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08876_Field_TCGG T641.txt
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1996-04-10
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918b
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16 lines
It is interesting that Shakespeare should comment on
the confessional aspect of authorship, “sold cheap what is
most dear,” for whether as actor or playwright his going “here
and there” would have seemed the same to him. And it is this
confessional pouring forth of private news and views that
seemed to Aretino and his contemporaries to warrant the
association of the press with pornography and filth. This is the
view that dominates Pope’s Dunciad in the early eighteenth
century. But for Aretino the switching of private confession into
public accusation was a perfectly natural response to the print
technology.
Indeed, remarks Raimondi, Aretino “is a prostitute”.
He has the prostitute’s instinct of social rebellion. “He
throws mud not merely in the face of his contemporaries,
but of a whole past. It would seem that he lifts up the