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Richard Bentley’s spider-web

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Abstract

Before Bentley’sDissertation it was not widely understood that works belonged in a historical context; Bentley showed the extent to which that context determined them. This brought him into conflict with men whose appreciation of the classics had, like Sir William Temple’s, been predicated on a hazy conception of their timelessness. Threatened by Bentley’s contextualizing, they responded in writings whose content and structure defied any such limitations. The most remarkable of those are Swift'sTale of a Tub andBattel of the Books, in which Bentley is famously ridiculed as a spider. The argument about historical context was resumed in the 1720s when Pope's edition of Shakespeare largely ignored it, Theobald's criticisms asserted it, and Pope'sDunciad in turn defied its limitations.

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  1. A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 2nd. ed., enl. (London, 1699), which I quote fromWorks, ed. Alexander Dyce, 3 vols. (London: Francis Macpherson, 1836–8). The 1st ed. was appended to William Wotton,Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 2nd ed., enl. (London, 1697).

  2. I, 97–154 (dates); I, 154 ff. (anachronisms); II, 100–14 (provenance). “I believe the author of Phalaris'sEpistles might live before [Titus'] time; for I find the forged Letters of Euripides were extant in Tiberius's days” (I, 169). Modern scholarship has not settled the date: “the widely held view [is] that the collection as a whole is not earlier than the fourth century”; there is also support for a second- or first-century date for at least some of the epistles; “but perhaps both parties are right and we have to do with a book that has grown over a long period” (D.A. Russell, “The Ass in the Lion's Skin: Thoughts on theLetters of Phalaris”,JHS, 108 [1988], 96–97).

  3. English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1986), p. 59.

  4. He is recalling his reluctance to compose works in the form of letters because so many published letters are really something else: “Again, what can we call those left to us by anonymous authors under the names of Brutus and Phalaris, and the letters of Paul and Seneca, except small-scale declamations?” (Erasmus to Beatus Rhenanus, 27 May [1521], inCollected Works, Vol. 8,Correspondence 1520–1521 tr. R. A. B. Mynors [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1988], p. 215). Politian had reassigned the letters to Lucian—“sed et Lucianum, quem falso Phalarim vulgo putant”—inEpistolarum libri XII, Book 1, no. 1 (to Piero Medici), inOpera (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1498) sig. a3r.

  5. G. W. Leibniz,Philosophische Schriften (Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Reihe 6), Vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Reichl, 1930), p. 19,Corollaria, no. 7.

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  7. Charles Boyle,Dr. Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, and the Fables of Æsop, Examin'd (London: Thomas Bennet, 1698), hereafter calledExamination; rptd. 1698, 1699.

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  9. De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London, 1614), Ex. I, x; pp. 70–87. See Anthony Grafton,Defenders of the Text (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), chs. v and vi.

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  13. P. 58. Joseph M. Levine,The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), p. 80, makes the same point, specifically about the Christ Church wits' seeing antiquity “as a static whole”, and adds that they “found reflected in it their own taste and judgment, even amending it where necessary, as in the case of Phalaris”.

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  19. P. 68. Except in the Aesop section, theExamination puts most of its Greek and much of its Latin in marginal notes, which can be ignored.

  20. Monk, I, 122; Wilamowitz, p. 80; H. W. Garrod, “Phalaris and Phalarism”, inSeventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 370; R. J. White,Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 103; Rudolf Pfeiffer,History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 151; Brink, p. 52; Levine, p. 74.

  21. Bentley, new ed. (London: Macmillan, 1889), p. 72.

  22. Pp. 77–78, He quotes Burnet's letter to John Locke, 17 Mar. 1699 (inCorrespondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–89], VI, 588–89).

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  23. Examination, pp. 97, 187, 94.

  24. A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1958), pp. 251–52.

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  25. Dissertation, I, 326:Aeneid, VIII. 485. Pfeiffer (p. 151) points out that the phrase “a sword in the hand of a child” is not coined by Bentley—struck out “at a red heat” (Jebb, p. 71)—but adapted from a Greek proverb. More such examples could doubtless be found.

  26. Dissertation, I, lviii. The cause of confusion was theM-like peculiarity of the “beaver-tailed” capitalS used (in cursive script) by scribes in England in the later thirteenth century. I am indebted to Professor Carter Revard for this explanation. See further his “Sulch Sorw I Walke With”,Notes & Queries, NS 25 (1978), 200.

  27. The examiners try to subvert Bentley's chronology by a calculated confusion of times in their own writing, where the dead editor Nevelet accuses the living Bentley of plagiarizing Aesop and ends their dialogue by quoting Virgil (Aeneid, X.500-5) on the blindness of “Bentlejus” to fate and futurity when he despoils “Neveletum” (pp. 247–50).

  28. Examination, pp. 185, 190. SeeHudibras, I.i. 93–97; and “Writers of Comedies”, namely Rochester, personating Alexander Bendo (inPoems, 4th ed. [London: Jacob Tonson, 1696], pp. 135–51), and Jonson, probably with his Scoto of Mantua (Volpone, II.i). This deliberate mistaking of theDissertation's context is in the witty tradition of Andrew Marvell'sRehearsal Transpros'd, where Samuel Parker'sDiscourse of Ecclesiastical Politie is taken to be “part Playbook and part-Romance” (The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. I. B. Smith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], p. 12). TheExamination refers to writings anciently “transdialected” (pp. 52–3).

  29. The Censor, No. 27 (8 June 1715).

  30. Shakespeare Restored (London, 1726), p. iv and esp. p. 193.

  31. Preface toThe Works of Shakespear (1725), inEighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed.D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 57.

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  32. Paceus,De fructu, qui ex doctrina percipitur (Basel, 1517), p. 80.Bentley quotes Pace's Latin in his footnote. The anti-catholic edge of Bentley's “Popish” (replacingindoctus) is lost in Theobald's Friar-Tuckish “good honest” and the priest's acknowledgement of his error.

  33. P. 135. Cf.Dissertation, I, 169–86, esp. (for the instances in Athenaeus) I, 181–84.

  34. P. 134. Cf.Dissertation, I, 271–72. R. F. Jones overlooks theDissertation when he analyses Theobald's debt to Bentley's notes on Horace (Lewis Theobald [New York: Columbia University Press, 1919], pp. 72–93).

  35. As explained in his Preface, loc cit. Cf.Dissertation, I, 271–72. R. F. Jones overlooks theDissertation when he analyses Theobald's debt to Bentley's notes on Horace (Lewis Theobald [New York: Columbia University Press, 1919], pp. 72–93).

  36. Shakespeare Restored, pp. 5, 53, 139.

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  1. University College, University of Toronto, M5S 1A1, Toronto, Canada

    A. H. De Quehen

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De Quehen, A.H. Richard Bentley’s spider-web. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 1, 92–104 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02678997

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