire / surgery are outweighed by the suffering it causes: ‘there was a woman having her cancer cut & she shrieked so. that I was quite sick’. There are hints of carnivalesque redemption here; the last onomatopoeic rhyme of ‘spots’ and ‘guts’ reminds the reader of the human impact of the satirical / surgical attitude, but while satire has been useful in exposing ‘that which was hid’, without empathy it is divisive. ‘Chap 7’ begins with Quid and Suction agreeing to renew their artistic efforts, but both, aiming to ‘knock all’ their opposition over, seem flawed. Quid’s resolution brings only thought, not action (‘if I was to go . . . but...’) and he misses the importance of the imagination: ‘Homer is bombast & Shakespeare is too wild & Milton has no feelings’. His attitude echoes Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres76 and values the Rowley poems only for their antiquity: he forgets that art is a creative, living occupation. Suction claims to be representing a different approach, an almost criminal reaction to the polite ‘Exhibition’, which involves abandoning polite ‘Philosophy’ and the commercial world for violence: ‘I would not give a farthing for it do all by your feelings and never think about it’, an attitude which will allow him to ‘work Sir Joshua’. This is often read as ‘work over Sir Joshua’, and if one reads ‘feelings’ as inspiration, then Suction will indeed be working against Sir Joshua, who tried to deny ‘Inspiration & Vision’ (E646) which is ‘born with us’ (E659). However, it also could mean to work like Sir Joshua and to rely on feelings without thought is to work in unorganized ‘blots & blurs’, for ‘Thought is Act’ (E623). To ignore thought in considering how to produce art is to treat language and symbols as mere representations of the physical world (which can be ‘felt’). As we have noted before, Blake likens Sir Joshua to Bacon (E648) and Bacon to Epicurus (E645), thus confirming the idea that he dislikes the artistic ‘language’ Reynolds




uses. Certainly the philosophers’ grand plans come to very little: ‘So they went to bed’, and Blake will later liken sleep to the ‘single vision’ of Newton (E722). Once again, such poor vision is shown as detrimental to society, as ‘Chap 8’ opens with the reappearance of Steelyard the Lawgiver, whose name wittily suggests he is the criminal opposite of his supposed trade: given an inch he will steal a yard. He is discovered taking extracts from Hervey’s Meditations Among the Tombs and Young’s Night Thoughts. The poor Visionary habits he represents help create an aesthetic sublime where the fear of death is uppermost. Predictably, this runs hand in hand with the fear of a controlling and punishing Other: Steelyard’s first comment is to console himself that ‘He is not able to hurt me . . . more than making me Constable or taking away the parish business’. He sees punishment in material, commercial terms, and fears having to do anything practical to help his fellows, especially at the level of the local community, the province of the clown. This is probably why Blake, having first given Steelyard a song about ‘scene’ and ‘disguise’, then deleted it: although a hypocrite, there is nothing of clown about him. As his vision of society comes from internal conflicts rather than being created within the community, Blake instead gives him a quote from Tichborne’s Elegy, written in 1586 while Tichborne was in the Tower awaiting execution, and it is worth noting here at length: My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of corn is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is past, and yet I saw no sun; And now I live, and now my life is done. This neatly encapsulates Steelyard’s view. He sees ‘no sun’ in that he does not appreciate visionary perception. His nature-oriented perspective leads him to an obsession with death, a belief in the Cartesian principle of self residing only in individual consciousness and a subsequent doubt of God and the afterlife: ‘And now I live, and now my life is done.’ This poverty of view is commented upon humorously in ‘The Fly’ of Experience and here it is contrasted with a passing reference to Hamlet, ‘happiness is not for us poor crawling reptiles of the earth’. This highlights the pretensions of Steelyard’s melancholy and reminds the reader of Hamlet’s claim that men are ‘arrant knaves all’ (III.i.130). That Steelyard’s disparaging view of his fellows is in large part attributable to




his poor reading skills is reiterated when he mistakenly attributes ‘My crop of corn’ to ‘Jerome’. St Jerome was the first translator of the Bible into Latin and therefore implicated in the process of obscuring its true meaning behind the laws of Thou Shalt Not, and ‘Jerome’ was a satirist translated by Erasmus. Steelyard then states his belief that happiness is impossible except ‘as something’, a material possession. He follows this claim with ‘Hear then the pride & knowledge of a sailor’, an amended version of John Taylor’s Urania (1616). Taylor, also known as the Water poet, was a near contemporary of Shakespeare who once set to sail in a brown-paper boat. What is missing from Steelyard’s version is the line ‘I know for sinners, Christ is dead, and rizen’.77 Steelyard lacks the faith an imaginative reading would give him. He sees the limit of the sailor’s happiness, his ‘pride & knowledge’, as his trade, and believes him to be a frail sinner. Steelyard’s patronizing attitude to Taylor ignores the fact that, Pharisee like, he is finding flaws in others and not in himself. Moreover, ‘to Despise Knowledge, is to Despise Jerusalem & her Builders’ (E232): Steelyard is failing to learn from his fellow men. He makes a further misreading of the importance of the sailor by overlooking the significance of his own references to St Jerome (whose first letter speaks of being a poor sailor in the world with good intentions) and to Young’s Night Thoughts (where in ‘Night Fourth’ the brave who believe in God’s mercy throw themselves from the Rock of Ages into the storm of life). It is possible that, in Steelyard’s attitude, Blake is also having a dig at sentimental humour. Sailors were also popular subjects of songs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were usually brave souls of patriotism and nostalgia (like ‘Tom Steady’ returning to the patient ‘loved one’) and many beggars pretended to be sailors to elicit charity.78 Steelyard’s attitude to Taylor, however, is simply pity – and moreover pity devoid of empathetic action. Sentimental ballads were increasing in popularity – witness the ballad ‘Little Tom’ written by his patron Hayley that Blake engraved in 1800 – and went hand in hand with a fatalist, death-obsessed view, the inevitable result of the beauty / fear sublime which underpinned them. Blake’s contemporary readers, however, would have been familiar with a wide range of other comic songs that depicted sailors as riotous figures, as John Taylor himself had been, often linked to prostitutes. Steelyard misses their humanity in the same act of blindness that allows him to overlook his own faults: lawyers too were traditional comic targets. A good example of this is ‘Lawyer Gruftykotz’ of the 1810 Song Book who is sexually unscrupulous, impotent, cuckolded and finally battered by his wife. Impotent Steelyard,




similarly cowed by Miss Gittipin, fails to notice the comic potential of the sailor. The other side of the sentimental attitude was the idea of a punishing Other who dishes out the calamities that encourage our pity. When Steelyard feels his ego under threat he responds with violence (trying to make others look ‘foolish’), hoping to invoke the destruction of that which threatens him in some cataclysmic sublime moment: ‘I hope shall live to see The wreck of matter and the crush of worlds’ [sic]. The sentence is grammatically awkward and the expected second ‘I’ is edited out, but this still makes sense if one remembers that in Blake’s view ‘Ihope’, or self-centredness, limited to the perception of this perishable world (‘the wreck of matter’), will indeed bring the destruction of the self and / or humanity. Steelyard is like a prototype of the angel in The Marriage, who takes comfort only in ratios and sees creativity as fearful chaos. His misreading is so great he mistakes the Meditations for Theron & Aspasio and attributes lines of Addison to Young: his reading does not teach him anything except how to confuse a false aesthetic with true poetry. When Obtuse Angle reads to him he becomes ‘quite tird’ out’. One of the books found on Steelyard’s desk is Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding and Blake uses a series of jokes to attack Locke’s theories and to restore a sense of carnival possibility. Scopprell, trying to read the title, mistakes Locke’s name, first for ‘Lookye’ and then for ‘Lock’. ‘Lookye’, the bombastic prelude to an aggressive assertion of opinion, gives us a picture of Locke as a bullying orator. It also reminds us of the need for vision, in both senses: ‘Look’ was the exclamation that began many prophecies.79 On the other hand, ‘Lock’ has implications of a restrictive, Thou Shalt Not philosophy of capitalist domination: Locke’s Essay held as a chief principle the ‘preservation of property’. ‘Lock’ had other meanings too, however, which show Locke’s hypocrisy and lack of Vision. A ‘lock’ was also a receptacle for stolen goods and the popular name for a VD hospital, the first of which had been opened in 1746,80 thus linking Locke with Hunter and the loss of vision. By simply repeating his name, Blake has implied that Locke is a bully and a defender of the unequal status quo who lacks spiritual insight. The title of Locke’s essay is then misread by Scopprell as ‘An Easy of Huming Understanding’ and there is a range of wordplay here. Locke’s work is ‘Easy’ both because it is simplistic and, perhaps with the sense of ‘easy virtue’, worthless. It also makes life ‘easy’ for the Lawgiver in that it promotes self-interest and takes so little account of his fellow men, denying their divine potential. Similarly ‘huming’ could imply that Locke has mistaken the understanding of humanity for the understanding




of a ‘hum’: either a sound with no sense (and such humming noises were the basis for the Aristotelian view of language) or an offensive smell, thus repeating the mistake of seeing human physicality as wormeaten, dirty and degraded. There is also a possible pun on ‘Humean’ understanding. Blake equated the thinking of David Hume (1711–76) with that of Newton and Voltaire (‘this Newtonian Phantasm . . . This Voltaire . . . this Hume’, E141). Interestingly Hume had lived in Soho at 40 Brewer Street, and therefore near the Blake family home, and was an Alderman: aldermen come in for a good deal of criticism in the ‘Good English Hospitality’ song.81 Hume saw human knowledge as restricted to impressions and their fainter copies, ideas. If this is the case, the sensory implication of ‘easy’ is even more appropriate. Locke’s title of ‘Gentleman’ is also altered to ‘Gent’, a mock-polite term that reduces the emphasis on his shared humanity and pokes fun at the concepts of social acceptability on which Locke’s thinking rests. There is a suggestion that at one point Blake wrote ‘Gaunt’ in the manuscript, an intriguing hint of a reference to the sick man of Shakespeare’s Richard II, praising England in poetic but nature-bound imagery. Scopprell’s mispronunciation of the title could also stem from his inability to read (thus placing him outside a society that equates reading with Newtonian rules and takes no account of individuals) or is an aural joke based on his having a strong regional accent. Either way, there is a suggestion that the ideas in Locke’s book are only available or comprehensible to someone schooled in the standardized language and thought of polite society. Locke’s theories were also one of the reasons that the notion of ‘self’ took on a new meaning in the eighteenth century.82 If Hume’s and Locke’s theories are right, man has nothing with which to understand the world but the evidence of his senses, so ‘self’ exists only in relation to sensory perception and isolated thought (which is merely a copy of sense). This would tend to deny the existence of God or humanity being an expression of God. Blake pokes fun at the poverty of this opinion in Miss Gittipin’s thoughtless complaints about her life. Her stream of consciousness, which anticipates Jane Austen’s Miss Bates in Emma, shows her to be entirely concerned with the sensory impressions of fashion (‘coaches & . . . maids & Stormonts & . . . a pair of Gloves every day’). This materialism leads her to a self-centredness that cannot appreciate anything beyond her own stimulation, is never satisfied (‘I am sure I never see any pleasure’) and is forced to rely on external opinions to validate such an existence (‘my cousin Gibble Gabble says that I am like nobody else’). Blake makes this connection later when he writes that




‘Beauty that is annexed and appended to folly, is a lamentable accident and error of the mortal and perishing life’ (E544) The curious references in her speech are rich in comic meaning. She is made funnier by her half-reference to Hamlet (III.i.121) ‘I might as well be in a nunnery’, which accentuates both her own lack of imagination and suggests that, like Ophelia, she too will be drowned, but in the waters of materialism that submerge Newton. Yet the physical world she craves is presented as being unattractive. She is deeply jealous, yet the women she envies are presented as awkward physical extremes: ‘Double Elelphants girls’ and ‘Miss Filligreework’. She begrudges them their pleasures, feeling she should have them because she is unique, but the pleasures she seeks are transient: fashions, a trip to Robinson’s old-fashioned singing concerts, the solipsistic despair of Goethe’s suicide novel. The ‘Sorrows of Werther’, first available in English in 1779, was a contemporary sensation. Part autobiography and part fiction based on the death of a man called, appropriately for Blake’s purposes, Jerusalem, Goethe had attempted to turn life into art, but his readers notoriously confused art with reality, leading to a governmental panic about a possible epidemic of suicides, with the result that in some places banned people from even dressing like the anti-hero Werther.83 In her confusion Miss Gittipin cannot hope to read the world positively: she wants to go to ‘Vauxhall & Ranelagh’, but sees them merely as distractions, with no awareness of their potential as places to see and partake in a community at play. To mention ‘the Queen of Frances puss colour’ recalls both the Pythagorean’s cat – she has no concept of souls – and suggests the decadence of a system of repression that can only be resolved by Vision or revolution. I made the suggestion earlier that Miss Gittipin recalls the Reverend Gilpin, whose writings on the picturesque Blake quotes in a letter to Thomas Butts (22 November 1802). Miss Gittipin’s ideas of the world are an expression of the sublime aesthetic of beauty and fear: she is seduced by physical pleasure and suffers from despair. Blake felt that such a perception is vulnerable to oppression by the unscrupulous and Miss Gittipin’s description of Mr Jacko’s household reveals the mechanisms of such exploitation to be in place. For Miss Gittipin, knowledge is something external: both ‘I’ and ‘you hardly know’ but Mr Jacko ‘knows’, he exerts power. His wife is deemed ‘agreeable’ because she is silenced (‘the most agreeable woman you hardly know she has a tongue in her head’),84 he has black servants (and so is implicated in imperialism) who only ‘lodge’ at his house (showing his lack of humanity) and he is part of a capitalist structure that is linked to oppression and




kingship (he will ‘go into partnership with his master’). If one accepts the identification of Jacko as Richard Cosway, the result of this outlook is the unity of Art with Kingship: Cosway was a friend of the Prince of Wales.85 Miss Gittipin even trusts his word over the proof of her own senses (‘I never saw such a place in my life he says he has Six & twenty rooms . . . and I believe it’). The only opposition apparent to Mr Jacko is from Quid, who in the sterility of his satirical attitude can do little more than call Jacko a ‘liar’. But although the characters are powerless against Jacko, Blake has chosen a name for him that allows the reader a comic debunking of his authority. In April 1785, ‘General Jacko’ was a famous performing monkey at Astley’s circus, dancing to someone else’s tune, and Jacko’s view of humanity, denying foolish empathy, shows him more monkey than human. Mr Jacko’s world view is then debunked further by the Lawgiver’s attempts to emulate him. He tells Miss Gittipin to ‘hold her tongue’, but she nags him mercilessly in return. The pettiness of her tirade is heightened by the elaborate description Blake affords it: interrupted ‘in her favourite topic . . . she proceed[s] to use every Provoking speech that ever she could’. The Lawgiver, we are told with gentle mockery, bears her wrath ‘more like a Saint than a Lawgiver’, which calls into question polite society’s definitions of both saints and lawyers, then proceeds to use the same kind of language (‘I am sure I take but little pleasure you have as much pleasure as I have’), formulaic wisdom (‘a girl has always more tongue than a boy’) and spiteful replies (‘if I had only myself to care for. I’d wring off their noses’) for which he has criticized her. As with many satiric exchanges, their argument is unresolved and Steelyard’s language (‘be such a fool . . . every fools insult’) reminds the reader of their lack of understanding of true foolishness. In answer to Steelyard, Scopprell’s reproof – ‘the Ladies discourses . . . are some of them more improving than any book, that is the way I have got some of my knowledge’ – returns us to the central theme of the importance of reading and communicating ideas. This is followed by the song ‘Phebe and Jellicoe’. The song appears to offer a possibility of happy human interaction that looks forward to ‘The Ecchoing Green’ and contrasts sharply with the jaded Islanders. But the fact that it is sung by sensory-led Miss Gittipin should sound a warning note. Phebe is only ‘like beauties Queen’, Jellicoe is in ‘faint’ peagreen (with its overtones of the jealousy found in ‘When early morn walks forth’), and the terrible rhyme of ‘grot’ and ‘trot’ suggests this is an over-sentimentalized vision of the ‘country folks a courting’. While the song is in progress, Steelyard walks around the room, placing him, like the ‘Pilgrim’ of the song, as a




mute observer. The juxtaposition of the vain singer and the sinister listener further questions whether the song presents a carnivalesque celebration of ‘loves asporting . . . Happy people’, or in fact a pastoral pseudo-idyll where the villagers are being misread as happy to ignore the reality of their situation. As Scopprell calls the song ‘charming’ and it is followed by a summons to a ‘merry making at the Philosophers house’ it seems likely that this view of society is incorrect. Moreover, it highlights one of the problems with the irony present in the Songs of Innocence (which it strongly anticipates): without the knowledge or understanding of comic methods of celebration there is potentially no positive message which cannot be ironically undercut. The song questions the nature of ‘happiness’, the subject that was so absorbing Steelyard at the start of the chapter, but comes no closer to a definition. Like many of the songs in An Island, ‘Phebe and Jellicoe’ is highly allusive. Phillips and others have pointed out that it could be a parody of Milton and seems to refer to a couplet of Cowley’s found in Bysshe’s Art of Poetry : ‘Happy INSECT! What can be / In happiness compar’d to thee?’86 This would tie in with Inflammable Gass’s later interest in entomology: Miss Gittipin’s worldview is shaped by the same narrow sensory view as the scientist’s. More than this, as part of an extraordinary hotchpotch of allusion to literature, cultural and scientific writing, it stresses the importance of understanding the assumptions which lie behind our acts of reading; the ways we order, prefer and understand information presented to us. ‘Chap 9’ appropriately opens with a song about a lexicographer. And once again, the sterile ordering of words quickly progresses to an act of physical domination and the negative effects of capitalism. The ‘Lo the Bat’ song gives a scurrilous picture of Dr Johnson, the renowned empiricist and doubter of imagination.87 This song at first seems a straightforward piece of satire. Foote warred continually with Johnson and the depiction of him as ‘winking & blinking’ seems to be a typically Footean blow at personal deformity.88 Johnson himself had referred to Reynold’s portrait of him as the picture of ‘Blinking Sam’. Again, however, the song is very allusive. ‘Winking & blinking’ may refer to the bat in Collins’ ‘Ode to Evening’ and elsewhere Blake associated bats with law and mystery. ‘Doctor’ was a slang term for a drink comprising milk, rum and water89 (and rum and water are offered to the Lawgiver a few lines later), so the ‘cellar goes down with a step’ links Johnson with the drunken hypocrisy of Steelyard. Phillips, however, argues that the ‘cellar goes down with a step’ refers to the trapdoor that catches out the dull Sir Formal Trifle in Shadwell’s The Virtuoso. In The




Dunciad Dryden uses this image to impute Shadwell’s own ‘dullness’, and compares Shadwell’s ‘threat’ to art to Hannibal’s ‘threat’ to Rome. Hannibal was stopped by Scipio; in the Islanders’ song Scipio proves Johnson’s nemesis too.90 It is Johnson’s vision of language and art that is being specifically attacked as limited and dull. His insistence on the primacy of physicality and the materiality of symbols leads first to his commercially minded vanity (‘own me a Philosopher’) and then to his humiliation by the logical result of his own opinion, a force majeure. Quid – Oho Said Doctor Johnson To Scipio Africanus If you dont own me a Philosopher Ill kick your Roman Anus Suction – A ha To Doctor Johnson Said Scipio Africanus Lift up my Roman Petticoatt And kiss my Roman Anus By being placed in a position to ‘kiss the devil’s arse’ and worship the worthless matter to which his view would reduce the whole world, Johnson is also being linked with the rule of Kingship, worldly oppression and an inability to see God. His abasement is different from the carnival grotesque; there is no rebirth, no baptism, no humbling of the King. Scipio Africanus was also the subject of one of the stories ‘lost’ from Plutarch’s Lives, a collection that contrasts great Greek and Roman characters in pairs. Blake is, therefore, amusingly providing his own version of a Plutarchian comparison, with Johnson’s thinking likened to that of the Greek world ransacked by Roman might. This connection is heightened with a faint allusion that suggests the satire levelled against Johnson is a very old form. Lucilius, one of the poets accredited with creating the Roman satiric style, aimed most of his jibes at Scipio’s enemies: Blake is possibly invoking something of the earliest recorded comedies in debunking Johnson’s authority. Once again, though, it is the carnivalesque that seems to offer a positive element to the situation. The Islanders have decided to ‘all get drunk’: they are entering the impolite world of ‘Publicans & Harlots’ (E233) where an alternative society may be worked out. Suction asks for an ‘Anthem’ and the result is a carnivalesque remedy to Johnson’s world that evokes comic songs, prints and inverse blessings. ‘Winking & blinking’, in the popular song ‘Mrs Flynn and the Bold Dragoon’, characterizes the inappropriate lechery of an old woman who uses her money to




entice a young soldier, but then dies, leaving him to spend it all. There were many versions of this song,91 and its application to Johnson is appropriate. In his focus on the sensory world Johnson is himself displaying a kind of lecherous desire, but ends up simply kissing arse. In this position he calls to mind several comic prints. Besides the ‘Birth of Sir Bugaboo’ print already mentioned, kissing a king’s arse also happens in ‘A British minister Worshipping the Meridian Sun’ (1786),92 where Pitt is kneeling to George III. This print is a skit on Maria Cosway’s ‘A Persian going to adore the sun’ (1786): Johnson’s act is a misreading of the ‘sun’ that ties him in with the attitudes of Mr Jacko as Mr and Mrs Jacko are often noted as a caricature of the Cosways. Moreover, arsekissing is also the means used by Fox to canvas votes in the print ‘A New Way to Secure a Majority’ (1784).93 Johnson, who would place himself above everyone, is shown to crave the basest political approval. This may be a powerful bawdy stab at polite society, but the laughter it provokes in Scopprell seems false, a possibility heightened by the number of times Blake repeats ‘Ho’. It also recalls Har and Heva’s vacuous chortling. After that, his amused comment, ‘I should die if I was to live here’, seems double-edged. The song about Johnson has hurt his ‘poooooor siiides’: the society it describes is one based on power relations where millions of poor citizens suffer. Blake carefully gives the word ‘poor’ six ‘o’s or zeroes: it is both an abstract mathematical number and a symbol of the existence of the poor. The poor have to live on the fringes of a commercial society and the very next episode in the chapter is a song that mimics a London street cry: 1st Vo Want Matches 2d Vo Yes Yes Yes 1 Vo Want Matches 2d Vo No—— It examines the human reality of the law of economic supply and demand advocated by those who share Johnson’s view of language, power and rules from the perspective of those at the bottom of the capitalist order. The system does not always work: the song throws the ‘company’, with a pun on ‘economic company’, into ‘Great confusion and disorder’. To restore the status quo Aradobo speaks of a ‘very pritty & funny’ song about matches, reducing the matchboys to a sentimentalized group and thus denying both the recognition of their suffering and the revolutionary potential of seeing them as individuals. This allows




Mrs Nannicantipot to sing a matchboy’s song herself (thus putting words into his mouth) which shows him to be thankful for the chance to partake in the commercial world – that is, ‘as far as’ the Guild, hand in hand with the aristocracy, polite religion and government, will allow him: I cry my matches as far as Guild hall God bless the duke & his aldermen all Scopprell’s response is to sing ‘And I ask the Gods no more’. This may indicate that the philosophers’ world of self-interest does not worry about the plight of matchboys, an attitude that is copied by unthinking society. However, by giving the song to someone who is not a philosopher and immediately after the other matchboy songs, Blake raises the question: what would the song mean if the matchboys sang it? If the poor stop asking the gods (the mechanism that keeps them oppressed) what to do, they may end up revolting and asking the gods no more. The comic challenge carries a threat to society and the Islanders react accordingly. Suction then asks the Lawgiver to sing (to re-establish the rule of law) and he obliges with ‘As I walk’d forth’, a song about a flowerseller. Like Har, he is lost in delusive pastoralism. Violets were sold to hide the stink of town life, but for Steelyard the flower-seller and the flower become confused; they are both ‘sweet’. His song dehumanizes the maid and ignores her real economic condition in favour of a patronizing idyll. To oppose this, Blake offers a more clearly carnivalesque reply to show how an act of reading could be beneficial to society. The Lawgiver’s song is answered by Tilly Lally’s imaginative, comic and sexually charged story of Joe Bradley’s dipping his arm in treacle. Again, one arm and a blind eye were popular comic subjects: ‘The Clown’s Courtship’ tells of a clown wooing a ‘comical lass’ who, like Nelson, has only one eye, arm and leg.94 Here, the joke of Joe’s literally turning a blind eye to excuse his own theft challenges Steelyard’s view of working class ‘sweetness’ in several ways. Treacle was the food of the workhouse. Joe’s theft restores power to the dependent underclass (he can feed himself), turns the table on those who would feed him and also implicitly challenges the imperialist ‘theft’ of treacle from the colonies. This is also the victory of a comic rogue triumphing over a ‘blind’ establishment that would try to repress his human spirit, a sense that is reinforced by a slightly sexual overtone to the passage (a ‘one-eyed’ ‘arm’ in ‘treacle’) that is reminiscent of those describing illicit relations at masquerades. ‘Lick lick lick’




contrasts with the ‘Lookye . . . Locke . . . Lock’ encountered earlier, and Scopprell’s repetition of ‘And I ask the Gods no more’ reinforces the revolutionary potential of the episode. The problem with treacle, though, is while it sustains life, in excess it makes you sick. The repetition of Scopprell’s ditty may suggest the poor establishing a new political, aesthetic and moral order, but it could also mean a return to the status quo. In a work that pays special attention to names the choice of ‘Joe Bradley’ raises some interesting possibilities. Joe was the name of the famous London street character mentioned in chapter one; Bradley was a famous swordsman of Coburg who was popular in the fairs of the day.95 However, it is tempting to link Joe with James Bradley (1693–1762), who resigned as a Reverend to become the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. There are a number of reasons he may have come to Blake’s attention. His observations of the movements of the stars had recently been reprinted. He was closely associated with Newton, had lectured on experimental philosophy, improved the quadrant (one that he had used at Greenwich famously ‘broke’ when exposed to sunlight), reported the mutation of the earth’s axis under the influence of the moon and calculated the time it took sunlight to reach the earth.96 Moreover, he spent years at the telescope (making the description ‘one-eyed’ most apt) and was generous, but only to his relations. If this is a comic use of his name, it is a further deflation of the pretensions of scientific ‘observation’ by comparing it with the indiscriminately generous impulses of the underclass scallywag. On another level, Joe’s activity is quite childlike, and it prompts Miss Gittipin’s song ‘This frog he would a wooing ride’. Her voice is described as being ‘like a harpsichord’ and her act of singing ‘bounty’ and a ‘favour’, so the reader is forewarned that this song will be less sympathetic to real human experience. It is a variation upon a popular song, close to the version printed in Ritson’s Gammer Gurton’s Garland (1783), where the frog, subject to desire and law, is finally eaten. In a version printed in the 1810 song book, the simpering sexuality of ‘Kitty’ and ‘Cock’ is played up: in Miss Gittipin’s version, although this remains a possible undercurrent, the anthropomorphism of the animal world and the almost meaningless refrain give a good indication of its unrealistic and sentimental nature. This is pointed up by Scopprell’s approbation of ‘Charming truly elegant’ and his repetition of ‘and I ask the Gods no more’. The logical end of this nature-oriented sentimentality is then shown up in Sipsop’s song, a nonsense aria that merely uses the arbitrary ‘words’ of a musical scale, proving that while a language may have rules it does not mean it also has innate sense.




Quid lambastes this trilling for the pretensions of an ‘Italian’ opera, and singing in the ‘Italian manner’ was another of the attributes Douce ascribes to the Fool.97 As a response to the problems of social economics and sexual politics, however, it is limited, so Quid sings ‘Hail Matrimony’, another possible parody of Milton that picks up on an age-old theme so neatly expressed by Chaucer: ‘Ne noon so grey goos gooth ther in the lake / As, seistow, wol been withoute make.’98 On the surface, ‘Hail Matrimony’ appears to blow a jolly, if hackneyed, raspberry at the idea of the ‘yok[e]’ of marriage. As with the rest of An Island, however, the contrast of different social voices – romantic, physical, euphemistic – exposes marriage as a confluence of the mistaken assumptions of the dominant ideology; an aggregation of stated and implicit assertions about how morality literally and metaphorically goes hand in hand with law, social structure and a materialistic reading of language. With its jaunty rhythm and simplistic rhymes Blake’s version affects a knowing naivety that simultaneously endorses and deconstructs both the romanticized social view of marriage and the traditional satirical attack against it. The use of euphemism (‘if her heart is well inclined’, ‘panteth for a bride’) pokes fun at the fact that the dominant view of ‘Love’ relies on the romantic fictions of a sentimentalized aesthetic of beauty while at same time ‘marriage’ is the dominant ideology’s method of restricting the sexual act it abhors but cannot stop. The use of words like ‘yok’d’, ‘drove’ and ‘Breed’ heighten this sense by suggesting that marriage is a way of controlling a breeding population of farm animals. To attempt to sanitize desire by sentimentalizing it leads to a distorted perception of humanity that mistakes the true notion of Love. What it creates instead is a false idolatry (‘Hail fingerfooted lovely creatures’) that claims to offer a ‘universal Poultice’ but concentrates on the ‘female [in Blakean shorthand, natural] side of our human Natures’ to the exclusion of all else: ‘Comfort’ is a secondary consideration to the need to ‘Breed’. The legal procedure of marriage is likened to a commercial transaction: in the manuscript, the word ‘tender’ is written with a slight break in it, perhaps to make us read it carefully and thus bring to mind other meanings, such as ‘contract’. Moreover, once again this worldview is underpinned by the aesthetic of beauty and fear: in this world, to be human-shaped is deviate from the ideal of beauty and this is considered almost a criminal act: ‘Nature’s hand has crooked her frame’ (my italics). But if the conventional idea of marriage is flawed, so is the satirical tradition of seeing matrimony as a ‘yok[e]’ and a ‘Golden cage’. While, in a manner reminiscent of Swift, the song undercuts the aesthetic of




beauty, reminding us that those who ‘trip on beauty’s toe’ also sit ‘on beauty’s bum’, it challenges the sentimental view of sexuality by picturing it as lecherous, ugly and scheming. Both sexes are shown to be indiscriminate in their lusts and little deserving of the titles ‘maidens’ and ‘swains’. Traditionally such anti-sexuality poems wore the mantle of being anti-feminist, attributed to a wise celibate male clergy trying to warn against the inappropriate distractions of conjugal union (often figured, as it is here, as a ‘widow gay’). Bakhtin points out that such poems actually celebrate women as a vital life force that throws off the old sterile ‘men’ of fixed social attitudes, as there is often a triumph of sexual activity over restriction and a sense that repression is wrong. In ‘Hail Matrimony’, however, the satirical current of the song offers very little positive response. The mention of the ‘universal Poultice’ should perhaps call to mind Christ, but the sexual satisfaction of marriage is seen in animalistic terms: women after sex are likened to ‘Birds just cured of the pip’, a nasty disease which involves a build up of mucus in the throat, which leaves them ‘chirp[ing]’: instead of bringing enlightenment sexual union has brought only the contented twittering of a nature-oriented language. ‘Chirping’ was also a slang term for being drunk, linking this attitude back to Johnson and Steelyard’s failings.99 Quid describes ‘Hail Matrimony’ as a work of ‘English genius’ and there are suggestions of a carnivalesque alternative in the song. Being cured of the pip could refer to the temporary cessation of menstrual bleeding during pregnancy and the Rabelaisian exaggeration of the image of breasts big enough to ‘suckle all Mankind’ raise the possibility of the unstoppable comic life force of continuing humanity. But the satirical element in the song emphasizes the ‘blind[ness]’ and ‘deaf[ness]’ of the lovers, a poor reading that leaves them in the position of Har and Heva, deluded and vulnerable to exploitation. The failure of the satirical gainsaying is underscored by Scopprell’s calling matrimony a ‘game’ while also inviting Quid to ‘Go & be hanged’ (the punishment for those who break social law) for making fun of it. Blake initially gave Quid an angry rejoinder, threatening to dash the ‘skipping flea’ (nature-bound insect) through a ‘chair’ (of learning?), suggesting it is Scopprell’s reading that is at fault, but then deleted it. The emphasis of the last song was less on an individual act of interpretation and more on a society reading itself, and instead Quid now calls for Obtuse Angle to sing one of the most complicated songs in An Island, ‘To be or not to be’. Interestingly, this burst of temper is often used as a justification for assuming the character of Quid is Blake’s self-mocking selfportrait. Even if it is true, its deletion only strengthens the idea that An




Island’s comments on reading are more important than its immediate sources. ‘To be or not to be’ is an unusual song in that it mentions real, nonliterary figures and has no obvious parallel in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. While singing it, Obtuse Angle stares at ‘the corner of the cieling [sic]’, implying some consideration of heaven. In keeping with An Island’s focus on reading, the song uses a wide range of cultural and literary references, presenting a dramatic, spiritual and practical sermon upon responsibility and social duty. It opens with the first line of Hamlet’s often quoted soliloquy, perhaps the most famous outpouring on life, free will and humanity’s relationship to God in English literature. This raises our expectations that the song will reflect on similar topics and, by alluding to Hamlet’s meditation on the limits of his knowledge and his lack of action, alerts us to the contrast between thinkers and doers, between ‘words, words, words’ and faith. Further, in choosing a dramatic speech, Blake is reminding us that thinking about oneself can be a very public act and even our most private moments occur in an arena of shared experience. What follows, however, is the immediate comic undercutting of this great expectation, with the faintly ridiculous rhyme of ‘to be’ with ‘capacity’ and the disruption of the iambic rhythm with the pedestrian ‘Id rather be Sutton’. Having made us think about our relationships to literature, God and each other, Blake is then poking fun at the pretension of Newton, Locke, South and Sherlock as part of a society that idolizes Shakespeare while heightening the contrast between the imaginative poet, the material-minded intellectuals and the charitable Sutton. The four thinkers mentioned at the start of the song all have a noticeably flawed attitude to reading. Newton and Locke have already been criticized in An Island for their nature-oriented view of the universe and of language. Sherlock and South, two divines who, like Hamlet, debated on the nature of death and the afterlife, display similar linguistic failings. Their very different viewpoints can be broadly categorized along the now familiar lines of Aristotelian and neo-Platonic. William Sherlock, DD, in his A Practical Discourse on Death (1689), writing in terms very reminiscent of Hamlet’s speech that a human is but a ‘Traveller’ or player in this world and that death ‘puts an End to all our labours’, puts forward a vision of the spiritual world that is based on very physical terms. His conception of the afterlife is governed by the familiar aesthetic of beauty and terror. For him, while death is ‘nothing but putting off these mortal Bodies’, Heaven is to ‘re-assume them again with all the Advantage of an immortal Youth’. Hell, on the other hand,




is both hidden and fearful: ‘That [the punishments of hell] are nuknown [sic], argues that they are something more terrible than [we] are acquainted with in this world’. This vision of immortality as an extension of earthly society is questioned in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Innocence, and Blake clearly did not approve of Sherlock, who claimed that ‘this world cannot be the happiest place’,100 while Blake stated ‘I feel that a Man may be happy in This World’ (E702). But neither did he approve of Dr Robert South, who challenged Sherlock’s opinion in his Animadversions (1693). South actually preached a sermon on Adamic language, saying that Adam was a philosopher, which sufficiently appeared by his writing the nature of things upon their names; he could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their respective properties.101 But he takes the idea of immanence too far, aggressively defending the ‘Sacred Truth’ and ‘Mystery’ of the Church and, significantly, its language, against Sherlock’s worldly explanations: But as for those who shall presume to Compose . . . another Faith, or . . . Teach . . . another Creed . . . or shall introduce any unusual way of speaking, or new invented Terms, as tending to Subvert all that has been defined by us . . . we decree . . . that they shall be Anathematized.102 South’s ‘mystery’, however, still sees the material world as nothing more than empirically understandable matter: ‘[a] satisfactory Account may be given of all the . . . Phaenomena of Nature’. His pallid belief in immanence is simply a disguised fear of the natural world and his answer to Sherlock’s heresy, in a passage which recalls the trumpet and hat exchange between the Epicurean and the Pythagorean, is expressed in the basest form of natural response: all the black Dirt of those Impi-ous and foul Passages which I have cited from him . . . ought to lie wholly at his Door: and let him (and his Porter) shovel it away thence as they are able.103 In contrast to these four materialist thinkers, the song-speaker prefers ‘Sutton’. In 1611 Thomas Sutton, then ‘England’s wealthiest commoner’, left money to buy the estate of Charterhouse with the intention of




establishing a ‘Hospitall for . . . poore Men and Children’.104 This act of foundation would have been topical, as an account of it had just been published in Thornton’s Survey of London (1784). At face value, Sutton’s act of practical charity seems to offer more tangible support for his fellows than the quartet of abstract thinkers, providing employment and healthy living conditions for the poor.105 Further, a close inspection of Sutton’s Last Will and Testament makes several positive contrasts between Sutton and Steelyard. The introduction to the will states that ‘Charitie’ was the greatest of the virtues but the ‘least regarded’, and goes on to note: All States generally are corrupted: each man preferring his owne priuate interest, before the common care of his distressed brethren; not measuring any thing, but by the rule of his owne profit . . . To insist longer upon these common places would bee ouer-tediuous to the Reader, and not much auaileable, but rather hurtfull, as wherein hee may behold the worlds miserable thrift, and so become a sectator [sic] thereof, whilest in the meane while hee make shipwracke of his Conscience, and hazard the perdition of Heauen and his owne Soule. Let vs therefore walk into the Valley of Lillies where Christ with his true and euerlasting delights is ready to entertain us.106 The awareness of the corruption of states, the rejection of the ‘rule’ of ‘profit’, wishing to avoid becoming a ‘spectator’ to ‘shipwracke’ and the preferment of ‘violets’ to ‘Lillies’ all compare Sutton favourably to Steelyard, and the writer of The Charterhouse even tells us that Sutton had to get an ‘Act of Parliament’ to have his hospital built (which Steelyard of course would have thought ‘shameful’). Digging deeper into Sutton’s background shows yet another reason why ‘To be or not to be’ might be an admittedly quirky panegyric of praise: Bearcroft’s An Historical Account of Thomas Sutton (1737) relates how Charterhouse stood on the site of a burial ground that had been created by Sir Walter Manny to relieve the problems of overcrowding in London’s cemeteries. Manny is Dagworth’s ally in the Poetical Sketches ‘King Edward the Third’ and in scene five he speaks of the terrors of the ‘field of death’ where ‘many’ lie ‘cover’d with stones and deathy dust’ and where he feels himself to be ‘in one great charnel house / And seem to scent the rotten carcases’ (E436). Dagworth’s response is to ‘drop a tear’ in pity (an action questioned in the Annotations to Reynolds, E641) and to suggest that the soldiers who die in war will be recompensed in heaven: the view of withheld reward that was espoused by Sherlock. The language of the




‘King Edward the Third’ references to Manny makes it tempting to think that Blake knew of Manny’s connection to Charterhouse and is here contrasting Sutton’s charity that rewards the living with Manny’s, Sherlock’s and exploitative capitalism’s charity that only ‘rewards’ the dead. So far, then, this song would seem to be straightforward. But the opening of the last verse, ‘Was not this a good man / Whose life was but a span’, in a work that has employed so much satire and irony, coupled with the fact the song is sung by the Mathematician, raises a doubt. In his attempts to ‘hinder pestilence’, is Sutton trying to stop the spread of ‘old corruption’, or is he like Jack Tearguts, claiming to know what is best for his patients while in fact hurting them? Early opponents of Charterhouse claimed that it was isolating and the residents died early from broken spirits caused by separation from their families. In the 1780s the Gentleman’s Magazine carried a number of stories criticizing the institution. Likewise, ‘To be or not to be’ describes the building of the hospital from ‘brick and stone’: while Thornton’s Survey describes the building of the ‘Foundling Hospital’ as employing ‘brick’ and ‘gravel walks’, the phrase ‘of brick & stone’ is used of Bedlam.107 Moreover, although the physical part of the building is described in some detail, there is no reference to the poor it houses. Sutton has nothing to do with the ‘aged men & youth’ he wants to help, only interacting with his ‘Stocks’ and ‘money’ and even communicating with the builders only indirectly via his ‘servant’. Blake later questions the establishment of hospitals (‘These were the Churches: Hospitals: Castles: Palaces: / Like nets & gins & traps to catch the joys of Eternity’, E67) and commercialization of pity (‘pity is become a trade, and generosity a science / That men get rich by’, E55) that Sutton’s work seems to embody. As Blake later remarks in his ‘The Laocoon’: ‘The True Christian Charity not dependent on Money (the lifes blood of Poor Families) that is on Caesar or Empire or Natural Religion’ (E275). Several other aspects of Sutton’s Will – like leaving money to be lent to ‘young merchants’ of London (like the matchboys) to help establish their businesses, to be chosen by the ‘Mayor and Aldermen’ and the ‘Dean of St Paul’s’ – also seem to be criticized as failing in An Island.108 Of course there is a good deal of poetic licence in the song. The real Sutton himself died before the hospital was established and besides which the building was already complete; it only needed alterations. Moreover, in the song Sutton is preferred to Newton and Locke, but not to Bacon, that other corner of Blake’s favourite infernal triangle. The historical Sutton’s Will was opposed by Bacon: Blake may be suggesting




that one should not draw too close a comparison between the real and the poetic Suttons. But most damningly, the song is approved of by Steelyard, who is ‘very attentive & begd to have it sung over again & again till the company were tired’. The Lawgiver is very happy to see somebody else take on the responsibility (and the expense) of looking after the poor away from him; it is something he wants repeated ‘again & again’. Even wealthy individuals like Sutton, however, have not the money to pay for all of the hospitals society needs: the ‘company’ grows ‘tired’; limited personal philanthropy will fail. To take this reading of the song, then, suggests Blake is criticizing modern, rational philanthropy,109 and thus raising the question, what should replace it? An obvious answer would be to return to an older attitude to charity, a more personal form of interaction and this is exactly what seems to be presented in the song the Lawgiver provides in response to ‘To be or not to be’. The company has demanded he sings a song (and therefore provide a vision of charity) himself, and what he provides is ‘Good English hospitality’. The song, with its contrast of well-fed mayors and hungry poor, and its repetition of the phrase ‘O then it did not fail’, is clearly open to a satiric reading. The very phrase ‘Good English hospitality’ invites it: in The New London City Jester ‘Scaraback Screechkinkerton’ proposes a tax on ‘real old English hospitality’ in the hope that to make it expensive would make it fashionable once more.110 The mayors in ‘Good English hospitality’ are a kind of pestilence: they are ‘brought forth’ from the ‘city & this country’ like ‘Scurvy & spotted fever’ were ‘brought forth’ from the ‘dead woman’ in the ‘When old corruption’ song. They sit in ‘old oak chairs’ which suggests that the myth of traditional values is being used to maintain an unequal power structure, and their eating ‘beef’ and drinking ‘strong ale’ is another indication that ‘Merrie England’ has been corrupted: beer bought elections and bribed bailiffs. Eating beef both suggests that they are devouring England – as ‘beef’ was a name for an ordinary Englishman, the aldermen are being pictured as cannibals111 – and highlights the song’s satiric content by alluding to, among others, Fielding’s The Grub Street Opera and Hogarth’s ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. The luxurious clothes they wear as badges of office are described as being such as would make a ‘yeoman sweat’ – true both because if he wore them he would be hot – they are at odds with the needs of ordinary humanity – and because someone else’s wearing them results in him having to work hard. Even the aldermen’s stockings are ‘rolld above their knees’ suggesting they are too proud to pray, and their shoes ‘as black as jet’, imply wealth and funereal pomp. The aldermen




are supposed to be ‘fit to give law to the city’, but the presence of the ‘hungry poor’ suggests they are failing in their office, and their eating ‘as much as ten’ harks back to the destructive ‘capacity’ of the thinkers in the previous song. Good English hospitality fails because the idea of face-to-face charity is sentimentalized and at best will provoke a cycle of violent revolution and oppression. In the last stanza, when ‘The hungry poor enter . . . the hall to eat good beef and ale’ the refrain ominously repeats ‘Good English hospitality O then it did not fail’ and we are told that here the Islanders ‘gave a shout & the company broke up’. However, the imagery of ‘Good English hospitality’ contains several references to comic and carnivalesque readings that contain the germ of a more positive response to the idea of charity. A Bakhtinian reading of the mayoral banquet would see it as an official feast, consolidating social hierarchies and not permitting laughter,112 part of the bourgeois tendency to suppress folk culture, such as happened at the opening of St Bart’s Fair.113 Gentlemen farmers used to arrange feasts so that they were on the inside of a building and their guests were outside:114 the mayors are being shown up as appropriating country customs into the town without taking any of the responsibility they suggest. Moreover, the mention of ‘old oak chairs’ and the description of faces ‘as brown as any nut brown ale’ should call to mind L’Allegro and the appropriations of carnival customs that occurred in ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’. But the image of the aldermen ‘sit[ting] in state & giv[ing] forth laws’ comically links them to the farting Nobodaddy and the arse-kissing Dr Johnson, and actual experience of carnival feasts, like St Bart’s, would remind the reader of a powerful alternative to Sutton’s and the Mayor’s forms of charity in the communal attitude of respect for all from all. In a work where names are so important, the mention of ‘Green the Bricklayer’ and ‘the Carpenter’ is intriguing. ‘Green the Bricklayer’ may, for Blake’s contemporaries, call to mind Sir William Green, who, on his return from the siege of Gibraltar in 1782, had been praised for his determined building of stonework defences even in the face of enemy fire. Thomas Sutton had begun his rise to riches as a successful artillery commander. To laud a single act of charity without properly grasping its intentions may make the ‘charitable’ exchange of money no better than a kind of warfare (‘Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only’ E271). Then again, the song is highly localized to Blake’s part of London: Newton had lived in nearby Leicester Square and Charterhouse was a short walk away near St Paul’s. A certain ‘J. Green’ had been a minister of Whitefield’s Chapel, situated barely a cricket ball’s throw from the Mathews’ salon: he had helped with the building of the




‘almshouses’ there.115 Charitable intentions affect the local community; real people are on the end of grand ideals and legal documents. An alternative connection between language, building, ‘Carpenter’ and ‘Green’ had also occured in the debate over Chatterton’s authorship of the Rowley poems. According to certain ‘Observations’ printed in 1782, Carpenter was the name of the man who, with William Canynge, had built Westbury College ‘for the poor’.116 Canynge was closely associated with Rowley, whose works had supposedly been found in ‘a box’ by a carpenter in St Mary Redcliffe, and a certain Mr Green was the largest bookseller in Bristol at that time.117 ‘To be or not to be’ also notes that ‘Sutton’ ‘furnished’ the house with ‘whatever he could win / And all his own’, and ‘all his own’ was a favourite expression of those trying to prove that Chatterton was the author of the Rowley poems.118 These same pamphleteers also frequently used the image of ‘building’ to describe Chatterton’s act of writing.119 The building of a house, then, could suggest a creative literary act. The real Thomas Sutton was also described as a ‘master of languages’ and his original foundation required a ‘Schoolemaster’ to ‘teach the Children to reade and write, and instruct them in their Latine and Greeke grammar’.120 The song may be suggesting that it is a correct grasp of language and its divine potential that builds Jerusalem, ‘Creating the beautiful House for the piteous sufferer’ ‘with bounds to the Infinite putting off the Indefinite / Into most holy forms of Thought’ (E125), rather than an individual act of charity. Building the New Jerusalem was precisely the task of the Millenarian Masons, and one, Joseph Wright, a carpenter, who denounced Swedenborg’s Temple and ‘fought against the evil influence of Locke’s and Newton’s empirical rationalism’, would almost certainly have been known to Blake.121 In the ‘Good English hospitality’ song, the phrase ‘good hospitality’ may be a reference to the biblical story of Abraham, Lot and Tobias, saved from destruction in Sodom and Gomorrah by their kind action in habouring angels. This story is also hinted at in the last line of the ‘Upon a holy Thursday’ song that follows it: ‘Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door’. ‘To be or not to be’ also contains possible biblical references. Sutton’s being ‘fervent’ in sending his servant to the ‘Carpenter’ prompts thoughts of the biblical rich man confronting the ‘divine Carpenter’, Jesus, and being reminded that it takes more than wealth to get to heaven. Further, in the last verse the song mentions life as a ‘but a span’. Wisdom 5: 4–13 mentions life as being but a span, and it seems to be a passage Blake knew well, as the images of the frailty of life found within it – a flying bird that leaves no trace of its passage, a ship lost in stormy seas, the pathless flight of an arrow and a trackless




desert – are all repeated and reworked in the Songs and The Marriage. The biblical verses describe how the virtuous man, who is thought mad and laughed at as a fool, is saved, while the ungodly disappear without trace. The end of ‘To be or not to be’, with its uncertain grammar, also seems to question what will happen to Sutton after death. Was not this a good man Whose life was but a span Whose name was Sutton As Locke or Doctor South Or Sherlock upon death Or Sir Isaac Newton Is the ‘man’ as good as Locke? Is ‘Sutton’ not an individual but simply a span of life? In a song which begins with a quotation from Shakespeare, ‘span’ may also recall the drinking songs of Othello that play on a different kind of capacity: ‘O man’s life’s but a span’ (II.iii.67). ‘To be or not to be’ seems to imply, then, that life is frail, our reputation uncertain, and while Sutton’s act of charity is positive when compared to the selffattening attitude of the mayor in ‘Good English hospitality’, it may be offering only the comforts of the impersonal hospital or the clean alehouse. It is clearly a song that raises questions. In the song Sutton gives his money to his ‘servant’ to have the hospital built: in the complexities of the historical Sutton’s will, his money went to the King. Is Sutton’s charity perpetuating the polite fiction of charitable Kingship, or, like a clown, is it reversing the established world order and challenging the rule of law for the benefit of the many? If a Christian life depends on being imaginative and empathetic, then the most effective building done in the song is by the reader, creating and juggling imaginative responses to a variety of references. The song has ‘rouze[d] the faculties to act’ (E702) and the reader’s desire to create meaning is presented as a social force against the ‘pestilence’ of poor reading. That these charity songs are a serious reflection on how one should live one’s life, and what remains after one dies, is signalled by the ironic opening line of ‘Chap 10’: ‘Thus these happy Islanders spent their time but felicity does not last long.’ To lighten the mood Blake introduces a more obviously comic episode, a visit to the house of Inflammable Gass that plays, just as his comment on Thornton does many years later, on the various meanings of spirit, vapour and gas. Scientific displays were often considered comic performances122 and the comic element of Inflammable’s Gass’ showing off is pointed up by Gibble Gabble’s




referring to his experiments as ‘Puppets’, once more alluding to the world of the fairground show. And here, again, the scientist’s limited empirical view of the world is being mocked, as he claims to be able to show his guests a picture of nature, but only produces ‘bog house’ wind. Far from improving the lot of humanity, he imposes on his servant by making him carry the ‘glasses. & brass tubes. & magic pictures’ that are as much the appurtenances of commercial production as of study. Most tellingly of all, he is soon ‘out of breath’, unable to give voice to Vision. Tilly Lally and Scopprell perform a sort of Laurel and Hardy routine, smearing the glass sliders and breaking the air pump. ‘Smack went the glass’ gives the glass as much of a physical character in the story as the would-be scientists; their empirical view has reduced humanity to the level of objects. As such they are vulnerable to the same kind of fear and oppression as Johnson in the earlier poem. When Inflammable Gass knocks over a bottle of wind, he sees the ‘Pestilence’ fly out and runs away from it. Despite his beliefs, the scientist cannot control nature and his view of the world will indeed ‘corrupt’ the ‘lungs’ of those who, by their speech, create the society in which they live, thus spreading ‘a plague all thro’ the Island’. The last line of the chapter, ‘So they need not bidding go’, alludes to Macbeth where guests try to escape a different, ghostly kind of vapour (III.iv.118), once more accenting the physicalitybound poverty of the Islanders’ imaginations. ‘Chap 11’ finds the characters at ‘Another merry meeting’, this time at Steelyard’s house, suggesting their discourse will relate even more particularly to the proper running of society. There are immediate hints that this marks a change in An Island. Inflammable Gass has been ‘pumpd . . . quite dry’ and the Islanders have ‘playd forfeits & tryd every method to get good humour’ without success. Neither the philosophic and scientific assertions nor the satirical gibes of the earlier chapters have produced an unequivocal guide to social organization. Such decisions, Blake prompts, are more properly the province of art. What follows is a series of competing and contrasting expressions of the bardic voice. The first is Obtuse Angle’s ‘Upon a holy thursday’. This song picks up on the themes of charity and public spectacle, describing a procession of children into St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving. Blake reworked these verses as ‘Holy Thursday’ in the Songs of Innocence, and there has, of course, been much critical discussion of this later version. Elements such as the austere appearance of the beadles ‘with wands as white as snow’ and the apparently ironic reminder in the last line to ‘cherish pity’ has led critics to see the song as an ironic attack on the corrupt motives of polite philanthropy, instituting the parade as nothing more than an




expression of their own munificence. The fact that the song is located in Innocence has also led many to seek ‘a real kernel of alternative feeling’ within the song (and hence ‘society’), usually centred in the imaginative picturing of the children being like ‘thames waters’ and the ‘flowers of London town’ and the potential revolutionary / Christian message in the power of their singing.123 Setting aside the possibility that such a reading ignores the warnings against aesthetic sentimentality raised elsewhere, one must be careful of imposing a retrospective reading on the An Island version, and thus overlooking its context. Certainly the song seems to question the charitable event. The ‘Grey headed beadles’, a popular comic target,124 recall Steelyard, who was similarly concerned with the ‘parish business’ and often encountered ‘walking’ or ‘stalking’ around. The conduct of the ‘rev’rend men’ recalls Mrs Nannicantipot and Mrs Sistagatist’s argument on proper clerical behaviour and one’s motives for going to church. In his will Sutton had stressed the connection between charity and the teachings of St Paul, and these children, with their ‘faces clean’ would seem to be the recipients of Suttonesque philanthropy, which has also been questioned. The Foundling Hospital had been the object of Foote’s satire,125 but Blake is careful to make his satiric gibes ambiguous, for example deleting a line about the children being ‘Like angels’ or their having to sit in order and wait for ‘the chief chanters commands’. This is not a straightforward attack on polite pity; to do so would be in some way to set oneself up as a ‘revrend . . . guardian . . . of the poor’, a position that is shown to be at best ambiguous. Likewise it is an attractive option to respond to the imaginative imagery used to describe the children, but these are entirely natural images that also have negative connotations. The Thames for Blake was ‘charter’d’ (E26), the ‘cheating waves of charterd streams’ that ‘stain’ one a ‘slave’ (E473). Similarly to call the ‘companies’ of children the ‘flowers of London town’ hints at the earlier mention of the violet seller and the matchboys who plainly do not benefit from polite society. The children are seen ‘raising their innocent hands’, but whether in praise or supplication or surrender is not clear. Are they in church (St Paul’s) or the workhouse (the recently opened St Paul’s on Tottenham Court Road)?126 Whatever its motives, philanthropy is a material act and as such always open to misunderstanding. Starting the Sutton song with ‘To be or not to be’ should alert the reader to any use of Shakespearean quotations and it is tempting to link ideas of children, pity and wind from ‘Upon a holy thursday’ with the ‘naked new-born babe’ from another speech about action and consequence, Macbeth, I.vii.20. There, ‘trumpet-tongu’d’ angels plead the virtues of the




just man against a murderer. In America ‘Boston’s Angel’ points out that now the situation has been reversed, for now ‘honesty’ trembles ‘like a murderer’ and the ‘generous’ must leave their joy to the ‘idle’ and ‘to pestilence’ (who become ‘unrestrain’d performers of the energies of nature’) and that ‘pity is become a trade’ so that the ‘crawling villain’ can ‘preach . . . abstinence & wrap . . . himself / In fat of lambs’ (E55). Sutton was ‘generous’ and tried to ward off ‘pestilence’, but his act of charity was usurped by the idle, crawling villains, like Steelyard and the Aldermen, who wrap themselves in the fat of lambs (recalling both the Mayoral robes and the exploitation of the charity children). The polite culture that seeks to make ‘pity a trade’ also tries to usurp the comic function, becoming ‘unrestrain’d performers’ in the Fool’s stead. But if ‘Pity’ is thought of as a ‘Sin’ (E168) then there is a danger that the ‘mighty wind’ of angelic complaint will become a revolutionary fire. Constructing a moral system based on physical acts means even charity can become devalued and part of the cycle of tyranny and oppression. Once again, it is the act of reading that is thrown into sharp relief. The opening phrase is quite deliberate: ‘Upon a holy thursday’ (my emphasis) which may indicate Ascension Day (the affirmation of eternal life in God) or the day before Christ’s crucifixion. The meaning of the song – a sentimental view of pity, a call to revolution or a Visionary forgiveness of sin – rests with the reader. To hear the potential ‘voice of song’ in the ‘hum of multitudes’ requires the reader not to be distracted by either its physical existence as a ‘mighty wind’ or its potential as politicalrevolutionary ‘thunderings’. To avoid such distraction will require an act of Vision capable of uniting perception and knowledge, a marriage of language and reading hinted at in the term ‘cherish’ in the last line. And once again, ‘Upon a holy thurday’ hints at a potential comic reading that makes this Vision accessible. In the story of Joe Bradley, Blake has already indicated that the poor have their own methods of opposing polite pity that are beyond any sentimental picture. The children are described as having a ‘radiance all their own’, picking up on the line from ‘To be or not to be’ and its allusion to Chatterton, suggesting their imaginative picturing of themselves – through carnival – will be more productive than polite pity. Their procession to St Paul’s had some direct carnival precedents that had recently been uncovered by antiquarian investigation. Thornton’s Survey of London mentions that when Colet founded St Paul’s school in 1509, he required the children to parade to St Paul’s church ‘two by two’.127 Strutt, in The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), citing older works, explained that the reason for this was so that the children could ‘every Chidermas, that is,




Innocents-Day, come to Paule’s churche, and hear the Childe Byshop’s sermon, and after be at hygh masse, and each of them offer a penny to the childe bishop; and with them the maisters and surveyors of the schole’. The boy bishop’s sermon was a part of the wider Festival of Fools tradition, where clergy and lay people parodied church services, ‘ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes’, as well as processing through the streets, ‘blessing’ the watchers with ordure.128 That other great antiquarian, Douce, noted that ‘Holy Thursday’ was ‘a morris day’, when Morris men went to the church to dance. Colet had demanded that his scholars not sing: Blake restores them to good voice and offers the possibility of a carnival alternative that also questions the genteel attitudes that seek to repress such expression. Thornton’s Survey of London could have brought another interesting antiquarian discovery to Blake’s notice, even if he hadn’t experienced it himself. In the thirteenth century there was a tradition of the ‘Folkmote’: a general assembly of the people, which used to be held in St. Paul’s church-yard . . . which meeting was looked upon as the supreme assembly of the city, and was empowered to call the magistrates to account for misgovernment [and] to examine and determine the liberties and customs by a majority of voices, &c.129 This tradition, Thornton claims, continued into the 1780s in the form of a ‘wardmote’. Behind the ironic picture of failing philanthropy lies an older, shared experience of carnival and popular expression. ‘Upon a holy thursday’ is a complex song, and it silences the company for a ‘quarter of an hour’. The first reaction is from Mrs Nannicantipot, who says it has put her ‘in Mind of my mothers song’, suggesting an intuitive, imaginative response, invoking the traditional storytelling of the carnivalesque although with perhaps a danger of being sentimental and nature-oriented. She sings ‘When the tongues of children are heard on the green’, a version of which appears as the ‘Nurse’s Song’ of Innocence. This song presents a merry scene similar to those found in many comic songs of the day,130 but following ‘Upon a holy thursday’ it shows a much more sympathetic picture of children’s happiness. Mrs Nannicantipot had argued that ‘a person may be as good at home’ as at church and here, like boy bishops, the children ‘play’ and leap and shout and laugh on the ‘green’, the traditional site of carnival. The song is presented with great immediacy: ‘are heard . . . is heard . . . is at rest . . . everything else is still’. Although the children’s world is again presented




to the reader through an adult perspective and there is clearly a threat to their joy in the coming of night, the children’s carnival attitude positively shapes the Nurse’s reading of the situation: her ‘heart is at rest’ and she agrees to the children’s playing longer. The opening line of the song stresses that this is a process of reading correctly: it is the ‘tongues’ of children we hear, rather than a somewhat disembodied ‘wind’ of the Paul’s children. Of course, this song is as open to reinterpretation as any other and the presence of the flying birds and sheep in the meadows suggest that correct interpretation of this pastoral demi-Eden is vital. Concentration on the natural world leads to despair at the sense of loss this engenders, a pattern present in the lyrical Poetical Sketches, and Blake follows Mrs Nannicantipot’s song with one by Quid. He had first thought of giving a song to Mrs Gittipin, and then Tilly Lally, but deleted them both: Quid is a deliberate choice, suggesting this is a cynical response. His song, a version of which appears as ‘The Little Boy lost’ of Innocence, shows the pain of a child subject to loss, as was anticipated by the coming of night in ‘When the tongues of children are heard on the green’. The child has lost his father, pointedly because communication has ceased between them: ‘O speak father speak to your little boy’. The boy is caught in a natural cycle: he is ‘wet with dew’, the ‘mire’ around him ‘was deep’, and the final line, ‘And away the vapour flew’ picks up on another biblical term for the shortness of life. Again this silences the characters, but Tilly Lally ‘pluck[s] up a spirit’ (of prophesy? or the soul? or imagination?) and sings a silly song about boys at play (again, it is implied, on the ‘green’). Phillips notes that this is perhaps one of the earliest poems in English literature about cricket.131 Certainly it became a very popular game with the young Carthusians and, with the character of ‘Joe’ appearing once more, this song offers a picture of children able to take care of themselves outside the polite world of adult speech, with all its charity and workhouses, where loss is just part of the game. I say you Joe Throw us the ball Ive a good mind to go And leave you all I never saw such a bowler To bowl the ball in a [turd del.] tansey And to clean it with my handkercher Without saying a word




Blake’s emendation of ‘turd’ for ‘tansey’ is significant. A common term for a bad bowler was a ‘holiday bowler’, and tansey cakes were the prize at Easter ball games.132 Again the redemption of carnival is being preferred to a matter-obsessed view – ‘turd’ is still present in the rhyme with ‘word’ at the end of the verse. It is tempting to see the ‘Bill’ of this song as a clowning portrait of Blake himself, manipulating his characters (‘He has given me a black eye’), mocking the creation of his pen (‘He does not know how to handle a bat’), breaking convention and acting the fool. The comic song lightens the mood and ‘Here a laugh began’, and it prompts Miss Gittipin to sing ‘Leave O leave me to my sorrows’, again similar to a number of popular songs sung at Ranelagh and Vauxhall. Her song speaks of losing the ‘form of clay’ that is her corporeal self and becoming a speaking shadow. Although the speaker will be dead, they will be available like the ‘fancied image’ in ‘The Little Girl Found’ of Innocence to offer some kind of communication (‘Hear my voice’) and consolation to those lost in the forest on ‘pathless ways’ (like Tiriel, E277). It is a voice from the ‘undiscovered country’, the lack of which was so troubling to Hamlet, and as such may offer a route back to God. Such a positive reading, though, relies on faith, and it is lost on the Lawgiver, who mistakes the nature of this ‘serious humour’ and is only delighted the conversation has returned to graves and loss, his favourite subject. However, the possibility of becoming sentimental or morbid is comically undercut when he asks Scopprell to sing. Scopprell tries to wriggle out of it: ‘O dear sir Ho Ho Ho I am no singer I must beg one of these tender hearted ladies to sing for me’, but ‘they all declined & he was forced to sing himself.’ His song, ‘Theres Doctor Clash’, has several comic influences.133 The character of ‘Signior Falalasole’ links the song back to the earlier Italian opera episode, and music and dancing masters were notoriously disreputable: as early as 1700 How’s The Dancing School claimed that such an academy was ‘the best Rendezvous of willing Tits, that a Man could desire to shake his Breech amongst’.134 Scopprell’s song describes how the tutors ‘sweep in the cash / Into their purse hole’ and this is followed by the chorus ‘La me fa sol’. ‘Sweep’ insinuates a degree of sexual licence and although such notational additions as ‘Tol de rol’ were common in songs of the period, the chorus makes a potentially rude cry of ‘La! me f’arsole’. The connection between money and anal retentiveness is a commonplace of popular psychology, and the song was requested by the money and matter-obsessed Steelyard. In this arch atmosphere, the inclusion in the second verse of ‘Great A little A / Bouncing B’ (a nursery rhyme from Ritson’s Gammer Gurton’s




Garland),135 the claim ‘Your out of the key’ and the description of the musicians as having ‘Long fingers & thumbs’ are all open to suggestive interpretation. Politics was often referred to as a dance136 and the implied corruption of the nursery rhyme signals a wider corruption underlying the polite virtues of government. With their long fingers the musicians are like pickpockets and the curious final verse suggests a detrimental relationship between ‘Gentlemen’ and society. The call to the gentlemen is followed by the line ‘Rap Rap Rap’. A ‘rap’ in eighteenth-century slang could mean several things, including bad or counterfeit money and to swap or even take by force. The next line, ‘Fiddle Fiddle Fiddle’ also suggests cheating and was a slang term for a writ for arrest. To ‘Clap’ someone on the shoulder was to arrest them for debt. ‘Fiddle’ also has sexual connotations, and those who dallied in commercial, surreptitious and violent sexual relations in London had to beware of another type of ‘Clap’. Political moral-mindedness has been shown up as perverted, thieving and responsible for society’s ills by a boisterous and impolite song. The Lawgiver underscores both the joke and his lack of understanding of it by asking for ‘handels waterpiece’, a dubious double entendre. In response, Sipsop begins his martial song on William of Orange. Kings are usually repressive figures in Blake’s work, but William was popularly touted to have restored democracy to England. Sutton was traditionally supposed to have fought with a Prince of Orange,137 and the ‘shout of . . . thousands’ could refer to the ‘Upon a holy thursday’ multitudes or the souls sent to die in King Edward the Third; will the king bring justice or more oppression? Phillips suggests that Blake stopped writing An Island around 1789, but the king’s arrival on a white horse could relate to an event popular in 1793. According to Revelations the Last Judgement, which would involve the arrival of death on a pale horse, would occur after the pouring of the seven vials of wrath. This imagery was very topical in the late eighteenth century, especially with the interest in Millenarian prophecy that had rediscovered a sermon preached in 1701 by Robert Fleming, a man closely associated with William of Orange, who had claimed that the pouring of the fourth vial would finish in 1794. This sermon became so popular the Whitehall Evening Post republished it on 15 January 1793.138 In singing about William of Orange on a horse, An Island seems to be alluding to the arrival of the day of Judgement, when the world will be read (judged) in a very different way. The ridiculous has become a form of apocalyptic prophecy. It is here, of course, that the text is broken, with a page (or pages?) of the work apparently missing. The conversation resumes, as one might




expect, with a discussion of manuscript illumination, a creative form that would add new possibilities to the act of reading. The speaker (Quid – Blake?) and his partner (Mrs Nannicantipot – Catherine Blake?) talk of engraving and Keynes has traced this description of a new printing method to Cumberland, whose profile sketch appears on the back of the manuscript leaf. The pair of them want to sell their work at high prices to show ‘strangers’ they have ‘an opinion’, and identify themselves with clowning, devilish energy, reading each other’s faces as those of a ‘Goat’ and ‘Tyger’. They claim to want to ‘do as much good as they can’ while at ‘Mr Femality’s’, a name that is perhaps an allusion to a famous crossdressing spy and perhaps a compound of ‘Female’ (thus shorthand for having a physical existence) and ‘formality’, the socially polite.139 They add that those who do not read their new works ‘will be ignorant fools & will not deserve to live’, with all the connotations of ignorance, foolery and life accumulated through the rest of the text. However, the story ends on a dying fall. Although ‘Quid’ says he will ‘hollow and stamp & . . . show . . . what truth is’, his ‘passion’ which will ‘frighten all the People’ is not dissimilar to Parson Huffcap’s. They show no sympathy for others, merely decrying their ‘envy’, that engenderer of satire. Their ‘Volumes’ may offer an alternative bible, a comic performance like the whole of An Island has been, but there is no guarantee that this society will receive it as such: Quid’s grand statement of intent is punctuated ‘at [that] Instant’ by the arrival of Obtuse Angle, which Quid warmly welcomes. An Island was, of course, never published. It is, nevertheless, an important and valuable work, an extensive comic education that explores the interrelationship of language, society and God. It was Blake’s first attempt to produce a new form of literary expression, part playscript, part performance, part experimental novel. It was a grand statement of comic education that at the same time parodied and challenged polite culture’s attempts, such as with the grand Handel Festival of 1784, to draw art forms together in a unified social code. He saw that this polite, sentimental code aimed to prescribe attitudes towards charity, religion, self-government and law and wanted to exclude that which was popular, boisterous and rude. In part, An Island seeks to redress that, to hint at what is lost, to offer alternative readings, comic debunkings and a new, Christian aesthetic. Any speculation as to why he did not print An Island is, ultimately, only speculation, but far from abandoning it as nonsense, he reworked many of the ideas and images of An Island in the Songs and especially in The Marriage. It is surely no coincidence that marriage is a major topic of the Islanders’ discussions and that parodies of Milton and




Swedenborg are among its distinctive features. Indeed, a completed version of An Island may have been at the back of Blake’s mind when he promised, at the end of The Marriage, ‘a Bible of Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no’. It might be, on the other hand, he laid it aside because he realized that the comic is properly part of a subculture: allusive and elusive, a reference to hope, commonality and shared humanity that is devalued if adopted by the dominant mode. It is, more properly, a matter of reversal and rebirth, of protest and faith – in short, the work of a fool.




To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience

The Songs of Innocence and of Experience are in many ways Blake’s most accessible work, and therein lies a problem. As a result, they are often a reader’s first experience of Blake and, because of the satisfying nature of their paired structure, it can seem that they are an end in themselves: a discrete unit that contains a complete (if not fully articulated) guide to Blake’s concept of Vision. It can become almost habitual to think that the key to Vision somehow lies in the synthesis of Innocence and Experience. Encouraged by the famous phrase in The Marriage, ‘Without Contraries is no progression’ (E34), readers come to believe that Blake wants us to follow him on a spiral route of discovery that ends in a state of experienced innocence, streetwise but hopeful in the face of adversity. The Songs have, of course, been the subject of a wealth of impressive criticism and modern readers owe a great deal to the work of Frye, Erdman, Thompson, Glen, Larrissy and Essick (to name but a very few) for illuminating the incredible breadth of perspectives – social, historical, political, religious and psychological – contained within them. (Indeed, the interdependence of these perspectives should help confirm the accuracy of Blake’s assumptions about the relation of language, society and consciousness in shaping each other.) However, although it may appear a vast oversimplification, it is not, I think, a very unfair one, to say that even the most sophisticated criticism of the Songs has such a spiral, ‘synthesized’ reading at its heart. In its simplest form, the spiral argument runs something like this. Innocence presents a pastoral idyll of children, lambs and adults apparently coexisting happily in the same space. But for the adult reader this picture is uncomfortable. The lyrics can seem insipid, their imagery open to cynical interpretation and their affirmations of hope and sympathy at 163



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odds with readers’ personal and, importantly, literary experiences of the world. Their resemblance to contemporary children’s nursery rhymes and spelling games suggests that they represent the oppressive machinations of the dominant order, imposing a dangerously naïve understanding of the world on children the better to exploit them. The inclusion of several potentially ironic lines with biblical resonance (most famously ‘So if all do their duty they need not fear harm’ and ‘Then cherish pity, least you drive an angel from your door’) heightens the sense that they are part of a sour satire. The discomfort caused by these Innocence lyrics prompts the reader to question their understanding of the conventional ‘Christian’ virtues of pity and duty to the extent that even the image of Jesus as Lamb ‘beguil[ing]’ the world to ‘peace’ with his ‘smiles’ seems potentially sinister. It is with some relief that the reader turns to Experience and finds it apparently confirming these suspicions. It offers the kind of demystification (‘Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor’) at which Innocence only hinted. It challenges the dominant order at its most fundamental level by questioning the idea of God as a protective, good father (‘A Little Girl Lost’, ‘The Little Black Boy’) and suggesting that ‘God’ may be no more than a construct of our own psychological limitations (‘The Poison Tree’). However, while Experience may bring knowledge of how the lambs of Innocence may be fleeced (literally, in the case of ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ Innocence’s Tom Dacre, who has all his white hair shorn off) it also emphasizes the limitations and failures of the adult perspective (‘For the time of youth was fled / And grey hairs were on my head’) and how that leads to a futile cycle of struggle and oppression (‘Bound and weary I thought best / To sulk upon my mother’s breast’). In particular its speakers are unable to respond with anything like the hopeful imagination found in the Innocence songs, with their images of flowers, lambs and the ‘harmonious thunderings’ that sound ‘the seats of heaven among’. In Experience such potentially prophetic and visionary activity is ignored (‘Is that trembling cry a song?’), even when the characters in the songs are ‘happy & dance & sing’ (as they do in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ Experience). In its failure to appreciate the neoPlatonic, Hermetic view of language (‘I a child, & thou a lamb, / We are called by his name’), the political and analytical cynicism of Experience, marked by its refusal to use simile and metaphor for even the most brutal events (‘burned him in a holy place / Where many had been burn’d before’), reserving it only for ironic jibes (‘all admir’d the Priestly care’) becomes a blight that threatens future generations (‘Blasts the new born Infant’s tear’). This lack of positive expression prompts the reader to return to Innocence to try to find some kind of justification for the hope-




ful feelings there. And, not surprisingly, for the modern reader this is often ‘found’ (to use a word that is examined in both Innocence and Experience) in those moments in Innocence which particularly appeal to the comfort zone of post-Romantic sensibility: the supremacy of the imagination and picturesque descriptions of the working class struggle for autonomy (‘As Tom was asleeping he had such a sight’). These elements of imagination and the potential for a new social order appear most clearly in the various episodes of child’s play that occur within Innocence. Coupled with the impression that, with their mixture of text and illumination, these ‘poetic tales’ are in some way challenging our aesthetic judgements – asking us to choose, to paraphrase from The Marriage, the ‘forms of worship’ with which we will decode them – many readings of the Songs have assumed that Blake is either proposing child’s play as a new aesthetic in itself, or using it as representative of some other poetics of reading – histopolitical, psychological, or whatever a critic wishes to define as a motive for empathy and communitas. This assertion is variously supported by reference to the many philosophers, anthropologists, social historians and artists who have claimed that child’s play offers a challenge to aesthetic practice,1 to Schiller’s praise for the ‘joyous kingdom of play’2 and to biographical reports that Blake himself claimed heaven was a group of children playing.3 It is further argued that, as child’s play to some extent exceeds or avoids or exists outside the world of language, it satisfies Blake’s need for a form of expression that can escape the trammels of the material world. But there are a number of problems with this thesis. First, it places an incredible burden on the shoulders of a group of urban youngsters, making their games assume the responsibility for demonstrating the linguistically and socially untrammelled neo-Platonic joy of realizing divine incarnate possibilities. Moreover, as any parent tidying up chewed pieces of Lego will tell you, child’s play does not always include transformational acts of poetic imagination that lead to divine revelation. Further, as the illuminations to the respective frontispieces indicate, with Innocence showing children learning to read and Experience showing the end of childhood with the death of parents, the Songs cover that period of life that sees the assumption of intellectual, social and spiritual responsibility. It calls to mind St Paul’s comment in I Corinthians 13, after he has spoken of the importance of love to the gift of prophecy and the need to see the world properly, that When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put



To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’ 165


Blake too speaks of the importance of seeing beyond the ‘Vegetable Glass of Nature’ (E555). Although there may be something valuable in the liberating experience of child’s play, it must be received and understood in a constructive, adult framework. To invest ‘play’ with an almost mystic significance is merely to remain within the aesthetic structure of beauty and fear that Blake so consistently criticizes. While he was clear that ‘Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly or Incapacity’ (E703), childhood and a childish perspective are frequently shown in the Songs to be naïve, flawed and subject to exploitation, with the ‘night’ of experience and the ‘harlot coy’ of natural imagery destroying or subverting the ‘honest joy’ of childhood (E447). From the first, celebrated moment where the wandering bard is asked to ‘write / In a book that all may read’ and as a result must ‘stain . . . the water clear’, the Songs reiterate the themes explored in earlier works: that language and imagery are constantly open to reinterpretation, that the potential seduction of the imagination by material imagery creates the conditions for the rise of formalized religion and the loss of freedom and Vision, and that without an aesthetic model, a way of reading imagination and play, they are susceptible to the machinations of the conventional Burkean sublime. The careful contrasts of Innocence and Experience only highlight our tendency to see the world through just such a distoring lens of beauty and fear (‘The Lamb’, ‘The Tyger’), fracturing the world into heaven and hell (‘The Clod & the Pebble’), dominant order and oppressed people (‘The Chimney Sweeper’ and ‘Holy Thursday’ pairings), self and other (‘Infant Joy’, ‘Infant Sorrow’), consciousness and reality (‘The Dream’, ‘The Angel’). They demonstrate the very real danger that Visionary perception will be lost as soon as it takes on a form of expression: ‘Sound the Flute! / Now its mute’. Significantly, the images that Blake used earlier as a form of shorthand to indicate such a loss of perception – birdsong, night, bells – cluster around those moments in the Songs which most clearly seem to offer the kind of child’s play and imagination which the spiral reading would hold up as exemplary. For example, the description of the sound of the children’s voices in ‘Holy Thursday’ Innocence as a ‘mighty wind’ is often stressed as important, yet in ‘Spring’ Blake reminds us that the voices of the ‘Little Boy / Full of joy’ and ‘Little Girl / Sweet and small’ can be like that of the ‘Cock’. Further, such ‘Infant noise’, the song suggests, like the



behind me. Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.

calls of the ‘Nightingale’ and ‘Lark’, although merry, is closely associated with the passing of time and the seasons, and hence an awareness and fear of mortality: the ‘Holy Thursday’ children are singing in church on the day before Christ is crucified. The illumination to ‘Spring’ shows an infant first reaching for, and then holding, a lamb. The song ‘The Lamb’ makes an explicit connection between Jesus and a lamb, but here the lamb is only presented in terms of a sensory exchange with the speaker (‘Come and lick / My white neck. / Let me pull your soft wool’). The emphasis is clearly on the lamb’s physical existence and, instead of reading the lamb as symbolic of something human, the child itself seems to take on ovine qualities. Child and sheep kiss each other’s faces, and in the illumination to the song, the position adopted by the adoring infant’s mother, shown at the top of the text, is, in the picture underneath the text, taken over by a sheep. The illumination also highlights the woolly, fleeceable quality of the infant’s hair (a point of vulnerability reinforced in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ Innocence and in Blake’s Notebook ditty discussed in chapter 2). In addition, near the start of the song the illumination shows the small figure of an angel blowing a trumpet (of praise or of judgement), but at the end of the song an angel is shown as hiding its face, suggesting something has been lost. In Experience, of course, the lamb is most famously mentioned in ‘The Tyger’, where the speaker questions whether one God could have made both beasts, with all the ‘fearful symmetry’ implied in the conventional aesthetic view. The compound effect of these references to the lamb-image suggests that by using such an image the Christian faith has confused signifier and signified, and the image of Christ as lamb is comforting but passive, limited to the senses, fearful and in need of a ‘shepherd’, with all the potential political domination that word implies. Indeed, this loss is illustrated in ‘The Shepherd’, where the shepherd effectively loses his own voice as his tongue becomes ‘filled with praise’. Over his head, very prominently, flies a bird of misreading. Other songs in Innocence also show this progression from child’s play to obeisance to the dominant modes of religious expression, a progression that goes hand in hand with an increased reliance on the material nature of imagery. For example, the ‘Laughing Song’ with its ‘painted birds’ and ‘cherries’, closely echoes the false Eden of Har and Heva, with all the loss of vision and misreading that implies. The exclamation of ‘Ha, Ha, He!’ at the end of the song, while potentially a sign of imagination and equality, could equally be the noise of a knave. It is the sound made by Scopprell, for example, and could also be a reference to the ‘ha! ha! he!’ of Pandarus’ song in Troilus and Cressida (III.i.116) where




pastoral imagery is used to bawdy ends. Indeed the line ‘Come live & be merry, and join with me / To sing the sweet chorus of “Ha, Ha, He!”’ seems an allusion to Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ and hence Ralegh’s answering poem, heightening the sense of a connection between sexual obsession and a misreading of pastoral imagery. The link between sex, venereal disease and the loss of real and Visionary sight was made in the Poetical Sketches and in An Island, and is repeated in what could be considered the ‘Laughing Song”s counterpart in Experience, ‘London’, where poor reading blights the sight of the ‘new born infant’. In the Songs, then, Blake seems to be suggesting that the elevation of children’s play to the status of a definition of ‘Vision’ is as much flawed as the desire to celebrate pity or beauty or duty as Visionary. Indeed, it is the inherent vulnerability of child’s play that leads to the need for institutionalized religion, thus exposing the child to exploitation. This is demonstrated in ‘The Ecchoing Green’, where at first the laughter of the children playing on the green is infectious and relieves Old John from ‘care’. This situation is repeated in the ‘Nurse’s Song’ (E15), where the children’s joy appears to overrule the Nurse’s cynical apprehensions: ‘No, no, let us play, for it is yet day’. However, the Nurse reminds the reader that ‘the sun [will go] down’ and the children can only play ‘till the light fades away’. In ‘The Ecchoing Green’, too, nightfall threatens play: when the ‘sun does descend . . . our sports have an end’, and when this happens the children become ‘Like birds in their nest’. The Innocence poem ‘Night’ warns that the ‘thoughtless nest’ has no protection against the ‘rush dreadful’ (E14) of beasts of prey. When the children ‘leave off play’ by growing into an awareness of the frailty of mortal existence, their sense of loss and fear of the dangers of the ‘night’ is linked to the growing need for the institutionalized patterns of dominant religion. This is marked in ‘The Ecchoing Green’ by the ‘chearful sound’ of church bells and, like canticle and response, the answering calls of the ‘skylark’ and ‘thrush’: religion and material reading in perpetuating harmony. To assuage the fear of death the material bound imagination conjurors up the image of a protective father or God (a process found in ‘The Lamb’ where the speaker invokes ‘God’ to ‘Bless’ the ‘Little Lamb’). The limitations of this father-image are then explored in other songs: the demand for obedience even while He fails to offer any real protection (‘The Little Black Boy’), the threat of tyranny in the forced acceptance of an adult viewpoint (‘Infant Joy’), or even the despair of discovering that ‘no father’ is ‘there’ (‘The Little Boy lost’, Innocence). All of these merely lead back to the need from which they




sprang – an increased reliance on the material world: ‘God’ leads the ‘little boy lost’ back to his ‘mother’ in ‘The Little Boy found’. Becoming aware of this process does not seem to help, either. In Experience several songs, including ‘A Little Boy Lost’, ‘The Poison Tree’ and ‘Holy Thursday’, question the imagery of the dominant mode of religious expression. They seem to show clearly how such imagery divides and controls society, exploiting guilt and creating revulsion at the physicality of existence. Fear and pity ruin even the most fundamental relationships of parents and children and human life is seen as subject to violence and oblivion. Yet knowledge of the failure of material-bound imagery has done nothing to alleviate that failure. The Experience counterpart to ‘The Ecchoing Green’, ‘The Garden of Love’, shows the speaker at a moment of revelation (‘saw what I had never seen’): by accepting institutionalized religion they have now lost the freedom of imaginative play ‘on the green’ because it has been closed off by the physical walls of the chapel ‘built in the midst’. Religion had seemed to promise an alternative to the fear of death, but instead the speaker is trapped ever more firmly in the material world of graves and tombstones. That this means a further loss of individual social and sexual freedom is made clear by the phrase ‘the gates of this Chapel were shut’. It is also clear that the moral code that restricts the speaker does so by controlling his reading: significantly it appears as written instructions (‘Thou Shalt Not’) inscribed over the door (of perception). Where once the speaker’s imagination was able to read the material world in a positive way – ‘sweet flowers’ on the green (a possible allusion to the children of ‘Holy Thursday’ Innocence) – such a transformational reading is now the sole preserve of the initiated who wear ‘black gowns’ (priests, doctors, lawyers). Language has become merely a means of ‘binding’ the speaker more closely to a vision of the world that preferences the material over the spiritual. Briar-chains appear often in Blake’s work to illustrate the difficulty of achieving a Visionary reading. In plates 9 and 10 of his illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts (B345, 346) they fetter the feet of both a bard-figure and a reader-figure. The briars offer a support to the bard’s upward flight: the poetic imagination can only find its expression through language, but language also limits that expression. The reader, on the other hand, is firmly tied to the earth, suggesting that the material existence of imagery may seduce the unwary into misreading the symbolic nature of the language. The pictorial briars in the illustration to ‘The Garden of Love’ mirror the figurative briars of the poem: it is not just the operation of the dominant order that oppresses the speaker, but their reading of the world that helps to create the reality they perceive.




Similarly briars appear in the illustration to ‘The Human Abstract’, chaining a Urizenic figure to the earth. The first stanza of the song describes how the act of naming the ‘Poor’ in relation to the abstract concepts of ‘Pity’ and ‘Mercy’ produces both a physically poor underclass and an abstract vision of the world that can be controlled by Priesthood. The vulnerability of Innocence and the importence of Experience are both created by our reading of them. Child’s play is vulnerable because they have not been taught to read in an imaginative, visionary way. ‘The Tyger’ is almost a test case for this. Anyone who does not answer the question ‘What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry’ with a jaunty cry of ‘My eye!’, is probably still subject to conventional sublime aesthetics and to all its inherent problems. The fundamental importance of good reading is stressed in The First Book of Urizen, where the imagery of the briar-chains reappears in a subtly altered form. It pictures the ‘unknown, abstracted, / Brooding, secret . . . dark power’ that is Urizen, is ‘rifted furious / By the black winds of perturbation’ that stimulate him to create himself out of the ‘void immense’ with ‘words articulate’ that express his laws of ‘unity’. The ‘Eternal Prophet’ Los, labouring like the God described in ‘The Tyger’, helps give shape to the ‘Unorganiz’d’ Urizen by ‘forging chains . . . of the mind’ and ‘fetters of ice’ that become a ‘vast Spine’. In the figure of Urizen, Blake seems to be exploring the limits of consciousness and charting how the developing mind, moved by the force of life / existence / eternal creativity, can only express itself through the use of a language which gives it simultaneously an awareness of self and an identity that suffers from the mortality and isolation of being ‘alone’. Urizen responds to his isolation by seeking to control all that threatens him, the undefined ‘Other’, by writing in books of brass and stone and taking his ‘golden compasses’ to mark the world into ratios and rules. In doing this, of course, he is laying the cornerstones of future oppression. Language, Blake suggests, creates our sense of consciousness which in turn creates our sense of reality and that in turn has physical impact on the self: in ‘London’ the speaker’s observations ‘mark’ others’ faces and a ‘sigh’ literally becomes a building stained with ‘blood’.4 Reading, consciousness and Vision are all interwoven. In the illumination to ‘Holy Thursday’ Innocence, a song often critically highlighted for the moments of imaginative potential it contains, the tail of the word ‘pity’ in the famous and admonitory last line is shown to be growing into the vegetation that forms the song’s border. The reader’s ideas of pity create the scene in front of them: in seeing the ‘answer’ to Vision in the imaginative acts of perceiving the children as ‘flowers’ and their




song as a ‘mighty wind’, are they not merely seeing what they wish to see? In ‘The Human Abstract’ of Experience the words ‘Pity’ and ‘Poor’ are linked by alliteration and capitalization. In eighteenth-century terminology, ‘House of Pity’ was a genteel name for the ‘Poor house’. What the speaker of Experience sees as poverty the speaker of Innocence may see as pity, but has that actually changed the situation of the children in the poor house? Did Sutton’s building a poor house actually improve the spiritual life of its occupants? It is often noted, as I mentioned above, that the Songs have their origins in An Island. Little attention is paid, however, as to which particular Songs of Innocence are first discovered there. Significantly these songs offer three different but linked perspectives on the child’s world: a social view (‘Upon a holy thursday’), a personal view (‘When the tongues of children are heard on the green’) and the subjective view of the child (O father, father, where are you going’). They chart a movement from the multitude to the individual: from a potential unity with God to the danger of reading children as cheerfully naïve ‘birds’ or ‘sheep’ and then to the isolated consciousness of a child lost in the ‘mire’ of materiality. Blake shows the constant vulnerability of the childish perspective: even the imaginative empathy of the consolation offered to Tom Dacre in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Innocence can be read as the product of conventional religious teaching that is designed to prevent social rebellion. What is needed is a return to the communal, social picture, a new poetics of reading that allows the imaginative and playful elements of the Songs to be read in a spiritual, positive way. Of course, any poetics of reading will be an ‘imposition’, to repeat Blake’s much used phrase, but given the importance Blake places on articulating Vision – ‘All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination’ (E643) – if one is not simply to impose an external system of reading (such as, say, Marxism) on the text, then a positive reading of the Songs ought to come from something that is both within and without the text: a structure for aesthetic interpretation less vulnerable to the vagaries of loss and sublime terror. The post-Romantic vision of the child / genius challenger of aesthetic and social mores may locate the child in a similar social position to the clown / fool, but like Schiller’s ‘play’, Huizinga’s ‘homo ludens’ or Cox’s ‘homo festivus’,5 it is a sanitized view of carnival, a splinter from the original concept, slivered off by the same historical impulse that sought to divorce foolery from faith; a halfsibling to vicious satirical prints on one side and the abased subservience of the Lord Mayor’s procession on the other. Child’s play was important to Blake in that it was one example, renewed every generation, of the celebration of positive carnival. However it will only succeed as a partial




guide to vision for the adult viewer / reader if it is understood as being part of a wider comic aesthetic. The song in An Island that actually shows children at play, indulging in a cricket match, places them in a carnival context, participating in a village green event that was struggling to adapt to the move into an urban culture and resisting attempts to absorb it into the polite world of refinement and restraint.6 This strong framework of carnivalesque and comic reference is no less present in the Songs than it is in An Island. In structure they are an embodiment of the comic principles of parody, social performance, satiric demystification and carnivalesque empathy that Blake had been exploring and developing in his earlier work. Characterized by a recurrent contrast between sentimental pastoral and satirical urban viewpoints and with a wealth of social voices, they display both wise-foolish and knavish readings of contemporary society. No less than An Island they examine acts of reading, often by parodying several sources at once, including works as diverse as Isaac Watt’s hymns, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Paine’s The Rights of Man and the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg.7 Their format as nursery rhymes with political meaning makes them reminiscent of other radical ‘Collection[s] of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Six Feet High’.8 Even the appearance of the Songs would, for a contemporary reader, raise the possibility of a comic intent, mimicking the popular collections of comic songs from Ranelagh, Vauxhall and Astley’s Circus. With their illuminations apparently both complementing and questioning the deceptively simple lyrics, they suggest the comic prints found in such works as A Political and Satirical History of the Years 1756 and 1757, a copy of which Blake had owned since 1773.9 Right from the outset, carnival imagery is present in the Songs. The frontispiece to Innocence (B215) shows a piping figure that is also a selfportrait: Blake is placing himself in the position of the clown / narrator of An Island. According to Malone, in his Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage (1800) piping and singing are the ancient trademarks of a clown,10 and the mention of piping and singing in the ‘Introduction’ is matched by a dancing figure in the accompanying illumination. The frontispiece to Experience also shows this clown / Blake figure, this time staring straight out at the reader, with his child companion now an angel sitting on his head. This posture of direct address is also associated with the clown, his gaze turned upon us: this is a reflection of our world. Many of the locations for the most positive moments in the Songs are also major sites of carnival: the village green, the churchyard, even the




church itself. An obvious example is ‘The Ecchoing Green’ of Innocence. The village green was the traditional site of rustic amusements, the focus for fairs, mountebanks and Maypoles.11 In Blake’s illustrations to Milton’s L’Allegro he pictured such a scene, with a piper child providing music while the generations dance together under an oak tree and the figure of Christ points towards heaven. The Maypole was a special event particularly because, while many of the seasonal fairs were flirting occasions, aimed at the young of the parish, the Maypole was seen as a communal celebration aimed at the whole community. When a Maypole was erected on the green outside St Mary le Strand in the 1660s, a contemporary report notes, ‘the little children did much rejoice and the ancient people did clap their hands, saying golden days had begun to appear’.12 Blundell, writing in the early 1700s, also remarks on the older generation’s appreciation of the Maypole,13 and this idea is taken up by a song from the 1785 Comic Songster whose lyrics anticipate several of the Songs: ‘Let us suppose it the first of May’. This song pictures a procession of ‘nymphs two and two’ and ‘youths [who come] To join in their sports dance and play; / While the old ones appear, / To bring up the rear, / Singing merrily’. (In ‘The Ecchoing Green’ the ‘old folk’ join in the sports and ‘laugh away care’, while in ‘Spring’, a song that could well be set on May Day, the speaker notes ‘Merrily, merrily, we welcome in the year’. The illumination to ‘The Ecchoing Green’ shows figures gathered around an oak tree in a manner not dissimilar to a May dance, and two of the figures are shown playing cricket, the subject of the carnival song in An Island. Although the accompanying text carries the implicit threat of night and all that entails, the illumination suggests that something positive can be taken from the song. The border figures around the first page of the text show another cricketer and a child playing with a hoop, and although there is a bird flying among the twisting vegetation, acknowledging the possibility of being misled, there is also a bunch of grapes hanging there. Grapes, of course, are central to many carnival festivals of harvest and winemaking; images which frequently presage the advent of the Day of Judgement and the restoration of Vision in Blake’s later works. On the second page of ‘The Ecchoing Green’, next to the lines in the text where the old folk remember their youthful joys, a figure on the left hand side of the page reaches up to pick a bunch of grapes. Lower down on the right hand side of the page, at a point where the text warns that sports will ‘no more [be] seen / On the darkening Green’, a second figure, dressed like a cross between the narrator and child of the frontispiece, hands grapes down to a child who is part of the procession of children being ushered off the green by




a protective adult. While the text has warned of the approach of the conscious-of-mortality fearfulness of adulthood, the illumination, with a linguistic / pictorial pun, shows the handing down of a positive, carnival memory to protect the child in the future.14 The relative positions of the picker and distributor of the grapes suggest the left to right, up to down eye movement of reading, and the child who receives the grapes is wearing a broad brimmed hat, so that, in the act of looking up, he or she now appears to have a halo. Reading a carnival act into the text has provided a chance of a Visionary future. When Blake wrote ‘The Ecchoing Green’, village green celebrations were still a significant part of village life. Indeed, in Kirklington, Oxfordshire, the Whit Ale festival was still happily resident on the village green as late as 1858. But, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, carnival was a contentious event, and the pressure of the dominant culture turned it into a moveable feast. As it has first been forced to migrate from church to churchyard and then to the green, so it now had to cope with the shift of the rural population into an urban setting. Here it came under increasing threat from those, like Sir Joseph Banks, whose ghost seems to float through An Island, who saw it as a potential political threat, or, at best, a licensed holiday barely tolerated by employers15 – in 1738 the London Magazine wrote of the ‘grateful Obedience to their Superiors’ that might be attained by letting the poor ‘Danc[e] on the Green’.16 This move may have been a gradual process, but it was inexorable. J. T. Smith and Isabel Hill, writing in the 1830s, both note the transfer of ‘Jack in the Green’ frolics and mountebank entertainments to a new, urban setting.17 In some cases, the trappings of the rural May carnival were literally brought into the town, with flowers and oak boughs being used to decorate houses and participants.18 Other elements adapted to the new setting, one of the most notable being the assumption of the Fool’s jesting role by chimney sweepers. This was not without precedent: in many parts of the country sweeps were closely associated with the Fool of the Morris, a connection that stemmed back to the tradition of having one’s hearth swept by the Devily Dout each New Year to keep off evil spirits.19 In the new urban carnival setting, sweeps became closely associated with the dancing festivities of May Day. As I mentioned in chapter 2, Blake had engraved an illustration of May Day for the Wit’s Magazine in 1784. Smith describes such dances as being accompanied by ‘street-strolling clowns’ and the figure of the ‘Jack in the Green’ or ‘The Chimney Sweeper’s Garland’, a man supporting a wicker cover of flowers.20 Chimney sweeps’ boys retained some of this carnival aspect in




their everyday existence, being popularly ascribed a sharp, selfprotective wit.21 For Blake, such May Day festivals demonstrated both the resilience of the carnival world and the considerable threat to it and sweep’s boys are of course the subjects of one of the most famous pairings in the Songs. The Innocence version, so often critically celebrated for the speaker’s moment of imaginative sympathy, shows this sense of threat clearly. Tom Dacre is described as having his white hair, that ‘curl’d like a lambs back’, shaved. This not only suggests a loss of innocence, of recognition of his divine nature as part of Christ, and commercial fleecing, but also hints at a loss of carnival expression. Pierre Jean Grosley, in his A Tour of London written in 1766–7, describes the chimney sweeper’s May Day costume as consisting of whitening their faces with meal, covering their heads with periwigs powdered as white as snow, and bedecking their clothes with paper lace.22 The theft of Tom’s hair has been the theft of his carnival costume and, in part, of his carnival heritage, but the song’s speaker’s imaginative response keeps a memory of carnival alive: ‘you know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair’. Being shaved was also the fate of the precentor of fools in the old church festivals, which he followed with a comic oration.23 The result of the shaving and jest in the song is a dream where the boys leap, laugh, run and ‘shine in the Sun’ of Vision. The illumination repeats this positive carnival message. It shows a group of dancing figures helped on their way by an adult and it echoes the situation in ‘The Ecchoing Green’, with grapes being passed to the future generations. That this Visionary possibility is connected to carnival, rather than just to an act of imagination which, on its own, may not escape the limitations of conventional aesthetics, is reinforced in the Experience version of the song. There, the child’s experience is mediated by an adult speaker, and adults are shown to have both relocated the boy from his happy position on the snow white ‘heath’ to the sooty clothing of the city and to have failed to understand his carnival actions (‘because I am happy & dance & sing. / They think they have done me no injury’). The illumination, showing a solitary figure, heightens this sense of the objectivization of the boy, and instead of community there is only incipient political collision: the ampersand list of the boy’s carnival actions is contrasted with ‘God & his Priest & King, / Who make up a heaven of our misery’. This conflict may also have been hinted at in ‘The Ecchoing Green’, where all the characters initially shelter under an oak tree. In Blake’s iconography the oak is often the home of Christ and poetry, but in contemporary slang it also signified a rich man.24 Carnival was not only increasingly subject to the commercial whims of the employers who allowed it, but it




was also becoming misread as a symbol of political struggle divorced from its spiritual meaning. This tension between the spiritual and the political – still present in those many critical views of carnival that see it as either an underclass riot or a licensed performance – is examined in ‘The Little Vagabond’ of Experience (see appendix). The description of the boys leaping, laughing and running in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ Innocence could have been taken almost directly from many antiquarian descriptions of the church origins of the festivals of Fools,25 and ‘The Little Vagabond’ opens by contrasting two sites of social activity that could be seen as either political or carnival: the Church and the Ale-house. Both pulpit and pub were sites for the dissemination of ideological codes and poetics of reading. On the physical, political and moral level these two represent the opposite ends of the spectrum: the church physically cold, home of conservative ideals and restriction; the ale-house the meeting place of radicals, indulgence and warmth. The song seems, at first reading, a fairly straightforward and somewhat cynically amusing dig at the Church. The title of the song and the opening phrase (‘Dear Mother, dear Mother’) suggest this will be truth ‘out of the mouth of babes’ denied a place in society despite sharing in the fundamental human capacity for loving relationships. The ‘logic’ of childish innocence sees that if the Church really wanted to look after the poor then it should adopt the actions of the ale-house – somewhere that the Church would characterize as sinful. The Church’s habit of describing salvation in purely physical terms has backfired in that the child now sees physical comfort as a paradigm of heaven. The satirical thrust is made sharper by the knowledge that the Church would also condemn such childish wisdom as ignorance. The failure of the Church is further emphasized in the pun possible on ‘never do well’ / ‘ne’er-do-well’ at the end of the first verse. ‘Besides I can tell where I am used well / Such usage in heaven does never do well’ suggests both that heaven will not reward the Church’s actions and that the ‘real’ heaven, in looking after ne’er-do-wells, is in fact like a pub. The pun further highlights that this is a conflict between two opposing languages, two political visions of an urban underclass: as those who are thriftless and so will never do well, or as those who will never do well in the current political climate. That this conflict is centred in language is accented in the description of the ale-house as ‘healthy & pleasant & warm’, which rhythmically opposes the ‘God & his Priest & King’ found in the ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, Experience. But the grammar of the song is carefully constructed, and it doesn’t let the ale-house have the argument all its own way: objections can be




made on both sides. The word ‘usage’ suggests there is something exploitative about the ale-house, too, and such usage, the grammar insists, will ‘never do well’ – potentially, in ignoring the Church’s teaching the ale-house is not fitting the child for heaven. The second verse continues this political tussle of views. The speaker proposes that if the Church offered ale and a ‘pleasant fire’, the poor parishioners would ‘sing and . . . pray all the livelong day / Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray’. This could be a way of stressing the urgency of the parishioners’ physical needs, which must be satisfied before they can even begin to contemplate taking a more active role in social or spiritual matters, and suggesting that the best way to help such an underclass is to replace the cold morality of that polite society with the ‘impolite’ activities of the alehouse. However, it might also suggest that this deprived social underclass may easily be swayed to accept the prevailing standards of polite society (‘Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray’) by ale-house provisions – another example of the beerswilling jingo-culture camaraderie often invoked in songs of the period (‘While Snug in Old England we drink and we sing, / Long life to our Laws, to our Church and our King’).26 The third verse can again be read in two ways. One suggests that, if the Parson begins to act like mine host, ‘preach, & drink & sing’, the parishioners would be happy and not suffer from the effects of the abstinence and restraint required by ‘Thou Shalt Not’ religion – the physical and emotional warping of human nature that produces malnourished ‘bandy’ children and imposes modesty on ‘dame Lurch’, a character whose name suggests human frailty trying to adapt itself to a polite ideal. On the other hand, the parishioners are only as happy ‘as birds in the spring’, an image that has already been used to suggest spiritual vulnerability and lack of Vision. This was the condition in which the children playing on ‘The Ecchoing Green’ began and here, too, there is a danger of focusing on the material conditions of existence rather than the human-centred spirituality of carnival. If the change of church for pub is only thought of as important in that it provides warmth and beer, then the song is little more than a political battlecry. Moreover, what would happen to ‘modest’ dame Lurch if the Church did become an ale-house? Back-alley experience of contemporary London life would suggest that pubs sometimes acted as brothels and there were one or two notorious ones, dubbed boarding schools, where most of the prostitutes were children.27 In this case, hidden under the title ‘modest dame’ is the less happy ‘madam’, and not only do ‘bandy’ and ‘birch’ take on dark sexual overtones, but the song seems to be suggesting that the




combination of the Church’s coldness and ale-house fire has created the moral starvation that allows such hypocritical ‘modesty’ to thrive. The last verse pictures God ‘like a father’ happy to see ‘His children’ enjoying the comforts He himself is blessed with, and accepting both the Demon and his drink with a kiss and clothing. The radical reading of the song would suggest this is a redistribution of wealth and the end of the polite classifications of Good and Evil, leading to social harmony (‘no more quarrel’). However, the illumination seems to be at odds with this potentially positive ending. The top design shows God comforting, or sorrowing with, a human figure, bound together in a circle of arms that suggests a repetitive cycle, downward looking, earth-bound, surrounded by trees but lacking the joy of those elsewhere found under oaks. The figure of God bears a passing resemblance to the figure of Urizen, whose writings, Blake explains elsewhere, become the ‘Oak Groves of Albion’ where the Accuser of Sin, the Satan of this world, lives (E258). The lower design shows more apparently sorrowful figures, perhaps a faceless mother and children, and a man leaning on a rock, in a posture not unlike Newton’s, or perhaps chained to it, like Prometheus or Orc. There is some suggestion of vine leaves around the text, but there is also a pair of birds. God-the-Father, as Raine has shown, was thought by Paracelsus, Boehme and others to be a thing of fire.28 The church-as-pub, with the additional implication of a pub as radical meeting house, would offer the poor a much better life, a first step to rebuilding a community of equality, where heaven is for all the ‘never do well[s]’. In that sense it has indeed stolen a little bit of God (in the sense of the dominant order)’s fire. But although this image highlights the lack of spiritual warmth in the Church, it fails in as much as it is only repeating the same cycle of political struggle; concentrating on material issues it gives preference to one part of society over another. The ‘pleasant fire our souls to regale’ may only produce the contented twittering of ‘birds in the spring’, and the childish solution it offers may only solve the problems of a nursery rhyme world: dame Lurch’s bandy and hungry children. Once again, a possible answer lies in finding a carnival reading of the song that goes beyond political posturing to posit an alternative world of church-upside-down that is more genuinely Christian. The choice is not so much between Church and the Ale-house as seeing both as sites of carnival activity. Pubs could be, in many senses, the urban version of the village green, a source of entertainment and news and a focal point of the community. They even had their own kind of carnival festivals, with the election of fool-like mock-mayors who would make drunken




speeches to their ‘electors’.29 Contrasting the world of the pub with the fasting world of Dame Lurch also has an echo of Carnival’s fight with Dame Lent in Bruegel’s ‘Carnival and Lent’ (1559). Placing the terms ‘Church’ and ‘Ale’ so closely together in the opening verse might also remind the reader of the tradition of the ‘Church Ale’, when churches used to brew their own beer, providing cheer, sustenance and a source of revenue for the parish.30 Antiquarian literature was full of records of other types of carnival activity in churches and churchyards too, from polite games of cricket with tansey cake prizes to licentious frolics and feasts for the dead.31 In his dissertation on Shakespeare’s fools, Douce relates outraged descriptions of Morris dancers at festivals of misrule entering churches ‘dauncing and swinging their handkerchiefes over their heades . . . like Devils incarnate’ and feasting and drinking in the churchyard afterwards. The song suggests that both ale-house and church need to remember such carnival roots and that both parson and parishioners need to learn to ‘preach, & drink & sing’. For God and his children to rejoice together is possible if God is seen as taking on the responsibilities of a comic father and a carnival host. Giving out drink and clothing was a feature of carnival celebrations that aimed to reunite disparate elements of the community. It is a re-vision of the relationship between ‘father’ and ‘children’ that places them on an equal footing (‘as happy and pleasant as he’). It is also a spiritual act: in kissing the Devil, ‘God’ is acting like the human, forgiving Christ rather than a judgmental deity: the spiritual message of inclusion, celebration and recognition. Blake’s fondness for porter is well known, and if it caused him to be snubbed by members of the Royal Academy then this song is a witty riposte at their lack of charity. The jolly drunken father-substitute is also a stock figure of comedy (think of Falstaff for example, or more lately Harry Potter’s Hagrid), and the image of God the father as a landlord is amusingly repeated in Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’, as I shall discuss in the next chapter. But Blake also asserted that ‘Publicans’ were men Christ ‘loved to associate with’, and in its use of carnival imagery, ‘The Little Vagabond’ contains an alternative Vision of society that once more offers an escape from aesthetic and political dialectics with a communal, spiritual act of revelry. Good hospitality and the carnival world are also present in ‘Holy Thursday’, Innocence. I mentioned in the last chapter that this song has considerable carnival resonance: the famous injunction to cherish pity ‘lest you drive an angel from your door’ was a commonplace recommendation to be hospitable. Such a recommendation had appeared in Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses; a work prized by Antiquarians for the




information on festivals and pastimes it contains. Stubbes’ warning comes just before a passage in which he complains of how solemn religious days, which should be devoted to prayer, contemplation and charity, have been given over to dancing, May-games, Church Ales, lords of misrule and the like. The scene presented in ‘Holy Thursday’ seems on the surface to be the kind of polite occasion of which Stubbes would approve: a speaker contemplating the significance of an orderly procession of charity children into St Paul’s to give thanks. But as Antiquarian research noted earlier had also discovered that Holy Thursday was a morris day, when dancers would process into the church.32 The positive elements of the song that critics have focused on – their colourful appearance like ‘flowers’, ‘red & blue & green’, their singing, the unity and potential they embody – all suggest a carnival context. Even the description of the children as being like ‘thames waters’ may suggest a carnival act. The Thames would have been little better than an open sewer in Blake’s time, and the children’s flowing into Paul’s could indicate the inverse blessing of an unholy baptism that restores humanity to religion (the church is described as ‘Paul’s’ not ‘St Paul’s’, and the ‘high dome’ suggests a mind as much as a building). Such grotesque baptisms are often associated with early church carnivals.33 Moreover, that this carnival is an alternative poetics of reading is wittily suggested by the image of their ‘harmonious thunderings’. That this thunder is a humanbased ‘harmony’ contrasts it with the natural ‘Terror’ of ‘resistless . . . thunder’ invoked by John Dennis in his attempts to define the sublime (in the Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704, in the same passage in which he speaks of the sun as a ‘flat shining Body’). That the speakers of ‘Holy Thursday’ Innocence and Experience fail to recognize this carnival world (‘Is that trembling cry a song?’) indicates not so much a failure of carnival as the growing tendency to read carnival activity as merely sentimental or political rather than as a spiritual experience. As Stallybrass and White point out, when Foolery is proscribed, prohibited and channelled it reemerges in both the rebellious energy of satire (an event clearly underlying much of the Songs) and in the creation of a ‘symbolic repertoire’ that serves the purposes of the polite elite, severing the poor from the rhythms of the year and the life of the village green.34 As one would expect from his work in the Poetical Sketches and An Island, in these songs Blake is both reminding the reader of the spiritual and social importance of carnival and examining the ways in which it was being objectified and overlooked by contemporary sublime aesthetics and political argument. It is significant that carnival echoes appear at those moments in the Songs that critics have concentrated on as show-




ing the positive elements of play and imagination. Carnival is also notably absent from some of the songs where the speaker’s viewpoint seems hopelessly limited. In ‘London’, for example, the speaker seems to create an anti-carnival, clothing the faces she or he meets with masks of weakness and woe, failing to respond to the plenitude of voices around them (particularly that of the chimney sweeper) and seeing youth, birth and marriage as a form of death. She or he also sees the walls of the city as covered with physical and moral tarnish, thus failing to notice the mass of radical and satirical pamphlets that were often to be found there,35 and in the famous image of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ may be echoing, among others, Burke’s comments on that a man of ‘intemperate passions’ cannot be free, for his passions forge his fetters.36 Wherever it appears, however, humour in the Songs is usually aimed at provoking an alternative reading. In ‘The Fly’, for example, Blake offers a lighthearted challenge to Descartes. The famous Cartesian assertion, ‘I think therefore I am’, already examined in An Island, comes under scrutiny in a simple ditty about a fly killed by the speaker’s ‘thoughtless hand’ in the midst of its ‘summers play’. First, the idea that consciousness is everything is challenged by the physical presence of the thoughtless hand. Then the speaker, comparing their existence to that of a fly – they both have a kind of consciousness and are subject to the whim of fate – both mocks Descartes’ idea by trivializing it, and implies that the Cartesian idea values human life as no more significant than a fly’s. The last two stanzas – ‘If thought is life / And strength and breath: / And the want / Of thought is death; / Then am I / A happy fly / If I live / Or if I die’ – continue this idea, implying that if ‘I think therefore I am’ is all that is important and when one is dead one cannot think, then one is a happy ‘fly’ at all times, because one’s criteria for life and happiness is always fulfilled. When the fly is dead he cannot be troubled by his own lack of thought. Further, to see a human as a fly is to consider the soul as no more than consciousness and thus the solipsistic ego is its own heaven and hell. But recognizing humanity’s similarity to a fly should not be a nihilistic, debasing experience. Blake insisted that ‘Every thing that lives is holy’, a notion he repeated at least four times (E45, 51, 54, 324) and what is important about life is not mere physical existence but celebrating it in ‘summers play’. The speaker dances and drinks and sings as an expression of God, rather than of their own consciousness. The illustration to the song shows a child being led by a woman who holds both its hands, creating the endless cycle of poor reading we saw in the God / sufferer pairing in the illumination to ‘The Little Vagabond’. Once again, concentrating on physical existence, as happened in the




‘Nurse’s Song’, is a potentially limiting activity. The tree they stand under is like a reverse image of the one found in the Gates of Paradise, plate 1. There, the tree saw the ‘birth’ of a new life; here the tree is leafless and wintry, indicating this is not a positive relationship between nurse or mother and child. The ‘fly’ is absent from the illustration, except perhaps as the shuttlecock about to be swatted by a child. A fly was a common image of the shortness of life; Ritson’s A select collection of English Songs includes a song where a speaker invites a fly to drink with him and ponders on the comparative shortness of their lives.37 A fly as sport, however, would, to a Shakespeare reader, recall Gloucester’s comment that man’s relationship to the ‘gods’ is like a fly that can be killed in sport by a ‘wanton’ boy. Gloucester gains insight to accept and celebrate life through the help of the mad / foolish Edgar (a passage which may inform Blake’s later comment about seeing men from ‘Afar’, E683). While a less comic reading would see ‘The Fly’ as merely a further example of the futility of existence, a mad / foolish reading opposes Cartesian reduction and reaffirms our shared humanity not as victims of God’s whim but expressions of God’s creative will. The importance of the style in which the comic is presented was an significant part of An Island and this also finds expression in the Songs, albeit in a somewhat surprising way: in, ‘The Sick Rose’ (E23): O Rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm, That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The song has, of course, many possible interpretations. But, in a famous image, Addison called satire ‘Arrows that fly in the dark’ bringing a ‘secret Shame’.38 The ‘arrow’ of Addison’s original has become a ‘worm’, a connection linking Wisdom 5: 12, where an ‘arrow shot at a mark’ is an image for the short span of a faithless life, with Blake’s description of human existence in Thel, Europe and elsewhere as being ‘worms of sixty winters’ (E285, 177). Arrows for Blake were images of ‘thought’ (E180, 722) and ‘desire’ (E95), acts of perception that could open the ‘hidden heart’ (E256). But ‘arrows’ are natural images and therefore may become part of the natural conflict or ‘Wars’ of ‘Natural Morality’ caused by the




‘Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart’ (E201). Satan is pictured as having a ‘bow’ of ‘Moral Law’ (E202), the law of the ‘Pharisees & Hypocrites’ (E201). Blake’s substitution of worm for arrow, then, suggests he links satire with faithlessness and the idea that humanity is subject to this natural, comparative morality, which in turn produces the rebellion of satire. Many readers have found a strong sexual element in the song, particularly in the image of the worm invading the rose and the connection between satire, perverted sexuality, veneral disease and the loss of vision was made in An Island and repeated, as I have already noted, in ‘London’. For Blake, this reaction to the worm’s ‘dark secret love’ of the rose is at the very heart of the sublime aesthetic that contrasts beauty and fear and deplores corruption at the same time as being fascinated with pornography. In Europe, ‘the distant heavens’ create Enitharmon’s ‘night of joy’ by proclaiming that ‘Woman’s love is Sin’ and the salvation of ‘Eternal life’ exists only in an ‘allegorical abode where existence hath never come’. This beauty / fear aesthetic both creates and is created by a misreading of human existence as mere vegetable mortality and results in a doctrine of prohibition that sees sex as dirty and union with God as only achievable after death. The corollary to this depressing view is a satirical reading of the ‘worm’ which poisons the rose and indeed all images: the rose was a Shakespearean image for the interchangeability of names (Romeo & Juliet, II.ii.43). But the worm was also linked to the potential for true visionary perception. A worm-child can be seen in the frontispiece to the Gates of Paradise, for example, where the accompanying comment notes that ‘The Suns light when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ that beholds it’ (E260). The worm is also the physical manifestation of God. God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes for he is become a worm that he may nourish the weak For let it be remember’d that creation is. God descending according to the weakness of man for our Lord is the word of God & every thing on earth is the word of God & in its essence is God. (E599) The worm is also linked to carnival. It is the grotesque leveller of all humans to a common, edible equality, a joke that Hamlet takes such delight in when faced with an oppressive, murderous King (IV.iii.16–31). But in nurturing the worm, the tomb is also an image of the womb. The grave also leads to re-birth – both spiritual (Hamlet has entered the grave and reemerged on his journey to a new understanding) and physical




(the idea that so frightens Thel after she meets a worm, described in a very similar fashion to the worm on a leaf from the Gates of Paradise plate, and is persuaded to look into the mouth of the grave). As one often finds in Blake, the layering of images has increased their meaning, but there is a consistent pattern here. The satirical reading has only brought corruption to the aesthetically pleasing image and, as elsewhere, this ‘sexual’ sickness is linked to social sickness, but remembering the carnival possibility restores insight and faith. The ‘howling storm’ may evoke the post-Fool, pre-enlightenment world of King Lear on the heath. Satire has been helpful: the Fool’s satirical wit has helped lift Lear’s blindness where Kent’s blunt pleadings to ‘see better’ (I.i.157) could not. But it has also destroyed Lear’s sanity, which must be restored by the madman and the foolish daughter’s forgiveness. Only reading the worm comically, as symbolic of God as every thing, as Everyman, will help restore a positive vision. Although difficult to prove, it is hard not to feel that there is a relation between the world of the Songs and the comic world of Shakespeare. The settings, characters and vocabularly seem very familiar. There is a contrast between a cynical urban world and a magical pastoral setting. There are disguises and dangers, young people lost in woods and in cities and bluff watchmen who rescue them. There are simple shepherds and melancholy observers, kingly beasts and tender babes, quick-witted innocents and wise urchins. Imagination is rewarded and there is an overarching sense of a consolation, even a divinity that one can perceive through the natural world and natural behaviour. As I discussed in chapter 2, contemporary criticism of Shakespearean comedy placed great value not only on wit, but also on the possession of a good heart, as the long debate over the character of Falstaff testified.39 In the Shakespearean comic world, people are seen as imperfect, all too easily hoodwinked and driven by passion or humour (a constant personality trait leading to a misreading of all around them). But although they are chastened, like the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Angelo in Measure for Measure or even Margaret in Much Ado, they are also restored by the power of love. Those who enter the pastoral world and retain some of the playfulness of the child and respect the powerful desires of Nature are redeemed into a new, Christian sacrament of marriage. To read the Songs is to enter that world and have a chance at a similar redemption. To claim that there are direct quotations from Shakespeare in the Songs would be as difficult to justify as they are hard to find. There are allusions to two of his comedies in the illuminations, however. The circle of




children dancing in the ‘Nurse’s Song’ resembles the circle of fairies in Blake’s ‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing’ (c.1785–90, L4). He calls Oberon and Titania the ‘rulers of the vegetable world’ (E535), and gives Oberon the look of a transformed Har or Urizen, suggesting comic dancing can restore unity between male and female, imagination and reality, reason and emotion, word and flesh. Blake’s decision to illustrate this episode from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is notable in that the fairies’ dance is a carnival expression, a rustic festival that heals the lovers’ rifts and blesses the bride-bed of Theseus and Hippolyta. Healing was a special feature of carnival. Stow, in his Survey of London (1603) noted how, when attempts were made to cancel midsummer revels and channel them into official Lord Mayor’s Shows, many citizens regretted the loss of the magical time when ‘neighbours that, before being at controuersie [sic], were there, by the labour of others, reconciled’.40 In Douce’s copy of Brand’s Observations on Popular Antiquities there was also a handwritten reminder that fairies were a refutation of the materialist vision of the world and a reminder of the wonder of God.41 To Blake they were a reminder of the ‘Four Eternal Senses’ of Man (E178) and his choice of subject carries additional weight when one remembers that, while other Shakespeare comedies like Twelfth Night were frequently on stage, Dream did not have any performances on the regular London stage between 1783 and 1792.42 If Blake were simply choosing to illustrate an episode from Shakespeare for commercial reasons, he would surely have picked a more popular play: to choose to illustrate a moment of Vision with this expression of carnival is significant. In contrast, the other Shakespeare comedy to which Blake’s illuminations may be alluding was one of the most popular: As You Like It. Between 1783 and 1792, it played thirty-nine times on the formal London stage. Its popularity led to it being chosen to open the new Royalty theatre in 1787 and the role of Orlando attracted the great actors of the day, including Kemble and Barrymore.43 There are several allusions in Blake’s work to the play,44 which would have been particularly interesting to him in the way it contrasts a number of very different Fools. The first is the cynical Jaques, the urban wit translated to the forest who reads nature as an extension of human society, a point illustrated by his reported speech on the wounded deer (‘Sweep on you fat and greasy citizens’, II.ii.55). He claims he is ‘ambitious for a motley coat’ and says he will ‘cleanse the foul body of th’infected world, / If they will patiently receive my medicine’ (II.vii.42, 60–1). But he is reproved by Duke Senior who says that Jaques is so corrupt himself his ‘cure’ would spread disease: the pattern of the ‘When old corruption’ song (E454).




Jaques, who claims to love melancholy ‘better than laughing’ (IV.i.4) is in himself an embodiment of the kind of ‘humours’-based character so favoured by Jonsonian satire, yet in the eighteenth century his name became a watchword for the splenetic misapplication of satire.45 Although happy to dish out his satiric observations, Jacques is a hypocrite, keen to hide his own defects, warning that: He that a fool doth very wisely hit Doth very foolishly, although he smart Not to seem senseless of the bob; if not, The wise man’s folly is anatomiz’d Even by the squand’ring glances of the fool. (II.vii.53–7) Blake picks up on this in a deleted line of Tiriel and in turn criticizes Jaques for ‘Hypocrisy the idiots wisdom & the wise mans folly’ (E815). As hypocrisy was Blake’s charge against Foote and Voltaire, the destructive satirists, Blake seems to be linking Jaques very strongly with that incessant application of satire that is destructive of understanding. Jaques himself is full of puns and wordplay, but he is the type of knavish anti-Fool Blake so often warned against. In contrast, Touchstone occupies the more traditional, and constructive, Fool’s role. His are the witty aphorisms on wisdom and folly (‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool’, V.i.30) that Blake later echoes in the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ (E36), and in his amusing wooing of Audrey deflates the romantic pretensions of Rosalind’s wooing Orlando. But in a sense, Orlando is also a Fool. With his good-nature, he becomes a natural heir to the Forest of Arden, the ‘golden world’ (I.i.109). Here, where knowledge is intuitive, ‘never school’d yet learned’ (I.ii.150), Duke Senior and the foresters find ‘tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (II.i.16–17). This Adamic view of language, seeing beyond ‘mortal and perishing nature’, is shared by Orlando, who hangs ‘Tongues . . . on every tree’ (III.ii.115–18). Orlando and Jaques are directly contrasted in the play. Orlando ends the play in marriage and inheriting a Dukedom: Jaques by going to join an ‘old, religious man’, realizing he has much to ‘learn’ about the world. Both are described as being found beneath a tree: Jaques ‘Under an oak’ like one of its ‘antique root[s]’ (II.i.31) and Orlando, also by implication under an oak, like a ‘dropp’d acorn’ (III.ii.220). Blake depicts both of these moments. Jaques appears in ‘Jacques and the Wounded Stag’




(1806, L43) and Orlando in ‘Adam Naming The Beasts’ (1810, V22), and they both appear in The Gates of Paradise, a series that carries a number of Shakespearean allusions:46 Jaques in ‘Water’ (B118, 583) and Orlando in ‘I found him beneath a tree’ (B117, 582). To be found beneath a tree is to take on a mortal existence: the satiric Jaques and the good-humoured Orlando read that existence in very different ways. Shakespeare depicts the two in a jocular confrontation, where Orlando bests Jaques with a joke that likens him to one drowned in a brook (II.ii.270–3). Jaques is indeed, like Newton, drowned in the waters of materialism, a point Blake makes clear in his 1806 watercolour of Jaques and the Stag. The scene is ostensibly as Shakespeare describes it, but instead of showing Jaques looking at the stag upon which Shakespeare has him moralize, Blake depicts him pointing at the brook and looking up into the oak above him. This would have been a potent image for Blake in the light of his interest in the work of Boehme. A tree reflected in the water is the Behemenist image for Nature: an ever-changing reflection of something permanent. Boehme insisted that the Tree of Life (merciful, forgiving) and the Tree of Good and Evil (moral law) were the same tree: what mattered was how one saw them: ‘The precious pearl lies in [the Knowledge of] the Difference of the two Trees; and yet it is but only one.’47 Blake puts this aphoristically in one of his Proverbs of Hell: ‘A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees’ (E35). In Blake’s picture, Jaques’ satirical moralizing is shown to stem from his misreading of the transient material world. In contrast, Orlando’s writing on trees indicates his Adamic, neoPlatonic approach to symbols, seeing God through the world. Such an act of writing on trees appears in ‘Adam Naming the Beasts’. Here Adam is shown with a snake winding round his left arm, reminding us of the difficulties of entering the world of signification. With his right hand, however, he points to an acorn in the oak tree above him, and Blake has, unusually, signed the work by painting his name as if it were scratched into the bark of a tree. Essick points out that the picture of Adam is a self-portrait and it would be entirely consistent if Blake was likening himself to Orlando here. He would thus be aligning himself with an imaginative, Shakespearean comic world that saw value in goodnature, natural expression free from guilt and a light-hearted, wise and not ‘ill-favoured’ (III.ii.246) reading of the incarnate possibilities of signs. The connection between good reading and an oak is continued in Blake’s painting ‘Christ Blessing the Little Children’. There, Christ seems almost to be a part of the oak tree against which He leans. He embraces the children closely: they look directly at him, but the three adults with




them do not. The female adult looks straight at the children, which is both an expression of maternal care and the action of someone caught in a deluded aesthetic. On the other side there is a young man who looks at an apple and has his gaze directed upwards by an older man. In Blake’s painting ‘Age Teaching Youth’ (c.1785–90) an old man, surrounded by trees, reads a book, while a young man points upwards. In a typical comic reversal, the youth is teaching the old man that there is another way to read the world apart from his bookish interpretation; youthful, energetic, carnival. In ‘Christ Blessing the Little Children’ the two figures are again engaged in a debate about reading, only this time the older man seems to be pointing the way. The young man’s staring at an apple shows him at a moment of choice: is this to prove the fruit of the Tree of Life (a positive reading) or the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (a poor reading)? The old man is pointing at an oak and resembles the figure of Plato in Raphael’s ‘The School of Athens’ (1510). Once again, Blake seems to be suggesting that to see Christ properly takes an act of love and an act of good, Platonic, reading. Moreover, each individual must decide for themselves between a hopeful or reductive reading, a Vision of Jerusalem or a judgemental God. What in An Island had been the responsibility of the clown / fool narrator now rests on the shoulders of the fool reader. Gesturing towards an oak tree is also part of the illumination to ‘The Little Black Boy’ of Innocence (B221/2), again suggesting that the reader must choose what to read into the song. We know from this poem, from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion and from his illustrations to J. G. Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) that Blake abhorred the idea of slavery and racial discrimination. This was a view shared by many in the late eighteenth century. A 1792 collection of poems called The Flights of Fancy (1792) contains ‘The Negro’s Complaint; or, Horrors of Slavery’ with the lines: ‘What tho’ our sable hue / Be foreign in your light, / HE, who form’d us, form’d you, / Both equal in his sight’.48 In showing a little black boy, however, Blake is not just bitterly complaining about racism, he is linking the boy’s plight to the view that man’s soul is separate from his body, an idea Blake challenged in The Marriage. In his Memoirs (1791), James Lackington remarked that God’s children, according to a popular Methodist expression, were ‘tho’ black with sin [still] fair within’.49 Blake is challenging the idea that the body, blackness, physicality, is separate from a pure, white, noumenal soul trapped within us. In ‘The Little Black Boy’ the mother is teaching the boy underneath a tree: our choice of a poetics of reading will be an important issue. As ‘It is impossible to




think without images of somewhat on earth’, the mother is giving the little boy the image of the sun as God to help him understand his existence and mortality. The problem with using this natural image for a divine essence is that the boy’s relationship to the world is determined by his relationship to the image: he is black ‘as if bereav’d of light’, God has ‘sunburnt’ him, whereas the white boy is ‘white as an angel’. The last line of the song, typically ambiguous, notes the black boy must ‘be like him, and he will then love me’. The ‘him’ could refer to God or the white boy the black boy feels he must protect: in either case, love is conditional on service and even then is subject to the logic of the oppressive system: ‘then he will love me’. This is like the hope offered to Tom Dacre in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’: happiness is only available after death and requires more suffering. It might be possible to read the song as celebrating the mother’s poetic capability that has fostered in her child a love of his fellow man such that he is prepared to suffer the heat of God’s love for them. God’s love, of course, should not require suffering and anyway such an act of communitas can only happen when they are all ‘free’ from their ‘clouds’ and beyond the trammels of signification in some way. However, if one takes the mother and child to be in the site of a carnivalesque celebration (in a ‘shady grove’ like the speaker in ‘Fresh from the dewy hill’ or under the ‘shade’ of the speaker’s dream in ‘A Dream’), there is a reminder to read the world comically. In this case, the child shares in a world of equality. He, the white boy and God are ‘like’ each other and ‘joy in the noonday’. The mother tells the child that he is black (like the letters of a word) to help him ‘bear’ the rays of the ‘rising sun’ where ‘God does live’. If one accepts the frequent Blakean connection between the sun and the Poetic Genius here, the child’s blackness is a physical manifestation of the divine power. When the children have learnt to bear the sun’s beams, their bodies can be discarded – in other words, when the Poetic Genius has been understood, the book or body of Error can be burnt up and this will lead to a true understanding of God-in-all-humanity: For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear The cloud will vanish; we shall hear his voice In the song’s second illustration the boys are united in the presence of Christ under a different species of tree. This appeared in the illustration to ‘The Little Girl Lost’ of Innocence where the girl embraces a youth and points up to a bird. Adopting a comic awareness of signs as incarnate can lead to a union with Christ: failure to read signs properly can lead to




a blasted, bookish vision: the tree reversed appears on the title-page of The First Book of Urizen, where Urizen’s eyes are closed and he reads the book of nature by touch. And part of this proper reading is to accept the clowning implications of childhood and play. ‘The Little Black Boy’ (a pun on Blake boy?) song is always open to ironic interpretations of ‘and he will then love me’. But viewing the tree as symbolic of a carnivalesque potential and reading the black boy as sharing in the equality of being an expression of the divine, offers a hopeful alternative. There are a great many oaks in the illuminations of the Songs, usually associated with the moments when remembering the comic potential of Visionary interpretation is important.50 Oaks, while protectors of innocence (‘laughter sat beneath the oaks, & innocence sported round’, E350) are potentially the home of both Eno, mother of poetry, (E90) and the Accuser of Sin (E258).51 The connection with the oaks of As You Like It is significant, but of course not every tree in the Songs will be a cutting from the Forest of Arden – as Jon Mee and others have pointed out, Blake’s idea of the ‘Tree of Mystery’ owes a great deal to Burke’s Reflections and political responses to his writings.52 But the emphasis placed on the position beneath the oak of both Jaques and OrlandoAdam, and the fact that the bride-bed blessing fairies in ‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies’ are also dancing underneath an oak, certainly adds an extra, comic dimension to the presence of oaks in the Songs. Dancing beneath the oak in the illumination to the ‘Nurse’s Song’ of Innocence (B226) suggests that, instead of being threatened by the approach of night, carnival celebrates the passage of time as an essential part of the change of seasons that will bring salvation in due course. But, of course, the dance must be understood correctly: the circle of dancing figures is repeated in the ‘Laughing Song’ (B220), only now most are seated and one figure has his back to the reader, seeming to exclude us from the party. The dangers of the deluding pastoral imagery in the text of this song, and its potential to create the damaging division between self and others, have already been discussed and this sense is heightened by the number of birds hovering over the words. But to the comically aware reader there are hints of something more positive; the ‘voice of joy’ and ‘merry wit’ that would perhaps recognize in the uplifted glass and positive posture of the central figure – like a back view of ‘Dance of Albion’ – the beginnings or remains of a carnival moment. As we have seen, the illuminations form a rich source of comic material. Some, such as the picture of a tiger that accompanies ‘The Tyger’ (B248), are comments on our tendency to read in terms of the fearful sublime. Compared to his ferocious textual cousin the graphic tiger




looks, in many copies, either worried or about as savage as a stuffed children’s toy. This is not simply, as has been suggested, bad draughtsmanship: Blake could draw rather more ferocious tigers when he wanted to do so (B388).53 Our proclivity to abstract from a natural image to a fearful sublime is demonstrated in the text, particularly after the point where a dead tree branch (a reductive reading) intervenes. The song’s questioning moves from being human or God-based (‘what immortal hand . . . eye . . . hand . . . shoulder . . . hand . . . feet’) to mechanical (‘what the hammer . . . chain . . . furnace . . . anvil’) with all the limiting implications of those images found in other songs. This starts a cycle of oppression: the stars ‘throw down their spears’ like the repressive kings of King Edward the Third and the speaker becomes armed like the speaker of ‘The Angel’ (E24). The illumination to ‘The Angel’ (B262) adds to the idea that this is a failure of reading skills. It shows a tree bent over like that on the title page of the The First Book of Urizen (B186), and the Angel looks like a gravestone, linking the song both with the selfdelusive psychology of ‘The Garden of Love’ and Urizen’s books of law. The graphic tiger reminds of us an alternative, creative reading. Another possible comic re-reading, faint but present, occurs in the appearance of the beautifully plumed bird that Erdman has called the ‘bird of innocence’. I have suggested, however, that this bird, clearly present in the painting ‘Eve Listening to the Birds’, is linked to the misreading of natural images and all that entails. It appears, among other illuminations, in ‘The Shepherd’ (B224), where the inarticulate cries of the sheep raise the possibility of misreading by the self-congratulating shepherd, and in ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (B247), where the Father produces his abstract moral law from physical perceptions. As has been mentioned before, however, certain images achieved a degree of recognition among the iconography of satiric prints, and this bird is like a bird of paradise, the nickname of Gertrude Mahon, a well-known courtesan and subject of many satiric prints.54 This bird may be a comic depiction of the ‘harlot coy’ of natural imagery, which not only comments upon its seductive power but also, because Mahon was also a comic subject, contains the potential of seeing through this delusion and rereading the sign. As a final example, another comic comment appears in the illumination to ‘The Lamb’ (B229). In the picture, a boy and a sheep stand outside a house. A boy-and-sheep was the badge of the London workhouse, coupled with the motto ‘God’s Providence is my inheritance’.55 In the text the child speaker likens himself to a lamb and thus to Jesus, who in turn is described as ‘meek’, one of those, the Sermon on the Mount tells us, who shall inherit the earth. Once again, the possibility of reading the




song positively is firmly and comically placed into the hands of the reader. With their format as nursery rhymes and spelling games, the Songs are as much a form of comic education as An Island. Challenging the dominant aesthetic, the comic is a blueprint for the sort of imaginative, playful reading to which so many readers respond, carefully articulated and embedded within the text as a strong reminder of a communal, extraliterary experience. In this, the illuminations have provided significant contributions. Before turning to the next stage of Blake’s programme of comic education – the Bible of Hell that appears in The Marriage – it will be worth looking at a few other examples of Blake’s graphic work to show how completely, and subversively, the comic inhabited his Vision.




A Vision of the Last Judgment: The Comic in Blake’s Designs

Blake described his method of combining text and illustration as the production of ‘Illuminated Books’ (E693) and ‘illumination’ is probably the most suitable term to characterize all of his pictorial work. More than mere illustration, his artwork is in all senses a ‘border text’ that requires multiple acts of interpretation. Combining sight and insight, it is a second language that speaks to the emotions as much as to the intellect, stimulating the consciousness in a direct challenge to those, like Hume and Locke, who believe all forms of communication can be reduced to a rational history of sensory experience. Peopled by figures at once both sinuously abstract and sensually present, Blake’s illuminations are a reading of the mundane world that finds through it something irrational, radiant and Divine. Blake’s comic vision can be found as much in his graphic work as his written texts. His artwork is playful, constantly borrowing and reworking images to challenge conventional sublime aesthetics. One of the first things to notice about it is, despite its vivid apocalyptic clarity, it is always opposed to the idealized mimeticism of Reynolds and the dwarfing grandeur of Dennis and Burke. Blake’s sublime is, as his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ recommends, built on a human scale – ‘The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion’ (E37). Unlike those of his contemporaries – Romney, Flaxman, even Fuseli – Blake’s figures do not objectify the body. They are not reports or observations or abstracts but, in their muscles and curves, they are heroes, essences of human experience, as if he was painting human thoughts and desires. His people are not beautiful, but they are attractive: this is not the idolatrous worship of the human form, but a statement of possibilities. In a sense, it is an apocalyptic folk-art: a version of the carnival 193



7

grotesque, visceral and energetic. Gods, angels, humans and chimera co-exist in the same world, not separate species but points on a continuum of conscious and spiritual understanding. Even the monsters and floating heads that haunt the margins of his prophecies and grand designs alike are human-based, telling of the struggle of humanity against all that threatens and restrains it, all the while recognizing that our limitations also empower us. We are trapped, his grotesques remind us, within a body, but the body is a portion of the soul. For example, a chrysalischild full of potential lies smiling asleep on an oak-leaf in the Gates of Paradise (B580). It may grow up into a demon; at the foot of the ‘Preludium’ to Europe a human head with bat’s wings and a snake body winds beneath a text that speaks of the pains of a mortal existence. The title page of Jerusalem, however, shows brilliant butterfly women (B481), with one a clear reminder of the chrysalis-child. Physical beauty, though, may not be enough. Another butterfly woman sits forlornly on a flower at the start of Chapter 3, adorned with a papal crown (B532). On plate 11 of Europe, snake-tailed angels bow before a bat-winged pope, emblem of materialist doctrine (B169, 178): existence and consciousness provide the conditions for superstition and repression. Yet human energy resists all that restricts life: on plate 4 of America a dragon-man chases God-Urizen across the sky (B151). This sense of mixed curse and blessing is repeated on plate 11 of Jerusalem, where the illumination shows a swan-woman floating on a lake and a fish-woman swimming beneath its surface (B490). In The First Book of Urizen, with a reference to the theory that the development of the human foetus mirrors human evolution, Blake suggests that fish and bird are reminders of our existence as part of the natural world (E70). This idea is repeated in Jerusalem (E199) and Milton (E135): ‘Visionary Life . . . Here renderd [as] Beasts & Birds & Fishes, & Plants & Minerals / Here fixd into a frozen bulk subject to decay & death / Those Visions of Human Life & Shadows of Wisdom & Knowledge’. Likewise in Visions of the Daughters of Albion the swan is used as an image for the soul, tainted with woe by being part of the physical body (E47). But they are also statements of possibility: in Europe Enitharmon, calling her sons and daughters to ‘sports of night’, mentions birds and fishes when reminding us that ‘Between two moments bliss is ripe’ (E66). These sports may, at first, only lead to a physical revolution, the ‘lineaments of gratified desire’. Enlightenment may appear first in the political field: Enitharmon’s awakening after eighteen hundred years reminds us of the revolutions in France and America and revolt in Surinam. But this physical liberation is a step towards the spiritual revolution that will bring ‘Brotherhood & Universal love’ (E401). In the




Jerusalem plate the younger, non-European fish-woman brings a burst of energy the older, drooping, white European swan lacks. The history of human consciousness and human existence are parallel, with the difference that new generations always supply fresh energy and hope. The movement to bring about Divine Humanity is not to change from Innocence to Experience and then back again; it is to take on the lively, youthful, comic perspective from a position of articulation and knowledge. On plate 23 of Jerusalem a swan-woman depicts the unliberated Jerusalem. Called the ‘unlawful pleasure’ and ‘Albions curse’ she is a soul, ashamed of the body and stricken to the ground. But pleasure – on plate 28 a couple embrace – and Vision – on plate 78 an eagle-headed man looks at the sun – bring a new unity of body and soul – on plate 84 an old man is being led towards a church by a child. Blake’s more conventionally grotesque figures seem to have a range of possible precedents. Some seem to be biblical, like ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman clothed with the Sun’ (L32, c.1803) or the reptilian Sin in ‘Satan, Sin and Death’ (c.1806). Others seem to echo the marginal figures of medieval gospels or books of hours or the sneering faces and distorted bodies of Bruegel and Bosch. It is also interesting to note how different they are from his potential sources. A few of his more frank images, such as the sexually charged ‘Enitharmon Kneeling’ (D29), ‘Dragon Forms’ (D24) and the snake-phallus woman of America, plate 14 (B161) seem to participate in the bawdy style of contemporary satiric prints. Even the polite collectibles frequently included the salacious: Darly’s Comic Prints (1776) includes a buxom ‘Female Shaver’ sitting astride her customer and ‘Captain Cutlass’ showing off his long weapon. As a youthful print collector and one time print-shop owner, Blake must have come across many such examples, but his sexual images are more than prurient: they are Rabelaisian expressions of human vitality. Of course, Rabelaisian imagery was not uncommon in the prints of this period too: Gillray certainly used it, as can be seen in his Gargantuan ‘Midas’ (1797), an image that was repeated in the work of other caricaturists, such as Basset’s ‘Gargantua’s Feast’ (1810). Both of these prints have a highly political content, but Blake’s picturing of a gargantuan figure, while less easy to discern, goes beyond a simple satire. The whole of his ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’ (1808: L47) is a grotesque portrait of a human being, with each element reinforcing the importance of Visionary perception. Jesus sits in the site of the imagination, the expanded cranium. Reading and writing figures serve as the eyes. A bible and stones of law take the place of ears, while a harlot in a red cloak forms the sensuous / sensory-oriented mouth. In keeping with his imagery in



A Vision of the Last Judgment 195

Milton, Blake places a chained seven-headed dragon man in the devouring stomach, the site of devouring energy that craves the material world. There is even a dark anal hole at the bottom of the picture: the home of the damned, who, like Nobodaddy, would reduce this world to the shite they despise by being unable to perceive anything other than material reality. In Blake’s Judgement-being, the ‘left’, physical, ‘sinister’ side of the body has the stone tablets of law and the reading figure, while the ‘right’, inspirational side has the Bible and the writing figure, once more stressing the importance of perceptive creativity in Vision. Just as he delights in puns, parodies and wordplay in his written texts, Blake’s illuminations often contain a sense of the playful, too. As several critics have noticed, he enjoys playing with his source materials. Patrick Noon finds Design 28 for Gray’s The Long Story ‘a jaunty reprise of Rembrandt’s etched “Annunciation of the Shepherds” ’.1 Jon Mee sees the chained figure on plate 12 of the illuminations as a comic comment on Milton’s ‘On Christ’s Nativity’ and Coleridge’s ‘Religious Musings’.2 ‘The Ghost of a Flea’ (L57, c.1819), with its acorn bleeding-cup and dagger of thorn, has fun with contemporary ideas of physiognomy and medicine. Placing the flea in a fairground sideshow setting allows Blake to poke fun at science,3 while making the flea reminiscent of his Goblin illumination to Milton’s L’Allegro reminds us that the body is as wondrous as anything in the fairytale world of Queen Mab. Many readers have noted Blake’s delight in visual puns – for example, his illumination of Young’s Night Thoughts (B375) where the line ‘for blessing wrestle not with heaven’ is illustrated by a real wrestling match, a traditional carnival site for the deflation of pomposity and fixed ideas. Blake was the target of his own jokes, too. The face of Satan in the finished version of ‘Satan Smiting Job’ (1826–7) is different from the face in the original engraving. It has the look of a self-portrait: in a conversation with Crabb Robinson, Blake remarked that all men had to struggle with their own devil.4 Then again, as an artist-creator he was smiting Job every bit as much as Satan had, imposing existence and form and pains, so it is amusingly appropriate he should depict himself in the role. As an artist, too, he had had to sacrifice his commercial self to his Visionary art, to prove the law of revenge for sin was wrong: this self-portrait arguably reappears in ‘The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve’ (1826). Blake’s comic images are often marked by an exuberant and unlikely combination of sources and ideas. A good example of this occurs in The Gates of Paradise, plate 11, ‘Aged Ignorance’. This little vignette shows a bespectacled Urizenic figure with a large pair of scissors trying to clip the wings of a youth who is looking at the sun. As well as having fun by




presenting a proverbial expression – much as Bruegel did in his ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ (1559) – and satirizing the restrictive Urizenic habit of reading the world, Blake is also displaying a comfortable familiarity with the language of contemporary satiric and comic prints. As I mentioned in chapter 2, many readers have found evidence of Blake’s borrowing images from contemporary graphic satire. To give only a few examples, Mee finds in the illuminations to Europe parodic depictions of George III that have their origins in anti-Catholic prints.5 Vincent Carretta finds much of the visual imagery of America to derive from satirical print sources.6 Marcus Wood notes Blake’s use of the scatological print ‘The Birth of Sir Bugaboo’, reworking elements of it in his designs and reproducing it in a doodle in his copy of Bacon’s Essays where, as a chain of excrement seen leading to a king, it reinforces his point that Bacon’s devotion to a purely material view of the universe leads to the evils of oppressive kingship (E624).7 David V. Erdman and others have assessed Blake’s debt to Gillray,8 and it is this caricaturist’s images that underlie ‘Aged Ignorance’. The sharing of images between Blake and Gillray is well noted, but as with the Rabelaisian Judgement, Blake was not just mimicking postures. In Gillray’s ‘The Butchers of Freedom’ (1788), Edmund Burke is shown wearing distinctive round eyeglasses and in ‘The Rights of Man’ (1791) Tom Paine is shown as a tailor with a pair of scissors – Blake’s Aged figure has both. In ‘Westminster School’ (1785) Gillray shows the aged Fox caning young Pitt and their relative positions are repeated in the old and young men in ‘Aged Ignorance’. While it cannot be claimed that the aged figure is either Burke or Paine or Fox, the images would suggest to the contemporary viewer a political and satirical meaning that, by adding religious and proverbial imagery – God clipping an angel’s wings – is given a wider context. Are Burke and Paine, the popular representatives of Monarchist and Republican views both, in their different ways, guilty of misleading the innocent? Has simple binary political opposition failed to ‘see’, like Burke, a new aesthetic vision of society, and is it instead partaking in the old system of the ‘Cloven Fiction’ based on ‘Two Horn’d Reasoning’? Huge eyeglasses were also the property of a Fool: is this picture, with its obvious appeal on behalf of youth, a gibe at aged folly by true foolery?9 Whichever version you adopt, Blake seems to be participating in contemporary satiric language, attempting to appeal to a public whose reading habits were similar to those Gillray both developed and enjoyed while offering a more visionary message. Many satirical prints attacked the mad king, George III, and Blake too seems to join in that tradition, but once again broadening his frame of reference to show the heart of the problem to be a failure of Visionary




perception. ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ (1795, B332) shows the biblical king who, having lost sight of God, is punished for his hubris by a descent into bestial madness. The biblical story should certainly have had a certain resonance for late eighteenth-century English artists, but rather surprisingly Nebuchadnezzar was rarely depicted in the art of the time. For Blake, though, he is valuable not just as an easy comic parallel. He carefully places Nebuchadnezzar in a posture similar to that of the crouching figure with compasses who illustrates There is No Natural Religion, plate b II (E2, B27), accompanying the text ‘He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only’.10 His inability to see God in all things has literally reduced him to a beast, and his tigerish claws suggest this lack of vision is connected to the doctrine of the fearful sublime. At a stroke, Blake has linked visionary and aesthetic failings with the dominion of oppressive kingship. But his picture goes beyond mere flyting. Nebuchadnezzar was one of the traditional comic targets of the Old Testament11 and, like Shakespeare’s King Lear, his grotesque fall from grace and loss of reason leads to the restoration of a wiser humanity. The key to his salvation – wonder at himself as an act of God – is inherent in his portrait. Painted at approximately the same time as ‘Nebuchadnezzar’, another of the Twelve Large Designs, ‘Newton’ (c.1795, B336, V12), has achieved an almost iconic comic status for all those who prefer art, intuition and the human spirit over whatever they perceive as soulless calculation. The picture amuses in a number of different ways. It shows the great scientist folded upon himself in a rather undignified position, almost as if he, too, like Nobodaddy, was on the throne. His muscled back is segmented almost like a reptilian body, giving him a faintly satanic air, linking him with contemporary images of political and biblical temptation, perversion and destruction (compare his torso to that of Blake’s figure of ‘Pestilence’, c.1800–5). Newton’s one visible eye is trained on the diagram on the ground in front of him: this is, literally, the famous Newtonian ‘Single vision’ (E722). Amusingly, the grand scientist of the natural world cannot see what is around him. He appears to sit on a rock, immersed in the waters of material perception. It is an appropriate setting for the man accredited with discovering the ebb and flow of the sea,12 yet what is noticeable is the lack of movement and of life in the picture. The only hint of movement comes from the trailing fronds of a sea anemone which, rather than signs of current, suggest the hairs of a Urizenic beard. Newton’s vision of God is a material image of a fixed deity, and his reading has created a world in its own likeness: void, empty and literally without breath, or inspiration. Newton’s poor read-




ing is emphasized in the garment that falls from his shoulder. It is held down by his left foot (indicating the domination of his material side), forms his writing surface and ends in a scroll. His reading of the world only deals with surface sensations and bodily form, a reading that extends to his own soul (represented by the furled scroll). His clothingbody is the drapery, the ‘portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses’ (E34), but he is unaware of its spiritual possibilities. On his garment, Newton has inscribed a triangle with a part of a circle inside it. He is pointing to the bottom side of the triangle with his right forefinger and measuring it with a pair of golden compasses. Compasses hark back to the moment in Milton’s Paradise Lost when God’s imagination takes on the boundaries of physical form: ‘in His hand / He took the golden compasses . . . to circumscribe / This universe and all created things’ (VII, 225–7). It is a tool that also appears in the hands of Urizen after he has achieved his isolating power of articulation and sets out to impose order on the Other around him: ‘And Urizen . . . formed golden compasses / And began to explore the Abyss’ (The First Book of Urizen, E81). Compasses were a wonderful image for Blake, in that they were traditionally associated with many acts of reading, not only of the mathematical world (Euclid) and the universe (Ptolemy), but also the medical and spiritual sides of human life – a pair of compasses was the colophon of Christopher Plantin, famous and no doubt familiar to Blake from his book of anatomy engravings and his polyglot bible (1582). The presence of the compasses in Newton’s hand suggests that his misreading of the world limits his understanding of many spheres of existence. The most damning of these, of course, is his spiritual blindness, a point emphasized in the shapes made by his hands and the diagram they point towards. Besides the triangle and part of a circle in the diagram, his hands form a line (right forefinger) and part of a square (left fingers and thumb). These shapes were all significant in Masonic imagery. These would have been familiar to Blake thanks to his knowledge of Swedenborg and the Millenarian movement.13 With its doctrine of teaching the secrets of the Immortality and symbolic act of building, Masonry was popular with those who styled themselves as the artisans of the New Jerusalem. These symbolic shapes have various interpretations, but as a rough guide the square can represent the earthly side of humanity, and hence moral behaviour, while the circle is creativity that has yet to take shape. The triangle is the manifest deity and the line is Christ. Newton’s diagram, ignoring Euclid’s proposition that the triangle is formed from the circle, instead places a fragment of the circle within the triangle – he is trying to make creativity subservient to his




idea of an absolute, fixed, exterior God, and only sees part of the picture. He makes this mistake because he imposes his ordered, fixed idea of humanity and materialist morality (his square left hand) on his reading of the world (the compasses). As a result he can only point to one aspect of creation (his right finger on the line) and imagines that the whole. What he sees is merely the span of physical existence, the straight line from birth to death, rather than the crooked line of inspiration that recognizes our eternal existence in God. The joke is heightened by the tomb-like stillness that surrounds him. It contrasts him markedly with us, the moving, breathing, amused observers, embodiments of the comic triumph of life over mathematical limitation. This comic questioning of authority appears in many of Blake’s illuminations. His Notebook 1808–11 couplet ‘To God’ asks God to ‘Go into’ the ‘Circle’ He has created to ‘see how [He] would do’ (E516). This Godin-a-circle is the subject of another of his famous designs, which also includes the imagery of compasses and Masonic designs: the ‘Ancient of Days’ (L75, B167), one of Blake’s favourite images. It appears as the Frontispiece to Europe (1794), apparently illustrating the line in the ‘Preludium’: ‘And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? / To compass it with swaddling bands?’ (E61). Blake’s inspiration for the composition is usually assumed to be Milton’s Paradise Lost: rather typically, though, Blake claimed it simply came to him as a vision hovering at the top of the stairs.14 The picture is dynamic and striking, the small, sharp shafts of sunlight and the flowing hair giving a sense of creative power. But our knowledge of Blake’s other work also leads to the conclusion that this is not the benign God-in-all-humanity but the figure of the tyrannical lawgiver implied by orthodox religion. He is similar to the ratio-bound figure from There Is No Natural Religion. He appears to have his eyes closed. He is using his left arm, suggesting this is the creation of only the material side of the universe. His long and flowing beard reminds us of Urizen and the blind anemone’s tentacles on Newton’s rock. And he, too, is using compasses. An early version of this image – the 1788 pencil drawing provisionally entitled ‘God creating the Universe’ (D6) – does indeed show a God-figure in a pose very similar to that adopted by Newton. As Phillips has pointed out, this figure is itself an adaptation of the frontispiece to the third edition of Hervey’s Meditation among the Tombs. The Ancient of Days is thus pictured as a tyrannical, material-bound lawgiver, associated with the fear of death and surrounded by clouds of ‘reason’ (E31), ‘night’ and ‘war’ (E296). Blake seems to be criticizing the orthodox view of God and associating it with the perils of material thinking and kingship.




But, as with so much of Blake’s work, there seems to be more to the picture than first or even second glance might tell you. Elsewhere in Blake, clouds are associated with ‘wrath’ (E344), ‘despair’ (E69) and ‘obscurity’ (E323), and with its threatening void of darkness and forbidding, windswept look, the picture would seem to conform to Burke’s and Dennis’ idea of the sublime: an angry God, distant and judgmental. But this picture of God is blocking our view of the sun: indeed, it seems to be a mote in the eye of the picture. Is it not possible, the picture seems to ask, that your dethroning of the conventional construct of God is merely the opposite side of such sublime aesthetics? That, in fact, such deconstruction is a sign that you are losing the ability to perceive both His creativity and His humanity? In the 1827 watercolour version of the print, the compasses in God’s hand are less like a mathematical tool and more like a lightning flash, a creative moment. Many contemporary sublime theorists, including Dennis, held up the passage in Genesis, ‘God said, Let there be light, and there was light’ (1: 3) as the most sublime piece of poetry.15 In this version of the watercolour, the effect of the sun on the clouds is of great luminosity, and Blake has even signed his name among them. The picture now seems to suggest that the sublime act of creation is indeed a positive one, despite taking physical shape. The important thing, as always, is how you read it. By reaching out of the circle-sun with one arm, the other hidden from us, God Himself becomes a compass. A compass with one foot in a circle was a Masonic image for the creation of eternity from nothingness, but Blake’s picture implicates us, the viewers, in that process. One arm of that Godcompass reaches down like a plumb line, at the end of which is an unfinished triangle. The plumb line is the Masonic symbol for Christ, and the triangle, the symbol of the manifest Deity, is left unfinished. It is our participation in the divine process that is needed to complete the picture. The essence of the comic is not simply to destabilize, but also to rebuild. Blake may be offering an alternative sublime in the lightning flash of the compass, but the picture also blows a loud and unexpected raspberry at the limitations of fearful aesthetic readings, whether conventional or deconstructive, in a far more positive way. The 1785 print ‘Keep within Compass’, exhorting ‘Industry’ and ‘Prudence’, had shown a pair of compasses with ‘Fear God’ written on them. In order to disrupt this idea of a fearful God, Blake is using a deliberately comic image. Voltaire had poked fun at the image of ‘God and his compass’ in Candide. ‘God encompasses’ was also a proverbial expression and its corruption ‘Goat and Compasses’ was used as the name of a public house.16




There is a record of a ‘Goat and Compasses’ pub in Fitzroy St, Soho (and therefore not far from the Blake family home) as early as 1834: the pub had been on that site since at least the 1770s. Suppose this picture, then, is actually a pub sign, like one of those gloriously simple and bold designs that can be seen in the 1716 print May Fair or J. F. Setchel’s 1721 illustration of ‘Bartholomew Fair’.17 It may seem far-fetched, but as we have seen, ‘The Little Vagabond’ of Songs of Experience, also begun about 1793, makes a direct comparison between God and a publican. In the song, what was important was to read the image of God in a carnival fashion. To see the Ancient of Days as a goat is to see God as a sign of lusty vitality, part of a Rabelaisian world of robust goodwill. It also links Him to Silenus, the satyr-god of comedy, a figure Blake associated with Chaucer’s publican ‘Host’ (E536). As a goat, too, He becomes allied to all of humanity, becoming, like us, a ‘Sinful Man’ who must learn to follow Christ (E40).18 A Foolish reading of ‘Ancient of Days’ has, literally, turned it into a sign that changes with our reading. It has shown us God creating the universe; offered and questioned the satirical image of GodUrizen; highlighted the perils of our sublime aesthetics and material bound vision of the universe; pointed to a carnival redemption in joyful humanity and, finally, reminded us to climb out of our ivory tower and go down the pub, all without losing the grandeur of the original design.

‘No man if hee be sober daunceth, except hee be mad’ Elsewhere in Blake’s work compasses become a positive image when placed in the hands of Foolish, carnival figures: the dancing figure of the poet Los in Jerusalem, plate 100 (B579), for example, or Christ the artisan in ‘Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop’ (c.1803–5). Fools and carnival imagery are present in many of his illuminations, repeatedly associated with Vision and faith. An obvious example is in his illustrations to Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Pensoroso. These two poems, the first praising Mirth, the other Melancholy, each dismissive of the other, are almost a pattern for the mirrored questioning of the Songs. Certainly Blake borrowed a number of lines and images from both. Il Penseroso describes the Moon as being ‘Like one that had been led astray / Through the heaven’s wide pathless way’ (ll.69–70), a description applied to the little girls lost in An Island’s ‘Leave, O leave me to my sorrows’ and both Innocence and Experience. Its mention of the four ‘demons that are found / In fire, air, flood or under ground’ also suggests the four figures of plates 2–5 of The Gates of Paradise. Lines from L’Allegro are echoed by ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, ‘Hail Matrimony’, ‘The School Boy’ and ‘The Ecchoing Green’. Between




1816 and 1820 Blake produced a series of twelve illustrations of the two poems for his patron Thomas Butts,19 and what is immediately noticeable is the positive, Visionary connotations of the L’Allegro illuminations and the repressive, unenlightened associations of those to Il Penseroso. The figure of ‘Mirth’ (B601a/b, L54), for example, is an energetic dancing figure, standing in front of a glorious sunrise with her golden hair forming a near halo. She is standing on her right (inspirational) foot, her right hand touching fingers with the figure of ‘Sweet Liberty’ (armed with arrows, weapons of ‘thought’, E180 and ‘desire’, E95). Her left hand is reaching up to dancing and musical figures usually associated with Christ in His glory (as can be seen in ‘An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man’, c.1811 or the last plate of Job, B646), suggesting she embodies a physical approach to spirituality. At her right side dances a shepherd who has been identified as Shakespeare and bears a passing resemblance to the adult figure in the frontispieces of the Songs. Above him the figure of ‘wrinkled Care’ is being derided by ‘Sport’ who has the appearance of a nymph-angel. On Mirth’s left dances a shepherdess and figures of the coarser manifestations of comedy – ‘Laughter holding both his Sides’, a figure like the lustful Wife of Bath (B477), a winged female grotesque and a Fool with asses ears – who also point upwards towards the dancing musicians of divine insight. Next to the musicians are three globes, like the lights of a fairground booth: this is indeed comic vision. In contrast, ‘Melancholy’ (L55) is a grey nun, stepping on her left (materialist) foot with her palms turned downward to show her concentration on the physical world. She is surrounded by figures that display various attributes of orthodox, repressive religion: arms crossed as if in death; fiery sacrificial altars; stillness and obedience. On her left Cynthia flies across the sky in a crescent moon drawn by two dragons, while on her right a bowed grey figure in a cloud bends in pain towards a beseeching nymph. Where Milton had found in Melancholy the inspiration for ‘something like prophetic strain’, Blake seems to indicate that such prophecy will be limited to this world. Other illustrations from this series continue the connection between mirth and Vision. ‘The Sun at his Eastern Gate’ shows a youthful figure standing on his left (materialist) foot on a mountain and in the landscape beneath him stand two oak trees, each containing an upwards looking nymph: the sun has a physical existence that must be read carefully. Nevertheless, latent in the physical image is a potential vision of the spiritual sun, and this is presented by Blake as being full of carnival figures who play trumpets, dance and bring food and drink. Musicians




and chalice bearers also attend on Christ in ‘Angels ministering to Christ’ (Paradise Regained, 1816–18): carnival is directly linked to union with Christ. The spiritual sun is also present in ‘L’Allegro VI: The Youthful Poet’s Dream’ (V28). Again, it is flanked by figures associated with the comic (Jonson and Shakespeare) and contains more dancing musicians associated with spiritual insight. In the landscape at the bottom of ‘The Sun at his Eastern Gate’ stand two oak trees, each containing an upwards looking nymph, which again suggests the need to read the scene imaginatively. A figure in a tree also appears in ‘A Sunshine holiday’, mentioned in the last chapter. This tree-dweller looks like the portrait of Christ in ‘The Baptism of Christ’ (also c.1816–20) and he points up to heaven where two angels sound their trumpets to signify a ‘sunshine holyday’. Next to the oak, Blake has chosen to depict Milton’s rather general images of youths dancing and ‘a-Maying’ specifically as the carnival event of a dance around a Maypole. On the mountain above these jovial figures rest Bacchus and Venus, reinforcing the idea that insight can come from an ‘improvement of sensual enjoyment’ through participation in such festive occasions. This series of illuminations portrays mirth and faith as closely interwoven, and this idea is repeated in other of Blake’s designs – sometimes in quite unexpected ways. As I mentioned earlier, Blake inscribed the line engraving version of ‘Mirth’ with a quotation from Ecclesiastes: ‘Solomon says Vanity of Vanities all is Vanity & what can be Foolisher than this’. Solomon was mentioned in Blake’s letter to Dr Trusler as one of the wisest of the Ancients, but he is also listed in Milton as one of the ‘Dragon Forms / Religion hid in War’ (E138). Ecclesiastes calls mirth ‘vanity’ and finds no difference between wisdom and foolishness as both would come to nothing in death. Blake, however, knew that Foolishness was a way of exposing the vanity of worldly presumption as a necessary prelude to Vision. It could also offer an escape from the grave by faith. This idea is represented, appropriately, in his depiction of the ‘Vanity Fair’ episode of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which contains one of Blake’s very few depictions of stereotypical Fool-figures. In Bunyan’s tale, Christian and Faithful have to pass through the temptations of Vanity Fair on their way to the Celestial City. Vanity Fair is a market of earthly distractions, where traders come to sell ‘houses, lands, titles, preferments . . . lusts [and] pleasures’. In their refusal to buy anything at the Fair, Christian and Faithful follow the example of Christ, but their behaviour angers the traders, who have them thrown into chains. They are mocked, but their patience converts some of the




onlookers to their side and a struggle ensues. Blake’s illumination shows this moment of mockery. Christian and Faithful stand in the background, high up on a dais, chained to a cross. In front of them dance two fools, one in motley and the other a Harlequin, while at the sides stand women with masks. The first interesting thing to note about this illumination is that while Bunyan merely describes a fair, Blake chooses to present us with maskers and fools. He is making what Bakhtin would come to see as the classic connection between the marketplace, the fair and carnival activity. He is also making the role of the Fool a central one. By doing so, of course, he seems only to be making the point so beloved of many recent critics, that carnival is nothing more than a licenced festival of spite marked by the bitter satire of victimization and disparagement. However, while Bunyan’s description of Vanity Fair reads like many anti-carnival tracts, complaining of ‘jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves and rogues’, he also reminds us that this Devil’s Fair is not a true carnival, as it is kept all year round. It is an act of folly rather than foolery, divorced from the religious calendar and positive spiritual resonance. To point this up, the women in Blake’s illumination are carrying their masks, not wearing them: this is a sham that has sought to borrow festive clothing. Bunyan contrasts such false ‘mocking’ (a term Blake often uses of the enemies of Vision, such as Reynolds, for example, E638) with the true foolishness of Christian faith. Christian and Faithful are explicitly called ‘fools’, ‘bedlams’ and ‘outlandish men’ by the traders and, like Christ, they are on the receiving end of the kind of ritual drubbing suffered by the carnival Fool (and often symbolically dished out to the crowd so that they might share in his carnival personality and experience): beating and bedaubing, a mock trial and, in the case of Faithful, a martyrdom.20 In Blake’s version, Christian and Faithful are the focal point of the illumination; the eye is always led towards them. As Christ was, they stand flanked by two other crosses: theirs is the true folly of faith. The dichotomous reaction of Bunyan’s traders is also represented here. The Harlequin, in an uncomfortable posture and with a reptilian look to his face that makes him unattractive to the viewer, twists away from Christian and the cross to which he is chained: he is, in Blake’s terms, a knave. The (native, British) motley Fool, however, is facing Christian in a manner that is almost a supplication. His participation in carnival has the potential to lead him to a new understanding of patience, tolerance and faith. Here, in a compressed form, is Blake’s idea of the comic: the satiric separation of humanity into fools and knaves; the earthly fool who challenges our interpretation of the world and looks towards the Christian




way of life; the Christian foolery of faith. As a symbol of faith, the Fool offered an alternative iconography to the image of crucifixion, which Blake criticized for its negative connotations. In a note jotted at the end of ‘Night the Fourth’ in the Four Zoas, Blake notes that ‘Christs Crucifixi[on] shall be made an Excuse for Executing Criminals’ (E697) and in an addition to his Descriptive Catalogue referring to his 1810 ink drawing of the ‘Last Judgment’ he remarks that Satan, Time, Death and the Cross are all linked and will all fall into the Abyss together (E556). Christ crucified is the subject of Jerusalem, plate 76 (B555, L35), interestingly just after the mention of Solomon the ‘Dragon form’ who dismissed the value of mirth. Christ, a radiant light coming from his head, hangs on an oak tree while the figure of Albion stands, arms outstretched, before him. In the background, the first glimmers of a new dawn appear. The text of plate 77 contains many of the terms and images related to the comic that we have encountered so far. It emphasizes the importance of the ‘Divine Harvest’, ‘the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination’ and the importance of celebrating the ‘Mental gifts’ of all humanity to defeat the ‘Hypocri[sy]’ of the ‘devouring sword’ of ‘Natural Religion’. It exalts the reader to remember that ‘Jesus is the bright Preacher of Life’, to ‘Heal . . . the sick of spiritual disease’ and to ‘Teach’ ‘Publicans & Harlots . . . True Happiness’. Blake’s Christ hangs on an oak tree, which can be both a place of carnival and a tree of mystery. Christ’s crucifixion, Blake implies, must be read comically as a symbol of life, not death. The light from Christ’s head is illuminating the acorns, those emblems of a creative reading found in the Songs and ‘Adam Naming the Beasts’. There is a strong indication, then, that Albion, who is shown in a position reminiscent of that adopted by the motley Fool in Vanity Fair, is starting to make the creative reading knowledge of the Divine Humanity requires. In this picture Albion is standing with his back turned to us, but his posture is almost identical to that he adopts in ‘The Dance of Albion’ (a print that exists in two versions, one engraved, marked ‘WB inv 1780’ and a watercolour usually dated 1794–6 – B400, L10). This figure has been likened to that of Mirth 21 and is one of the boldest and most attractive of Blake’s fools, standing arms open to receive us all. Several inspirations for the proud, naked figure have been put forward. Clark proposes the original to be Scamozzi’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ (1615), ‘a Renaissance diagram of a geometricised figure’,22 while Blunt points to illustrations of a bronze faun Blake seems to have copied from De’ Bronzi Ercolano (1767–71). Both of these may be possible; indeed the design may deliberately be alluding to several sources at once. What is most significant




about this joyful image, however, is that while no doubt representing Humanity finding its place in the universe, it also shows us, as an alternative to a crucifixion, a man dancing. The second state of the engraved version is inscribed ‘Albion rose from where he labour’d at the Mill with Slaves: / Giving himself to the Nations he danc’d the dance of Eternal Death’. Although we should remember Blake’s great friend Fuseli disparaged artists who allowed their ‘expression [to be] dictated by the theatre’, the art of the period – especially the comic art – frequently copied stage positions.23 Darly’s Comic Prints of 1776 is dedicated to David Garrick and full of macaronies and foolish figures. Blake’s audience would have recognized Albion as being in a very theatrical, comic pose. And while we should also remember that ‘identity of body positions is not by itself sufficient ground for assuming identity of meaning’,24 there is nevertheless agreement among art historians that certain ‘pathos formulae’ or body positions were accepted as being suitable to convey ‘a definable range of mental and emotional states’.25 It is possible, then, that in Albion’s joyful stance Blake is deliberately presenting us with a dancing Fool. Fools have been shown as dancing throughout their history. Even the Roman bronze faun, proposed as the model for Albion is, with its tail and staff, a satyr or comic figure.26 Contemporary antiquarian research had re-emphasized this Terpsichorean habit, whether of the domestic, household fool (Douce cites Lodge’s Wits Miserie of 1599 describing a fool dancing about the house and leaping over tables)27 or the cavorting prelate of a religious festival (such as mentioned by Lydgate).28 Douce even provides a picture of such a spring-heeled Fool which looks very much like the figure of Albion in reverse.29 With slight variations, similar pictures of dancing fools had appeared everywhere from medieval Books of Hours and the famous front page illustration of ‘Kemp’s Jig’ in Kemps nine daies wonder (1600) to stagecraft teaching manuals like Green’s Clown Positions (1812). The dancing fool appeared in many eighteenth-century comic prints, such as ‘The Favourite Comic Dance’ or ‘The Covent Garden Pantomime’ (both 1784). It often represented a triumph over adversity, whether that be duping a credulous public in ‘Oh Qui Goose-Toe’ (1781),30 or defeating a political rival, like the ‘Royal Champion of his Country’ does in ‘The Jack Boot kick’d down or English WILL Triumphant’ (a print included in Darly’s Political and Satirical History). The effect was cheerful: the dancing Fool was an Everyman figure of life and laughter, such as the Jack Pudding sailor in Lambranzi’s New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing, who performs a cabriole in a suit covered in spoons.31 In Blake’s version, Albion is also an Everyman, both politically and spiritually. As a dancing clown, he is a




symbol of the people, one of the ‘slaves’ who has laboured at the ‘Mill’ but broken free. Douce’s dissertation notes that the Morris was ‘the recreation . . . of the common people’,32 and certainly in Revolutionary France Arlequin and Polichinelle were often used as representatives of ‘the People’ fighting back at oppressive authority.33 Blake could certainly have seen Morris dancers: the Abingdon Morris danced at Richmond in 1783.34 His Albion is a vigorous expression of the senses, defying cold restraint and the curb of reason, a comic refutation of Stubbes’ dour puritanical warning in his Anatomy of Abuses that ‘No man if hee be sober daunceth, except hee be mad’. 35 Once again, this is more than just a political freedom. Now, with his flamelike hair, Albion is a creature of the sun of inspiration, like the biblical David, dancing naked before the ark of the Lord (II Samuel 6: 5, 21).36 This, Blake points out, is a dance of Death, an event that formed part of a long comic tradition of rejecting the vanity of the world. This tradition could have reached Blake in a number of ways. His good friend Fuseli was certainly aware of it, thanks to his editorship of Pilkingtons’ A Dictionary of Painters (1810) and it was a popular subject of antiquarian investigation.37 It held particular fascination for Douce, who collected many examples of it and made two striking observations in his commentaries upon them. The first is that Death often played the role of the Fool: he was a grotesque satirist and witty burlesque hero. Douce also points out that these dances were not always merely representational. The literary and pictorial forms developed from actual dances that took place in churchyards as a kind of spiritual masquerade for the common people. Douce associates these with other, more obvious carnival festivals, like the election of the boy-bishop and the feast of fools, and suggests that their purpose was twofold: to remind the dancers of the vanity of their ambitions and to show them that they had nothing to fear in ‘the passage from death to another state of existence’.38 Even stories of punishments visited on those who continued the dance, despite the fact that such carnival activity had come to be frowned upon by the orthodox church, carry this sense of a passage to divine grace. One set of participants in a ‘forbidden’ dance, Douce reports, having been cursed by the local priest suffered St Vitus’ Dance and could not leave off their cavorting for a year. When they finally did stop, they slept for three days and, on awaking, some, like Christ, ascended to heaven, while others, like His disciples, were forced to go their separate ways across the face of the earth. Albion’s dance, likewise, is a foolish triumph over Eternal Death, that realm ‘Remote from the divine Vision [of our] Lord and Saviour’ (E168).




Eternal Death is more than just physical non-existence; it is the assumption that physical death, the end of consciousness as we know it, means the end of our spiritual selves as well. This is a delusion created in the Mill of rationality that ‘seem[s] every thing’ (E98) but is not; a material vision of existence woven for us by the ‘Loom of Locke’ and the ‘Waterwheels of Newton’ (E159). In the engraved version of the design, Albion seems to triumph over the limitations of mortal existence: the moth and worm at his feet are retreating from him. These creatures make many appearances in Blake’s work and their effect is, of course, compound rather than singular, but Albion’s dominant position over them suggests freedom from the limitations of a physical life cycle (the worm) and from the holy ‘Mystery’ (E27) of the established church (the moth). It is possible that Blake later thought that this was rather overgilding the lily, for the moth and worm are not present in the watercolour version, and all we are left with is Albion’s joyous ascendancy. Albion’s act of dancing free of selfhood is echoed in plates 40–42 of Milton (E141–3) after Milton’s emanation, Ololon, has asked about the ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ of ‘Natural Religion’. That Natural Religion brings a loss of Vision is indicated by the images that follow: the physical sun and the Dragon Form of ‘Religion hidden in War’. Milton’s reply, ‘the Words of the Inspired Man’, is that to regain Vision the ‘Negation [or] Reasoning Power in Man’ must be ‘cast off . . . by Faith in the Saviour’. Blake depicts this as the casting off of the ‘rotten rags of Memory’ and a rejection of all those things against which he has pitted the comic: the hypocrisy of artists who draw ‘Natures Images . . . from Remembrance’, the governments who ‘creep . . . like a caterpillar to destroy’, the ‘idiot Questioner who is always questioning / But never capable of answering’ and those who cast ‘aspersions of Madness’. The result is that Milton’s Humanity and his seven angels become ‘One Man, Jesus the Saviour’, wearing a garment ‘dipped in blood’ on which is written ‘the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression’. The Vision of Christ is achieved by a creative reading that Blake depicts as a comic dance. Interestingly, in this passage Ololon’s acceptance of Milton’s words prompts her to go into the ‘Void Outside of Existence, which if enterd into / Becomes a Womb’. The tomb as a womb is a transformation often found in the carnivalesque, and it reappears in Blake’s representations of Cain and Abel. In the painting ‘The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve’ (1809, reworked 1826, L73), the body of Abel lies on the ground, head to the right. Eve kneels behind him, bent over in grief; her hair trailing across his body, her arms making a wide circle that encompasses Abel’s head. Behind her kneels Adam, his gaze directed at Cain. Cain,




his face towards us and the mark of the Lord (Genesis 4: 15) just visible on his forehead, is shown fleeing headlong to our left. Behind him, in the centre of the composition, is a dull red sun, surrounded by flames that seem to come from Cain’s body. Above him a dark limb of cloud, similar to that found in the ‘Ancient of Days’, stretches as if to encompass him. The murder of Abel was a popular subject for artists who wished to convey the idea of divine retribution against evil. In Blake’s version, however, Cain becomes a Byronic hero challenging repressive authority. In his description of the Rosenwald ‘Last Judgment’, Blake associates Abel with the ‘Churches . . . of blood & fire & vapour of smoke’ (E556) who preach the doctrine of vengeance, rather than forgiveness, for sin. In his later The Ghost of Abel (1822) Blake has the character of Abel call for a sacrificial ‘Life for Life’ (E271). His bloodthirsty demand is contrasted with the attitude of Adam and Eve who, although initially dismayed at the sight of death, mistaking it for an absolute end (‘Is this the Promise of Jehovah? O, it is all a vain delusion, / This Death & this Life & this Jehovah’), come to see it as a fact of mortal existence (‘We shall also Die a Death’) and learn to trust their imaginative ‘Spiritual Vision’ that sees something beyond death: ‘were it not better to believe in Vision / With all our might & strength, tho’ we are fallen & lost?’. They come to realize that Death establishes a ‘Brotherhood’ among humanity and because Christ partakes of it, it allows for the possibility of God’s forgiveness of our sins. Abel, in calling for vengeance, remains trapped in the cycle of physical existence and orthodox religion. Cain, although a sinner, has created the possibility of forgiveness and exposed the fiction that God is a vengeful father. In the 1826 watercolour, Abel’s connection with death is accentuated by Eve’s hair trailing across his body and the circle of her arms around him. Eve had prominently played with her hair in ‘Eve listening to the birds’, a picture that stressed the dangers of a limited reading of the world. Here, Adam, Eve and Abel all seem to be one body, limited in death. However, although it is Abel who has died, it is Cain who seems to be leaving the grave. His long right leg is shown stretching back toward the grave he has dug for Abel, his toes hovering above it, giving the impression he is climbing out of the ground. This impression is even stronger in the 1808 drawing Blake made of this subject (D47), where Cain is the central figure and the whole of his right foot is below ground level. The grave is a comic emblem of rebirth:39 Cain’s act of murder has led to his birth into a new moral universe. At the end of The Ghost of Abel, Abel becomes Satan and Cain a progenitor of Jesus.




The ground from which Cain escapes is very similar to the colour of the rock upon which Newton sits. Vengeance, repression, materialistic vision and kingship are all linked in Blake’s thinking. Intriguingly, the figure of Cain seems to be the mirror image of the figure of Fox in Sayer’s ‘A Transfer of East India Stock’ (1783), where Fox is challenging the authority of the King. By borrowing the satiric image Blake is perhaps suggesting the best way to offer an alternative to kingship is to unite political opposition with spiritual insight. That the figure of Cain should be read with such creative insight is suggested both by the flames that surround his head (linking him to the sun) and by the clouds above him. In his description of the Rosenwald ‘Last Judgment’ Blake states that Abel is kneeling on a ‘bloody Cloud’ (E556), so the cumulus above Cain could be the Elohim’s vengeance stretching out to overtake him. But the shape and relative positions of both the cloud and Cain’s body suggest the Spirit and Pegasus in ‘A Spirit vaulting’ (1809). In his A Descriptive Catalogue Blake calls Pegasus the ‘Horse of Intellect leaping from . . . the Barren Waste of Locke and Newton’ (E546). When Pegasus stamped on the ground the Hippocrene Fountain flowed and anyone who drank its waters would be inspired to write poetry.40 Cain is thus being identified with the ‘Forgiveness of Sins’ (E688), the inspiration of poetry and the comic, all in one dense image that revisions the orthodox reading of the Bible. ‘A Spirit vaulting’ may in itself be a comic comment on Burke’s concept of the sublime. In his A Philosophical Enquiry Burke had stated that the sublime rose from ‘whatever is fitted . . . to excite the ideas of pain, and danger’ (section VII) or in ‘a richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is . . . dazzled’ (section XIII). As an example of the latter he quotes Shakespeare’s I Henry IV (IV.i.97–109), the passage that Blake acknowledges as the inspiration for his picture. In it, Henry is described as being ‘full of spirit as the month of May / And gorgeous as the sun in Midsummer’. In a manner reminiscent of his King Edward the Third, Blake is reclaiming carnival, festive imagery from a fearful sublime description of a king and returning it to an act of Vision or creative reading: in his ‘A Spirit vaulting’ at the top of the picture is a female figure reading a book. Many of the comic images we have found in Blake’s designs so far come together in his illuminations to the Book of Job. His decision to illustrate The Canterbury Tales, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Divine Comedy, and Job indicates an enduring interest in the grand comic panorama of life, and the first and last plates of Job show his use of carnival imagery to indicate a spiritual regeneration. The first plate (B626) finds Job and




his family beneath an oak, a site of carnival, but instead of behaving in a festive manner, they are kneeling in prayer. In the background to their right is a Gothic church with the sun setting behind it: Job is not practicing true spiritual insight, but merely following the word of orthodox religious law. Beneath him Blake has marked the words ‘The letter killeth / The Spirit giveth Life’ (II Corinthians 3: 6), indicating that this is a failure of reading. After his many trials, which include a picture of Job again sitting under an oak, flanked by the pillars of the Druidical, mistaken church (plate 4, B629), Job eventually learns to read correctly (‘my Eye seeth thee’, plate 17, B642) and achieves spiritual enlightenment. This is shown in the final image of Job and his Wife restored to prosperity (plate 21, B646). There, the sun has arisen (a neat pun on Christ’s resurrection) and all Job’s family play musical instruments under the oak in a true carnival. In the 1821 watercolour version of this plate, the sun has ‘Great & Marvellous are thy Works Lord’ written within it, to emphasize that Vision has been achieved. There are other hints of comic imagery in Blake’s work. In the first plate of Job the family are seen reading books: in the final plate these have been turned into scrolls. A scroll opened by an angel in front of the sun floats over the top of ‘Death on a Pale Horse’ (c.1800, L31). This illumination is normally taken to be Blake’s depiction of Revelations 6: 7–8. However, while the feathers around the sun (suggesting birds and hence the material world) and the reptilian figure on a dark horse at the bottom of the picture indicate that this horseman brings death to the physical self, Blake’s figure of Death is sitting on a horse very much like Pegasus. He is also leaping from flames, and flames surrounded the reborn Cain. Physical death is merely the putting off of these ‘Vegetable Mortal Bodies’ so that we can inhabit our ‘Eternal or Imaginative Bodies’ (E231), a rejection of ‘Error & [an] Embrac[ing of]Truth [so that] a Last Judgment passes upon’ us (E562). While Death may be pointing with his left (material) hand, his right (inspirational, spiritual) side is the one that clutches the ‘Sword’ of ‘Mental Fight’ (E95). What might have been an image of terror is in fact an image of regeneration and Douce notes that Death on a pale horse was a particular feature of the comic dance of Death.41 Douce also mentions the conflict of the larvae and lemures, or good and evil shadows of death, as a significant feature of the dance42 and it is tempting to think these appear in the form of the Good and Evil Angels struggling for possession of a child (in The Marriage, B85, and two later watercolour versions, L8, T252). The 1795 version of this picture is part of the group of twelve large colour prints, including ‘Nebuchadnezzar’




and ‘Newton’, which Blake offered together as a series, suggesting that, although ‘unaccompanied by any writing’ (E771), they form a narrative scheme of creation, error, judgement and redemption. Alongside the portraits of the King and the Scientist, the series contains other comic images. Two of the more unusual can be found in the print formerly known as ‘Hecate’ (B334). Here, a female figure reads from a book similar to Urizen’s: she is reading Nature with a materialist vision that will miss its spiritual essence. That this is a woman, in Blake’s iconography, increases the sense that this reader is concerned with their physical and material aspect. Above her flies a bat, similar to the floating face identified in the satiric print ‘The Times’ (1768) as ‘a venal lawyer’: the suggestion being, if Blake intended it, that such misreading begets law. Behind her are two figures that, from their colouring, could be the Good and Evil angels or Pity and Newton. If the former, then their downcast, faceless presence behind the woman reader suggest her misreading is a ‘Negation’ that seeks to destroy the ‘Contraries’ (E142) ‘necessary to Human existence’ (E34). If the figures are Pity and Newton, it suggests the fracturing of the human soul under the pressures of materialist thought. To the left of the picture is a rock similar to that on which Newton sits, and out of it emerges a toad, which, in Blake’s illumination ‘Adam and Eve Asleep’ (1808), represents Satan. On the rock, too, sits an owl. In Blake’s iconography, the owl is the opposite of the eagle (‘a portion of Genius’ E37). While eagles are associated with visionary perception – grasping the serpent of Nature – owls are associated with mistaken perception and the fright of the ‘Unbeliever’ (E490). In plate 11 of Job (B635) eagle and owl stand either side of a passage which questions whether humanity is anything more than a mortal existence. In the spiritual field, her misreading has produced the doctrine of vengeance for sin and the folly of unbelief. The woman’s gaze, though, is directed at the prominent ass, grazing contentedly on the left of the picture. The title now given to this painting, ‘The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy’, comes from Europe plate 8 (5), illustrating, it is argued, ‘Enitharmon’s dream’ of the domination of the doctrine that ‘Womans love is Sin!’ (E62) and hence the repression of humanity. However, it is not Blake’s title, and despite good arguments for the attribution there is nothing in Europe that corresponds easily with the bat, toad, owl and ass. Given the importance Blake places on visionary reading, is it not possible that this ‘wild Ass’ is a reminder of Bottom and the magical transformations of the comic? Bottom’s recounting of his dream is in itself a parody of I Corinthians 2: 9: ‘But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath




prepared for them that love him.’ Paul claims this ‘hidden wisdom of God’ is something ‘none of the princes of this world’ know; had we known it, we should not have crucified Christ. Bottom’s jumbled statement asserts that we can know such love, but only dimly, through a fairy dream. The presence of the ass in Blake’s painting reminds us that such a Vision is possible, despite our inherently materialist nature, if we re-read the world comically. This chapter has focused on only a few examples of Blake’s illuminations, but has endeavoured to show that a potentially comic reading can lie behind even the sternest of images. Noon notes that, in his picture of Christ giving sight to Bartimaeus, Blake has made Bartimaeus look like Newton arising from his slumbers on the rock.43 Blake’s graphic work is another way of approaching Vision, another form of inspiration that seeks to avoid doctrine and appeal to the lively, spiritual and imaginative side of his readers.




And to conclude: A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees

The Angel that presided oer my birth Said Little creature formd of Joy & Mirth Go love without the help of any King on Earth (E502) In this study of the early work of William Blake, I have tried to show how the comic formed an integral part of Blake’s concept of Vision. It was, for him, a poetics of reading that was both an artistic and social practice. By participating in the contemporary use of satiric imagery and style, Blake was able to demystify political, religious and social authority. By using puns, wordplay and absurd humour he tried to disrupt the sense that language conveys a material reality (in the sense of a set of rules and laws external to the self) and to reinforce the importance of the reader in creating meaning. He saw the comic as a way of distinguishing between the wise Foolishness of faith and the hypocrisy of the Knave who sought to usurp the Fool’s attributes to his own ends. Thus it was a way for him to challenge the dominant culture’s attempt to absorb the traditional carnivalesque into the language of orthodox morality, the ‘allowed’ rebellion that restricted freedom of expression. His humorous world also reflected and challenged contemporary debate on the nature of comedy and the production of a sublime aesthetic, replacing the fear / beauty / obscurity paradigm with a ridiculous and essentially human alternative. Perhaps most importantly of all he adopted contemporary, Shakespearean and antiquarian carnivalesque imagery and practice into his work as a way of presenting an imaginative, empathetic and playful reading of texts, a sensual enjoyment that could lead to spiritual understanding. Much eighteenth-century comic fiction is concerned with the conflict between 215



8

self-consciousness and society.1 Blake’s use of carnival imagery is a challenge to the increasing inwardness and separation implicit in the work of Bacon, Newton, Locke, Hume, Hobbes and Descartes. It leads us, jokingly, back to the Divine Humanity. It is perhaps this overarching spiritual intention, as much as his participation in comic style, that marks Blake’s work as being profoundly comic. The modern reader and critic tends to value the comic, especially in its more overt forms of caricature and satire, as significant only for what it can tell us about the political life of the period in which it was made.2 Eighteenth-century jokes about swine, for example, prompt us to think of Paine’s Rights of Man and Gillray’s cartoons, of the French Revolutionary Army and the plight of the British underclass. When Blake lays himself down with the swine, however, he is turning away from the political dialectic of repression and revolution. In his song ‘I saw a chapel all of gold’ (E467), a snake breaks down the prohibitive doors of the chapel of ‘Thou Shalt Not’ with furious sexual energy, but ends up vomiting poison on the ‘bread and wine’ of communion. A snake in Blake’s work is often associated with a materialist understanding of the world: the song suggests that physical revolution, while a step in the right direction, is in danger of destroying our sense of Divine Humanity just as surely as Urizenic Law does. Blake’s reaction, to turn away to ‘the swine’, is to ally himself with the political underclass, those deemed mad and unclean by polite society, in a far more comprehensive way. He is voluntarily making himself a carnival sacrifice to encourage a wider understanding of Divine Humanity. In a passage of The Everlasting Gospel (E518), Blake makes explicit reference to the biblical story of Christ casting out evil spirits into swine (Mark 5: 1–20) and commenting on the cleanliness of all foods (Mark 7: 14–23). Noting that Jesus ‘mocked’ the idea of restrictive law, Blake translates Christ’s casting out devils as a carnival act of freedom and providing a feast. In becoming a pig, Blake is part of that carnival process, finding faith in madness, food in the unclean. He does so while aware that to take on the status of a pig is to be subject to discrimination and aggression by the dominant culture (‘Since which a Pig has got a look / That for a Jew may be mistook’). To do so is, again, to adopt the position of Christ himself. For Blake, becoming the lowest is another way of promoting his alternative reading of the Bible, his comic ‘Vision’ of the world: ‘The Vision of Christ that thou dost see / Is my Visions Greatest Enemy . . . / Both read the Bible day & night / But thou readst black where I read white’ (E524). To participate in the comic was to promote a vision of Christ: indeed, this was the purpose of art itself:




Christianity is Art . . . The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art . . . Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists . . . ART is the Tree of LIFE . . . Prayer is the Study of Art / Praise is the Practise of Art . . . A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. (E274) For Blake, then, art and literature are in themselves comic activities: humanist, creative, acts of praise and faith, the vision of Everyone and all Humanity. In this study I have concentrated on Blake’s early work, but even a brief survey of his later prophetic books will show that the comic imagery becomes a shorthand for a vision of the Divine Humanity. For example, The Marriage is often claimed to be one of Blake’s clearest statements of Visionary practice, and it is full of satire, parody and carnival reversals. It is a humorous blow against written and historical authority, including sources as different as the Bible and the work of Paine. Frye speaks of Blake’s using The Marriage to laugh at the work of Emmanuel Swedenborg with ‘rowdy guffaws’.3 Martin Nurmi praises his use of ‘the infernal corrosives of irony’ and ‘audacious philosophical satire’ and calls the fourth ‘Memorable Fancy’ ‘one of the most astonishing satirical performances in English literature’.4 Besides Paine and Swedenborg, The Marriage parodies a wide range of sources, many of them comic in themselves, including the works of Boehme, Locke and Hobbes, traveller’s tales, More’s Utopia, Pilgrims’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Chaucer’s House of Fame,5 the temptation of Christ, the books of Isaiah and Proverbs, Matthew’s gospel and Joseph Andrews.6 It is, in many ways, a reworking of An Island, a comic education in Vision. The foolish narrator takes us on a journey to another world through a landscape that resembles the mechanics of a fairground attraction. On the way he celebrates the possibilities of Vision, the importance of energy and fertility, notes the difference between ‘fools’ and ‘knaves’ and champions life over the ‘bones’ of law. Above all he celebrates a human-based sublime that delights in the ‘enjoyments of Genius’ which to the orthodox seem the torments of ‘insanity’. Throughout, The Marriage employs comic and carnival imagery, especially when they are connected to religious enlightenment: creative devils, corrosive medicine, wrestling matches, eating dung. Wrestling was not only a popular pastime: Brand, in his Observations on Popular Antiquities, had made its biblical connections explicit, discussing Jacob’s comic wrestling for a blessing in Genesis 32.7 The ‘Proverbs of Hell’ remind us to ‘Drive [our] cart and [our] plow over the bones of the dead’



And to conclude 217

(E35). Plows and carts were both central features of carnival festivals, especially related to those celebrating the birth of a new year.8 The mill was the traditional carnival site for the defeat of earthly kings: Blake’s narrator overcomes the opposition of his opponent, a rational angel, there.9 The Marriage even manages to make the distinction between satire and the carnivalesque. One of the most comic episodes in the book is in the penultimate ‘Memorable Fancy’, when the narrator and angel present each other with a vision of their ‘fate’ – the end to which their reading of the world is leading them. The angel tries to show the fool-narrator his fate first, and what they see is an abyss from which arises a monstrous Leviathan with tiger-stripes on its forehead. That it is the angel’s reading of the world that produces such a hideous vision is hinted at when Blake notes that the monster comes from ‘between the black & white’ (of writing and law). The vision bears the hallmarks of the fearful sublime: it comes out of chaos, it has tiger stripes, it sees the Other as dangerous. Calling the monster a Leviathan shows the poverty of the angel’s social beliefs and inability to recognize his own fundamental humanity: Hobbes had famously used it as an image of social interaction. Nurmi points out this is also a political vision: the Leviathan arises at a distance of about ‘three degrees’ – in other words, about the distance of Paris from London. The angel believes the narrator’s reading of the world will lead to the bloody chaos of the French Revolution.10 It is also, with its descriptions of cataracts of blood and fire, a very Old Testament vision of vengeance and destruction. Blake first pokes fun at the angel’s cowardice – at this sight he runs away. Then, with a deft comic dig at the claim in Hobbes’ Leviathan that ‘Imagination . . . is nothing but decaying sense’,11 Blake shows the scene transforming into a pleasant view of a river in moonlight accompanied by the sound of a singing harper. This was an image Blake could have found in Milton’s L’Allegro, and was one which he chose to illuminate as ‘The Youthful Poet Sleeping on a Bank’. The harper is both a poetic bard and a carnival fool, singing a piece of folk wisdom that Blake could have found in Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses. ‘Leviathan’ picks up on a line from Cowper’s poem ‘The Task’ (Poems, 1782–5), where Cowper noted that satire was ineffective in curing society’s ills: ‘Alas! Leviathan is not so easily tamed’.12 That the angel sees society, revolution and bardic activity as a ‘Leviathan’ marks him a satirist, and as his fate shows, this makes him mistake humanity for a group of cannibalistic monkeys, coupling with and devouring each other. This satiric view is very similar to that found in Gulliver’s Travels for example, or in Gillray’s ‘The State of War’ (20 May 1799), where the French Revolutionary army is shown as a group of monkeys.13 The angel despises others and sets itself




up as a hypocritical judge of morality. Against this satiric view, then, Blake is championing an imaginative, empathetic and specifically comic alternative. Even the angel is redeemed by it. To be a ‘leader of apes in hell’ was a traditional punishment for an old maid: Beatrice uses it in Much Ado (II.i.34) and Grose includes it in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. The angel is saved from this fate when he embraces the fiery inspiration he fears, and re-emerges as Elijah. The connection between the comic and Vision is continued in The Four Zoas, a poem that brings together quotations and images from the Poetical Sketches, the Songs, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The First Book of Urizen and The Marriage. It opens with a quotation from Ephesians 6: 12, claiming that it opposes not existence, or flesh, but false reading, or blind authority. What follows is an alternate vision of human history that sees historical processes (including Biblical history) and individual psychological development as linked. This ‘Intellectual Battle’ to re-establish the ‘Universal Brotherhood’ (E300) uses much of the insight Blake acquired from exploring the relationship of the comic to Vision that we have traced in this study of his early work. The Four Zoas presents a history that begins with infant innocence, joyful and energetic: like Adam and Eve, ‘A male & female naked & ruddy as the pride of summer’ (E305). This primitive state carries with it the energy of prophecy and the possibility of the imaginative manipulation of time and space, but it is inarticulate, unaware of itself. It is therefore vulnerable when it seeks expression, a pattern we found in the infants of the Songs and the obsessive lovers in Poetical Sketches. As soon as it becomes articulated, it becomes isolated and fearful: ‘The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy / Horrible Ghast & Deadly nought shalt thou find in it / But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy’ (E302). Again, this creates the possibility of oppression: ‘Wherefore was I born & what am I / A sorrow & a fear, a living torment, & naked Victim’ (E304, K268). The primitive will-to-pleasure now expresses itself in vicious, unconstructive forms, a destructive carnival of spite: Let us refuse the Plow & Spade, the heavy Roller & spiked Harrow. burn all these Corn fields. throw down all these fences Fattend on Human blood & drunk with wine of life is better far Than all these labours of the harvest & the vintage. See the river Red with the blood of Men. swells lustful round my rocky knees My clouds are not the clouds of verdant fields & groves of fruit But Clouds of Human Souls. my nostrils drink the lives of Men. (E308)



And to conclude 219


the Clarions of War blew loud The Feast redounds & Crownd with roses & the circling vine The Enormous Bride & Bridegroom sat, beside them Urizen With faded radiance sighd, forgetful of the flowing wine And of Ahania his Pure Bride but She was distant far. (E310) It leads to the failure of communication between people (‘The daughters of Beulah terrified have closd the Gate of the Tongue’, E311) and fear, the pattern present in the failed conversations of An Island. This in turn forces humanity to resort to laws to impose order on the threatening Other: Terrific Urizen strode above, in fear & pale dismay He saw the indefinite space beneath & his soul shrunk with horror His feet upon the verge of Non Existence . . . Some fix’d the anvil, some the loom erected, some . . . The golden compasses, the quadrant & the rule & balance. (E314) This material reading of the universe inevitably leads to a loss of faith: ‘And Urizen who was Faith & Certainty is changd to Doubt’ (E318). Blake again connects this with poor reading and the fearful, obscure, thunder-based sublime that forgets the sun is a symbol of divine creativity. In its attempts to impose order, humanity creates the conditions for a commercial, exploitative society. And many said We see no Visions in the darksom air Measure the course of that sulphur orb that lights the darksom day Set stations on this breeding Earth & let us buy & sell Others arose & schools Erected forming Instruments To measure out the course of heaven. (E318) The fulcrum of this dark fiction is a belief that God is a distant, obscure judge and humanity is put on earth to sin and suffer:



It is a perversion of the grotesque, a ‘Feast of envy’ (E313) and a monstrous misreading (an ‘Oak of Weeping’, E310) that threatens all of humanity:

And to conclude 221

(E318) Los maintains the possibility of a comic vision, remembering the ‘sports’ and ‘joys’ of innocence and stating that ‘every thing that lives is holy’ (E324). But in this world of limited perception (‘he became what he beheld’, E336) laughter is no more than Hobbesian scorn, (‘The Emmet & the beetle hark they laugh & mock at Los’, E323). In mentioning the emmet, Blake is reminding us of the carnival possibilities embodied in Shakespeare’s comedies and some of the Songs, a reminder that only serves to heighten the desolation of Urizen’s world. However, all is not lost. A turning point appears in the shape of Urizen’s mad dance, an echo of Tiriel and the antics of Ijim and Zazel, bringing with it a new kind of sublime aesthetic, which Blake hints at by the use of the word ‘stonify’: Infected Mad he dancd on his mountains high & dark as heaven Now fixd into one stedfast bulk his features stonify. (E338) ‘Mighty bulk & majesty & beauty remain’ although they are ‘unexpansive’ (E339), but an increasing presence of carnival imagery suggests a return to Brotherhood. Orc is born to music (in particular ‘the sweet sound of silver voices’). He is the Christ-like ‘new born king’ (E339) and he is associated with carnival activities: His bosom is like starry heaven expanded all the stars Sing round; there waves the harvest & the vintage rejoices; the springs Flow into rivers of delight. there the spontaneous flowers Drink laugh & sing. (E342, K308) Like Zazel, Orc ‘dost laugh at all these tortures & this horrible place’ (E354). And, ‘since life cannot be quenchd’ (E381), the cycle of birth and



Stern Urizen beheld In woe his brethren & his Sons in darkning woe lamenting Upon the winds in clouds involvd Uttering his voice in thunders Commanding all the work with care & power & severity


the cries of birth & in the groans of death . . . throughout the Universe whereever a grass grows Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt . . . till he reassumes his ancient bliss. (E385) Bliss is not hidden from us: it remains in the moments when ‘laughter [sits] beneath the Oaks & innocence sport[s] round’ (E350) and the ‘grapes . . . burst in summers vast Excess’ (E357). Despite Urizen’s attempts to practice Suttonesque philanthropy (‘Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread by soft mild arts’, E355), the example of Jesus teaches humanity to recognize our spiritual nature through our physical existence: Then sang the Sons of Eden round the Lamb of God & said Glory Glory Glory to the holy Lamb of God Who now beginneth to put off the dark Satanic body Now we behold redemption Now we know that life Eternal Depends alone upon the Universal hand & not in us. (E376) When we begin to realize that ‘every thing that lives’ is indeed holy, and that ‘futurity is in this moment’, we too see the ‘Self renewing Vision’ (E391) that allows us to ‘reorganize’ through the ‘sports of Glory’ (E393) until we ‘resume’ our place in the ‘Human form Divine’ (E395). This rejuvenation is pictured as a giant carnival feast of harvest and song that replaces the sacrifice of Christ with the carnival mixing of everyone into the divine blood. The passage is worth repeating at length as it draws together much of the imagery we have discussed in this book: Attempting to be more than Man We become less said Luvah As he arose from the bright feast drunk with the wine of ages His crown of thorns fell from his head he hung his living Lyre Behind the seat of the Eternal Man & took his way Sounding the Song of Los descending to the Vineyards bright His sons arising from the feast with golden baskets follow



death keeps humanity moving forward through the ‘dark vacuity’ (E348). In

A fiery train as when the Sun sings in the ripe vineyards Then Luvah stood before the wine press all his fiery sons Brought up the loaded Waggons with shoutings ramping tygers play In the jingling traces furious lions sound the song of joy To the golden wheels circling upon the pavement of heaven & all The Villages of Luvah ring the golden tiles of the villages Reply to violins & tabors to the pipe flute lyre & cymbal Then fell the Legions of Mystery in maddning confusion Down Down thro the immense with outcry fury & despair Into the wine presses of Luvah howling fell the Clusters Of human families thro the deep. the wine presses were filld The blood of life flowd plentiful Odors of life arose All round the heavenly arches. (E403–4) Luvah’s crown of thorns slipping reminds us this is no longer the doctrine of the sacrifice demanded by law and vengeance, but the festive forgiveness of sins. The sun singing and tigers playing remind us that this is a new reading, a new sublime based on village carnival, a community in accord, operating on ‘golden wheels’ rather than satanic cogs or rational looms. The village festival defeats the ‘Legions of Mystery’ by providing a new reading of the world that is based on sensory delight in our universal existence. The Four Zoas is interesting in that it can be seen as a pivotal moment in Blake’s work; a summation of much that had gone before and a source of material for Milton and Jerusalem. Milton too emphasizes the importance of ‘the Divine Vision / And of the sports of Wisdom in the Human Imagination’ (E96) and contrasts material folly with the foolishness of faith (E98). It charts the development of the consciousness through its increasing use of language and notes the sense of isolation this brings (‘Do with me as thou wilt! for I am nothing, and vanity’, E114). It creates a society where ‘the crue[l]ties of Moral Law’ and the materialist readings of ‘Druidical Mathematical Proportion’ (E98) keep humanity in subjection. In this state, humanity swings between ‘wrath’ and ‘pity’ with ‘no hope of an end’ (E120). But even in our bowels, in the ‘Stomach [of] every individual’, is a reminder of the forces of life, the cycles of death and regeneration, a fact that Blake had used so effectively in his Notebook triumph over Nobodaddy. We are all ‘dancers in the dance of



And to conclude 223


These are the Sons of Los, & these the Labourers of the Vintage Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave: Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance, To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & return These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom sky Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity. (E123) Christ comes to restore humanity to its spiritual awareness by playing the fool, being a ‘Transgressor’ (E107), accompanied by ‘Prophets’ who seem ‘Idiots or Madmen’ to the orthodox view (E118). The imagination is vital in this transformation and, in describing its importance in creative reading, Blake significantly reminds us of the relationship between Vision and the comic by repeating a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Giving to airy nothing a name and a habitation / Delightful! with bounds to the Infinite putting off the Indefinite / Into most holy forms of Thought: (such is the power of inspiration)’ (E125).14 Milton of course ends with the passage discussed earlier that so neatly describes Albion’s dance of freedom and the sacrifice of selfhood. It is the casting off of the ‘Newtonian Phantasm’ and ‘idiot Questioner’, of the ‘State Government’ and those who ‘mock with the aspersion of Madness’, those who ‘deny Faith & mock at Eternal Life’ – everything that is ‘Not Human’ (E142). In its place comes a grand carnival celebration of life, the ‘Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations’ (E144). It is not my intention to pursue Blake’s use of the comic any further in this present volume. I have already discussed some of the ways Blake uses carnival imagery in Jerusalem, but it would take another book altogether to follow it in detail. What I hope to have done here is to suggest that, from Oothoon’s claim in Visions that ‘each joy is a Love’ (E48) to Blake’s reminder in The Everlasting Gospel that Jesus ‘Selected’ ‘Publicans & Harlots’ for ‘his company’ (E878), the images of harvest, vintage and



death’ (E121) and there is a destiny that shapes our lives, a point Blake makes in a passage that remembers both the Poetical Sketches and the Songs:

carnival that appear in his later works, stem from his close association of the comic with Vision. As I mentioned right at the beginning, this is not meant to be a definitive study of Blake’s use of the comic. I hope it has suggested that, far from being a serious-minded, sometimes wild enthusiast, Blake was a committed comic writer who not only participated in the eighteenthcentury debate on the importance of the comic in forming and regulating society, taste and morals, but restored the age old connection between comedy and faith. At the very least, I hope this book offers a more concrete foundation for the ideas of communitas, empathy and play that have recently been touted as the core of his Vision. The comic may seem ephemeral, but it is the best way to teach the creative art of Visionary perception. The value of the comic lies in its ability to transcend dogma and sterility and remind us of our humanity. It can succeed when the language of beauty and fear, sublime aesthetics and radical thought fail. In Proverbs 26: 4–5, the Bible says that one should answer a fool according to his folly. Folly was the subject of a quarrel between Burke and Paine. Burke denied any value to folly, claiming wisdom the only viable form of activity. Paine claimed that ‘if he means that it is better to correct folly with wisdom than wisdom with folly, I will not otherwise contend with him, than that it would be much better to reject the folly entirely.’15 Blake replies to them both: Listen to the fool’s reproach! It is a kingly title! The kind of fool you are defines the kind of king you see – of earth or of heaven. For Blake, true foolery provided a rebellious, creative, visionary reading of the world that demanded the reader’s participation and transcended linguistic limitation. It was a way of separating the ‘Fairies & Elves’ from the ‘Knave’ and the ‘Hypocrite’ (E499) and of cleansing the gates of perception, an event that will ‘come to pass with an improvement of sensual enjoyment’. And this sensual enjoyment includes the ability to laugh.



And to conclude 225

‘When Klopstock England defied’: from Blake’s Note-book 1793 When Klopstock England defied Uprose terrible Blake in his pride For old Nobodaddy aloft Farted & Belchd & coughd Then swore a great oath that made heaven quake And calld aloud to English Blake. Blake was giving his body ease At Lambeth beneath the poplar trees. From his seat then started he And turn’s himself round three times three. The Moon at that sight blushd scarlet red The stars threw down their cups & fled And all the devils that were in hell Answered with a ninefold yell Klopstock felt the intripled turn And all his bowels began to churn And his bowels turned round three times three And lockd in his soul with a ninefold key That form his body it ne’er could be parted Till to the last trumpet it was farted. Then again old Nobodaddy swore He ne’er had seen such a thing before Since Noah was shut in the Ark Since Eve first chose her hellfire spark Since ‘twas the fashion to go naked Since any old thing was created Ands so feeling, he beg’d him to turn again And ease poor Klopstock’s ninefold pain If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite What might he not do if he sat down to write (E500–1)

Extract from a letter to the Reverend Dr J. Trusler, 23 August 1799, E702 You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd 226



Appendix

what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses Solomon Esop Homer Plato But as you have favord me with your remarks on my Design permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is. That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause. – Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in another & Serenity & Happiness & Beauty a Cause of Malevolence. But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alledged as the Cause of his Thievery. for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs I have therefore proved your Reasonings Ill proportiond which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo Rafael & the Antique & of the best living Models. I percieve that your Eye[s] is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth – I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers

The Little Vagabond, E26 Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; Besides I can tell where I am use’d well, Such usage in heaven will never do well. [Original reading: Such usage in heaven makes all go to hell.] But if at the Church they would give us some Ale. And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale; We’d sing and we’d pray, all the live-long day; Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray, Then the Parson might preach & drink & sing. And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring: And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church, Would not have bandy children nor fasting nor birch. And God like a father rejoicing to see, His children as pleasant and happy as he: Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel.



Appendix 227

Chapter 1: Songs of Pleasant Glee: William Blake and the Comic 1. A. Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, ed. R. Todd (London: J. M. Dent, 1982) p. 71. 2 A. C. Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Study (London: Chatto and Windus, 1906) p. 227. 3. R. Hamlyn and M. Phillips (eds), William Blake: Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue (London: Tate, 2000) p. 190. 4. John Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992) pp. 3, 15. 5. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 13. 6. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 27. 7. B. H. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (London: 1806) p. xxiii. 8. M. Gutwirth, Laughing Matter: An Essay on the Comic (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993) p. 7. 9. E. L. Galligan, The Comic Vision In Literature (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 1984) p. x. 10. See M. T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950) p. 37, Dr Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 125 (1751) and M. Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975) p. 13. 11. See Herrick, Comic Theory, p. 58, Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision, p. 35 and F. M. Cornford, The Origins of Attic Comedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1914). 12. Quoted by Herrick, Comic Theory, p. 49. 13. As T. G. A. Nelson puts it, readers of comic theory find themselves ‘in the middle of a battlefield . . . formidable names . . . burst around them like shells’. Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Drama, Literature and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 17. 14. ‘Comic practice has always been more important than theory, of course, and doubtless always will be’. Herrick, Comic Theory, p. 225. 15. M. Parkinson, ‘Comedy’, A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, ed. R. Fowler (London: Routledge, 1973) pp. 31–2. 16. D. J. Palmer, ed., Comedy: Developments in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 9. 17. R. M. Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 20. 18. For a useful explanation of Baudelaire’s view of laughter, see J. W. MacInnes, The Comical as Textual Practice in Les Fleurs du Mal (Tampa: University of Florida Press, 1988) p. 48. 19. R. C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) p. 29. 228



Notes

20. A French Apologia of 1444, cited D. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown: Actor and text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 173. 21. V. Turner, The Ritual Progress: Structure and Anti-structure (London: Routledge, 1969) p. 110: fools are prime examples of figures who, ‘representing the poor and the deformed, appear to symbolize the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers’. 22. C. Fry, ‘Comedy’, Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. R. W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965) p. 17. Joyce Cary makes a similar point The Horse’s Mouth (London: Michael Joseph, 1944) with Gulley Jimson’s claim that laughter and prayer are the same thing – see Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 3. On the relationship between Cary and Blake, see A. S. Levitt, ‘’The Mental Traveller’ in The Horse’s Mouth: New Light on the Old Cycle’, William Blake and the Moderns eds A. S. Levitt and R. J. Bertholf, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) pp. 186–211. 23. For homo ludens, see J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949) and for homo festivus, see H. Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) p. 10. 24. Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 13. 25. For example by Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1967) cited by Galligan, Comic Vision In Literature, pp. 7–8. 26. Many comic theorists have pointed out that jokes are often signalled by a special use of humorous or unusual language, a stress on physicality and the (mis)application of conventional logic: for one such explication, see S. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, eds J. Strachey and A. Richards, trans. J. Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 167–90. Freud claimed jokes are a rebellion against the inhibition of logic, calling attention to the difference between words and things and notes ‘we count rebellion against authority as a merit’, p. 149. Such rebellion is often childish in form: Freud adds that joking is begun in childhood and continued in adult life, pp. 174–5. Whatever one may feel about Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, his minute study of the process of a joke’s understanding is interesting. 27. See MacInnes, Comical as Textual Practice, p. 55 and Galligan, Comic Vision in Literature, pp. 7–8. 28. Of course, as Bryson comments in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), recognition of the function of the signifier is the ‘principle mode of interaction’ in society. One must conform to certain rules or fade into unintelligibility: to be successful the comic must be based in some reality. However, as Bryson goes on to point out, to perceive this ‘reality’ as being the only source of power within the social field is to submit to the ‘classic topologies of paranoia; something outside, invisible, some essence of exteriority closing in’. This ‘outside’ force is a good description of the relationship Blake indicates between humanity, the Urizen-Nobodaddy-God-Father and language. Both this external reality (law) and an absence of language (chaos) are destructive and induce a paranoiac state. The solution, therefore, is to use language in such a way as to suggest something that exceeds the trammels of signification: to use it



Notes 229

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

imaginatively, artistically. Bryson finds the answer in painting. ‘If there is a power intrinsic in painting it resides in the capacity to exceed the fixities of representation’ (see pp. 160–1, 150, 170). Comic practice too goes beyond the rational ‘fixities of representation’ but retains the possibility of creating new meaning once the language used to convey it is recognized as needing to be read in a special way – see W. Nash, The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse (New York: Longman, 1985) pp. 9, 128. Gilchrist, Life, p. 364. Blake and Nobodaddy are both ‘on the throne’, ‘one of the most ancient, rectifying, double meanings’: W. Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) p. 8. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1988) p. 229. Compare Nobodaddy to The London Spy, November 1698 (London: J. How, 1702) p. 3 – ‘a Fig for St Austin and his Doctrines, a Fart for Virgil and his Elegancy, and a T—d for Discartes and his Philosophy’. J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) p. 62.

Chapter 2: ‘Mirth at the errors of a foe’: the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comic World 1. H. Fielding, Covent-Garden Journal, ed. G. Jensen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915) I, 249 (No. 19). 2. I am indebted to Stuart M. Tave’s excellent book The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) for an overview of contemporary comic theories. 3. J. Brown, ‘Essay on Ridicule’, Essays on the Characteristics (London: C. Davis, 1751) cited in P. K. Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973) pp. 19–20. 4. Prologue to ‘The Alchemist’, Ben Jonson: Three Comedies, ed. M. Jamieson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) pp. 191–2. 5. J. Dryden, ‘Absalom and Architophel,’ John Dryden, ed. K. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 177. 6. Anthony Collins, Discourse concerning ridicule and an irony in writing (1729) cited S. Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984) p. 75. 7. T. Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. A. Benn. (London: J. M. Dent, 1993) pp. 46, 55. For the work of radical satirists, see V. Caretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Atlanta: Georgia University Press, 1990) and also, amongst others, the work of John Mee, Marcus Wood, Heather Glen, and David V. Erdman. 8. See Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s ‘Songs’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 89–91. 9. E. Larsen, Wit as a Weapon – The Political Joke in History (London, 1980) p. 10. See also M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, ed. and trans. H. Isowolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 85.



230 Notes

10. D. Donald, The Age of Caricature – Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) p. 1. The rise in popularity of print satires in the late eighteenth century has been attributed in part to the work of three men Blake admired: Hogarth’s 1743 reworking of Leonardo da Vinci’s grotesque sketches and to Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–8). Blake notes that he knew ‘the Works of our own Hogarth’ well (E567, E576). His ‘Satan, Sin and Death’ certainly bears a striking resemblance to Hogarth’s treatment of the same theme. 11. J. Addison, The Spectator, Nos. 1–635, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), no. 58, cited Donald, The Age of Caricature, p. 44. 12. Thomas Rowlandson, whom Blake almost certainly knew (P. Ackroyd, Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995) p. 99) often challenged the polite notions of art with the bare-faced cheek of the human body, as he does so effectively in ‘The Exhibition Stare-Case’ (1800). 13. Pigs, associated with the mad and the unclean, were often the victims of the ritual satire of festivals: see P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 55–6. 14. J. Tillotson, ‘The Folly of Scoffing at Religion’, Works (London, 1696) pp. 40–1. See also Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 10. 15. J. Swift, ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’, Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 497, ll.471–2. 16. J. Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. A. R. Humphries (London: J. M. Dent, 1973) p. v. Subjects deemed unfit for satire included natural defects, deformity, misfortunes of the worthy, great calamities and crimes, poverty, dullness, serious matters, obscene jokes, members of the highest echelons and persons of low character. Despite claiming the moral high ground, however, satirists saw these as rules to be broken, justifying almost any attack on the grounds that it provoked laughter. Hobbes (Human Nature, 1650) and Descartes (Passiones Animae, 1656) had offered the philosophical reasoning to support this, but theirs is laughter ‘at’, not self-recognizingly ‘with’. Foote, in his A Letter from Mr. Foote to the Reverend Author of the ‘Remarks, Critical and Christian’ on The Minor (London, 1760) justifies attacking Whitefield’s cross-eyes in much the same way. 17. See D. C. Payne, ‘Comedy, Satire or Farce’, Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-century Satire, ed. J. E. Gill (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1995) p. 40. 18. Blake’s letter to Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799. In this, Blake was following the opinion of James Barry, who, in his Letter to the Dilettanti Society (London, 1798) deplored the corruption of public taste by caricatures. See Donald, The Age of Caricature, p. 23. Blake lays the fault at the door of the satirist, not the subject: ‘Unappropriate Execution is the Most nauseous of all affectation & foppery’ (E576). 19. Addison, The Spectator no. 249, 15 December 1711: ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford, 1965) II. 467. 20. Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (Edinburgh, 1762) and J. Beattie, Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition (London, 1776). 21. H. Blair, Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres (London, 1783) II, 528–9. 22. V. Knox, ‘On the Moral Effects of a Good Tragedy’, Essays Moral and Literary (3rd edition, 1782) II, 165. See Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 34.



Notes 231

23. For a fine exposition of this dilemma, see W. C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974) p. 30. Frye makes an interesting comparison of satire and irony: ‘The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Sheer invective or name-calling (“flyting”) is satire in which there is relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is not sure what the author’s attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire.’ N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) p. 223. 24. See Walpole’s letter to Mason, 27 March 1773: ‘You have a vein of irony and satire that the best of causes bleeds for having wanted’; cited Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 74. 25. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, p. 59 fn 14. 26. ‘Irony is a healthiness insofar as it rescues the soul from the snares of relativity; it is a sickness insofar as it is unable to tolerate the absolute except in the form of nothingness . . . infinite absolute negativity . . . divine madness . . . irony . . . plays with abandon and unrestraint, gambols like a leviathan in the sea . . . but . . . inasmuch as it has nothing higher than itself, it can receive no blessing . . . Therefore it watches over itself and fears nothing more than that some impression or other might overwhelm it, because not until one is free in that way does one live poetically.’ S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with continual reference to Socrates, eds H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) pp. 77, 261, 279, 280. 27. For a good discussion of this theory, see Tave, The Amiable Humorist, pp. viii-ix. 28. F. Hutcheson, A Collection of Letters and Essays on several Subjects, Lately Publish’d in the Dublin Journal (1729). 29. J. Hacket, A Century of Sermons upon Several Remarkable Subjects (1675). Hacket was often cited by eighteenth-century supporters of good-nature: see Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 8. 30. The Tatler, 13 December 1830, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987) p. 343. 31. J. Addison, The Free-Holder; Or, Political Essays (London: Jacob and Richard Tonson, 1758) No. 45. 32. See Tave, The Amiable Humorist, pp. 148 and 21, citing L. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. J. A. Work (New York, 1940) I, xxxi, pp. 63–5; and L. Hunt’s Autobiography (London, 1860 edition) p. xiv. 33. C. Morris, An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule (London: J. Roberts, 1744: reprinted The Augustan Reprint Society, Series One: Essays on Wit (November 1947)) p. 30. 34. ‘Children became powerful witnesses against Hobbes’: Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 55. 35. J. Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London: M. Cooper, 1756) pp. iv-v, cited Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 69. 36. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 172. 37. For example, Fielding’s preface to Joseph Andrews sounds like the work of a traditional satirist, claiming to aim a comic blow at ‘the Ridiculous’ and its



232 Notes

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

cause, ‘Affectation’, and to offer ‘a wholesome physic’ for the mind, yet the same novel also contains a character that would become a hero of sentimental humorists, Parson Adams. Crabb Robinson’s diary, in A. Symons, William Blake (1907; repr. New York: Cooper Square, 1970) p. 260. In his ‘Satan in His Original Glory’ (c.1805, L40) Blake has Satan surrounded by writing, reading and musical figures. The suggestion seems to be that Satan’s fall involved a loss of a Visionary understanding of texts. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, contain’d in some new discoveries never made before, requisite for the Writing and Judging of Poems surely (London, 1704) p. 15. For a discussion of Dennis’ use of the sun image, see R. Paulson, ‘Turner’s Graffitti: The Sun and its Glosses’, Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities eds K. Kroeber and W. Walling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). The Gentleman’s Magazine XXXVII (1767) p. 75. ‘The history of the idea of humour in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be read as part of the larger histories of aesthetics, of nature and of human nature, of man’s relation to his fellow man and to God; the English themselves saw in it social, economic and political significance.’ Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. vii. D. Morrice, The Science of Teaching, applied to Elocution, Poetry, The Sublime of Scripture, And History (1801) was typical in identifying the sublime as a teaching tool. Addison, The Spectator, No. 333. The progress of comic movement, from a ‘flat’ state of ordinary awareness through the ‘shock’ of surprise to the ‘exaltation’ of laughter bears close relation to Weiskel’s description of the operation of the sublime. T. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). See Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 31. Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, p. 5. Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, pp. 14–15. Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, pp. 91–2. Dennis, Grounds of Criticism, p. 13. The Gentleman’s Magazine LXVI (September 1796) p. 756. As Vincent de Luca has shown, Blake was highly conscious of the workings of the sublime, pointing out, among other things, that he uses the sublimedescriptive word ‘astonishment’ more times than any other poet from 1660 to 1830. See V. A. de Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) pp. 11, 18. W. J. T. Mitchell notes how the style of Blake’s visual images move them from the ‘reality of seeing’ toward the realm of being a language in themselves, ‘operating as arbitrary signs, emblems or hieroglyphics’. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 4, cited de Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 40. de Luca, Words of Eternity, p. 43. Baudelaire feels that while language has given us identity (‘I am me’), it also separates us from the ‘Other’. However, he sees in laughter the celebration both of our desire to find meaning (reunification with the Other) and the possibility that meaning may be available to us in the creative



Notes 233

52.

53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

interpretation of language. Laughter marks the reader’s ‘will to contain meaning in language [and] that effort as will, or as desire’ and ‘What Baudelaire has singled out in the phenomenon of laughter as its most telling trait is the testimony it bears to the deferral of presence, a deferral that leads to the mediation of significant codes, that enables representation and denotation, and that imbeds meaning in a temporally complex structure’. The ‘comic significatif’ as opposed to the merely funny of commonplace jokes shows ‘laughter as admission of the comical as disjoining, mediation, and deferral [which] could inhere on the impurity – the textuality – of writing’. See MacInnes, Comical as Textual Practice, pp. 82, 55, 73. Poetry as the new saving religion was a persistent Romantic idea: Eagleton cites Oxford Professor of English Literature George Gordon as saying ‘England is sick, and . . . English Literature must save it.’ T. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) p. 23. Public Advertiser, 5 June 1765, cited Donald, The Age of Caricature p. 4. M. D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) p. 185. T. Hyman and R. Malbert, Carnivalesque (London: Hayward Gallery, 2000) p. 15. In a new twist on an old theory, Halliwell sees the Western version of this tradition as having its roots in the classical theatre, Aristophanes’ work embodying both ‘corrective satire’ and a development of the Festesfreude carnivals of popular origin, a wickedly and self-knowledgeably politically incorrect celebration of common humanity. S. Halliwell, ‘Aristophanes’, Cutting Edges: Postmodern critical essays on Eighteenth century satire, ed. J. E. Gill (Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1995). Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 11. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 8. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 6. Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 90, 92. Arthur Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse: Studies in Carnivalesque Subversion (London: Associated University Presses, 1969) p. 17. See also S. Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995) p. 65, who in turn quotes C. Emerson, ‘Problems with Baxtin’s Poetics’, Slavic and East European Journal 32 (1988) p. 520: ‘The weakest, least consistent, and most dangerous category in Bakhtin’s arsenal is the concept of ‘carnival’’ and sees Bakhtin’s work being shaped in part as a response to Lunacharvsky’s Bolshevik dismissal of laughter as a safety value (p. 71). But this is to miss its value in identifying the carnivalesque’s power. Dentith also notes that most academics espousing Bakhtin’s ideas are themselves ideal subjects for brusque carnivalesque ‘uncrownings’. Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse, p. 17. Martin Buzacott, The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare on Page and Stage (London: Routledge, 1991) pp. 61, 65. K. Hirshkop and D. Shepherd, eds, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) p. 35. M. D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of authority in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1989) p. 213.



234 Notes

66. Lindley, Hyperion and the Hobbyhorse, p. 24. 67. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 12. 68. Cited T. Frost, The Old Showmen and the Old Country Fairs (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874) p. 202. 69. For the collective power of the fair visitors, see, among others, R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) p. 81. 70. S. Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960) p. 66. 71. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 40. 72. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 121. 73. J. Tucker, ‘6 Sermons on important subjects’ (Bristol, 1772) cited Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 93. 74. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 33–6. 75. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, pp. 101ff. 76. See B. Weinreb and C. Hibbert, eds, The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983) p. 520. 77. J. T. Smith, Vagabondia; or, Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London (London, 1817) p. 33. 78. Ackroyd, Blake, p. 33. 79. T. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986) p. 19. I am much indebted to Mr Castle’s fascinating book for my understanding of contemporary reactions to the masquerade. 80. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, p. 53. 81. Jane Shore was performed regularly at Drury Lane and Anthony Blunt notes that the dress of the figures in Blake’s design conforms to contemporary stage costume: A. Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 6. 82. See Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, p. 48. 83. R. Allen, The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700–1914 (London: Routledge, 1988) p. 90. 84. Ackroyd, Blake notes Blake was ‘influenced by the theatre of the period’, p. 190. Blake’s relationship to the stage is discussed by Jonathan Bate. It is known that Blake attended the Drury Lane Theatre and was a friend of the impresario Prince Hoare. J. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989) p. 127. 85. See Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) I, 45–9. 86. Many critics have found a dramatic posture in Blake’s figures, for example in America, a fact which has led his biographer Peter Ackroyd to assert that Blake’s work ‘owes something to Gothic drama and to pantomime’ and even ‘to opera’. Ackroyd, Blake, pp. 165, 77. 87. J. J. Lynch, Box, Pit and Gallery: Stage and Society in Johnson’s London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953) p. 202. A print from 1763 shows a riot in the Covent Garden Theatre, with patrons invading the stage – see The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. J. R. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 267. 88. Lynch, Box, Pit and Gallery, p. 57.



Notes 235

89. S. Foote, The Comic Theatre, being a Free Translation of all the Best French Comedies (London, 1762) cited E. N. Chatten, Samuel Foote (Boston: Twayne, 1980) p. 26. 90. J. Ritson, A select collection of English Songs in three volumes (London, 1793) p. ii. 91. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 120. 92. J. Ritson, The Letters of Joseph Ritson 2 vols (London, 1833) ii. 85, cited Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 115. 93. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 118. 94. Francis Douce’s copy of Phillip Stubbes’ The Anatomie of Abuses in Ailgna (1583) has written in the flyleaf: ‘Perhaps no other book is so illustrative of antient manners in the 16th century’ and it is ‘so extremely rare and intrinsically curious that even a fragment is worth preserving’. 95. See Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 123. 96. C. Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) p. 151. 97. Naturally, there was also a comic reaction to this: among others a Royal Circus pantomime entitled ‘The Prophecy’ where Mirth brings forth Harlequin to defeat the prophet. Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 199. 98. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 161. 99. F. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners: with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare; on the Collection of Popular Tales entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris Dance (London, 1807) pp. 306, 329, 315. 100. The costume of a ‘natural’ Fool was usually that of a male of low social status: a bumpkin or a lunatic with ‘a foul shirt without a band, and in a blue coat with one sleeve, his stockings out at heels, and his head full of straw and feathers’. Edwin Nungezer, Truth of our Times, p. 363, cited Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, p. 17. 101. According to Walter Kaiser, the stage Fool turned the innocent’s nonconformity ‘into iconoclasm, his [sic] naturalism into anarchy, and his frankness into satire. Whether in the court or on the stage, [the fool] was able to criticize the accepted order of things and to voice daring indictments of the church or the throne or the law or society in general’. W. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (London: Gollancz, 1964) p. 7. 102. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, p. x. Wiles notes the Fool ‘stands at the heart of the Elizabethan debate about acting . . . the neo-classicist point of view . . . wishes spectators to see their own world mirrored in the play [while] the servant-clown[‘s]. . . mannerisms exploit the fact that he is a known theatrical performer . . . The audience is actively involved, egging on the clown [. . .] to disrupt the orderly progress of the narrative’. This conflict between neo-classical order and carnival licence can be seen in the different approaches to comedy adopted by Jonson and Shakespeare. Despite his use of contemporary slang, Jonson’s plays were an attempt to assert a formal, classical control over a theatre he felt in danger of becoming too populist. Jonson objected to ‘Theatricall wit, right Stage-jesting’ because it appealed to ‘the beast, the multitude. They love nothing that is right and proper’. Shakespeare, on the other hand, included many carnivalesque elements in



236 Notes

his work. For example, King Lear’s attempts to keep Christmas all year are defeated by his Lenten butcher daughters, and Lear only gains humanity amid the mad and outlawed (see Bristol, Carnival and Theater pp. 205, 211). Hamlet takes on an extensive list of the attributes of a carnival Fool. He feigns madness, describes himself as a ‘jig-maker’, word-plays (III.ii.120) and acts as an intermediary between the audience and the play-within-the-play: ‘You are as good as a chorus’ (III.ii.239). The speech he writes for the Players is ‘poison in jest; no offence i’th’world’ (III.ii.230) and the play they perform, ‘The Mousetrap’, is a kind of carnival charivari. He calls Claudius a ‘king of shreds and patches’ (III.iv.102), a carnival figure to be ritually torn down, yet he himself dies in a Foolish fight. Such exhibition fights were associated with May-Lord’s Fools, and they made a specialty of losing – Tarlton once staged an exhibition fight against Queen Elizabeth’s lapdog, and lost. The point is heightened by Gertrude’s wiping Hamlet’s face with a handkerchief: this was a recognized property of the Fool. The genuine Fool spent a long time arming himself for such a fight, in parody of Romance or Nordic heroes. Having placed himself in the role of Fool, Hamlet’s failure to play the Fool properly and examine the foils ensures he will lose; he has dismissed his worries about the fight as ‘but foolery’ (V.ii.207). However, his foolish behaviour has, until the end, punished Claudius and Gertrude without resorting to murderous vengeance and, in his jesting with a clown gravedigger over Yorick’s grave, he has begun to understand the ‘special providence’ (V.ii.211) of God that shapes our ends. Indeed, the whole of Hamlet seems to question the true place of the Fool on stage and life: Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, argues that Hamlet’s song after ‘The Mousetrap’ is a reference to Kemp’s leaving the Globe and being replaced by Burbage’s son in the ‘paiock’ or patchock, the motley fool’s uniform (p. 59). And if this carnival borrowing was true of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, it was even clearer in his comedies: Falstaff, opposing jingoism with survival and feasting, for example, or the traditional fight between carnival and Lent emerging in the Twelfth Night struggles between Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Malvolio. Where Jonson invited his audience to laugh at his characters, Shakespeare’s invited the audience to laugh with them. ‘The clown performed with, and not to, an audience constructed as equals’. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, p. 179. 103. The distinction between the performing clown and the foolish character is still made clear by our best performers: see the work of Clive Mendus and the Théâtre de Complicité for example. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, offers a useful summary of the differences between the ‘clown’ and the ‘fool’, noting the country bumpkin as a specialty of that great clown of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, Tarlton, and the lunatic as that of his successor, Armin. 104. The Shakespearean clown was a constant reminder to the audience that ‘there is no truth behind the action – there is only the complex inter-play of theatrical signs manipulated by flesh-and-blood actors’. In the words of the anthropologist Geertz, the Vice’s performance showed ‘what his [sic] culture’s ethos and his private sensibility . . . look[ed] like when spelled out externally in a collective text’. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, pp. x, 126. 105. Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 3.



Notes 237

106. Despite Baudelaire’s famous comment that Holy Books never laugh (C. Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter, and, in General, on the Comic the Plastic Arts’, Comedy, Meaning and Form, ed. R. W. Corrigan (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1965) p. 455) some parts of the Bible to which Blake frequently refers, particularly Genesis and the stories of Pharaoh and Job, have been identified as comic in structure. See J. W. Whedbee, The Bible and Comic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 107. Many critics have noted this: see for example P. Noon, The Human Form Divine: William Blake from the Paul Mellon Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) p. 11. 108. Damon and others have written on the importance of St Paul to Blake (A Blake Dictionary, pp. 323–4). What I wish to stress is Paul’s insistence that faith can see the insubstantial through the actual, and the importance he placed on love. 109. See Cox, The Feast of Fools and M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Harvard University Press, 1992). 110. In the Richard II Bible and the Wingfield Psalter for example, fools point the way to heaven: see Billington, A Social History, pp. 4, 14. For the Asshead Christ, see Cox, The Feast of Fools, p. 140. 111. See Billington, A Social History, p. 19 and Cox, The Feast of Fools, p. 150. 112. Bakhtin claimed the clown creates a ‘carnival spirit in everyday life’ to oppose serious ‘official’ culture. Bakhtin, Rabelais p. 8. See also R. Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the exiled author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 126, 151. 113. W. Kemp, Kemps nine daies wonder, performed in a daunce from London to Norwich, written by himselfe (1600), cited Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, p. 24. 114. J. Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England; including the rural and domestic recreations, May games, mummeries, show processions, pageants, and pompous spectacles, from the earliest period to the present time (London, 1830 [1801]) p. 154. 115. W. Warner, Albion’s England: A continued Historie of the Same Kingdome (London, 1612). 116. The clown developed from the ‘Vice’ character of medieval Interludes, who had the ‘power to juggle layers of reality’ and traditionally ‘swept aside the confines of a script’, often blurring the boundary between audience and play, ‘talking’ to pickpocket and prostitute ‘friends’ who were working the crowd: ‘an antagonist devoted to the destruction of the dramatic conventions’. Moreover, in their physicality, the clown / Fool challenges the polite aesthetic. Wiles contends that the clown’s jig, with all its anarchic and sexual overtones, came as an expected addition to a play, which is why some of Shakespeare’s plays appear unfinished or unresolved. The abstract romanticism, intellectual marriage and pastoral Eden of the comedies would be deconstructed by the physicality of the clown’s jig, rerooting the action within the audience’s own experience. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, pp. 2, 5 and Buzacott, Death of the Actor, p. 67. 117. See Buzacott, Death of the Actor, p. 79. 118. Wiles, Shakespeare’s clown, p. 14. 119. It was possible that Blake saw descendants of the medieval divine Fools in action at first hand. Of course, the twin forces of genteel respectability and



238 Notes

120. 121. 122.

123.

124.

125.

126. 127. 128.

urban life were constantly modifying comic expression, but Billington in her study A Social History notes that at the end of the eighteenth century it was still possible to find traditional folk-Fools, the inheritors of the traditions of Medieval carnival mummers and Morris dancers, at church feasts. Had Blake attended the 1809 Royal Circus pantomime The Rival Clowns, he could have seen virtually every type of Fool imaginable at the same time in a kaleidoscope of songs, sea battles, Harlequin’s wedding and updated May game brawls. Addison, The Spectator No. 494, 26 September 1712, cited by Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision, p. 183. Isaac Barrow, cited by Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 5. John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Including the Whole of Mr. Bourne’s Antiquitates Vulgares, with Addenda to every Chapter of that work: As also, An Appendix, Containing such Articles on the Subject, as have been omitted by that Author (Newcastle upon Tyne: T. Saint, 1777) p. vi. Douce makes the importance of Shakespeare in this process clear, speaking of the ‘laudable spirit of curiosity respecting the manners of former times which at present constitutes much of the amusement of an enlightened public’ and noting how much of our knowledge of Fools could be gained from Shakespeare. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, pp. 306, 310. R. F. Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) p. 89 and R. Garnett, ‘William Blake’, The Portfolio, 22 (1895) p. 15. There are even more references to King Lear than Bate notes: amongst others, ‘Nature, thou art my goddess’ (I.ii.1) (E689) and an allusion in Blake’s speech reported in Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs p. xxii: ‘He professes drawing from life always to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or smelling of mortality’. Lear complains his hand ‘smells of mortality’, (IV.vi.133). Bate too cites Shakespeare’s rise in popularity as proof of a reaction to the intense rationality of the Augustans, whose dominant literary mode, was, arguably, satire. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, p. 137. He links the Fool’s prophecy in King Lear to ‘The Garden of Love’. The madman is deliberately given the speech attributes of the Fool: compare, for example, I.iv.123–7 and III.iv.95–6. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 58, citing J. Relly, Christian Liberty (London 1775).

Chapter 3: Playing the Fool: Blake’s sense of humour 1. For an excellent summary of these, see Whedbee, Bible and Comic Vision p. 7ff. 2. Northrop Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy’, Theories of Comedy, ed. P. Lauter (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1964). 3. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1981) p. 322. See also Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought,



Notes 239

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

p. 218. Again this term is only being used because it gives a sense of Blake participating in a recognized comic style, rather than because I wish to imply a rigorous application of all of Bakhtin’s concepts. Indeed such a reading of the Songs would seem to challenge Bakhtin’s assertion that poetic symbolism does not contain this dialogic aspect. See Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 62 G. M. Harper, The Neoplatonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1961) p. 46. J. King, William Blake: His Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991) pp. 215, 183. Peter Ackroyd, while stressing the need for a more comprehensive study of Blake’s idea of comedy, still shows a twentieth-century biographer’s preference for disturbed psychology over comic style, calling Blake’s humour in An Island ‘whimsical’ and ‘angry sarcasm’, Blake, p. 91. Ackroyd, Blake, p. 106. Like Edward Shuter or Charles Dibdin – see Billington, A Social History, p. 83. Palmer to Gilchrist, 23 August 1855, cited Gilchrist, Life, p. 304. Crabb Robinson admits that it was his ‘object’ to get ‘an avowal of his peculiar sentiments’ (Symons, Blake, p. 254) and Blake probably sensed this. Unfortunately this habit often ‘left his opponent angry and bewildered’. See also King, William Blake: His Life, p. 74. As M. R. Lowery puts it, ‘he had an ear for a good story’, Windows of the Morning: A Critical Study of William Blake’s Poetical Sketches (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) p. 27. F. Tatham, The Letters of William Blake Together with a Life, ed. G. B. Russell (London: Methuen, 1906) p. 38. Tatham, Life, pp. 38, 27, 32. Symons, Blake, pp. 254, 255, 260. A. Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London, 1830–46) II, 159–60, 168, 175. Gilchrist, Life, pp. 139, 80. ‘I see him now – there, there, how noble he looks – reach me my things!’ Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters II, 171. J. T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times, 2 vols (London, 1828) II, 472 Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters II, 170. Not discounting the fact that this could be a wry reference to Hunt’s complaint in The Examiner that Blake ‘blotted & blurred’. See E. Blunden, Leigh Hunt’s ‘Examiner’ Examined (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1928) p. 10. Symons, Blake, pp. 290–1. Dryden had made a similar remark: see Damon, A Blake Dictionary, pp. 79, 110. ‘Troilus and Cressyde’, Book IV, 1406, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979) p. 456. For a discussion of the political implications of pigs and swine, see Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, p. 90. Blake criticizes Dryden for his misunderstanding of Milton in similar terms. To Dryden’s claim that ‘Milton only plann’d’ Blake remarks that ‘Every Fool shook his bells throughout the land’ (E505) a double edged barb that implies both the stupidity of Dryden’s condemnation (which Blake links to the church bells of oppressive religion) and the jesting response of the true comedian – Blake’s own act of writing a comic poem, for instance.



240 Notes

24. O. Goldsmith, ‘An Essay on the Theatre’, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. A. Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966) III, 209–10. 25. W. Hazlitt, ‘Comic Writers of the Last Century’, The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, eds A. R. Waller, A. Glover and W. Henley, 12 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1902–4) VIII, 151. H. Bergson, Le Rire, trans. W. Sypher, Comedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) p. 73. 26. For a discussion of the movement of carnival spaces see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 179. 27. Polhemus, Comic Faith, p. 4. 28. See G. Bentley, Blake Records (Oxford, 1969) p. 207. 29. Although Freud speculated that ‘the joker is . . . disposed to neurotic disorders’ (Freud, Jokes, pp. 193–4) there is a lack of theoretical guidance on the relationship between depression and joking. But, if one accepts Blake’s own argument on the consistency in human nature and behaviour (‘The characters of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations’, E532) accounts of other ‘unhappy’ poets (like the ‘joker and punster’ De Quincey) as well as certain more recent comedians suggest that there is a strong link between the depressive and the joker. Much of Blake’s behaviour, like leaping out of bed to write two hours more, his belief in omens (E696, K803, K817) and even his visionary propensity, bears the hallmark of a depressive personality. In his notebooks and letters he makes frequent references to ‘Nervous Fear’ (E708): ‘Tuesday Janry. 20 1807 between Two & Seven in the Evening – Despair’ (E694) ‘I begin to Emerge from a Deep pit of Melancholy, Melancholy without any real reason for it’ (E706). Interestingly he had Dürer’s ‘Melancholy the Mother of Invention’ by his desk (Gilchrist, Life, p. 303) and in his poetry there are frequent references to his bardic voice being in part stimulated by his struggle with Los, his poetic alter-ego, whose ‘terrors make [him] afraid’ (E721). Avoiding depression by joking is recommended in R. Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton, listing ‘force of imagination’, ‘scoffs, calumnies’, ‘poverty and want’ and ‘loss of friends’ as causes of melancholy, remarks on the melancholic’s habit of ‘profusely laughing, extraordinarily merry’ and recommends ‘Dr. Merryman’ as a cure. Burton’s theories had influenced Milton and many of Blake’s contemporaries including Keats, Lamb and Southey. See P. Jordan-Smith, Bibliographia Burtoniana: A Study of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with a Bibliography of Burton’s Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934) pp. 106–8. 30. E. Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953) p. 169: ‘the search for genius in the insane has now become fashionable’. Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (London, 1904) scoured the Dictionary of National Biography for examples of the ‘peculiar connection between genius and insanity’, p. 191. Disappointed, he could only find 4.2 percent to be insane. 31. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, pp. xviii, xxiv. 32. Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters II, 158. 33. Symons, Blake, pp. 261, 293–4. 34. King, William Blake: His Life, p. 222. 35. See Gilchrist, Life, p. 1. 36. Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs, p. xxiii.



Notes 241

242 Notes

1. John Aiken, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London, 1777) pp. 5–6, cited Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, pp. 59–60. 2. Lowery, Windows of the Morning, notes a possible source for the expression in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (II.i.71): ‘Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love’, and in ‘The Bard’ Gray used ‘buskin’d measures’ as shorthand for ‘Shakespearean’. 3. H. Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (see The Beggar’s Opera and other Eighteenth Century Plays, ed. D. W. Lindsay (London 1974) pp. 205, 200, 177). The play comes complete with many fake erudite references, written by Fielding himself, to mock the tradition of borrowing poetic terminology. It makes fun of many romantic expressions such as ‘rosy-fingered morn’ and ‘thy modesty’s a candle to thy merit’. 4. J. Beer, ‘Influence and Independence in Blake’, Interpreting Blake, ed. M. Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) p. 221. Beer also sounds a stern warning that one must be careful not to impose meaning retrospectively, a caution repeated by Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, p. 10: ‘there is nothing easier than to create a supporting structure for an interpretation’. 5. Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, p. 45. 6. The Castle Spectre, in The London Stage; A collection of the most reputed tragedies, Comedies, Operas, Melo-dramas, Farces and Interludes (London: Sherwood, Jones & Co., 1825). 7. This part of the poem obviously had great impact on Blake, as, intriguingly, the last line of the lord’s utterance, ‘Hired a Villain to bereave my Life’ reappears at the end of a bitter Notebook 1808–11 ditty, ‘On H[ayle]y’s Friendship’ (E506). 8. See W. Thornton, The New, Complete and Universal History, Description and Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, The Borough of Southwark and the Parts adjacent (London: A. Hogg, 1784) p. 101. 9. Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, pp. 17–18. 10. Gleckner follows W. H. Stevenson in pointing out how rare it is to have a female speaker in the spurned lover poem tradition. However, Percy’s Ancient Ballads (1807) points out that a female bard made complaint to Edward II in 1316. Because they were to some extent outside polite culture, records of bards and clowns are not plentiful, but clearly there were some female comic practitioners. 11. Gleckner, for one, finds it unpalatable. ‘The only reason [he] can suggest’ for saving the poem, and he candidly ‘confess[es] the desperateness of the reach – is inherent in the last line of the Spenser imitation. Is ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’ one example of Minerva-inspired wisdom whose bosom is moved by ‘the afflicted man’?’ Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, p. 25. 12. M. Gardner, The Annotated Alice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) p. 15, sees religion as arising at the moment when laughter fails, but Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 42, sees the positive element of the comic leading on to spiritual awareness. 13. Lowery, Windows of the Morning, pp. 112–30.



Chapter 4: ‘I love the jocund dance’: the comic in the Poetical Sketches and Tiriel

14. This much-discussed doubt is well expressed by E. Larrissy, William Blake (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) p. 50. 15. ‘How beautiful the feet of those who bring good news!’, Romans 10: 15. 16. Raine, Blake and Tradition I, 55. 17. Lowery, Windows of the Morning, p. 121. See also p. 112. 18. M. de Montaigne, Essays (Florio’s translation, 1603) cited K. Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) p. 171. 19. M. Myrone, ‘Tiriel’, William Blake: Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, eds R. Hamlyn and M. Phillips (London: Tate, 2000) p. 44. 20. Myrone, ‘Tiriel’, p. 44. 21. G. E. Bentley, William Blake’s Tiriel (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967) p. 13. 22. This recalls Miranda’s ‘O brave new world!’ (V.i.185). Miranda taught Caliban to speak, to name the sun and moon and, like Tiriel, his only ‘profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse’. Shakespeare’s The Tempest (I.ii.364). 23. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 406. Gleckner, Blake’s Prelude, p. 73, notes Blake could have found reference to Hecla in Thomson’s poem ‘Winter’: J. Thomson, Works (London: A. Millar, 1750). 24. For example R. F. Gleckner, The Piper & the Bard; A Study of William Blake (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960) p. 147. On the other hand, Bentley dismisses the influence lightly: William Blake’s Tiriel, p. 13. 25. Some of the more obvious include Tiriel’s curse ‘may the heavens rain wrath / As thick as northern fogs. around your gates. to choke you up!’ (1:43–4) echoing Lear’s: ‘Infect her beauty, / You fen-suck’d fogs . . . / To fall and blast her pride’ (II.iv.165–6). Tiriel’s exclamation ‘Serpents not sons’ (1: 22) recalls both Lear’s curse on Goneril (I.iv.285–9) and Albany’s exclamation ‘Tigers, not daughters’ (IV.ii.40). Tiriel pleads that he is ‘poor blind Tiriel . . . you may see I am a harmless man’ (2: 14, 31) while Lear contends ‘Here I stand, your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak and despis’d old man’ (III.ii.19–20). Tiriel’s exclamation ‘What, Myratana. art thou dead. Look here ye serpents look’ (1:31) recalls both Gloucester’s and Lear’s reactions to death (IV.vi.257 and V.iii.310–11). The ‘aged Tiriel’ strives ‘against his rising passions’ (2: 44–5, del.) just as Lear complains of his ‘rising heart!’ (II.iv.55, 119). Both kings complain that they are ‘the natural fool of fortune’ (IV.vi.192) and ‘compelld to number footsteps / Upon the sand. &c’ (8: 32–3). 26. Bentley also adds that ‘Ijim’ is found in E. Swedenborg’s True Christian religion: containing the universal theology of the New Church (London, 1781) undergoing similar trials by tyger and toad. In Swedenborg’s description Ijim represents ‘Love of Self’ and desire for ‘Dominion’. Blake turns that on its head to show that what conventional religion calls self-love is understanding of the divine nature of everyone, and what Tiriel thinks of as humility is pride. 27. S. Foster Damon, Blake, His Philosophy and Symbols (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1969) p. 306. 28. See G. Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels including the Fallen Angels (New York: Free Press, 1967) pp. 63, 151. 29. From The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913).



Notes 243

30. On Jerusalem plate 12 (B491), the illumination shows a descending figure measuring out the world with compasses. In the accompanying text, Los beholds the ‘finger of God’ writing a physical existence: ‘by mathematic power / ‘Giving a body to Falshood that it may be cast off for ever’ (E155). God creates a physical body so that humanity may not be deluded by the terrors of an unstable, meaningless sublime, and through this physical body or text humanity can come to perceive its part in the Universal Brotherhood. The cause of isolation and vengeance is the very means to transcend it: ‘With Demonstrative Science piercing Apollyon with his own bow’: Apollyon is the pen-phallus angel of the abyss shown in Blake’s ‘Christ and Apollyon’. This will only be the case, of course, if texts are read creatively. Moses’ Moral Law (E521) must be reinterpreted – a point made by Jesus’ writing in sand when considering a case of moral law (John 8: 6–7).

Chapter 5: Talking of Virtuous Cats: An Island in the Moon 1. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Blake Complete Writings with variant readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) p. 884, Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 200, Brenda S. Webster, ‘Blake, Women and Sexuality’, Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, eds D. Miller, M. Bracher and D. Ault, (NC: Duke University Press, 1987) p. 224 and M. W. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, eds J. E. Grant and D. V. Erdman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). England’s comment shows an interesting institutionalization of Blake: he was ‘William Blake’ even to himself, it seems. 2. M. Phillips, William Blake: An Island in the Moon; A facsimile of the Manuscript (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 17, 6. In Phillips’ preface he says that An Island ‘leads directly to Blake’s center’ and is convinced that the ‘friends’ were not the object of Blake’s satirical touches, but still finds the whole piece parochial. James King, following Phillips, finds elements of Smollett, Sterne, Ariosto, Rabelais, Cervantes, Pope, Rochester and Smart in An Island, but still considers it ‘tomfoolery’. King, William Blake: His Life, pp. 45, 47. 3. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 200. 4. See K. M. Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1995) pp. 37ff, especially referring to Bakhtin’s Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics trans C. Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984) p. 112. See also Billington, A Social History, p. 24. 5. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 339: ‘It was likewise a part of the stage fool’s office to introduce at his own discretion a great many old songs, or at least fragments of them.’ 6. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 4. 7. See S. Foote, A Letter from Mr. Foote . . . on The Minor, cited in W. Cooke’s Memoirs of Samuel Foote, Esq. with a Collection of His genuine Bon-Mots, Anecdotes, Opinions, &c. Mostly original. and Three of his Dramatic Pieces, not published in his Works 3 vols (London: Richard Phillips, 1805) III, 162–3.



244 Notes

8. S. Foote, The Minor in Plays by Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy, ed. G. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) p. 50. 9. Cooke, Memoirs of Foote I, 2. 10. S. Foote, The Roman and English Comedy Compar’d (London: T. Waller, 1747) p. 5. 11. Cooke Memoirs of Foote I, 5. 12. ‘A Merry Andrew and a prostitute are no bad poetical parents, especially for a writer of plays: the first to give humour and mirth; the last to furnish graces and powers of attraction’ – S. Foote, A Letter to the Duchess of Kingston, August 1775 cited Chatten, Samuel Foote p. 126. Foote was also highly conscious of the relationship between the subtle clown or ‘Man of Humour’ who acts the clown and the mad fool or ‘Humorist’, the buffoonish character-persona who is portrayed, seeing the Humorist as suffering from ‘some Extravagance, or disease of the Mind’ which makes him unwittingly ridiculous. To the Man of Humour the Humorist is his ‘food’ or topic: ‘it is to the Labour and Pleasantry of the [Man of Humour] that you are indebted for all the Entertainment you meet with in the [Humorist]’. See Chatten, Samuel Foote, pp. 11–12. 13. R. W. Bevis, Eighteenth Century Drama: Afterpieces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 244. See also Chatten, Samuel Foote, pp. 16, 31–2, 136. 14. Blake’s identification with Foote may be much greater than England proposes, as the following notes will suggest. Direct proofs of Foote’s influence on Blake can be found as late as the 1800s. In Blake’s Notebook 1808–11 verse ‘I askd my Dear Friend Orator Prigg’ (E515) the first principle of Oratory is satirized as ‘a Great wig’. Orator Prig appears in Foote’s The Minor, where he stresses ‘the importance of a wig’. Certainly there is a great deal of sympathy between Foote and Blake’s approach to particular comic targets. For example, like a good clown / fool Foote challenged the literary affectations of his day, including the tendency to sigh over Shakespeare. In Tragedy-à-la-Mode (1761) Foote provides much of the humour by the incongruous echoing of Shakespeare’s romantic images. This both exposes the ludicrousness of his own tragedy and points out the ridiculousness of his audience’s reverential attitude to the original. His intention was to have pasteboard figures on stage and, although this was not fully appreciated by his audience, it showed Foote’s belief that the insights of Shakespeare had been reduced to trite formulae about life, part of a polite culture that had no thought or imagination of its own. Blake uses the image of Pasteboard men in a similar context: ‘Both in Art & in Life General Masses are as Much Art as a Pasteboard Man is Human’ (E560). Foote’s after-pieces, like the clown’s jig, rejected such institutionalized platitudes in favour of dancing, physicality, improvisation and ‘forcing the higher order of the audience’, as it says in his Piety in Pattens prologue, ‘to a vulgar and mean use of their muscles’. This is an intention that Blake clearly approved and, in works such as The ‘Dance of Albion’, celebrated, as the first step towards grasping a spiritual egalitarianism. Foote and Blake also agreed that art was being perverted by commercial pressures. In Taste (1752) the character of Carmine, an art forger, blames rich patrons with little understanding of Art and too much self-importance for the prostitution of his talent: ‘As matters are now managed, the Art is the last Thing to be regarded. Family Connections,



Notes 245

private Recommendations, and an easy genteel Method of Flattering, is to supply the Delicacy of a Guido, the colouring of a Rubens, and the design of a Raphael.’ (S. Foote, Taste, in Samuel Foote’s Taste and The Orators. A Modern Edition with Five Essays, ed. M. C. Murphy (Annapolis: United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, 1982) p. 7.) Blake would have disagreed about Rubens, but one could cite a similar number of his annotations in similar vein: ‘The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents. & Genius? But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass: & obedient to Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science. If he is; he is a Good Man: If Not he must be Starved’ (E642). It is interesting to note that for both Foote and Blake it is the outsider, the rogue, the madman, who has the true appreciation of Art, while Bad Art is encouraged by ‘Booksellers & Trading Dealers’ (E576). This poor taste was supported by art historians who felt that art was only valuable if it was old: as Foote puts it: ‘those Goths in Science, who had prostituted the useful Study of Antiquity to trifling superficial purposes; who had blasted the Progress of the elegant Arts amongst us, by unpardonable Frauds and absurd Prejudices’ (Taste, p. 3). In The Orators (1762) Foote took a sideswipe at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and the vogue for finding ‘ancient’ or ‘Runic’ poetry in Scotland or Ireland and then valuing it simply because of its age. How much better, he suggests, would their time be spent in searching out ‘the ablest professors’ (S. Foote, The Orators, in Samuel Foote’s Taste and The Orators. A Modern edition with Five Essays, ed. M. C. Murphy (Annapolis: United States Naval Academy, 1982) p. 73.) Blake too values ability over antiquity, asserting that what is important about poetry, what makes it valuable, is the adherence to the ancient and prophetic value of vision rather than merely being ‘old’. Much contemporary debate had been provoked by Chatterton and Macpherson’s ‘forgeries’ of the ‘ancient’ works of ‘Rowley’ and ‘Ossian’ respectively. In An Island Blake suggests that those who value the poems simply because of their age will probably also misread other great writers: Quid at first denies Chatterton’s poetic skill (‘Chatterton never writ those poems. A parcel of fools going to Bristol’) and then claims ‘that Homer is bombast & Shakespeare too wild & Milton has no feelings’ (E455). Later, when annotating the work of the nature-fixated Wordsworth, Blake asserts that he believes ‘both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient Is so’ (E665) because no matter when they were composed, the poems were written with the true bardic conviction. Also in The Orators Foote parodies Sheridan’s dull lectures on oratory, claiming in his mock-lecture that if intelligent persons were sent to listen to Sheridan at the public expense, then England would soon become intellectually superior ‘even to the most illustrious periods of Greece and Rome!’ (The Orators, p. 63.) His example is of Ephraim Suds, a graceless soapboiler, who feels that a lecture or two has given him almost divine inspiration: ‘O Lud! It is unknown what knowledge we got; we can read – Oh! we never stop to spell a word now – and then he told us such things about verbs, and nouns, and adverbs, that never entered our heads before . . . heaven bless us, I did not think there had been such things in the world’ (The Orators, p. 61). Suds’ sentiments are all the funnier for echoing ‘O brave new world’ (a line from a play celebrating the almost magical powers of the imagination) while being about the rules of grammar. Blake,



246 Notes

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

himself no respecter of conventional grammatical observance, insisted that it was ‘Eloquence’, not rules, that made ‘discretion of Speech’ (E630) and rejected any form of ‘Slobbering School’ (E514). To make England ‘What Italy is, and Envied Storehouse of Intellectual Riches’ (E581) he demanded state help for the artist, ‘a national commission’ (E531) a ‘Fair Price & Proportionate Value’ and a ‘general demand for Art’ (E637). Many of Blake’s scientific bugbears are also subject to Foote’s scathing wit. In The Cozeners (1774), the character ‘Flaw’ says of a warring couple: ‘They have been bred in a state of Nature’, thus jibbing at Rousseau’s idea of the natural man. Blake remarks that the ‘Natural Man’ is opposed to ‘the Soul or Imagination’ (E273) and suggests that Rousseau’s damning idea could only have come from a despite for mankind: he claims Rousseau found man ‘no friend’ (E201). In the same play, Aircastle’s speech moves from one topic to another so fast that he is probably a satire on Locke’s theory of the association of ideas (Chatten, Samuel Foote, pp. 114, 116). Blake pictures Locke’s theory as the ‘Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire’ in the European universities (E159). England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 15. Foote, The Minor, p. 36. Whitefield and Mother Douglas were also the subject of Hogarth’s ‘Enthusiasm Delineated’ (c.1761). The similarity of method in Foote and Hogarth lead the former to be called ‘The Hogarth of the Stage’, Chatten, Samuel Foote, p. 79. Foote, The Minor, p. 8. See D. F. Smith and M. L. Lawhon, Plays about the Theatre in England, 1737–1800 or, The Self-conscious Stage from Foote to Sheridan (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979) pp. 177–88. See S. Collings, Picturesque Beauties of Boswell (London, 1786). Phillips has many other suggestions, including William Matthew as Sipsop, and James Edwards as Aradobo: An Island in the Moon, pp. 69–74. Phillips also suggests it could mean ‘a guinea’ and be an alternative version of ‘Ovid’: An Island in the Moon, p. 69. See Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 38. A broad translation might be: ‘Whatever motivates mankind: religion, fear, anger, lust, jollity, debate; that is the subject of our work.’ A farrago is of course a hotchpotch, a medley, a patched thing, like a fool’s coat, but the Tatler fool is more a licensed speaker than a true spokesman for the community. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 14. ‘Thus Blake made fun of his own undoubtable propensity for pushing arguments too hotly in social gatherings, and in a measure excused them’. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 200. G. E. Bentley, A Bibliography of George Cumberland (1754–1848) (New York: Garland, 1975) p. xviii. See G. Keynes, ‘Blake and Cumberland’ from The Book Collector, Spring 1970, pp. 35–6, and Bentley, A Bibliography of George Cumberland, p. 48. See The Douce Legacy (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1984). See William Hone’s The Every Day Book and table book: or, Everlasting calendar of popular amusements, sports, pastimes, ceremonies, manners, customs, and events, incident to each of the three hundred and sixty-five days, in past and present times; forming a complete history of the year, months, and seasons, and a perpetual key to the almanac . . . for daily use and diversion (London, 1839),



Notes 247

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

vol. 2, quoted by Donald, The Age of Caricature, p. 3. The Every-day book was originally published weekly from January 1825, to December 1826 (105 numbers), here published in 2 volumes including indexes). As Priestley did not arrive in London until 1791 (see Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 134) Banks is arguably as good a candidate for Inflammable Gass as anyone else. Besides famously and quite explosively experimenting with ‘Inflammable Air’ at his Soho house (see W. Austin, Experiments on the Formation of Volatile Alkali, and on the Affinities of the Phlogisticated and light Inflammable Airs (London, 1787) p. 4) he had a close interest in ‘cockchafers’, knew John Hunter (‘Jack Tearguts’) and had praised the latter’s treatise on the sex life of whales (The Marriage of course also refers to a ‘leviathan’). In one contemporary satirical poem he is even depicted as chasing blindly after the ‘Emperor of Morocco’, an elusive butterfly (Aradobo is described as the ‘Dean of Morocco’). F. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785). References to ideas such as oriental gardening and virtuous cats would have been available to Blake in a variety of contemporary sources. See Phillips, Keynes and England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 16. Rosenfeld, London Fairs, p. 151. Like Monty Python, E. Ward’s Wine and Wisdom: or, the Tipling Philosophers (London: J. Woodward, 1719) is similarly intent on producing howls of derisive laughter. Blake would have particularly enjoyed Python’s idea that ‘Hobbes was fond of his dram and René Descartes was a drunken fart – I drink therefore I am’. For a connection between these thinkers and the Machiavellianism popular in Elizabethan thought, see H. Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (London: Faber & Faber, 1973) pp. 20ff. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W. A. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926) p. 30. See also Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, pp. 169–70. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1963) cited Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, p. 166. R. N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989) pp. 41, 43. Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1688) cited by Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, p. 42. Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, p. 169. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, pp. 17ff. Essick notes that William Warburton’s The divine legation of Moses demonstrated, on the principles of a religious deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish dispensation. In six books (London: Fletcher Gyles, 1738–41) was valuable in its day as ‘an exemplar of antiquarian scholarship’, William Blake and the Language of Adam, p. 36. Warburton’s antiquarian research was aimed at discovering the basis of all languages. He proposed that priests were responsible for the abstraction of pictographs, and hence the destruction of the notion of the incarnate sign, replacing it with abstract, arbitrary convention. Such a pattern will, of course, appear in The Marriage.



248 Notes

42. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 43. Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 9–10. 44. There is a possible literary precedent for Blake’s philosophers in Lyly’s comedy Alexander and Campaspe. It is not recorded in The London Stage as having been performed around 1784–5 (C. B. Hogan et al. eds The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 5: 1776–1800 2 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)), but it has several interesting features. It contains a trio of philosophers, Aristotle, Plato and Diogenes, and their counterpart servants. Aristotle and Plato are dry and rather stupid, and are stumped by their own reasoning when trying to answer questions about natural movement (A4r) rather as Inflammable Gass and Etruscan Column are when talking about swallows (E450). Diogenes the Cynic is quick-witted and sharp. He dislikes money (D1v) and has no respect for Emperor Alexander or organized religion: ‘From the Bee you haue take-[n] not the honey, but the wax to make your religion, framing it to the time, not to the trueth’ (D4v). Quid too would ‘hang’ both Phebus (who, ‘with his fat belly’ and ‘I won’t let it go for only so & so’, is the epitome of market forces) and Pharaoh. Diogenes is also more of a clown than a philosopher, (see Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 230: not ‘a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the malcontent type [who] steals the show’). Quotations from J. Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1933). 45. Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe, p. 2. 46. Phillips notices this mistake: An Island in the Moon, p. 71. 47. See Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, pp. 91–2. 48. Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 99. 49. See J. F. Newton, The Three Degrees and Great Symbols of Masonry (Washington, DC: 1924) p. 69ff, and J. S. M. Ward, An Interpretation of our Masonic Symbols (London: A. Lewis, 1924) p. 7. 50. This kind of reinterpretation is an almost copybook definition of Bakhtin’s idea that ‘to speak, to write and to read . . . is to apprehend the relative, open-ended nature of semantic phenomena . . . all interpreters re-form, conform and de-form the stories they read and hear according to their own perspectives, their objectives, and their life experiences’. See Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque, p. 20. 51. An example is H. Sutton, A Description & use of a Large Quadrant (London: 1669). 52. Thornton, Survey, pp. 114, 90. 53. See The London Spy (London: How, 1701) II, 7, and Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. There are a number of references to alcohol in the text. Besides the rum and water the characters drink, act of parliament (beer) pharaoh (malt liquor) and morocco (strong beer brewed from roast beef – see A. Cobban, History of Pubs and Pub Signs (Brentwood: Discovering London, 1986) p. 86) are all mentioned, often equating the dominant ideology (church, parliament) with their consumption. 54. For Robin Goodfellow’s braying, see W. Warner, Albion’s England. A Continued History of the Same Kingdome (London, 1612). Joe Haines, a famous near contemporary comic and the Andy Kaufmann of his day, often rode on an Ass (Billington, A Social History, p. 97). Christ with an Ass’ head has already been mentioned (Cox, The Feast of Fools, p. 140). Balaam’s



Notes 249

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

talking ass is a comic episode in the Bible (Numbers 22: 22–35) – see Whedbee Bible and Comic Vision, p. 2. ‘Call me Ass’ is also the exclamation of the Lion (Britain) in spurning Fox and others from its back in a satirical print of the 1750s (which can be found in M. Darly, A Political and Satirical History of the Years 1756, 1757, 1758, 1759 and 1760, in a series of one hundred and four Humourous and Entertaining Prints (London, 1760). It is a call to reject false political beliefs. For the trumpet in Millenarian thought, see Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 136. The ‘separation of mentalism and sensibilism into mutually exclusive doctrines is at best a useful simplification’, Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam, p. 57. To have shit clapped on your head was a traditional reward for laughing at the Devil: see The History of Mother Shipton (1630s, bound for Francis Douce, London, 1780s) p. 10: the devil clown’s reward for misbelief. Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 74. An idea of course repeated in The Marriage in comments on Priesthood and the warning that ‘man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern’ (E39). In many ways, Inflammable Gass is the sum of his instruments: a bottle of wind and a camera obscura. He is close to the projectors of Swift’s Laputa: he is even ‘pumped dry’ like the poor dog in the bellows experiment. J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1727) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. 226. See Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and works as early as A Step to Stir-Bitch Fair: with remarks upon the University of Cambridge (London: J. How, 1700) p. 8. D. V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of his own Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 114. For the pulpit, see J. R. H. Roberts and W. H. Godfrey, London County Council Survey of London XXI (London: County Hall, 1949) p. 23. Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 74, likens Huffcap to Whitefield, a comparison made all the more plausible by contemporary comments on the impressive nature of Whitefield’s pulpit and the connection noted earlier between Whitefield and Foote. There were a number of other violent sermonizers in London at the time, however. James Lackington’s Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of the Life of James Lackington (London, 1791) describes a Methodist preacher of the time who preached so wildly when drunk that he ‘nearly tumbled headlong out of is portable pulpit’, whereupon he was pelted by a mob (pp. 200–1). Garrett, Respectable Folly, mentions Elhanah Winchester, a fiery Baptist preacher from Philadelphia (p. 137). Those who complained about such enthusiasm, however, were themselves questioned: S. Whitchurch, in Another Witness! or Further Testimony in Favour of Richard Brothers (London: 1795) remarks on the ‘petulant Ishmael of the Gospel at Providence Chapel’ who ‘exclaim[s] from the pulpit ‘Beware of the Paddington Prophet’ . . . when perhaps it would be much better if he cautioned his bigotted admirers against the contagion of his own uncharitable temper’, p. 20. The similarity between Huffcap’s stamping and Quid’s is noted by T. A. Vogler, ‘In vain the Eloquent tongue’: An Un-Reading of VISIONS of the Daughters of Albion’, Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, eds D. Miller, M. Bracher, and D. Ault (NC: Duke University Press, 1987).



250 Notes

63. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue notes the term ‘Ottomy’ meaning a skeleton and ‘To be ottomized’ as being dissected and displayed: the suggestion is that science is matter / death oriented and offers at best only an imperfect dissection of society. Interestingly, Aradobo’s description of Chatterton’s end bears a faint resemblance to the comic-pathetic fate of ‘Bellows Joe’ in E. Newbery’s The Cries of London, As They are daily exhibited in the Streets (London, 1784), who drinks too much and ‘very little eats’ until ‘The Phthisic coming on a-pace / Destroys his own life’s bellows’ and silences his social and personal voice. 64. E. B. Greene, Strictures Upon a Pamphlet intitled, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley (London: 1782). 65. John Dennis, ‘Court of Death’ (1695), cited H. G. Paul, John Dennis: His Life and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911) p. 135. 66. J. Towne, A Dissertation on the Ancient Pagan Mysteries Wherein the Opinions of Bp. Warburton and Dr. Leland on this subject. are particularly considered (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1766) pp. 19, 36, 28. 67. See G. Keynes, Blake Complete Writings p. 884, Phillips, An Island in the Moon p. 69; R. Tames, Soho Past (London: Historical Publications, 1994) p. 85, E. B. Chancellor, London’s Old Latin Quarter (London: Cape, 1930) p. 105, and Frost, The Old Showmen, p. 206. 68. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 19. 69. Dryden, ‘Absalom and Architophel’, p. 178. 70. See Foote, A Letter from Mr. Foote . . . on The Minor in Cooke, Memoirs of Foote III, 163 and The Minor, p. 51. 71. For the ‘pen’ as ‘knife’ in satire, see M. C. Randolph, ‘The Medical Concept in English Satiric Theory’, Studies in Philology xxxviii (1941) pp. 125–57. 72. Cited by Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 169. 73. Quoted by Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 323. 74. This kind of Genealogy was of course not unique to Blake: consider the anonymous Raillerie a la Mode Consider’d: or the Supercilious Detractor (1763): ‘A Detractor is . . . at first bred up and suckled with sour Sustenance from the lank and flaggy Dugs of his lean and meager Mother Envy, he afterwards feeds on Fame; his words are worse than Poyson of Asps’, cited Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 53. 75. See J. Ritson, Gammer Gurton’s Garland: or, the Nursery Parnassus A choice collection of pretty Songs and Versers for the amusement of all good little children who can neither read or run (Stockton: R. Christopher, 1783) p. 54. This kind of collection was popular food for the satirist. 76. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, p. 119. 77. See Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 82. 78. See Smith, Vagabondiana, p. 25ff. 79. Interestingly, Locke’s name is repeated three times in three lines, and ‘Look, look, look’ where the opening words of the ‘messenger’ who spoke to Christopher Colter in 1794, predicting an earthquake on 4 June of that year. See Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 204. 80. See Thornton, Survey, p. 459, Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia. 81. See Tames, Soho Past, p. 97.



Notes 251

82. See, for example, E. Kraft, Character & Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (Georgia: Georgia University Press, 1992) p. 36. 83. Leipzig, from 1775 to 1825. See Michael Hulse’s introduction to Werther (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). Goethe claimed to have been inspired by melancholic English poetry from Hamlet to Gray’s ‘Elegy’. As Goethe’s tale was republished in English as Werter and Charlotte in 1786, this gives another clue as to the date of this section of An Island. 84. Although this phrase is normally given as ‘in her head’, the manuscript is unclear. It could read ‘in his head’. In either case, Mrs Jacko has no say in either the household affairs or her own life. Interestingly, Dr Johnson was also famous for having a black servant. 85. Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 84. 86. See S. Gardner, Blake (London: Evans, 1968) cited Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 84. Cowley had, of course, famously written on the difficulty of defining wit. 87. Dr Johnson was a natural target for Blake: a typical embodiment of the school of thought that called the imaginative ‘Mad’: ‘All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity’, Rasselas, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) p. 150. 88. For Foote and Johnson’s rivalry, see England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 20. 89. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 90. See Phillips, An Island in the Moon, pp. 85, 87. 91. See for example M. Randall, The New Comic Songster, containing A Select Collection of All the Witty, Humorous, Droll, Odd, Burlesque, Laughable, Whimsical, and Eccentrical Songs (Stirling: n.d.) or T. Hughes The Theatrical Song Book for 1810 (London, 1810). 92. M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London: 1938) print 6964. 93. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, print 6572. 94. Randall, New Comic Songster, pp. 17–18. 95. See Frost, The Old Showmen, p. 217. 96. The Reverend J. Bradley, Astronomical Observations, made at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, from the year MDCCL to the year MDCCLXII (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1798). 97. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 304. Ned Ward, in The London Spy (1690) p. 101, remarked on how the clown ‘Jack Pudding’ would imitate Italian singers. See Billington, A Social History, p. 62. 98. Chaucer, ‘The Wife of Bath’, in Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 78, ll. 269–70. 99. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 100. W. Sherlock, A Practical Discourse concerning Death (London, 1739) pp. 74, 65–6, 57, 71, 31, 14. 101. R. South, Sermons preached upon several occasions 6 vols (London: H. Lintot, 1737). 102. R. South, Animadversions Upon Dr Sherlock’s Book, Entitled a Vindication of the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity, &c. (London, 1693) pp. 4, vii.



252 Notes

103. South, Animadversions, pp. 13, xvi–xvii. 104. See M. Sewell, Charter-House, its Foundation and History (London: 1949) and T. Sutton, The Charterhouse, with the Last will and Testament of Thomas Sutton Esquire (London, 1614) p. 8. 105. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’, p. 23. 106. Sutton, The Charterhouse, pp. 1–3. 107. Thornton, Survey, pp. 276, 408. 108. Sutton, The Charterhouse, p. 10. 109. This is certainly the reading proposed by Glen, who sees the song as an ‘hilarious parody of totally rationalistic “philanthropy” . . . the new kind of impersonal, monetary philanthropy . . . which had steadily been replacing, older, more face-to-face forms of social obligation’, a style of charity that Glen calls ‘the magic that transforms the world’: Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, pp. 125, 116. Glen’s deeply perceptive reading has a lot to recommend it, but there remains the question that, if Blake wants to offer a positive alternative, where in the song might this come from? While she is certain that ‘Good English hospitality’ is satiric (Vision and Disenchantment, p. 115) she does not locate any alternative within the songs themselves that are not open to the same kind of sentimentalizing ‘Merrie England’ reading that is being sent up in ‘Good English hospitality’. Similarly, when writing of the ‘potential’ of the charity children in the later ‘Holy Thursday’ song, Glen suggests the reader is supposed to respond to the ‘aesthetic dimension of the scene’ (Vision and Disenchantment, p. 119). However, in the version of ‘Holy Thursday’ reproduced in Innocence, the tail of the ‘y’ in the word ‘Pity’ helps to create the border illustration. The ‘aesthetic dimension’ of the song can help to create the sentimental picture which allows polite ‘charity’ to convince itself it is doing the best for the poor. If the ‘hospital’ is not successful, neither is ‘hospitality’. 110. Roach, The New London City Jester, end pages. The list of taxes also includes a tax on all those who go to Italian opera without understanding a single word of it. 111. Billington, A Social History, p. 105. 112. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 9. 113. Frost, The Old Showmen, p. 17. 114. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 136. 115. See Roberts and Godfrey, Survey of London XXI, p. 73. A Thomas Green was also a Soho ‘paviour’ around about the time of South and Sherlock’s debate and this Green illustrates the connection between buildings and language: he gave his name to a local street. 116. Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley, tending to prove That they really were written by Him (London, 1782) p. 10. See also W. Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (Bristol: William Pine, 1789) p. 635. 117. J. Warton, An Enquiry into the Authenticity of the poems attributed to Thomas Rowley (London, 1782) p. 110. 118. See Greene, Strictures Upon a Pamphlet, p. 53, for example. 119. See J. Miles and J. Bryant, Cursory Observations on the Poems attributed to Rowley (London, 1782) p. 11, for example.



Notes 253

120. P. Bearcroft, An Historical Account of Thomas Sutton Esq and of his Foundation in Charter-house (London, 1737) p. 5. 121. Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 161. 122. Lackington, Memoirs of the First Forty-five Years of The Life of James Lackington, p. 240, decribes as common practice the habit of having a few friends round to play with microscopes, airpumps, ‘a good bottle of wine and other philosophical instruments’. G. Villiers, ‘Prince Cantamire’s Galante Shew in Westminster Hall’, Flights of Fancy (1788) is illustrated with an engraving of the Prince in huge spectacles at a projector showing ‘A Benare’s Flea’, p. 120. See also Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 148 and Billington, A Social History, p. 59. 123. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, p. 126. 124. See for example, Randall, The New Comic Songster, pp. 5–6, where the Beadle of the parish, a ‘knowing prig / with [a] laced coat and wig’ is shown as greedy and hypocritical. 125. England, ‘Apprenticeship at the Haymarket?’ p. 6. 126. Roberts and Godfrey, Survey of London, vol. XXI, p. 4, note this workhouse opening in 1788. Phillips suggests that this section of An Island could have been written as late as 1789: An Island in the Moon, p. 5. 127. Thornton, Survey, p. 133. 128. Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, pp. 347, 345. 129. Thornton, Survey, p. 35. 130. See, for example, Hook’s comic song ‘For I’m to Meet My Colin There’, sung at Vauxhall Gardens in 1782 (‘At E’en I love to go, When the Jocund Lasses and Lads are seen . . . Pursuing their sports on the laughing green’). James Hook, 1782 A Collection of Songs sung by Mr Cubitt, Mrs Wrighten, Mrs Weichsell and Mrs Kennedy at Vauxhall Gardens Compos’d by James Hook (London, 1782) p. 3. 131. Phillips, An Island in the Moon, p. 96. 132. See Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, p. 81, and the Gentlemen’s Magazine 1777, in an article which also discusses the boy bishop in Salisbury Cathedral. 133. Phillips sees ‘Doctor Clash’ as reminiscent of the comic rehearsals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and G. V. Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671): An Island in the Moon, p. 97. Scopprell is rather like the ingenue ‘Gentleman cit’ in Foote’s translation of a French farce, getting involved in complex disputes, dancing classes, and even in his exclamations of ‘ho ho ho’ and ‘O ay’ echoing the cit’s experiences in learning polite pronunciation. See S. Foote, The Comic Theatre, being a Free Translation of all the Best French Comedies (London, 1762). 134. J. How, The Dancing School. with the Adventures of the Easter Holy-Days (London, 1700) p. 4. 135. Ritson, Gammer Gurton’s Garland, p. 18. 136. See Greene, Strictures Upon a Pamphlet, p. 80, for example, as well as Gulliver’s Travels and several contemporary prints. 137. See Bearcroft, An Historical Account of Thomas Sutton, preface. 138. See Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 169. 139. Ackroyd, Blake, p. 93.



254 Notes

Notes 255

1. One such example is the work of Roger Fry and the Post-Impressionists. Fry posited, in his ‘Essay in Aesthetics’ (1909) that children drew from imagination and not from nature and were thus a challenge to the learned conventions of aesthetic practice – see Juliet Dusinberre, ‘The vision of innocents’, Tate 19 (Winter 1999) pp. 20–5. Such an attitude is all the more attractive because of the many apparent similarities between the PostImpressionists and Blake; both placed great value on the art of ‘seeing differently’, praised the work of Giotto and noticed how the shock of undermining aesthetic hierarchies often led to accusations of madness. Indeed, Leslie Stephens, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, went so far as to suggest that there was a direct connection between the genius / lunatic and the ability to perceive aesthetic alternatives. However, while the Post-Impressionists were interested in the socially naïve position of the child / genius / lunatic (interestingly, a position frequently ascribed to Blake himself) Blake consistently presents us with an art that is highly socially aware. 2. F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, eds E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967) p. 144, cited Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, p. 222. 3. Gilchrist, Life, p. 301. 4. The opening of ‘London’, with its reference to ‘charter’ and ‘mark’, may in itself be a satiric attack on the work of Tom Paine – see Larrissy, William Blake, pp. 43, 50. 5. Cox, The Feast of Fools, p. 10. 6. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 41. 7. Swedenborg used the image of a tree growing from seed to fruit to symbolize an angel’s progression: Blake conflates the rational angel with the Upas tree of Java to produce ‘The Poison Tree’. Paine claimed the Thames would save London from being completely ‘chartered’. See also Glen, Vision and Disenchantment and G. Pechey, ‘1789 and After: Mutations of “Romantic” Discourse’, 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, eds F. Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1982) p. 56. 8. J. Newbery, A Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Six Feet High (London, 1757). Radical satirical poems continued to use the style of children’s rhymes throughout Blake’s life: Newbery’s title is quoted by Hone in his post-Peterloo collection The true political house that Jack built (London, 1820). See M. Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1994) pp. 215ff. 9. It has long been recognized that the songs’ illustrations or illuminations form a Derridean ‘parergon’ to the text and must be understood alongside it: see for example the work of R. Young, Untying the Text (Boston: Routledge, 1981) p. 226 and Larrissy, William Blake pp. 23–5, 29. D. E. Hicks, BorderWriting, The Multidimensional Text (Minnesota: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1991), suggests that readers of such border[ed] texts, in crossing between the boundaries of one discourse and another, become border crossers, or ‘transgressors’, to use Stallybrass and White’s term, themselves. See also M. Loeb and G. Porter, eds., Dangerous Crossing: Papers on Transgression in Literature and culture (Umeå University, 1999) p. 10.



Chapter 6: To Sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha, Ha, He’: The Songs Of Innocence And Of Experience

10. E. Malone, A Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage (Basil: J. J. Tourneisen, 1800) pp. 149ff. 11. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 38; Billington, A Social History, p. 46. 12. See the entry for May poles in Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia. This May pole would have particularly appealed to Blake if he knew of it (and there is no reason to suppose that he, with all his antiquarian contacts, did not) because it was removed in 1718 and acquired by Newton to support the highest telescope in Europe: a direct case of carnival falling prey to the new materialist vision of the world. 13. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 55. 14. The image of the grapes is repeated by Blake, occurring in ‘The Brothers seen by Comus Plucking Grapes’ and in ‘The Argument’ plate of The Marriage, and the connection between grapes, trees and visionary perception is also made, significantly, in Blake’s letter to Dr Trusler, mentioned earlier (E702). 15. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 67. 16. London Magazine vii (1738) p. 140, cited Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 71. 17. Billington, A Social History, pp. 107–8. 18. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, pp. 29–30. 19. Billington, A Social History, pp. 111, 114. 20. Smith, Vagabondia, p. 41. 21. ‘A chimney-sweep boy, had swept the chimney at a barber’s shop in London, and while he was tying up the soot, some of the journey-men who were at work in the shop, being inclined to exercise their wit on the poor lad, among other questions, asked him what trade his father was? To which the boy very archly replied – what trade? Why, my father was a barber, and I might have been a barber too; but to tell you the truth, I did not like such a blackguard business.’ Roach, The New London City Jester, p. 13. 22. P. J. Grosley, ‘A Tour of London’, The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-life, 1700–1914, ed. R. Allen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988) p. 69. 23. Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, p. 345. 24. Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the vulgar tongue. 25. Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, p. 345. 26. ‘The Rival Loyalists’, in A Collection of Songs performed at Sadlers Wells, ed. T. Dibdin (London, 1795). 27. See R. C. Riley and P. Eley, Public Houses and Beerhouses in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth (City of Portsmouth, 1983) p. 13. Pubs were often opposed to vagabonds, too: in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews the inn-keeper’s wife declares she has ‘a natural antipathy to vagabonds’, p. 42. 28. Raine, Blake and Tradition I, 360–7. 29. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, pp. 74, 82. In the Highgate and Hampstead area of Blake’s London, there was a popular drinking game that involved ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’ pledging to look after one another. 30. A tradition that still exists, in a temporate, genteel fashion, in the Church jumble sale. Cobban, History of Pubs and Pub Signs, p. 9. 31. See Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 42, J. How, A Frolick to Horn-Fair. With a walk from Cuckold’s-Point Thro’ Deptford and Greenwich (London, 1700) and F. Douce, Some Remarks on the ancient Ceremony of the Feast of Fools, and on the sculptured Girdle worn at its celebration (London, 1804) p. 4.



256 Notes

32. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 440. 33. While the mention of St Paul would call to mind again the warnings of the need for faith and the failure of language, saying just ‘Paul’s’ may invoke a more secular reference. The ‘Children of Paul’s’ were a theatrical company (the children in the song sit in ‘companies’) who were most prominent between c.1570 and 1605, performing works by Kyd, Marston and Lyly. If Blake knew of their existence and there is the suggestion that he at least knew Lyly’s work well, he could be calling to attention how the lively and performative aspect of the Paul’s children has become appropriated, regimented and sanitized. 34. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, pp. 103ff. 35. See J.-P. Pittion, Taking Liberties: Satirical Prints of the French Revolution (French Bicentenary Committee, 1989) foreword. 36. Quoted by Newton, The Three Degrees and Great Symbols of Masonry, p. 79. 37. Ritson, A select collection of English Songs vol. 2, song XIX. 38. ‘It is impossible to enumerate the Evils which arise from these Arrows that fly in the dark, and I know no other Excuse that is or can be made for them, than that the Wounds they give are only Imaginary, and produce nothing more than a secret Shame or Sorrow in the Mind of the Suffering Person.’ Addison, Spectator No. 23 (27 March 1711). 39. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. 129. 40. ‘Of watches of London’, J. Stow, Survey of London (1603), ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1971) p. 101. 41. Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, p. 118. Priestley had then recently claimed fairy rings were the result of lightning. 42. For the absence of performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Hogan, The London Stage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream may also play a part in another of the Songs: appropriately, ‘A Dream’, which in many copies of the Songs follows the ‘Introduction’ and continues the allusions to wandering Shakespearean fool / guides. In this song a ‘dream’ weaves a ‘shade’ about the ‘Angel-guarded bed’ of the narrator, a situation not unlike that of the speaker of ‘Fresh from the dewy hill’. The speaker is lying on the grass and is therefore entangled with the world of the five senses. He or she sees an emmet and assumes that the ant is lost, ‘benighted’ and caught in ‘tangled’ ways. ‘Tangled’ reappears in ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’, where the bard deliberately contrasts the ‘Youth of delight’ with ‘Folly’ and its attending ‘doubt’ and ‘reason’. In phrasing reminiscent of Steelyard the bard notes that many who ‘wish to lead others, when they should be led’, ‘feel they know not what but care’ and ‘stumble all night over bones of the dead’. In their dead reading of language and natural imagery, the speaker is indulging in pity and projecting their own sense of loss on to the emmet. The emmet is a mother: the ‘The Little Girl Found’, ‘Infant Joy’, ‘Nurse’s Song’, ‘London’ and both ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ songs implicate the mother and child relationship as being vital in the shaping of society. The speaker hears her lament her children and worry over their relationship to their father: ‘Do they hear their father sigh?’ The society will shape the children’s reactions to their father and thereby affect their vision of God. Further, we are pointedly reminded that the speaker sees and hears this situation; they are reading it and their reaction is ‘pity’ and ‘tear[s]’. However, a night watchman resolves



Notes 257

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

the situation by bringing light and telling the emmet to follow the beetle’s ‘hum’ home. The fretful forest visitor and ‘wanderer of the night’ recall the figure of Puck (and to a lesser extent Dogberry and the watch). Puck, a wordplayer who mediates with the audience, fills many of the functions of the Fool in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He practises his magic upon the bumbling Bottom, turning him into an ‘Ass’ who has a ‘dream’ that he calls a ‘rare vision’. The beetle’s ‘hum’ recalls the many layered joke on Hume’s Essay in An Island. The fact the watchman does not actually show the emmet home, but only insists that it follows the beetle’s hum, undercuts the sense that this is meant to offer the ‘wise-innocent’ consolation of an act of imaginative sympathy that a synthesized reading of the Songs would suggest. At best, such an act of imagination offers both the emmet and the speaker a fragile resolution that is dependent on the overtones of conventional religion (the guidance and protection of a potentially misleading hum). If the watchman is read as a Fool, however, his presence restores a sense of communality and imaginative empathy the speaker was lacking. Home becomes their present location, a shared existence in God. As we will see in extracts from The Four Zoas and Milton later, emmets reappear in Blake in moments of festival celebration. A Midsummer Night’s Dream stresses the consolations of imagination when it is given a ‘local habitation and a name’, and Blake illustrated the dance of the fairies which comes when all lovers have found their way home and the world is blessed. This circle of dancers is similar to that which appears in the illustration ‘Nurse’s Song’ (B226, L4). By referring to the world of clowning, ‘A Dream’ provides an alternative reading when the interdependent spiral of Innocence and Experience would seem to offer only continual doubt and potential oppression. Hogan, The London Stage. ‘Song 3D by an old Shepherd’ recalls both ‘Blow blow thou winter wind’ (II.vii.174–90) and King Lear. The illustration to Night Thoughts plate 23, recalls the ‘brief life of man’ where ‘the stretching of a span / Buckles the sum of his age’ (III.ii.120–1) and the snake darting towards a reclining figure’s mouth on plate 7 recalls the snake mentioned in IV.iii.106–10. This image recurs frequently in Blake’s work: see ‘Christ’s Troubled Sleep’, Jerusalem plate 9 and Tiriel 4:57–8. There are further allusions to the play in the ‘Proverbs of Hell’: ‘The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure’ (E36) repeats Jaques argument with ‘a motley fool’ about measuring life by the length of time (II.vii.20–34). Interestingly the later narrator of The Marriage, like Orlando, wrestles the king’s representative and wins. R. Steele, Tatler No.41; for example, see also Elkin, The Augustan Defence of Satire, p. 143. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, p. 130. J. Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, cited Raine, Blake and Tradition II, 37. Blake could have come across Boehme’s work in The Three Principles of the Divine Essence: The Works of Jacob Behmen, The Teutonic Theosopher, ed. G. Ward and T. Langcake (London, 1764–81). On Blake and Boehme, see Damon, A Blake Dictionary, pp. 39ff and Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, pp. 29ff.



258 Notes

48. W. Sullivan, The Flights of Fancy (Leeds, 1792) p. 17. 49. Lackington, Memoirs, p. 175. 50. Arguably the trees in the following are all oaks: ‘The Ecchoing Green’ (B218), ‘Laughing Song’ (B220), ‘The Little Black Boy’ (B221), ‘The Shepherd’ (B224), ‘Nurse’s Song’ (B226), ‘Spring’ (B231) and ‘The Little Boy found’ (B241) of Innocence; the frontispiece (B242), ‘The Tyger’ (B245), ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (B247), ‘The Little Girl Lost’ and ‘The Little Girl Found’ (B254), ‘The Fly’ (B260) and ‘Holy Thursday’ (B264) of Experience. 51. Damon, A Blake Dictionary, p. 125. 52. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 8. 53. He was certainly not short of precedents: he had probably seen Stubb’s famous painting – see P. McCaughey’s introduction to Noon, The Human Form Divine p. viii – and may have known of the picture and description of the tiger as ‘le plus cruel de tous’ in J. A. Komensky, Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Stockholm: A. J. Nordstrom, 1775) plate 29, p. 41. 54. C. McCreery, ‘Satiric Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 1996) p. 113. 55. Thornton, Survey, p. 394.

Chapter 7: A Vision of the Last Judgment: the comic in Blake’s designs 1. Noon, The Human Form Divine, p. 8. 2. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 44. 3. Billington notes how scientific demonstrations were often seen as mountebank entertainments: A Social History, p. 59. 4. Crabb Robinson’s diary, reprinted in Symons, Blake, p. 268. 5. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, pp. 40, 93. 6. V. Carretta, George III and the satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Georgia: Georgia University Press, 1990) pp. 167ff. 7. M. Wood, ‘A Caricature Source for One of Blake’s Illustrations to Hayley’s Ballads’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, vol. 24, No. 1 (1990) pp. 247–8. 8. On Blake and Gillray, see D. V. Erdman, ‘Blake’s Debt to James Gillray,’ Art Quarterly xii (1949) pp. 165–70. Gillray had also been unhappy as an engraver’s apprentice and had run away to join a group of strolling players before becoming Blake’s fellow student at the Royal Academy in 1779. The borrowing between them was not necessarily just one way. Fuseli had remarked that Blake was ‘damned good to steal from’: Gillray’s ‘A corner near the bank’ (1797) shows a certain well-known clerk leering at two flirtatious girls. His body position is not unlike that of the old man of the Gates of Paradise plates 14 and 15 (1793). The old man reappears on plate 12 of America, itself the reverse of the illustration to ‘London’, a poem that ends with the ‘harlot’s curse’. 9. See the Jacques Callot picture of 1616 in Hyman and Malbert, Carnivalesque plate 94 and J. Roberts A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling; Its Dignity, Antiquity, and Excellence, With a Word upon Pudding And Many other Useful Discoveries, of great Benefit to the Publick (London, 1726), p. 7.



Notes 259

10. For a possible origin of this pose in the work of Albrecht Dürer, see Hamlyn and Phillips, Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, p. 208. 11. Whedbee, Bible and Comic Vision, p. 8. Carretta also finds ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ to be a comment on George III’s madness: George III and the Satirists, p. 169. 12. Thornton, Survey, p. 114. 13. In 1785 there was a call for all ‘true Masons’ to meet to discuss the building of the New Temple of Jerusalem. See Garrett, Respectable Folly, p. 155. For Masonic symbols, Newton, The Three Degrees and Great Symbols of Masonry and Ward, An Interpretation of our Masonic Symbols. 14. Smith, Nollekens and his Times. 15. For example C. Melmoth, The Sublime and Beautiful of Scripture: Being Essays on Select Passages of Sacred Composition 2 vols (London, 1777). 16. See, among others, Cobban, History of Pubs and Pub Signs, p. 8. 17. See Rosenfeld, London Fairs. 18. Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, p. 104. 19. Detailed discussions of these illustrations can be found in P. Dunbar, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and S. C. Behrendt, The Moment of Explosion (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 20. J. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. M. Furlong (Rockport, Mass.: Element, 1997) pp. 88–96, 252. 21. J. Warner, Blake and the Language of Art (Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984) calls ‘Mirth’ a ‘female version of Albion Rose’, and sees the energy of leaping or dancing figures as much psychical as physical: p. 168, 127. 22. K. Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic versus Classical art (London: John Murray, 1973) pp. 152–4. If Blake knew of Scamozzi’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ print, it is not inconceivable he was deliberately reworking it. Vitruvius, an Augustan architect, condemned the grotesquely comic or imaginative in favour of the ‘bright reflection of the world of objects’ – what Blake would see as ‘this Vegetable glass of Nature’ (E555). See Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 33. 23. L. Kelly, The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage (London: Bodley Head, 1980) p. 98. 24. C. Heppner, Reading Blake’s designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 7, 58. 25. Jenijoy LaBelle, ‘ Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo’, Blake in his Time eds R. N. Essick and D. Pearce (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978) pp. 14–15. 26. Blunt, Art of William Blake, p. 34. 27. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 311. 28. Billington, A Social History, p. 10. 29. See Israel von Meckenen’s copper engraving in Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 461. 30. See M. D. George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London: Allen Lane, 1967) p. 116. 31. G. Lambranzi, New and Curious School of Theatrical Dancing (first published Nuremburg: J. J. Wolrab, 1716), ed. C. W. Beaumont (London, 1928) II, plate 22. 32. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 432. 33. Pittion, Taking Liberties, prints 42, 43. In similar egalitarian vein, Wiles



260 Notes

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

illustrates his idea of the clown’s function with a quotation from Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 110: ‘Clowns are prime examples of figures who, ‘representing the poor and the deformed, appear to symbolize the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers’’. Shakespeare’s clown, p. 174. Douce, ‘A dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, p. 480. C. R. Baskervill, mentions the traditional fool character of Peter Pickleherring appearing in folk-play texts as late as 1799: The Elizabethan jig (New York, 1965) p. 93, cited Billinton, A Social History, p. 42. Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses. The burst of colour behind Albion emphasizes this joyful process, and gives the sense that this Fool has thrown off his motley, sometimes seen as the emblem of selfhood and pride. See Billington, A Social History, p. 47 Cox, Feast of Fools, p. 151, and Wood, Comedy of Redemption, p. 32. There were several collections published at the turn of the nineteenth century. A good if late example of the genre is W. Combe’s The English Dance of Death 2 vols (London, 1815). The Dance of Death in a Series of Engravings on Wood from designs attributed to Hans Holbein with a treatise on the subject by Francis Douce: also Holbein’s Bible Cuts consisting of ninety engravings on wood with an introduction by Thomas Frognall Dibdin (London, 1896) p. 11. In 1675, Douce reports, Maître Jacques Jacques published a burlesque work in which Death plays the Fool (p. 22). See also pp. 12, 16 and 73. Leslie Tannenbaum calls Blake’s picture of Cain ‘a comic vision’: ‘Blake and the Iconography of Cain’, Blake and his Time, ed. R. N. Essick and D. Pearce (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978) p. 28. Hamlyn and Phillips, Tate Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, p. 184. Douce, The Dance of Death (London, 1896) p. 47. Douce, The Dance of Death, p. 3. Noon, The Human Form Divine, p. 72.

Chapter 8: And to conclude: A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees 1. See Kraft, Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction especially pp. 16, 43, 56. 2. A point also made by H. P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (Macmillan, 1997) p. 180. 3. N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 201. 4. The ‘bland Swedenborg could not have been satirized more successfully than he is in the aphysical high-jinks of The Marriage’. M. K. Nurmi, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Critical Study (Kent State University Bulletin, April 1957) pp. 26, 25. 5. In Chaucer’s House of Fame (in Complete Works (Oxford, 1979)), the narrator goes on a journey from a ‘chirche’ (l.473) over a landscape full of ‘grete bestes’ (l. 900) and sees many harpers with smaller attendants who ‘on hem upward gape, / And counterfete hem as an ape’ (ll.1211–2).



Notes 261

6. ‘But [said Adams] when [Whitefield] began to call nonsense and enthusiasm to his aid, and to set up the detestable doctrine of faith against good works, I was his friend no longer; for surely the doctrine was coined in hell; and one would think none but the devil himself could have the confidence to preach it.’ . . .’God forbid,’ said Adams, ‘any book should be propagated which the clergy would cry down; but if you mean by the clergy, some few designing factious men, who have it at heart to establish some favourite schemes at the price of the liberty of mankind, and the very essence of religion, it is not in the power of such persons to descry any book they please.’ Joseph Andrews, pp. 55, 60. 7. Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, p. 64. On Jacob as a comic figure, see Whedbee, Bible and Comic Vision, p. 94. 8. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, p. 28. 9. Craig, Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque, p. 106. 10. Nurmi, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, p. 51. 11. W. Cowper, Poetry and Prose eds B. Spiller and R. Hart-Davis (London: Trinity Press, 1968) p. 203, l.728, and p. 427, l.288. 12. T. Hobbes, The Leviathan or, The matter, forme, and power of a common-wealth, ecclesiasticall and civill, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904; first published 1651), p. 3. 13. See D. Hill, ed., The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray (New York: Dover, 1976). 14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.16–7). The comment is Theseus’, and he is belittling the power of the imagination. He also rejects neoPlatonic ideas; he refuses to hear of the killing of Orpheus (who embodied all four of the Platonic furori: Bacchic, erotic, poetic and prophetic), claiming the ‘Tearing of the Thracian singer’ is ‘an old device’ (V.i.49–50). According to Blake this was ‘Theseus’s opinion Not Shakespeares’ (E601). 15. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 137–8.



262 Notes

Primary works The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, W. Blake (Dover Publications, 1994). Blake Records, ed. G. E. Bentley Jnr (Oxford, 1969). Blake Records Supplement, ed. G. E. Bentley Jnr (Oxford, 1988). The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, ed. D. Bindman (Thames & Hudson, 1978). The Illuminated Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (Oxford, 1974). The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (Doubleday, 1965). NIGHT THOUGHTS or, The Complaint and The Consolation, eds R. Essick and J. LaBelle (Dover, 1975). Blake Complete Writings with variant readings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford UP, 1972). The Letters of William Blake, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (New York, 1980). Drawings of William Blake, selected by Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Dover, 1970). The Paintings of William Blake, selected by R. Lister (Cambridge UP, 1986). William Blake’s Vala, Blake’s numbered Text, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford UP, 1956). William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. A. Ostriker (Penguin, repr. 1985). William Blake: An Island in the Moon; a Facsimile of the Manuscript, introduced, transcribed and annotated by M. Phillips with a preface by Haven O’More (Cambridge UP, 1987). The Poems of William Blake, ed. W. H. Stevenson, text by D. V. Erdman (Longman, 1971). William Blake, ed. W. Vaughan (Park South Books, 1977). William Blake and His Contemporaries, Catalogue of the Fitzwilliam Exhibition (Wildenstein, 1986).

Secondary works: Articles, essays and unpublished works Aers, D. ‘Representation of Revolution: From The French Revolution to The Four Zoas’, Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, eds D. Miller, M. Bracher, and D. Ault (Duke UP, 1987). Baine, R. M. and M. R. ‘Blake’s Inflammable Gass’, Blake Newsletter, x. 2 (1976). Baudelaire, C. ‘On the Essence of Laughter, and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts’, Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. R. W. Corrigan (Chandler Publishing Co., 1965). Beer, J. ‘Influence and Independence in Blake’, Interpreting Blake, ed. M. Phillips (Cambridge UP, 1978). Brown, J. ‘Essay on Ridicule’, Essays on the Characteristics (London: C. Davis, 1751). Douglas, M. ‘The Social Control of Cognition’, Man, 3 (1968).



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Abbot, Bud and Costello, Lou, 122 Ackroyd, Peter, 240n Addison, Joseph and satire, 24, 182 and sublime aesthetics, 4, 29, 135 The Free-Holder (journal), 25 The Spectator (journal), 22, 24, 29, 47, 182, 257n Aesop, 227 Agrippa, Cornelius, 89 Aiken, John, 67 Allestree, Richard, 130 Antinomians, 49 Antiquarianism, 34, 36, 41, 239n, 248n Ariosto, Lodovico, 244n Aristophanes, 6, 234n Aristotle, 5, 6, 8, 19, 23, 109–10, 249n Armin, Robert, see Fool Arnold, Matthew, 6 Ass, as a symbol of Fools and Christ, 45, 46, 107, 120, 203, 213–14, 249n Astley, Philip, and his Circus, 35, 138, 172 Atkinson, Rowan, 62 Augustan satirists, 61, 99, 101 239n Austen, Jane, vii, 136

theory of the carnivalesque, 33–4 value to Blake reader, 33–4 Banks, Joseph, 107, 128, 174, 248n Barrow, Isaac, 46 Barry, James, 231n Basire, James, 36, 55 Bate, Jonathan, 47, 48, 235n, 239n Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 233n, 238n Bearcroft, Philip, 148 Beattie, James, 36, 55 Beer, John, 67 Behmen, Jacob see Boehme, Jacob Bentley, Gerald Eades, Jr, 89, 94 Bergson, Henri, 6, 61 Bible, Holy, comic episodes in, 198, 238n, 250n as example of sublime, 29, 201 needs to be read correctly, 123 Old Testament revenge, 78, 218 books of I Corinthians, 34, 45, 165, 213 II Corinthians, 212 Ecclesiastes, 44, 113, 204 Ephesians, 86, 219 Exodus, 90 Genesis, 201, 210, 217, 238n Habbakuk, 93 Isaiah, 94, 118, 217 John, 97 Luke, 64 Mark, 216 Matthew, 217 Numbers, 250n, Phillipians, 45 Proverbs, 217, 225 Revelations, 88, 160, 212 Romans, 93, 243n I Samuel, 83 II Samuel, 208 Wisdom, 152, 182 characters from: see also Jesus Christ

Bacon, Francis, 45, 48, 58, 59, 80, 109–10 opposition to Charterhouse, 149 philosophy criticized, 45, 58, 59–60, 66, 81, 109–10 subject to Blake’s humour, 59–60, 197 theory of language, 110–11 Baine, Rodney and Baine, Mary, 107 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121, 151, 238n, 240n, 249n opposition to, 33, 234n, 240n sees spiritual element in carnival, 45, 242n 279



Index

Bible, Holy (contd.) Abraham, Lot and Tobias, 152, 179 Adam, 111, 209–11, 219 Cain and Abel, 209–11 David, 208 Elijah, 219 Esther, 45 Eve, 16, 91, 209–11, 219 Ezekiel, 13 Isaiah, 13 Jacob, 262n Job, 45, 95–6, 211, 238n Jonah, 45 Joseph, 89 Leviathan, 95, 118, 218, 232n, 248n Moses, 28, 89, 90–1, 111, 227 Nebuchadnezzar, 45, 198 Pharoah, 45, 69, 90, 238n Satan, 21, 28 Solomon, 65, 204, 227 Billington, Sandra, 239n birds, significance of, 86, 145, 166–8, 171, 173, 177, 191, 212 Black Joe, 38 Blair, Hugh, 24, 30, 104, 132 Blake, Catherine, 78, 105, 161 Blake, Robert, 107 Blake, William and alcohol, 56, 64, 119, 123, 139, 179, 202, 249n and Antinomian thought, 49 biographical notes, 52–4, 60–6 and depression, 55, 241n and elephants, 55 knowledge of fairs, 35 and madness, 52, 62–5, 66, 88–9, 94–7 and play, 11, 12, 51, 78–9, 107, 137, 157, 158, 165, 173, 184, 190 and Shakespeare, 41–8, 51, 184–7 and theatre, 39, 40, 47–8, 185, 207 and theories of language, 2–3, 11–14, 51, 109–11, 147, 186 and Toryism, 54

self-portraits, 104–5, 145, 161, 196, 187 Engravings and paintings of Adam and Eve Asleep, 213 Adam naming the beasts, 111, 187, 206 Age teaching Youth, 188 An Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man, 203 Ancient of Days, 118, 179, 200–2, 211 Angels ministering to Christ, 204 The Baptism of Christ, 204 The Bard, From Gray, 121 The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve, 196, 209–11 The Brothers Seen by Comus Plucking Grapes, 256n Canterbury Tales, illuminations to Chaucer’s, 51 Christ and Apollyon, 244n Christ and Bartimaeus, 214 Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery, 97 Christ Blessing the Little Children, 111, 187–8 Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, 202 Christ’s Troubled Sleep, 258n Dance of Albion, 36, 190, 206 Death on a Pale Horse, 212 Divine Comedy, illuminations to Dante’s, 51, 64 Dragon Forms, 195 Enitharmon Kneeling, 195 Eve listening to the birds, 111, 112, 191, 210 Gates of Paradise, illuminations to, 43, 182–3, 184, 187, 194, 196, 197, 202, 259n The Ghost of a Flea, 54, 196 God Creating the Universe, 200 Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, 195 Jaques and the Wounded Stag, 187 Job, illuminations to, 51, 69, 203, 211, 213



280 Index

L’Allegro, illuminations to Milton’s, 173, 196, 203, 204, 218, May-Day in London, engraving of Samuel Collings’, 38, 174 Melancholy, 203 Mirth, 28, 113, 203 Nebuchadnezzar, 198, 212, 260n Newton, 1, 198–200, 213 Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, formerly Hecate, 213 Night Thoughts, illuminations to Young’s, 31, 169, 196, 258n Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, 185, 190 The Penance of Jane Shore, 39 Pestilence, 198 Pilgrim’s Progress, illuminations to Bunyan’s, 51 Pity, 48 Richard III and the Ghosts, 48 Satan in his Original Glory, 233n Satan, Sin and Death, 195, 231n Satan Smiting Job, 196 Songs of Experience, frontispiece, 172, 203, 259n Songs of Innocence, frontispiece, 172, 203 The Spirit vaulting from a cloud to turn and wind a fiery Pegasus, 211 Stedman’s Narrative, illuminations to 188 The Temple of Mirth, 117 The Virgin and Child in Egypt, 111 A Vision of the Last Judgement, 195–6, 210, 211 Winter, 68 Writings of All Religions are One, 33 America, 1, 5, 15, 89, 97, 149, 156, 181, 194, 195, 197, 259n Auguries of Innocence, 3, 54, 213 An Island in the Moon, viii, 1, 5, 16, 25, 27, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 51, 72, 89, 98–162, 167,

168, 170, 172, 174, 183, 192, 217, 220, 246n, 249n ‘As I walk’d forth’, 142 ‘Good English hospitality’, 25, 36, 86, 150, 253n ‘Hail Matrimony’, 106, 144–5, 202 ‘I say you Joe’, 158, 172 ‘Leave, O leave me to my sorrows’, 159, 202 ‘O father where are you going’, 158, 171 ‘Oho Said Dr Johnson’, 140–1 ‘Phoebe and Jellicoe’, 138–9 ‘Theres Dr Clash’, 159 ‘To be or not to be’, 106, 146–50 ‘Upon a holy Thursday’, 106, 152, 154–7, 171, 253n ‘When old corruption first begun’, 130–2, 150, 185 ‘When the tongues of children’, 157, 171 Bacon, annotations to, 14, 60, 80, 88, 109, 111, 125, 132, 171, 197, 247n Berkeley, annotations to, 67, 116 Boyd, annotations to, 27, 31, 80 The Book of Los, 28, 190 Dante, illustrations to, 51, 239n A Descriptive Catalogue, 47, 55, 59, 73, 103, 111, 121, 128, 137, 185, 202, 206, 211, 241n, 247n Europe, 42, 83, 89, 118, 183, 194, 197, 200, 213 The Everlasting Gospel, 14, 216, 224, 244n The First Book of Urizen, 50, 51, 68, 89, 90, 92, 95, 170, 190, 191, 194, 199, 219 Flaxman, letter to, 66 The French Revolution, 200 Gates of Paradise: For the Sexes, 183 Genesis, inscriptions to, 211 The Ghost of Abel, 210 ‘The Gray Monk’, 14, 130 Homer’s Poetry, On, 23



Index 281

Bible, Holy (contd.) Jerusalem, 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 14, 23, 50, 51, 59, 66, 79, 80, 81, 103, 117, 123, 127, 134, 140, 156, 178, 182, 183, 185, 190, 194, 195, 202, 203, 206, 208, 212, 223, 244n, 247n, 258n The Laocoon, 11, 14, 64, 127, 149, 217, 247n Lavater, annotations to, 13, 25, 52, 80, 81, 106, 122, 183 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ix, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36, 40, 42, 43, 51, 54, 58, 59, 71, 80, 90, 96, 111, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 126, 135, 161–2, 163, 181, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193, 198, 202, 212, 213, 217–18, 219, 223, 224, 248n, 250n, 256n, 258n, 261n Milton, 1, 3, 27, 48, 50, 51, 69, 81, 130, 136, 152, 182, 194, 196, 204, 209, 212, 213, 223, 258n Note-book (1793), 14, 20, 48, 52, 57, 155, 166, 225 ‘I saw a chapel all of gold’, 216 ‘When Klopstock England defied’, 15–17, 226 Note-book (1808–11), 17, 35, 39, 55, 57, 64, 65, 66, 81, 118, 128, 200, 215, 240n, 241n, 242n, 245n, 246n, 247n Poetical Sketches, 4, 66, 67–89, 99, 100, 103, 110, 113, 158, 168, 219, 224 ‘To Autumn’, 70–71 ‘Blind-Man’s Buff’, 78–81 ‘To the Evening Star’, 71 ‘Fair Elenor’, 39, 73–6, 189, 257n ‘Fresh from the Dewy Hill’, 71–2, 189, 257n ‘How sweet I roam’d’, 69, 73, 92 ‘I love the jocund dance’, 77–8 ‘King Edward III’, 4, 40, 81–9, 148–9, 160, 191, 211

‘Prologue to King Edward IV’, 40, 82, 88 ‘Prologue to King John’, 40, 88 ‘Love and Harmony combine’, 96 ‘Mad Song’, 88–9 ‘To Morning’, 71 ‘To the Muses’, 73 ‘My silks and fine array’, 76–7 ‘To Spring’, 69 ‘To Summer’, 69–70, 73, 96 ‘When early morn walks forth’, 71–2 ‘To Winter’, 67, 68, 93 Public Address, 28, 30, 57, 66, 246n, 247n Reynolds, annotations to, 14, 17, 30, 38, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 76, 81, 110, 111, 114, 116, 129, 131, 132, 148, 205, 231n, 247n The Song of Los, 28, 70, 92, 149, 201 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 5, 15, 43, 50, 91, 98, 99, 139, 146, 161, 163–192, 202, 206, 219, 224, 240n, 257n ‘The Angel’, 71, 92, 164, 166, 191 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Experience), 164, 166, 175–6, 257n ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (Innocence), 1, 16, 25, 38, 85, 147, 164, 165, 166, 167, 171, 175–6, 189, 257n ‘The Clod & the Pebble’, 166 ‘A Cradle Song’, 164 ‘A Dream’, 166, 189, 221, 257–8n ‘The Ecchoing Green’, 39, 138, 168, 173–4, 175, 202, 259n ‘The Fly’, 133, 181–2, 259n ‘The Garden of Love’, 169, 191, 239n ‘Holy Thursday’ (Experience), 164, 169, 259n



282 Index

‘Holy Thursday’ (Innocence), 154, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 179, 253n ‘The Human Abstract’, 164, 170, 171, 209 ‘Infant Joy’, 26, 92, 166, 168, 257n ‘Infant Sorrow’, 89, 164, 166 ‘Introduction’ (Innocence), 14, 70, 166, 172, 257n ‘The Lamb’, 164, 166, 167, 168, 191 ‘Laughing Song’, 92, 167–8, 190, 259n ‘The Little Black Boy’, 164, 168, 188–90, 259n ‘The Little Boy found’ (Innocence), 92, 169, 259n ‘A Little Boy Lost’ (Experience), 118, 164, 169 ‘The Little Boy lost’ (Innocence), 158, 168 ‘The Little Girl Found’ (Innocence), 159, 257n, 259n ‘A Little Girl Lost’ (Experience), 93, 164, 191, 259n ‘The Little Vagabond’, 176–9, 180, 202, 227 ‘London’, 13, 83, 131, 155, 164, 168, 170, 180, 183, 225n, 257n, 259n ‘Night’, 168 ‘Nurses Song’ (Experience), 180 ‘Nurse’s Song’ (Innocence), 157, 168, 185, 190, 257–8n, 259n ‘The Poison Tree’, 164, 169, 255n ‘The Schoolboy’, 71, 202 ‘The Shepherd’, 167, 191, 259n ‘The Sick Rose’, 76, 167, 182–4 ‘Spring’, 166, 173, 259n ‘The Tyger’, 1, 2, 166, 167, 170, 190–1, 259n ‘The Voice of the Ancient Bard’, 200, 257n Spurzheim, annotations to, 66 Swedenborg, annotations to, 28 The Book of Thel, 42, 184 Then She bore Pale Desire, 131

There is No Natural Religion, 14, 16, 123, 198, 200 Thornton, annotations to, 21, 47, 56 Tiriel, 5, 40, 89–97, 100, 107, 159, 186, 221, 258n Trusler, Dr, letter to, 3, 14, 23, 27, 50, 147, 153, 166, 204, 226–7, 231n, 256n Vala, or The Four Zoas, 50, 51, 70, 75, 89, 181, 194, 201, 206, 218, 219–23, 258n Virgil, on, 115, 116 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 15, 73, 181, 188, 190, 194, 219, 224 A Vision of the last Judgment, 3 13, 14, 28, 30, 34, 50, 51, 69, 71, 112, 166, 206, 211, 212, 245n, 260n Watson, annotations to, 13 Wordsworth, annotations to, 70, 246n Letters of, 25, 30, 40, 47, 54, 55, 56, 133, 137, 182, 198, 213, 241n Blunt, Anthony, 206 Boal, Augusto, 104 Boccacio, 128 Boehme, Jacob, 178, 187, 217, 258n Bogen, Nancy, 107 Book of Enoch The, 94–5 Bosch, Hieronymous, 195 Boswell, James, 104 Boydell, John, 41 Bradley, James, 143 Brand, John, 41, 46, 106, 185, 217 Bristol, city of, 152 Bristol, Michael D., 40 Brothers, Richard, 18, 43 Brown, John., ‘Essay on Ridicule’, 19 Browne, Sir William, 101 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, 34, 179, 195, 196 Bryson, Norman, 229n Buckingham, George VIlliers, The Rehearsal, 254n Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 51, 204, 211, 217



Index 283

Burke, Edmund alternatives to his theory of the sublime, 4, 31 Blake’s comments upon, 30 in contemporary prints, 197 and the passions, 181 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 190 thoughts of folly, 225 thoughts on the sublime, 30, 39, 193, 201, 211 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 241n Butts, Thomas, 34 Buzacott, Martin, 33 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 64, 210 Bysshe, Edward, The Art of English Poetry, 139 Cambridge University, 100 Canynge, William, 152 carnivalesque abbé de malegouverne, 36 alternative to fearful sublime, 4, 31, 171, 180, 211, 215, 218 and Bakhtin, 33–4 and child’s play, 171 and Christianity, 34, 179–80, 205, 216, 222 Church Ale, 176, 179 Commedia dell Arte, 103 definitions of, 10, 32–3, 179 festa stultorum, 34, 36 Festesfreude, 234n Festival of Fools, 157 Fool as representative of, 44, 238n gesta romanorum, 43 grotesque, 31, 32, 140, 194–5, 220, 232n heteroglossia, 51, 102 holi, 32 and madness, 32, 216 masquerades, 39–40, 103, 208 Morris dancing, 43, 157, 173–4, 179, 180, 208, 239n and popular festivals, 40, 173, 179 presence in the Songs, 172 ff

saturnalia, 32, 34 scatological language, 15, 121, 147, 159 sites of, 33, 38, 101, 104, 172–4, 178–9, 180, 189, 205, 209, 217–18, 237n sources of, for Blake, 34–48, 104 threats to, 33, 37, 39, 174, 175, 180 village green, 77, 157, 172, 174, 180 Whit Ale festival, 174 see also Mikhail Bakhtin; fairs; Fool; village green Carretta, Vincent, 22, 197 Carrey, Jim, 62 Carroll, Lewis, 62 Cary, Joyce, 62, 229n Cervantes, Miguel de viii, 43, 244n Don Quixote, 43 chapbooks, 38 Chatterton, Thomas (‘Thomas Rowley’), 106, 122, 127, 152, 156, 246n, 251n Chaucer, Geoffrey, viii, 59, 144 Canterbury Tales, 51, 59, 144, 202, 203, 211, 241n House of Fame, 59, 217, 261n Troilus and Cresyde, 59 Cibber, Mrs Susanna, 41 Cicero, 6 Clark, Kenneth, 206 Clown, see Fool Coleridge, Samuel T., 47, 196 Colet, John, 156–7 Collings, Samuel, 38 Collins, Anthony, 20 Collins, William, ‘Ode to Evening’, 139 Colter, Christopher, 251n Conway castle, 73 Cook, Cornelia, x Cooke, W., Memoirs of Samuel Foote, 101 Cornford, F. M., 6 Cosway, Maria, 42, 141 Cosway, Richard, 42, 104, 138 The Covent-Garden Journal, 19, see also Henry Fielding



284 Index

Index 285

Damon, (Samuel) Foster, 93, 98 dance, 36, 43, 77, 160, 173, 185, 190, 203, 204, 207, 208, 221, 223, 260n, see also carnivalesque dance of Death, 208, 212 Dante Aligheri, viii, 5, 51, 211 Darly, Matthew, 172, 195, 207 da Vinci, Leonardo, 231n de Cusa, Nicholas, 45, 100 de Luca, Vincent, 30, 233n De Quincey, Thomas, 241n Dennis, John, 8, 28–9, 31, 69, 127–8 Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter, 19 Grounds for Criticism in Poetry, 28, 180, 193, 201 Dentith, Simon, 33 Derrida, Jacques, 255n Descartes, René, 125, 181–2, 216, 230n, 231n, 248n DeVries, Peter, 7 Dibdin, Charles, 40 Dibdin, Thomas, 42 Dickens, Charles, vii, 62, 113 Dillon, Robert Crawford, 37 Diogenes, 249n Douce, Francis, 42–4, 185, 239n ‘A Dissertation on the Clowns and Fools of Shakespeare’, 43–4, 179, 239n definitions of Fool, 44, 101, 144 and Morris, 157, 179, 207, 208, 212

possible appearance in An Island, 42, 106 Dryden, John, 8, 19, 25, 118, 128, 140, 240n Dürer, Albrecht, 241n, 260n Eagleton, Terry, 33, 234n Eco, Umberto, 33 Edward I, 74 Edward II, 242n Edward III, 39, 90 Edwards, James, 247n Egan, Pierce, The Elder, 39 Elam, Keir, 110 Eleanor, Queen, 74–5 Ellis, Havelock, 241n England, Martha, 1, 98 Epicurus, 58, 109–10, 114, 132 Erasmus, 5, 45, 100, 134 Erdman, David V., 20, 94, 121, 123, 163, 191, 197, 230n Essick, Robert N., 109, 111, 163, 187 Euclid, 100, 199 Evanthius, 6 Examiner, The (journal), 62 Fairs, 101, 154, 173, 186 attractions, 34–8, 40 booths, 196, 203, 217 contemporary descriptions of, 34, 37, 175 as model of democracy, 37 problems with, 33, 37 Vanity Fair, 204–6 violent suppression of, 37 see also John Bunyan Fawkes, Guy, 16 Fielding, Henry, 19, 23, 67 The Covent Garden Journal, 19 Grub Street Opera, 150 Joseph Andrews, 217, 232n, 256n, 262n Tragedy of Tragedies, 67 Flaxman, John, 66, 118, 193 Flaxmer, Sarah, 18 Fleming, Robert, 160 Fo, Dario, 102



Coverley, Sir Richard de, 27 Cowley, Abraham, 138 Cowper, William, 66 Table Talk, 24 The Task, 68, 218 Cox, Harvey Gallagher, 171 Crabb Robinson see Robinson, Henry Crabb cricket, 158–9, 172, 173 Cromek, Robert Hartley, 55 Cruikshank, George, 40 Cruikshank, Isaac Robert, 40 Cumberland, George, 106, 161 Cunningham, Allan, 63

286 Index Frye, Northrop, 5, 50, 109, 163, 217, 232n Fuseli, Henry, 52, 55–6, 65, 193, 207, 208, 259n ‘Nightmare’, 22 Galligan, Edward, 6 Garnett, Robert, 47 Garrett, Clarke, 250n Garrick, David, 40, 41, 101, 207 Gaudi, Antoni, 60 Gauterus, Emperor, 43 Gawain and the Green Knight, 78 Geertz, Clifford, The interpretation of cultures, 237n George III, 89, 107, 141, 197, 260n George IV, 138 Gentleman’s Magazine, The (journal) 27, 30, 36, 42, 149 Gilchrest, Alexander, 1, 54, 64 Gillray, James, vii, 19, 24, 31, 197, 216, 259n ‘The Butchers of Freedom’, 197 ‘A corner near the bank’, 259n ‘Midas’, 195 ‘Presages of the Millennium’, 22, 31 ‘The Rights of Man’, 197 ‘The State of War’, 218 ‘Westminster School’, 197 Gilpin, Revd William, 27, 137 Giotto di Bondone, 127–30, 255n Gleckner, Robert F., 47, 72, 75, 109 Glen, Heather, 20, 163, 230n, 253n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 137, 252n Goldsmith, Oliver, 58, 61 grapes, significance of, 28, 174–5, 222, 256n Gray, Thomas, 67 ‘The Bard’, 74–5, 77, 242n ‘Elegy’, 252n ‘The Long Story’, 196 ‘Ode to Adversity’, 78–9 Green the bookseller, 152 Green, I. K., 207 Green, Thomas, 253n Green, Sir William, 151 Grimaldi, Joseph, 47, see also Fool



Fools, 4, 16, 40–8, 100, 130–1, 156, 157, 162, 171, 174–6, 178, 184, 197, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 215, 225, 236n, 237n, 238n, 240n, 244n, 261n Armin, Robert, 46, 237n and Christ, 45, 205, 224, 238n, 249n Clowns, 9 Devily Dout, 174 idiots savants, 43 Jack-in-the-Green, 38, 174 Jack Pudding, 38, 46, 207, 252n Kemp, Will, 45, 207, 237n Harlequin, 35, 46, 205, 208, 236n Macaronies, 207 Merry Andrew, 44, 46, 245n Morris Men, 44, 46, see also carnivalesque Mountebanks, 173, 259n Peter Pickleherring, 46, 261n Pierrot, 46 Rahere, jester, 36 Robin Goodfellow, 45, 46, 120, 249n Tarlton, John, 94, 237n Yankee clowns, 35 see also Shakespeare, William Foote, Samuel, 1, 5, 40, 41, 98, 101–3, 113, 117, 130, 139, 155, 231n, 245n, 250n, 254n The Comic Theatre, 19 The Cozeners, 247n The Devil on Two Sticks, 101, 130 The Maid of Bath, 41 The Minor, 102 The Orators, 246n Piety in Pattens, 245n Taste, 245n Tea at the Haymarket, 103 Tragedy à la Mode, 245n Fox, Charles James, 22, 197, 211, 250n Free-Holder, The, (journal) 25, see also Joseph Addison Freemasonry, 115, 199, 201, 260n Freud, Sigmund, 5, 6, 229n, 241n Fry, Christopher, 5, 11, 62 Fry, Roger, 255n

Grose, Francis, 21, 51, 107, 219 Grosley, Pierre Jean, 175 grotesque, see carnivalesque Gurewitch, Moreton, 6 Hacket, John, Bishop of Lichfield, 232n Haines, William, 65 Hall, Thomas, 37 Halliwell, Stephen, 234n Hamlyn, Robin, 1 Handel, George Frederick, 124, 160, 161 Hannibal, 140 Harlequin, see Fool Harper, George Mills, 51, 106 Hawking, Stephen, 60 Hayley, William, 55, 57, 118, 134 Hazlitt, William, 61 Henderson, Jeffrey, 17 Hervey, James, Meditations among the Tombs, 133, 135, 200 Hill, Isabel, 174 Hilton, Nelson, 51 Hobbes, Thomas, 20, 26, 129, 216, 217, 221, 231n, 232n, 248n On Human Nature, 8 Leviathan, 218 Hogarth, William, 150, 231n, 247n Homer, 100, 132, 227, 246n homo festivus, 11 homo ludens, 11 How, J., 159 Huizinga, Johan, 171 Hume, David, 136, 193, 216 Hunt, Leigh, 26, 240 Hunt, Robert, 62 Hunter, Dr John, 129, 131, 248n Hutcheson, Francis, 21, 25 Interregnum, socialist movements of, 20, 21, 25 Jack-in-the-Green, see Fool Jack Pudding, see Fool Jacques, Jacques, 261n James I, 111 Jerome, satirist, 134

Jesus Christ, 57, 69, 145, 148, 152, 156, 167, 204, 216, 221, 244n mentioned by Blake, 11, 21, 45, 53, 59, 87, 111, 164, 173, 187–8, 195, 202, 204, 206, 214, 217, 244n and carnival imagery 31, 45, 203, 205, 208, 216, 222 connection to the Fool, 45, 120, 205, 224 and the foolishness of belief, 58, 117, 206 and the imagination, 11, 195 as a lamb, 167, 191 in Masonic symbolism, 199, 201 and the oak tree, 175, 187, 206 physical nature of, 11, 31, 45, 53, 210, 244n connection to neo-Platonism, 87, 111, 189 and Publicans, 179, 206, 224 as an act of reading, 111, 188, 206, 209, 244n and the ridiculous, 4 mentioned by John Taylor, 134 John Bull, 27 Johnson, Samuel, 6, 154 The Rambler, 6 target of Blake’s humour, 128, 139–41, 145, 151, 154 Jonson, Ben, 5, 6, 54, 204, 236n The Alchemist, 20 Bartholemew Fair, 35 as representative of attiture to satire 8, 19, 20, 186, 236n Joyce, James, 62 Juvenal, 105 Kaiser, Walter, 236n Kames, Henry Homes, Lord, 24 Kant, Immanuel, 30 Kaufmann, Andy, 249n Keats, John, 241n Kemble, John Philip, 185 Kemp, Will see Fool Kempis, Thomas à, 45 Keynes, Geoffrey, 1, 98, 161 Kierkegaard, Søren, 25 King, James, biographer, 244n



Index 287

Kirklington, Oxfordshire, 174 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 16 Knox, Vicesimus, 24 Koestler, Arthur, 12 Kyd, Thomas, 257n Lackington, James, 188, 250n, 254n Lady’s Magazine, The, (journal) 39 Lamb, Charles, 5, 55, 241n Lambranzi, Gregorio, 207 Larrissy, Edward, 163 Laurel, Stan and Hardy, Oliver, 154 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 54, 231n Lee, Ann, 18 Lennox, Charlotte, 104 Lindley, Arthur, 34 Locke, John, 100, 129, 146, 149, 251n and aesthetic theory, 30, 31 and association of ideas, 193, 247 criticized by Blake, 30, 66, 209, 211 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 100, 135 and Joseph Wright, 152 and language theory, 110 parodied in The Marriage 217 Lodge, Thomas, Wits Miserie, 207 London Apollo Gardens, 35 Astley’s Amphitheatre, 35 Bedlam, 149 Blue Maid Alley, 38 British Museum, 42 Charterhouse, 147–51, 158 Covent Garden Theatre, 235n Drury Lane Theatre, 40, 67, 235n Farthing Pie House, 38 Finchley, 38 Foundling Hospital, 155 Goat and Compasses pub, Fitzroy Square, 202 Greenwich, 143 Greyhound Theatre, 36 Hall’s City Road Museum, 35 Hampstead and Highgate, 34, 256n Leicester Square, 151 Lock’s Hospital, 135 Lord Mayor, 36, 37, 171, 185 May Fair, 37

Notting Hill, 33 Opera House, 39 Paddington, 34 Piccadilly, 37 Poplar, 15 Pye Corner, 38 Queen Anne’s Tavern Yard, 38 Ranelagh, 38, 137, 159, 172 Reynold’s Booth, 40 Royal Circus, 236n, 239n Royalty Theatre, 187 St Bartholomew’s Fair, 36, 151, see also Fairs St James, 37 St Mary le Strand, 173 St Paul’s Cathedral, 151, 155, 156–7, 180, 257n Shoreditch workhouse, 43 Smithfield Fair, 34–5, see also Fairs Soho, 202 Stow’s Survey of London, 185 street life, 38 Thames, 155, 255n Thornton’s Survey of the cities of London and Westminster, 42 Tottenham Court, 34, 38, 155 Vauxhall, 38, 137, 159, 172 Wandsworth, 34 Westminster Abbey, 38, 75, 119 Whitefield’s Chapel, 151 London Magazine, 174 London Spy, The, 159 Longinus, 30, see also sublime Louis XIV, 89 Lowery, Margaret Ruth, 82, 86 Lowth, Robert, 2 Lucian, 100 Lucilius, 140 Lucretius, 109 Lydgate, Dan, 207 Lyly, John, 249n, 257n Macpherson, James (‘Ossian’), 246n Madius, 8, 11, 25 Mahon, Gertrude, 191 Malkin, Benjamin, 63 Mallet, Paul Henri, Northern Antiquities, 93 Malone, Edmond, 172



288 Index

Manny, Sir Walter, 148 Marlowe, Christopher, 168 Marston, John, 257n masquerade, see carnivalesque Mathew, Revd A., 98, 100, 151 Matthew, William, 247 May Fair, 37, 174–5, 202, 211, see also carnivalesque; Fairs; Fool; London Maypoles, 37, 173, 204, 256n Medusa, 93 Mee, Jon, 2, 22, 42, 190, 196, 197, 230n Melmoth, Courtney, 29 Mendus, Clive, 237n Michaelangelo, 227 Millenarians, 2, 18, 63, 115, 121, 152, 160, 199, Miller, Revd George, 30 Milligan, Spike, viii, 53 Milton, John, 16, 64, 66, 111, 132, 144, 161, 203, 240n, 241n, 246n Il Penseroso, 202 ‘L’Allegro’, 78, 151, 173, 202, 218 ‘On Christ’s Nativity’, 196 Paradise Lost, 130, 199, 200 Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 6 Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, 29 Montaigne, Michel de, 86 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, viii, 102, 108, 124 More, Hannah, 37 More, Sir Thomas, 45, 217 Morecombe, Eric and Wise, Ernie, 122 Morris, Corbyn, 26 Morris Men, see carnivalesque, dancing, Fool Myrone, Martin, 89 Napoleon I (Bonaparte), 39 Nelson, Horatio, Admiral Lord, 142 Neo-Platonism, 111–13, 146, 164, 165, 188 Newbery, E., The true political house that Jack built, 255n Newton, Isaac

Blake’s jibes against, 1, 30, 66, 70, 117, 137, 146, 149, 178, 187, 209, 211, 214, 224 and James Bradley, 143 buys a May pole, 37–8 and language, 51 lives in London, 151 and Millenerians, 152 part of philosophy degree, 101 Principia Mathematica, 51 and sublime, 30 tomb, 119 Nicholson, William, 107 Nietzsche, Frederich Wilhelm, 6 Nixon, Robert, 43 Nollekens, Joseph, 42 Noon, Patrick, 214 Norwich Acting Company, 38 Nurmi, Martin, 217, 218 oak tree, significance of, 28, 78, 79, 91, 175, 187, 188, 190, 194, 203, 204, 206, 212, 220, 222 O’Brien, Patrick (Charles Byrne), The Irish Giant, 35 Oedipus, 89 O’Keefe, John, Wild Oats, 41 Orpheus, 111 Ossian, see James Macpherson Paine, Thomas, 2, 123, 197, 217, 225, 255n The Rights of Man, 20, 172, 216 Palmer, Samuel, 52, 53, 64 Paracelsus, 178 Parr, R., 39 Phoebus, 69 Phillips, Michael, 98, 107, 121, 139, 158, 160, 200, 244n, 250n, 254n phrenology, 54 Piggot, Charles, Pigott’s Political Dictionary for Guinealess Pigs, 21 Pilgrim’s Progress, see John Bunyan Pilkington, Matthew, 208 Pindar, 100, 127, 130 Pindar, Peter, 128 Pitt, William, the younger, 10, 22, 90, 141, 197 Plantin, Christopher, 199



Index 289

Plato, 51, 87, 111, 112, 188, 227, 248n Plautus, 5 Pliny, 100, 114 Plutarch, 100, 128, 129, 130, 140 Pope, Alexander, 26, 57, 118, 244n Potter, Harry, 179 Powell, the Human Salamander, 35 Priestley, Joseph, 30, 100, 107, 257n Prometheus, 178 Ptolemy, 199 Public Advertiser, The, 34 Pythagoras, 51, 100, 111 quadrant, significance of, 101, 118, 126, 220 Rabelais, François, viii, 15, 33, 42, 43, 106, 116, 145, 195, 197, 202, 244n Gargantua and Pantagruel, ix see also Mikhail Bakhtin Rahere, jester turned monk, 36 Raine, Kathleen, 85, 178 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 168 Raphael, 188, 227, 246n Rembrandt van Rijn, 196 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 4, 31, 48, 57–8, 90, 111, 132, 139, 193, 205 Richardson, Henry, Clarissa, 27 Ritson, Joseph, 42, 143, 159, 182 Roberts, J., A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling, ix Robinson, Henry Crabb, 13, 28, 53, 63–4, 117, 196, 240n Rochester, John Wilmot, Second Earl of, 244n Romney, George, 193 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 37, 97, 105, 172, 247n Rowlandson, Thomas, ‘The Covent Garden Nightmare’, 22, 31 ‘The Exhibition Stare-Case’, 231n Rowley, Thomas, 106, 127, 132, 152, 246n, see Thomas Chatterton Rubens, Peter Paul, 17, 57, 246n St Augustine, 230n

St Bartholomew’s Fair, 151, 220, see also London; fairs St Christopher, 95 St Jerome, 134 St Paul, 45, 46, 54, 86, 155, 165, 180, 214, 238n, 257n Sales, William, 18 satire, 19–26, 101, 105, 112, 130–1, 186, 195, 205, 215, 216, 217, 218, 231n, 239n and irony, 24–25, 99, 103, 139, 149, 217, 232n as medicine, 20, 130, 232n satiric prints, 21, 195, 197, 231n Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 206, 260n Schiller, Frederich, 165, 171 Scipio Africanus, 140 Scott, Sir Walter, 64 Sellers, Peter, 75 Sentimental comedy, 26–31, 41, 61 Setchel, J. F., 202 Shadwell, Thomas, 139 Shakespeare, William, vii, 105, 114, 132, 146, 245n in Blake’s artwork, 185–7, 203–4 influence on Blake, 47–8, 51, 66, 67, 99, 215 preferred to Jonson, 26, 237n and language, 114, 121 and Plutarch, 130 popularity of, 41, 239 similarity between his plays and Songs, 185 Plays Antony & Cleopatra, 46 As You Like It, 48, 76, 91, 95, 185–7, 190, 258n Hamlet, 7, 61, 74, 76, 77, 79, 89, 96, 101, 130, 133, 137, 146, 159, 183, 237n, 252n I Henry IV, 211 Henry V, 48, 82 King Lear, 40, 48, 57, 83, 89, 93–4, 96, 122, 182, 184, 198, 237n, 239n, 243n, 258n Love’s Labours Lost, 11, 79, 86 Macbeth, 47, 80, 81, 154, 155 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4, 46, 48, 120, 184, 185,



290 Index

224, 242n, 254n, 257–8n, 262n Measure for Measure, 104 Much Ado About Nothing, 46, 48, 120, 184, 219 Othello, 153 Richard II, 136 Romeo & Juliet, 41, 86, 183 The Tempest, 92, 103, 243n, 246n Troilus & Cressida, 167 Twelfth Night, 33, 46, 115, 127, 131, 185, 237n Shakespeare’s Fools, 43–4, 45–6, 57, 101, 179, 257n Toby Belch, 115 Bottom, 120, 213–4, 257n Dogberry, 46, 48, 120, 127, 257n Falstaff, 25, 41, 179, 184, 237n Feste, 46 Jaques, 48, 76, 91, 185–7, 190 Orlando, 48 Puck, 46, 257n, see also Fool Touchstone, 76, 186 Yorick, 77 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 97 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 246n Sherlock, William, 146–7, 153 Shuter, Edward, 40 Silenus, 59, 202 Smart, Christopher, 244n Smith, John Thomas, 54, 174 Smollett, Tobias, 244n Socrates, 53, 100 South, Robert, 146–7, 153 Southcott, Joanna, 18 Southey, Robert, 63, 241n Spectator, The, 24, 46, 257n, see also Joseph Addison Spenser, Edmund, 67, 242n The Fairie Queene, 69 Spurzheim, Johann, 54 Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, 32 Stedman, John Gabriel, 188 Steele, Richard, 24, 25 Stephens, Leslie, 255n Sterne, Laurence, 26, 244n Stothard, Thomas, 118

Stow, John, Survey of London, 185 Strutt, Josephy, 42, 156 Stubbs, George, 259n Stubbes, Phillip, 42, 179–80, 208, 218, 236n sublime, viii, 3, 8 Bible as source of, 29, 201 Blake’s comments upon, 14, 30, 171, 193, 233n and the comic, 29, 74, 233n destruction of Self in, 72, 135 distinction between poetry and painting, 127 ridiculous as alternative to, 4, 18, 28, 29, 31, 39, 103, 128, 171, 180, 191, 193, 198, 201, 211, 215, 217, 221, 223, 225 as teaching tool, 29, 233n of terror, beauty or obscurity, 29, 30, 39, 71, 74, 91, 93, 116, 127, 133, 135, 137, 166, 170, 171, 183, 191, 201, 218, 220, 244n opposite of Vision, 75 see also Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke; John Dennis; Longinus sun, significance of, 28–9, 68–9, 114, 126, 143, 175, 180, 183, 189, 195, 196, 201, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 220, 223, 227 Sutton, Thomas, 106, 147–51, 152–3, 156, 171, 222 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 100, 152, 162, 172, 199, 217, 255n, 261n Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 1 Swift, Jonathan, viii, 19, 144 Gulliver’s Travels, 31, 108, 131, 217, 218, 250n The Shortest Way with Dissenters, 23 Tarlton, John see Fool Tatham, Frederick, 52, 53 Tatler, The, 105, 247n Tave, Stuart M., 230 Taylor, John, The Water Poet, 134 Taylor, Thomas, 51, 104



Index 291

Théâtre de Complicité, 237n Thompson, E. P., 163 Thomson, James, 67, 243n Thornton, William, Survey, 148–9, 156–7 Thornton, Dr Robert, 21, 56, 153 Tichborne, Chidiock, 133 Tillotson, John, 23 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 55 Towne, John, 43, 129 Trusler, Revd John, 27, 29, 204, 226–7, 231n Tucker, Josiah, 37 Varley, John, 54 village green, 157, 172, 180; see also carnivalesque Virgil, 47, 230n Viz Magazine, 62 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 100, 114, 116, 117, 119, 136, 201 Warburton, William, 248n Warner, William, 45

Warton, Joseph, 27 Watts, Isaac, 172 Weekly Journal, 39 Weiskel, Thomas, 233n Whitchurch, Samuel, 250n White, Allon, see Peter Stallybrass and White, Allon Whitefield, Joseph, 102, 124, 231n, 247n, 250n, 262n Whitehall Evening Post, 160 Whittle, Jemmy, 107 Wiles, David, 236n, 237n Wilkes, John, 22 William III, 160 Winchester, Elhanah, 250n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 12 Wit’s Magazine, 117, 174 Wood, Marcus, 1, 22, 197, 230n Wordsworth, William, 64 Wright, Joseph, 152 York Mystery Plays, 45 Young, Edward The Complaint; or Night Thoughts, 31, 133–4, 135, 169, 196, 258



292 Index

William Blake's Comic Vision

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Alptraum-Comic

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Submitting to Freedom: The Religious Vision of William James

Vision

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The Comic Book Mystery

Das schwarze Imperium. Comic

Comic Mnemonics for Spanish Verbs

Walking Dead #30 Comic Book

Marvel Illustrated Odyssey #2 Comic

Gothic and the Comic Turn

Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

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The Comic Irishman

Vision

Vision

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Vision

Vision

Submitting to Freedom: The Religious Vision of William James

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Vision

Vision

Vision

The Comic Book Mystery

Das schwarze Imperium. Comic

Comic Mnemonics for Spanish Verbs

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Komiks: Comic Art in Russia

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