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Nashe's ‘Brightnesse falls from the ayre’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
With all the immense learning and imagination we have been taught to expect, William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, provides more than seven readings of ‘Brightnesse falls from the ayre’, the third line in the third stanza of Thomas Nashe's ‘Song’ from Svmmers Last Will and Testament. Yet only in what appears to be his ninth ambiguity does Mr. Empson even approach Nashe's meaning. Possibly the line is obscure, but it does not present the difficulties that R. B. McKerrow implies nor the indirections that Mr. Empson records. McKerrow suspected ‘that the true reading’ for ayre ‘is “hayre” ‘ and admitted candidly that hair would give ‘a more obvious, but far inferior, sense’. Mr. Empson calls the verse ‘an example of ambiguity by vagueness’ and believes that ‘evidently there are a variety of things the line may be about’.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1959
References
1 The Works of Thomas Nashe, re-edited by F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1958), IV, 440.
2 Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930), p. 33.
3 The New Cambridge text, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1934), p. 45.
4 The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow-Wilson, pp.416-418.
5 Empson, p. 35.
6 See Janelle, Pierre, Robert Southwell: The Writer (London, 1935), pp. 274–275 Google Scholar. Professor Janelle cites Dunbar's ‘Of manis mortalitie’ also, especially the second stanza, which lists among the ancient heroes gone back to dust not only the Samson and Alexander of Southwell's poem but also the Hector of Nashe's. Professor Janelle concludes that both Dunbar and Southwell may have remembered St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Rhythmus de Contemptu mundi:
Die, ubi Salomon, olim tarn nobilis?
Vel ubi Samson est, dux invincibilis?
Vel pulcher Absalon, vultu mirabilis?
Vel dulcis Jonathas, multum amabilis?
Quo Caesar abiit, celsus imperio?
Vel Dives splendidus, totus in prandio?
Vel Aristoteles, summus ingenio?
Die, ubi Tullius, clarus eloquio?