[W.F. Lantry]

Andrew, Richard, Gregory,

Thanks for your comments. I'm a little surprised that my notes were considered at all controversial, as the argument is far from original with me, and can be traced back at least a hundred years (well, 98 to be exact, but I'm pretty sure the ideas were floating around before then.

The argument could be subdivided into three sections: Matter, Manner, and audience. Or perhaps theme, language, and attendance...

On matter: quick, what do Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio have in common? They all snagged most of their stories from other, older texts. This may not seem like a 'conservative' practice in some senses of the word, but it would be hard to call it 'revolutionary' or inventive, without invoking some kind of special pleading. One may as well say Ovid was inventive! Now, there's an untenable position...

On manner, which seems the heart of the issue, I simply lean on Pound:

"I am constantly contending that it took two centuries of Provence and one of Tuscany to develop the media of Dante's masterwork, that it took the latinists of the Renaissance, Pleiade, and his own age of painted speech to prepare Shakespeare his tools."

I do strongly agree with both of these claims, and their underlying assumption: that language is a cultural product, that we don't make it up in our heads, that writers are, for the most part, not inventive: that they are simply really good listeners, who consider carefully what they hear, and make good selections from the materials available to them. I do agree we tend to focus on individuals when we study inventive language, but we shouldn't forget that's simply a convenient trope, that their names are ciphers for changes that go well beyond their work.

Audience is also an interesting aspect of this, and I would argue that the audiences for all four have always been fairly conservative, but perhaps that's a discussion for another day. Still, their identities do reflect on any discussion of language choices...

Thanks,

Bill