The Norton Anthology of English Literature!
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Our book today is a masterpiece so ubiquitous it’s often completely overlooked: The Norton Anthology of English Literature–although as soon as I say that, I have to qualify it. Not qualify the ‘masterpiece’ part, of course (if I could be wrong about that part, I’d shutter Stevereads and start a beauty-tutorial channel on YouTube), but qualify the Norton Anthology part: the book–now a series of books–is periodically revised, so I need to qualify that I’m referring to the Fifth Edition, issued in 1986. That edition has, heretically, less Shakespeare–it has all of Henry IV, Part I, but instead of King Lear, editor M. H. Abrams and his team, bless their bookish hearts, have used the freed-up space to include more of Sidney and Spenser. But more importantly, since it was compiled right before ‘politically correctness’ swept through higher education like a plague, its Table of Contents still reflects the reality of literary history rather than the fads of complaint culture.
In other words, since the anthology – specifically this first volume – covers the span of time from the Venerable Bede in the late 7th century to William Cowper in the late 18th, it contains writing samples from virtually no women. A handful, yes (there’ll always be that magnificent enigma, Aphra Behn, for instance), but not the strict numerical one-for-one ratio modern political correctness demands, forcing editors to the darkest back-alleys of literature so they can include fifty talentless petticoat nonentities in order that little Schuyler and Caitlinnn (the latter of whose parents have already successfully sued three different school districts for inflicting emotional suffering when they accidentally left off the third ‘n’) won’t have their feelings hurt on the rare instances that they raise their glitter-cheeked faces from their cellphones. Like the male students in their class, Schuyler and Caitlinnn are concerned only with their cellphones, their tobacco addictions, and their ability to get blackout drunk five nights out of seven, but their buttinsky parents have moral outrage on speed-dial, and so the modern Norton Anthologies have been made to construct a demographic parity that existed nowhere in real life until the mid-19th century. Genuinely important poets and polemicists guilty of the sin of being white and male have been shown the door in order to make room for Guatemalan short order cooks and semi-literate Bavarian nuns.
But not so quite yet in the great Fifth edition! Here readers still get the recognizable old boring Dead White Male canon in all its glory, and they also get that speciality of the Norton Books: notes and critical support that’s both exhaustive and, somehow, unobtrusive. The editorial team might have failed (without realizing it, the myopic dears) in their impossible dream of making this book “comfortably portable,” but they succeeded wildly at their bigger aim of creating a volume that functions as its own totally self-contained classroom, a book whose comprehensive background notes really do make it something that “may be read anywhere – in the student’s room, in a coffee lounge, on a bus, or under a tree.”
The idea was to provide with each work a quick, authoritative thumbnail biography of its author and notes explaining any of its textual oddities, so that the student – or anybody else, since some of us haven’t been students in a while – doesn’t need to break off and consult the nearest encyclopedia for clarification of who, for instance, Queen Elizabeth I is. Instead, they can just enjoy her occasional ditty:
My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be surpressed.
Likewise in these earlier editions, when the reader gets to an author, they can expect to find that author’s best stuff (space permitting, that is), not juvenilia and marginalia
that’s artistically worthless but happens to make sidelong mention of the African slave trade or the plight of undocumented aliens. When we reach Ben Jonson, for instance, we can count on having our hearts broken all over again by one of the saddest laments in English literature:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy,
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say,“Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.
And still hanging around in the mighty Fifth edition will be all of those now-untaught architects of the canon itself. To Sidney and Spenser we might add John Dryden, hammering away with his easy, lilting power in“Absalom and Achitophel”:
Those heaped affronts that haughty subjects bring,
Are burdens for a camel, not a king:
Kings are the public pillars of the State,
Born to sustain and prop the nation’s weight:
If my young Samson will pretend a call
To shake the column, let him share the fall.
But, oh, that yet he would repent and live!
How easy ’tis for parents to forgive!
With how few tears a pardon might be won
From nature, pleading for a darling son!
The book isn’t at all comfortably portable – it’s a brick. But it’s also a library unto itself, free of fad or agenda, utterly confident in itself. And if you’re lucky (as I was in a recent re-purchase), while you’re re-reading all these old glories, you’ll find yourself following in the footsteps of some irreverent student prone to doodling – probably while stuck in class, rather than under a tree.
