1  | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 >> Whetstone scrittore Elisabettiano L’ambiente storico – culturale    George Whetstone, letterato ella seconda metà del XVI secolo(1) visse totalmente i problemi, le scelte e i mutamenti della sua epoca. Frequenti sono, nei suoi scritti, le espressioni tipiche dei pregiudizi, delle credenze e delle preoccupazioni, che riflettono il mondo intellettuale elisabettiano: scenario della sua formazione e dell’affermazione della sua opera. Whetstone aderì quasi incondizionatamente a tutti i modelli convenzionali dell’epoca, al punto da rendere i propri scritti quasi “a mirror for the mind of an Elizabethan gentleman of (2). I suoi libri riflettono il carattere di una società in espansione, ritratta nei suoi processi di mutamento, con tutte le difficoltà che un’epoca di trapasso comporta (3). Whetstone fu un autore minore, eppure fu considerato   ..a person of some importance in the important  but relatively eglected   period   which immediately preceded the emergence of Shakespeare(4).     Fu uomo di Corte, letterato, molto colto, di famiglia benestante(5). La sua giovinezza fu, tuttavia, funestata dalla perdita del padre e dei possedimenti (6). Ebbe, inoltre, difficoltà legali al ritorno dal suo viaggio in Italia (7). Appartenne, forse, ad una delle “Inns of Court’’(8) e partecipò alla vita avventurosa tipica del “gentleman” dell’epoca. È molto probabile, infatti, che egli abbia preso parte alla spedizione militare del 1565 in Olanda(9) e a quella del settembre 1578 in America, guidata da Sir Humphrey Gilbert. A (Another) volunteer was George Whetstone who in place of a last will and testament hastened to leave to the world his Promos and Cassandra ...the list snows that Whetstone sailed with Carew Raleigh in the Vice-Admiral (ship), which was forced to return before Christmas. Whetstone, it may be added eventually died ‘’in partibus ultramarinis’’ (probably the Low Countries ), according to letters of administration issued on January 3, 1587-8 to his widow Anne(10).    Alla vita militare, cui partecipò accanto a personaggi illustri, quali Sir Walter Raleigh, pare fosse stato spinto dalle prime delusioni nella professione letteraria. E proprio sulla scia delle suggestioni procurategli dalla spedizione in Olanda, scrisse, in quello stesso anno The Honourable Reputation of a Souldier, che dedicò alla guerra, anche se la considerava “un male da cui non potesse derivare alcun profitto”. Nonostante il manifesto patriottismo, più che un libro sul tema della guerra, è un libro-guida alla moralità del buon soldato e una disquisizione sulla differenza tra la giustizia civile e quella militare, di cui la peggiore è, senz’altro, la seconda(11). 1  | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 >> Note:   1 La data di nascita di George Whetstone non è certa. Si pensa che sia nato intorno al 1550 e morto intorno a 1587, ma i biografi non sono del tutto d’accordo. In un articolo di Mark Eccles, “George Whetstone in Star Chamber”, in The Review of English Studies, vol. XXIII, n. 132. November 1982, pag. 385, si legge:  “Sir Sidney Lee in the DNB conjectured that Whetstone was born about 1544; but Izard came much closer by suggesting a date about 1551. ‘George Whetstone’ was in fact christened on 27 July 1550 at St. Lawrence in the Old Jewry, the church near the Guildhall where Middleton was christened in 1580. The entry is in both the original paper register and a transcript made in 1598, which was printed by the Harleian Society in 1940’’. 2 T. C. Izard, Whetstone: mid-Elizabethan Gentleman of Letters, New York 1942, chap. IV, pag. 119. 3 Ivi, chap. IX, pag. 259-260: “...Whetstone was not a man of the future. He was definitely, as most writer are, a product of his own age and the ages preceding it. Rarely if even does he express a sentiment, an opinion, a prejudice, or an idea that cannot be duplicated many times over among his contemporaries and predecessors. Such a statement, however, does not by any means constitute complete disparagement. His prose in clarity and vigor is well above the average for mid-Elizabethan times...It would be hard to find a single writer, who more accurately represents the mid-Elizabethan years-roughly a decade in which he was active in literature. Nor is the process of reading him always a base, mechanic exercise to be endured merely as training for the reading of his more prominent fellows”. 4 Ivi, chap. I, pag. 5. Il riferimento di Izard è, qui, proprio all’Heptameron (1582), prima edizione di Aurelia (1593). 5 Da: “George Whetstone” in DNB, s. v., vol. XX, pagg. 1360-1: “...(He) was related to a wealthy family of Whetstones, which owned in the XVI century the manor of Walcon in the parish of Bernack, near Stamford in Lincolnshire. He seems to have been a native of London and third son of Robert Whetstone who owned a tenement called ‘the three Gilded Anchors’ in westcheap and five messuages in Gutter Line. His mother was Margareth, sister and coheiress of Francis Bernard of Suffolk. The father Robert Whetstone died in 1557, leaving five sons: Robert (aged 17), Bernard, George, Francis and John’.” 6 Cfr. M. Eccles, “George Whetstone in Star Chamber”, in op.cit., pagg. 389-91. 7 Cfr. T.C. Izard, op. cit., chap. I, pag. 26. 8 Izard, op. cit., chap. I, pag. 13: “There is evidence, however, to support a conjecture that he was in 1576 a student at one of the Inns of Court. His The Rocke of Regarder, signed ‘from my lodgings in Holborn, October 15, 1576’, contains poems addressed to other youngmen who were matriculated at the neighbouring Inns of Court; among these poems is one addressed to ‘my friends and companions at Furnival’s Inn’. Complete Register of Furnival’s Inn for the period in question are not available. At any rate his residence in the neighborhood of the Inns of Court doubtless served to intensify any impulse to write which he may previously have entertained. The neighborhood had long been a center of literary activity’’. 9 Ivi, chap. VI, pag. 163: “Whetstone’s alleged military compaigns prior to 1585, therefore, dissolve into this fiction. The long awaited departure of the British expeditionary force the Low Countries in 1585 probably provided the stimulus for Whetstone’s little book. In fact, when Leicester sailed in December there was a Whetstone among ‘the Earl’s gentlemen’- doubtless George’s elder brother, Bernard Whetstone, who was granted an augumentation to his coat of arms by Leicester, in September, 1586. Our author’s concern with The Honorable Reputation of a British Soldier is therefore intimate and personal. He himself later received an appointment which caused him in August 1587 to join the forces in Holland”. 10 Mark Eccles, ‘’Arthur Massinger’’, TLS, 16 July 1931. 11 T. C. Izard, op. cit., chap. VI.