Conversations: Classical & Renaissance Intertextuality 1526152673, 9781526152671

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5267 1 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Engraving by Gustave Doré (1857), illustrating Dante Alighieri, Inferno iv.94–96, ‘Cosi vidi adunar la bella scola’ Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents List of contributors List of illustrations 1 Introduction Syrithe Pugh 2 Flying with the immortals: reaching for the sky in classical and Renaissance poetics Philip Hardie 3 In and Out of Latin: diptych and virtual diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and others Stephen Hinds 4 Reviving Lucan: Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Lucans First Booke Emma Buckle

5 Citizenship and suicide: Shakespeare’s Roman plays, republicanism and identity in Samson Agonistes Helen Lynch 6 Adonis and literary immortality in pastoral elegy Syrithe Pugh Bibliography Index

Contributors EMMA BUCKLEY is Senior Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at St Andrews University. She has published widely in the field of early imperial literature and its early modern reception, and is with E. J. Paleit editor of the first modern edition of Lucan’s

Pharsalia

by

Thomas

May

(1627),

forthcoming in the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series. PHILIP HARDIE is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Honorary Professor of Latin, University of Cambridge. STEPHEN HINDS (University of Washington, Seattle) is the author of The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge, 1987) and Allusion and Intertext

(Cambridge, 1998); he writes on Ovid, Roman poetry and the Classical tradition. HELEN LYNCH is Reader in Early Modern Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen. Her publications include Milton and the Politics of Public Speech (Farnham, 2015), an Arendtian account of seventeenth-century politics and poetics and a reading of Samson Agonistes. SYRITHE PUGH is Reader in English at the University of Aberdeen, where she works on classical reception in Renaissance literature. Her most recent monograph is Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems (Manchester, 2016).

Illustrations 1 Ingres, ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ (Louvre) 2 Raphael, ‘School of Athens’ (Vatican) 3 Raphael, ‘Parnassus’ (Vatican) 4 Archelaus of Priene, relief of apotheosis of Homer (British Museum) 5 Ingres, ‘Apotheosis of Napoleon I’ (modello, Musée Carnavalet, Paris) 6 Pennae gloria perennis, emblem in Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, (Leiden, 1586) 196–197. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics

of

Cambridge

University

Library

Andrea

Alciato,

(Peterborough H.615) 7 Hercules

Gallicus

from

Emblemata, CLXXX (p. 580): ‘Eloquentia

fortitudine reproduced

praestantior’, with

kind

(Antwerp,

1577),

permission

of

Universitätsbibliothek, Mannheim. 8 Mark Antony from Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, XXIX (p. 152): ‘Etiam ferocissimos domari’, (Antwerp, permission Mannheim.

1577), of

reproduced

with

kind

Universitätsbibliothek,

Introduction Syrithe Pugh This volume had its origin in a small interdisciplinary symposium which took place at the University of Aberdeen in the summer of 2015, bringing together a group of classicists and Renaissance specialists to discuss their shared fascination with the practice of allusion, imitation and intertextuality in poetry of both periods. Our title, ‘Conversations’, is chosen in part to commemorate

the

animated

and

illuminating

conversation enjoyed at the original symposium, and long into the evening, between those represented here and other friends now absent. It also has several other intended connotations. Firstly, it is meant to convey a sense of literary imitation as a lively process of give and take, as the poets discussed here read and respond to one another’s words, and the allusive text takes on the character of an interplay of voices, with memories and echoes of the old heard afresh and given a new turn, like a kind of reply or series of replies both from and through

the later writer. Secondly, beyond the individual poets, it evokes the broader conversation between ages, cultures, world-views and languages, as poets self-consciously adapt an ancient original and adjust its meaning, reflecting on the different conditions which pertain to their own time and circumstances, and sometimes drawing on the voices and values of the past in an attempt to change the present. Finally, it refers to the lively conversation now under way in the wider world of academia between the disciplines of Classics and Renaissance Studies, which can be overheard in an increasing number of conferences, publications and even journals devoted to classical reception, and which is attracting ever more participants from both sides of the traditional disciplinary divide. The symposium and this volume set out to foster and contribute to that wider conversation, which promises to bring a wealth of new understanding to our study of the texts of both periods. One thing, indeed, which is shared by all the contributors represented here, is a sense that the separation of Classics and Renaissance Studies into different specialized disciplines and departments in modern universities has sometimes been a barrier to our

understanding of what ought to be considered, at a deep level, a single object of study. A word often used to try to 1

capture this singularity is ‘tradition’, but this is perhaps not an ideal description: the term may suggest something handed down to be preserved unchanged, bringing in its train unwelcome and inappropriate connotations of ideological conservatism or reverential obedience to elders. This would not be a true reflection of the kinds of continuity traced here. Rather, the body of literature which demands the attention of classicists and Renaissance scholars alike is open-ended, evolving, polyvocal,

fractured,

dynamic;

marked

by

play,

contradiction, dispute and innovation; but also bound together

by

the

intricate

interconnections

and

responsiveness between its separate parts. It is in fact more like a very long conversation, in which, for instance, a speaker in seventeenth-century England brings his or her peculiar concerns and ideas to bear, but may still be replying

to

another

speaker

who

entered

the

conversation seventeen centuries earlier in Rome, and doing so in the light of contributions from others, early or late. Dividing the constituent parts of that conversation into different specialisms for study, along

the lines of language or of periodization, impedes our ability to listen properly to it, and distorts our sense of what Renaissance culture was like. To those who enjoyed a formal education in the Renaissance, classical Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) literature was as familiar as the most widely known modern vernacular works: indeed, in what was effectively their bilingual culture, the language of Virgil and Cicero was the medium not only for much official business but also for many new literary works – the large body of neo-Latin literature which is still only beginning to be catalogued and studied. Moreover, in the age of humanist scholarship and the early days of print, classical texts newly ‘discovered’, amended by the efforts of editors, or appearing in their first printed editions, could themselves come with the shock of the new. Latin and vernacular, ancient and modern existed side by side in the literary culture in which Renaissance authors were participating, as they did on the ever-expanding library shelves. Our very disciplines have grown out of the interactive simultaneity of that culture, as Renaissance writers interpreted and responded to their classical predecessors, and the methods

and

concerns

of

Renaissance

scholars

contributed to the evolution of our current view of classical literature and approaches to studying it. This sense of a paradoxical contemporaneity between classical and Renaissance literature was also reflected in the title of the original symposium, ‘Reviving the Dead’, chosen to evoke the trope by which Renaissance writers commonly present themselves as bringing authors of the past back to life through their reading and their own imitative work – a rhetorical expression of what Thomas Greene calls ‘the necromantic superstition at the heart of the humanist enlightenment’. A late and attractively 2

light-hearted example is Robert Herrick’s ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’, where Herrick invites his musician friends to join him for an evening of poetry, music and merry-making, in which they will not only ‘Sing o’re Horace’ but ‘Rouze Anacreon from the dead’ so effectively that he becomes one of the revellers: at the end of the party they will have to ‘return him drunk to bed’. On the surface this is a piece of elegant whimsy, and indeed it is intrinsic to the poem’s style that it gives little hint of hidden depths. But if we peer through its translucent surface, it has much to tell us about how Herrick and his contemporaries view their relation to antiquity. We should notice first that this is

not simply a statement that Anacreon’s verse is immortal. The revival imagined here happens not merely through reading and recital, but also through imitation, both in the behaviour being pictured, and in the literary form it is given. Herrick’s poem is designed to recall the many symposiastic lyrics in the Anacreontea (a collection of verse which he and his contemporaries attributed to Anacreon, though it is now believed to be itself an assemblage of later imitations of Anacreon’s poems), first-person poems in which the poet enjoys a symposium – a party at which respectable male citizens meet to drink wine, but also to listen to poetry and music, and to enjoy refined conversation (such as that recorded in Plato’s Symposium) – and which seem to have been composed for performance at symposia. It is one of 3

many such poems scattered through the Hesperides, to the extent that the symposiastic scene of alcohol-fuelled and convivial song becomes not only a recurrent motif but an implicit metaphor for Herrick’s volume. Some of these poems describe habitual or future gatherings with living friends, some look back nostalgically to ‘lyrick feasts’ hosted by Ben Jonson, now dead, many involve the recitation of Anacreon or Horace (whose Odes also

contain anacreontic and symposiastic songs) as well as newly made verse, and in some – as here – it is hard to distinguish the living guests from the dead. In ‘To Live Merrily and Trust to Good Verses’, we realize only gradually that Herrick is drinking alone, in a room which feels crowded by the ghostly presences of the catalogue of classical poets to whom he raises a glass. In ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium’, there is even an uncanny moment when, during a catalogue of the poets of the past whose shades Herrick is told he will meet there, the speaker promises Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon, Quaffing his full-crown’d bowles of burning Wine, And in his Raptures speaking Lines of Thine. (32–4)

Mere temporal distinctions and questions of life or death have become so insignificant that it no longer matters which poet is considered the original and which the imitator. Herrick and his contemporaries seem to exist in the same time as long-dead poets of Greece and Rome. Such a thought might seem naïvely a-historicist, at the opposite pole from, and therefore of little interest to, the rigorous

historicism

which

has

enriched

our

understanding of the period in so much recent criticism.

But in fact historical context is needed to see what is really at stake here. Though many of the poems it contains had originally been composed for private manuscript circulation as early as the 1610s and 1620s, the Hesperides was collected for print publication in 1648, at the end of the Civil Wars. Bearing a large crown on its title-page, and dedicated to Prince Charles, it is an unabashedly royalist publication, forming part of a ‘rush to print’ in the late 1640s by royalist poets who, having previously scorned the medium as socially beneath them because of its associations with paid work and trade, look to it now as ‘a safe haven for their work and a sign of political resistance to the authority of those who had defeated the king’s forces’. Herrick’s symposium poems 4

take on a new significance in this context. Not only does convivial drinking, and especially the drinking of wine, take on a distinctly anti-Puritan edge and connotations of defiant Cavalier culture (at a time when ale-houses and traditional festivities were being suppressed, public morals becoming a focus of legislation and the dispersal of the royal court and the elite social networks associated with it making such convivial gatherings harder to arrange), but imitation of Anacreon specifically carries a

complex freight of contemporary cultural and political meaning. It is particularly associated with the Order of 5

the Black Riband, a literary fraternity formed by Thomas Stanley at the Middle Temple, in or by 1646. Stanley extended

patronage

mainly

to

royalist

poets

impoverished by the disbanding of the court and by the war, possibly including Herrick after he had been deprived of his ecclesiastical living for refusing to sign the Solemn League and Covenant; its sign, the black riband, apparently symbolizes mourning for the Caroline age.

6

The central activity of Stanley’s Order, like that of Ben Jonson’s ‘Tribe’ in the 1620s, was the reading, composition, exchange and appreciation of poetry; looking back on this period after the Restoration of monarchy, in a poem he never published, ‘A Register of Friends’, Stanley remembers their meetings as symposia where, ‘withdrawne from the dull ears of those / Who licens’t nothing but rebellious Prose,’ they ‘Love and Loyalty did … sing’, in defiance of ‘th’Usurpers’ and without

the

acquiescent

‘caution

of

that

guilty

Multitude’. But the Order of the Black Riband focussed 7

especially on the translation of classical, modern European vernacular and neo-Latin poetry. Stanley was

in particular a Greek scholar. In 1663 he would publish an edition of Aeschylus, with Greek text, Latin translation, textual notes and commentary, but at this time he was working on Anacreon: the expanded 1651 edition of his Poems and Translations would include the first complete English translation of the Anacreontea; John Hall already praises the first edition in 1647 as ‘breath[ing] new life into the Teian Lyre’. In the late 1640s and 1650s, imitations and translations of Anacreon were also produced by several other royalist poets whom we can confidently place in Stanley’s group (Richard Lovelace, Edward Sherburne and Alexander Brome), as well as others identified as ‘on its fringes’ (Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton the younger). These 8

poems frequently seem to respond to one another, as for instance

when

Stanley

titles

his

translation

of

Anacreontea 43 ‘The Grasse-hopper’, in an apparent nod to Lovelace’s poem, which adapts the same poem more loosely and in combination with an Horatian ode: as Revard suggests, à propos of a similar plurality of translations of a neo-Latin poem by Secundus, it seems that ‘poets of the circle were serving as audience and

respondents to one another’, perhaps in ‘some kind of poetic competition’.

9

The elegant and humorous gesture in Herrick’s ‘Lyrick to Mirth’, then, needs to be read against the background of a cultural moment in which a flowering of anacreontic verse emerges out of serious humanist scholarship and mutually responsive poetic composition, within a community of contemporaries self-consciously convened to preserve and revive both the politics and the literary culture of the Caroline age. Across Herrick’s volume, translations from and imitations of Anacreon and other classical poets alternate with invitations to named contemporaries to join him for an evening of wine and song, or simply to take up their place in the virtual space of Herrick’s Hesperides and be immortalized there. A sense emerges that the uncanny revival of Anacreon symbolizes a community’s successful defiance of time, change and death by its persistence in a set of social practices centred on the reading, performance and composition of poetry. The dispersed and threatened community of those loyal to the king are assured of their ultimate immunity to physical separation and adverse fortune by being placed on a transcendent plane, where

they can exist outside normal time and space along with the immortal poets of the past. It is the technology of 10

writing, and the attendant technology of print, which enable this transcendence, of course. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, ‘men widely separated in space have conversations through written communications with those who are at the farthest distance from them, as if they were standing nearby’. It is this idea of epistolary 11

writing overcoming physical distance which Herrick exploits at the end of his ‘Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’ (another invitation to join him for symposiastic merrymaking), where he explains that sending a few verses will do just as well as physical attendance: Take Horse, and come; or be so kind, To send your mind (Though but in Numbers few) And I shall think I have the heart, Or part Of Clipseby Crew.

But by this measure, Anacreon and Horace will also be essentially present, as Herrick himself will be present to any reader of his volume – then or now. Herrick emphasizes the materiality of writing and reading in

poem after poem, addressing no fewer than thirteen poems ‘To his Booke’, and continually imagining how it will be received and used by its readers. Elsewhere he 12

refers to it repeatedly through metaphors such as ‘this sacred grove’ (H–265), ‘my rich Plantation’ (H–392), ‘the Poets Endlesse Kalendar’ (H–444), imagining it as a virtual space, transcending the misfortunes afflicting the real world and unaffected by the predations of time. For it is a commonplace from earliest antiquity to the present (and one endlessly reiterated in Herrick’s volume) that good poetry is immortal and, like the golden fruit in the garden for which the volume is named, has the power to immortalize those it names or praises. For a more serious example of the trope of imitative writing as reviving the dead, and one which foregrounds the notion of epistolary writing as a paradigm of literature’s capacity to bridge not only spatial but temporal distance, we may look to a famous moment often seen as marking the birth of the Renaissance. In 1345, Petrarch visited the cathedral library at Verona and discovered, lying buried in obscurity there, a collection of hundreds of Cicero’s private letters to his friend Atticus, with some to his brother Quintus and to Brutus. Moved

by the freshness and immediacy of Cicero’s voice in these letters, and taken aback by the human character flaws they reveal in a writer famed for his moral teachings in the orations and philosophical works whose wide currency and canonical status had never lapsed, Petrarch was prompted to write his own letter back to Cicero, ‘as to a contemporary friend, with the familiarity of long acquaintance, as if forgetting the passage of time’ (tamquam coaetaneo amico, familiaritate quae mihi cum illius ingenio est, quasi temporum oblitus). This 13

was followed in later years by a letter to Seneca prompted by his rereading of Octavia, another to Cicero, and more to other classical authors. When, inspired by the examples of Cicero and Seneca, he finally compiled a collection

of

his

own

letters

to

friends

and

contemporaries, giving it the title Familiarium rerum libri (‘books of familiar matters’), Petrarch included ten of these letters to the ancients, grouped together in the twenty-fourth and final volume. The explanation quoted above of how they had come to be written appears in the prefatory letter to the whole collection, since they ‘might much surprise the reader, if he were not forewarned’ (quae nisi praemonitum lectorem subita possent

admiratione perfundere). The effect when we come to them is indeed quite uncanny, as Petrarch addresses the dead writers in the same familiar style which characterized the letters to his contemporaries in the previous books, and we are almost lulled into the feeling that Petrarch expects a response, and into expecting one ourselves. This is achieved in part by the way in which many of the letters are replete with echoes of the addressees’ own works: the verse letter to Horace (24.10), especially, reads almost like a ‘cento’ – a kind of patchwork of quotations from Horace’s poems. Petrarch 14

gives the impression that he is so familiar with his addressees’ works that he has absorbed and internalized their words and thought, and can now converse with them in their own terms, and his allusions make us remember the original texts and hear them again as though it were their part in the conversation – what they have said to Petrarch a moment ago, just before we began to listen in, or as though they are interjecting now. The traditional trope of letter-writing as virtual conversation (as in the quotation from Diodorus above) is exploited to the full: as Petrarch says in the letter to Seneca,

I derive great enjoyment from speaking with you (vobiscum

colloqui),

O

illustrious

characters

of

antiquity…I daily listen to your words (vos loquentes audio) with more attention than can be believed; and so, perchance, I shall not be considered impertinent in desiring you in your turn to listen to me once (a vobis semel audiar).

15

The illusion of immediacy is such that it comes as a shock when, at the end of each letter, we encounter some variation on this theme (this is from the first letter to Cicero, 24.3): Written in the land of the living, on the right bank of the river Adige, in Verona, a city of Transpadane Italy, on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of Quintilis (June 16), in the thirteen hundred and forty-fifth year from the birth of that God whom thou never knewest.

The reality check, reminding us of the gulf separating Petrarch from his classical addressees, is poignant. Petrarch has been called the first Renaissance man because this acute sense of historical distance and difference is felt to be something new and un-mediaeval. Often quoted to illustrate Petrarch’s sense that this distance is ultimately insuperable is a moment from the

letter to Homer (24.12), referring to the excerpts in Latin translation which are all he has been able to read of the great Greek poet, ‘wherein I beheld thee as one sees, from a distance, the doubtful and rapid look of a wished-for friend, or perhaps, catches a glimpse of his streaming hair’. But this is a special case, for Petrarch dwells on his long-frustrated attempts to learn Greek, and so to encounter Homer more directly: it is the language barrier rather than the passage of time which comes between them. When the letters to familiar Latin writers are signed off ‘from the land of the living’, the moment is poignant because the sense of immediacy, presence and communion has first been established so convincingly, and we should not downplay its importance. In fact, the idea of corresponding with the dead is not exactly Petrarch’s invention, but rather his striking extrapolation from something he has found in Seneca’s letters, along with much else which impressed him deeply. Of the two great classical exemplars for published collections of prose letters, Cicero and Seneca, the influence of Cicero tends to get more critical attention. This is partly at the prompting of Petrarch, who says in the prefatory epistle that he follows Cicero’s manner

much more than Seneca’s, but the context of the remark is important. Petrarch has been talking about how he has edited the collection: Also I cut out much about everyday concerns, which was worth while when it was written, but would now bore the most curious reader. I remembered that Seneca derided Cicero on that score; though in these letters I follow Cicero’s manner much more than Seneca’s. For Seneca crammed into his letters almost all the moral system of his books, while Cicero treats philosophical matters in his books and puts domestic news and timely gossip in his letters. What Seneca may think of Cicero’s letters is his own affair. For me, I confess, they are delightful reading.

Petrarch is talking about subject-matter, and implicitly purpose. Seneca’s epistles to Lucilius are everywhere concerned with philosophy: though they include personal and anecdotal matter, it is always used to make a philosophical point, and Seneca is quite explicit about the didactic purpose of the correspondence. He chooses the epistolary form for two reasons: firstly, because letters are equivalent to the conversational exchange which is a more effective teaching method than

lecturing; and secondly because friendship – the bond 16

of familiaritas sustained through conversation and personal correspondence – itself plays a central role in his moral philosophy. For Cicero, there is a real generic 17

difference between his letters and his philosophical writings: though they contain philosophy, the letters are also concerned with sustaining a wider social network, and with discussing news and current affairs – as Seneca puts it in Epistles 118.2, ‘what candidate is in difficulties, who is striving on borrowed resources and who on his own; who is a candidate for the consulship relying on Caesar, or on Pompey…’ Such questions were important 18

to Cicero the statesman, but Seneca insists throughout that the philosopher must withdraw from public life, for it can only distract him from his quest for wisdom and knowledge of the summum bonum (the highest good) with its deceptive lures of wealth and advancement, which are subject to Fortune and so devoid of true worth. Wisdom consists, for Seneca, in learning to despise such things, thus liberating ourselves from servitude to the body, to our own misdirected passions and to Fortune. Petrarch echoes Seneca’s sentiments on all these things constantly throughout his writings. Here, he is telling us

that he enjoys reading Cicero’s gossipy letters, and that his own as originally written may have resembled them more closely than they resembled Seneca’s, but he is also telling us that the editing process has taken him in a Senecan direction, cutting ‘much about everyday concerns’. Petrarch’s peculiar closeness to Seneca was recognized by the early commentator Squarzafico, who observes that Petrarch ‘imitates the density of Seneca rather than the fullness of Cicero, whence very often, because of this, I have called him the new Seneca’ (ille qui magis

Senecae

amplitudinem

densitatem,

imitatur,

unde

quam persaepe

Ciceronis ex

hoc

recentiorem Senecam ipsum appellauerim), and Ronald Witt more recently argues: ‘the attitudes and sententious tone of Petrarch’s letters shows the overwhelming influence of Seneca’s Ad Lucilium epistulae morales’. As 19

in Seneca, Petrarch’s famous fascination with observing and writing about his self, in all its vagaries and struggles, is always intimately bound up with such moral concerns, with an implied exemplary role in helping others to engage in morally salutary selfreflection. The prefatory letter describes the collection as ‘a sort of effigy of my mind, a simulacrum of my character’ (qualemcumque

animi mei effigiem, atque ingenii simulachrum) which he is sending to his ‘Socrates’ (his friend Lodewyck Heyliger), recalling the way in which, according to Tacitus, Seneca before his suicide bequeathed to his friends

‘his

one

remaining,

but

most

beautiful

possession, the pattern of his life’ (unum iam et tamen pulcherrimum habeat, imaginem vitae suae, Tacitus, Annals 15.62). One of the things Petrarch learns from Seneca is the very idea of literature as correspondence with the dead, transcending time. Seneca takes from Cicero the idea of 20

epistolary exchange as conversation, bringing distant correspondents into each other’s presence (e.g. Cicero, Ad Att. 7.15.1, ut loquerer tecum absens), and expands it to suggest that authors are present in their books, and that to read them is to commune with them: Cum libellis mihi plurimus sermo est. Si quando intervenerunt epistulae tuae, tecum esse mihi videor et sic afficior animo tamquam tibi non rescribam sed respondeam. (‘Most of my conversation is with books. Whenever your letters intervene, it seems to me that I am with you, and I feel as though I were about to speak my answer, not to write it.’) (Seneca, Epistles 67.2) Thus Seneca can choose

the best and wisest as friends who will help him in his arduous journey to wisdom, rather than distracting him from it as living acquaintances so often do: ‘I spend my time in the company of all the best; no matter in what lands they may have lived, or in what age, I let my thoughts fly to them’. (62.2; cp. 52.7) Again, ‘We ought to spend our time in study, and to cultivate those who are masters of wisdom, learning something which has been investigated but not settled; by this means the mind can be relieved of a most wretched serfdom, and won over to freedom’. (104.16) Since Seneca, as Lucilius’ true friend, wishes to help him attain wisdom, Lucilius should live always as though Seneca were with him and watching, a kind of internal judge and guide (32.1); and in the same way, he should choose from among the ancients someone he particularly admires – a Cato or a Laelius – to be another internal guardian, another ever-present friend (11.10, 25.6, 104.21–22). He will benefit from their guidance, but add his own discoveries to theirs, because the attainment of wisdom is always a work in progress and a communal effort, in which what has already been learned is common property (33). He will bequeath his writings in turn to posterity, and thus all that Seneca has

said of the living presence of ancient authors in their texts applies also to his texts as they are read in the future. Seneca’s immediate addressee is Lucilius, but he is also ‘working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them’, (posterorum negotium ago; illis aliqua, quae possint prodesse, conscribo, 8.2) and thus conversing with posterity (cum posteris loquor, 8.6) – with future readers of his epistles, including us. And just as Seneca’s letters always expect a reply from Lucilius – and just as philosophers are expected to add their discoveries to what they have found in the works of others – so the implication is that he expects a kind of reply from us. Epistle 64 furnishes a beautiful illustration of Seneca on reading. He is describing to Lucilius a convivial conversation he enjoyed with guests the previous evening: Lectus est deinde liber Quinti Sextii patris, magni, si quid mihi credis, viri et, licet neget, Stoici. Quantus in illo, di boni, vigor est, quantum animi! Hoc non in omnibus philosophis invenies; quorundam scripta clarum habentium nomen exanguia sunt. Instituunt, disputant, cavillantur, non faciunt animum, quia non

habent; cum legeris Sextium, dices: ‘Vivit, viget, liber est, supra hominem est, dimittit me plenum ingentis fiduciae’. In qua positione mentis sim, cum hunc lego, fatebor tibi: libet omnis casus provocare, libet exclamare:

‘Quid

cessas,

fortuna?

Congredere;

paratum vides.’ We then had read to us the book of Quintus Sextius the Elder. He is a great man, if you have any confidence in my opinion, and a real Stoic, though he himself denies it. Ye Gods, what strength and spirit one finds in him! This is not the case with all philosophers; there are some men of illustrious name whose writings are anaemic. They lay down rules, they argue and they quibble; they do not infuse spirit simply because they have no spirit. But when you come to read Sextius, you will say: ‘He is alive; he is strong; he is free; he is more than a man; he sends me away filled with a mighty confidence’. I shall acknowledge to you the state of mind I am in when I read him: I want to challenge every hazard; I want to cry ‘Why keep me waiting, Fortune? Enter the lists! Behold, I am ready for you!’ (64.2–4)

Though Sextius is long dead (he lived in the time of Julius Caesar), he is ‘alive’ and ‘free’ in several senses. As a ‘real Stoic’, who knows the true value of things, he is free from

subjection to Fortune and the body, and to enjoy such mental freedom is to be most alive. Since he has actually died, he has been liberated from the trammels of the body in a more literal and Platonic sense, too. As Seneca explains in the very next letter (65), while pondering the thoughts of different schools of philosophy about the nature of the First Cause, the freedom of philosophy is a foretaste of such post mortem freedom:

21

these questions…elevate and lighten the soul, which is weighted down by a heavy burden and desires to be freed and to return to the elements of which it was once a part. For this body of ours is a weight upon the soul and its penance; as the load presses down the soul is crushed and is in bondage, unless philosophy has come to its assistance and has bid it take fresh courage by contemplating the universe, and has turned it from things earthly to things divine. There it has its liberty, there it can roam abroad; meantime it escapes the custody in which it is bound, and renews its life in heaven. (65.16)

Most suggestively, Sextius is equated with his writings, and these are full of strength and spirit (vigor, animi) because of their rhetorical enargeia, their vivid and

rousing style. Where the writings of many others are anaemic in their dull, dry argumentation – literally ‘bloodless’ (exanguia), like sickly men – and cannot infuse (literally ‘make’ or ‘bring forth’, faciunt) spirit because they have none, Sextius vividly shows you the grandeur of the happy life (ostendet tibi beatae vitae magnitudinem, 65.5) and inspires you with the courage to attain it, to enter the lists against Fortune. Sextius’ animus is alive and free because it is supra hominem and detached from his mortal body in all these ways, and can both ‘roam abroad’ through the heavens and flow through new readers. There is a hidden pun in Seneca’s exclamatory liber est: he is free (līber) in part because he is a book (l˘ber), and one with the rhetorical energy and moral truth to liberate the receptive and responsive reader.

22

Petrarch shares a great deal with Seneca throughout his writings, frequently quoting him, and even more frequently repeating his thoughts in different words (a process he declares at Fam. 23.19 the more artful form of imitation, citing Seneca’s epistle 84 as authority).

23

Fundamental in both is the focus on the brevity of life, the worthlessness of the gifts of fortune and the things of

the body, scorn for the pettiness and corruption of contemporary society, and the desire to retreat from the bustling city into a peaceful setting to commune with their books and pursue the care of the self which leads to wisdom and the happy life. Other classical writers were also important to Petrarch, of course – especially Cicero, and, in his poetic career, Virgil –but his relationship with books, and thus with all these writers, is deeply and consciously informed by Seneca’s ideas about reading, about his own place as a writer in the continuum of written philosophy, and about his participation in a ‘counter-society of philosophers’, a ‘society of the imagination’,

an

intellectual

transcends space and time.

24

community

which

Like Seneca, Petrarch

spends his jealously guarded time ‘in the company of all the best’ (Seneca 62.2). Writing of his retreat at Vaucluse, for instance: Escaping lately, as is my custom, the noise of this hateful city, I took refuge in my transalpine Helicon, and with me came your Cicero. He was amazed by the place, which was new to him, and confessed that he had never been more at home in his Arpinate, ringed with chilly streams (I quote him directly), than he was with me at 25

the fountain of Vaucluse…Cicero and I spent ten tranquil, leisurely days together; and I think he enjoyed his stay and liked my company. Cicero was accompanied by many eminent, superior men… (Familiares 12.8)

He goes on to list a host of classical figures, who form part of the company because Petrarch is reading about them in Cicero, so that Petrarch’s solitude becomes a virtual convening of 150 like those described in Cicero’s dialogues. This is the nature of Petrarch’s inner life, the pervasive theme of his writing. Thus, in a sense, he is always writing back to the ancients, and not only in Familiares 24. Modern criticism tends to emphasize the ultimate unbridgeability of the gulf of time separating him from his favourite authors, but this is partly because we do not always notice the bridges he builds through imitation. By way of example, I shall sketch an alternative perspective on the most famous letter of the Familiares, 4.1, exploring what happens if we see it as a reply to Seneca. Petrarch’s letter, to the Augustinian monk Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, recounts his ascent of Mount Ventoux (Mons Ventosus),

26

in the company of his

brother Gherardo, ‘to see what the great height was like’.

Flagging on the way up, he spurs himself on by drawing a mental analogy with the soul’s arduous journey towards virtue and salvation. On reaching the summit, he admires the view towards Italy in the East, suffering a pang of exilic longing; looks back over his past life, with its faltering moral progress, and hopes to do better in future; then admires the view of France to the West. As he stands wondering at all these things, ‘now recognizing some earthly object, now uplifting my soul, after the example of my body’ (quæ dum mirarer singula, et nunc terrenum aliquid saperem, nunc exemplo corporis animum ad altiora subveherem), he opens his copy of Augustine’s Confessions at random, chancing on a passage from Book X: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains and the great flood of the seas, and the widerolling rivers…and themselves they pass by’ (et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum … et relinquunt se ipsos, Confessions X.15, a passage in which Augustine, in his ascent towards God, has turned from the body to think about the human mind, and marvels at the boundless capacity of memory, which enables him to see these floods and mountains inwardly as he speaks of them,

though they are not before his eyes). This he takes as an 27

admonition addressed specifically to him at this moment (in another example of an author seeming directly present in a book), and reflects that he could have learned long ago from Seneca nihil praeter animum esse mirabile, cui magno nihil magnum est (‘that nothing except the soul is worthy of wonder; for to the soul, if it be great, naught is great’, Seneca ep. 8.5, part of an inset speech in Seneca, representing what he ‘cries out’ as a warning to others in his writings, pointing them ‘to the right path, which I have found late in life, when weary with wandering’, 8.3). As the sun begins to set, content that he has viewed the mountain sufficiently (montem satis vidisse contentus), Petrarch turns his eyes inward (in me ipsum interiores oculos reflexi) and descends silently, ‘wondering at the natural nobility of the soul’ (admirantique nobilitatem animi nostri) which men so foolishly neglect, looking back often at the peak to reflect how small it seems ‘in comparison with the height of human thought, unless this is plunged in the filth of earth’, and thinking of how men should ‘strive eagerly’ towards God, fearing no difficulties and trampling bodily appetites under foot. When he reaches the inn, he

immediately sits down to pen this letter lest the mood should pass, closing by beseeching Dionigi to pray ut [cogitatus]

tamdiu

vagi

et

instabiles

aliquando

subsistant, et inutiliter per multa iactati, ad unum, bonum, verum, certum, stabile se convertant (‘that these vague, wandering thoughts may some day come to a stand. Now so vainly dispersed, may they be turned to the one good, true, certain, stable end’). Thomas Greene reads Petrarch’s letter as riven by ‘a conflict between humanist and Christian, curiosity and compunction’, between echoes of classical writers and echoes of scripture, and between an ‘objective’ view of ‘the material mountain’, on one hand, and a ‘drift 28

towards allegoresis’, (‘a consecrated literary mode … authorized by the Christian tradition’) on the other.

29

Petrarch’s ‘authorial consciousness’ is revealed, for Greene, as being ‘deeply divided’ between Renaissance humanism and mediaeval Christianity.

30

After the

reprimand from Augustine yielded by the sortes at the summit, Petrarch succumbs to ‘the ahistorical inertia of his culture’, losing interest both in the physical scene and in the classical culture he has associated with it (Livy’s account of the ascent of Mount Haemus by Philip II of

Macedon, which reminded him of his long-standing desire to climb Ventoux and prompted him to undertake it; Hannibal, of whom he is reminded when he sees the Alps from the summit, as he looks yearningly towards Rome – with all the classical associations that carries). His final view of the mountain is, for Greene, ‘blurred by Christian symbolism’, and he loses the opportunity for ‘an original, secular experience’ and ‘authentic contact with the non-self’, which his ‘heady, experimental act’ could have afforded. Part of the problem with the stark 31

dichotomy this reading imposes on the text arises from the flattened-out sense of classical culture it puts on one side of the scales, and vagueness about what it connotes or signifies. (How comparable are references to Philip of Macedon’s or Hannibal’s wars against Rome and quotations from Seneca or Virgil? What do any of these things have to do with Lucretian materialism, or with the ‘existential actuality of the climb’ and its ‘sensory impressions’?) And there is sleight of hand in deciding what to put in which of the scales, too. Petrarch quotes Ovid approvingly as part of his allegorical reflection on the ascent of the soul on his way up the mountain; Seneca’s nihil praeter animum esse mirabile, cui magno

nihil est magnum is quoted in support of the reading from Augustine, not against it; and the Virgilian makarismos is quoted (amid that supposed ‘blur’ of ‘Christian symbolism’ during the descent) to describe virtuous souls who steadfastly pursue the path towards heaven. How are these quotations to be seen as in ‘conflict’ with Christianity? Petrarch’s letter looks rather different, and makes more sense, when we set it beside Seneca’s epistle 79. Lucilius is in Sicily, and Seneca writes to ask him to climb Mount Aetna, in order to make observations which will help Seneca settle some scientific questions about whether the volcano is cooling or shrinking, perhaps because it is consuming itself. (The letter was probably written while Seneca was working on his great work of natural history, the Natural Questions.) But Lucilius will need no encouragement to make the ascent, because he is planning to write a poem about Aetna, following in the footsteps of Virgil, Ovid and Cornelius Severus, who all included Aetna in their poems. We imagine Lucilius planning an expedition to conduct research for his poem, but at this point the literal ascent begins to merge with figurative senses. None of the former poets were put off

the theme by the fact that others had treated it before, and neither should Lucilius be deterred, for ‘those who have gone before seem’ to Seneca ‘not to have forestalled all that could be said, but merely to have opened the way’ (qui praecesserant, non praeripuisse mihi videntur, quae dici poterant, sed aperuisse, 79.5). The buried metaphors here (‘going before’, ‘seizing in advance’, ‘opening the way’) insinuate that writing about Aetna is equivalent to climbing it, and this is wittily developed in the sentences which follow: Multum interest, utrum ad consumptam materiam an ad subactam accedas; crescit in dies et inventuris inventa non obstant. Praeterea condicio optima est ultimi; parata verba invenit, quae aliter instructa novam faciem habent. Nec illis manus inicit tamquam alienis. Sunt enim publica. Iurisconsulti negant quicquam publicum usu capi. It makes a great deal of difference whether you approach a subject that has been exhausted, or one where the ground has merely been broken; in the latter case, the topic grows day by day, and what is already discovered does not hinder new discoveries. Besides, he who writes last has the best of the bargain; he finds already at hand words which, when marshalled in a different way, show

a new face. And he is not pilfering them, as if they belonged to someone else, when he uses them, for they are public property. The lawyers say that public property cannot be acquired privately by possession. (79.6) 32

We are reminded of the opening question as to whether or not Aetna is shrinking as it physically ‘consumes’ itself; previous poets have not ‘consumed’ the ‘matter’ of Aetna, but helped to tame it, and in doing so have made it grow. (One almost imagines the earlier poetic treatments as cooled lava adding incrementally to the height of the mountain.) New poets can always give it a ‘new face’, and like public land, such poetic treatments 33

remain in public ownership. Lucilius will not be able to resist making the attempt himself, because, as Seneca knows, he has ‘for some time been desirous of writing something in the lofty style (grande) and on the level of the older school (par prioribus, 79.7): the physical height of the mountain here reflects the high style and excellence of the poems. So great is his modesty and his reverence for the old masters, however, that he will hold himself back (retracturus) if there is any danger of outdoing them. This is the mountain of poetic emulation and ambition, then: poems may be public property in

theory, but selfish desire for social esteem is clearly still a residual temptation. Seneca reminds us of the mountains where poets have received an investiture from the Muses, like Hesiod at the beginning of the Theogony or Gallus in Virgil’s sixth eclogue, but overlays it with a more cynical hint of the popular acclaim which he has warned Lucilius to disregard in favour of inner selfjudgement (7.11–12, 29.12). Such acclaim is a gift of fortune; seeking it ‘leads us into precipitous ways, and life on such heights ends in a fall’, as he puts it in another epistle (in praecipitia…deducit. Huius eminentis vitae exitus cadere est, 8.4). At this point Aetna takes on another new face, as a better allegorical mountain comes into view: Inter cetera hoc habet boni sapientia: nemo ab altero potest vinci, nisi dum ascenditur. Cum ad summum perveneris, paria sunt, non est incremento locus, statur…Quicumque fuerint sapientes, pares erunt et aequales. Wisdom has this advantage, among others – that no man can be outdone by another, except during the climb. When you have arrived at the summit, it is a draw; there is no place to advance further, one remains at rest…Men

who have attained wisdom will therefore be equals [aequales, with subsidiary meanings ‘of the same rank’ and ‘of the same age’ or ‘belonging to the same generation’] and on a level. (79.8–9)

This is the mountain of philosophy, whose summit is wisdom and virtue. This mountain is free of selfish competition or concern for popular acclaim, and in contrast with the others – the physical mountain and the mountain of ambitious poetry – there is no danger that it will ever suffer diminution: An Aetna tua possit sublabi et in se ruere, an hoc excelsum cacumen et conspicuum per vasti maris spatia detrahat adsidua vis ignium, nescio; virtutem non flamma, non ruina inferius adducet. Haec una maiestas deprimi nescit. Nec proferri ultra nec referri potest. Sic huius, ut caelestium, stata magnitudo est. Ad hanc nos conemur educere. I do not know whether this Aetna of yours can collapse and fall in ruins, whether this lofty summit, visible for many miles over the deep sea, is wasted by the incessant power of the flames; but I do know that virtue will not be brought down to a lower plane either by flames or by ruins. Hers is the only greatness that knows no lowering;

there can be for her no further rising or sinking. Her stature, like that of the stars in the heavens, is fixed. Let us therefore strive to raise ourselves to this altitude. (79.10)

At this roughly mid-point of the letter, Seneca begins to congratulate himself that he has already accomplished much of his own ascent up this allegorical mountain, but then corrects himself: immo, si verum fateri volo, non multum (‘nay, rather, if I can bring myself to confess the truth, not much’, 79.11). Still a proficiens and not yet a sage, he has ‘glimpsed the brightness with feeble vision’ like one seeing sunlight ‘through a mist’ (79.11–12), but he has yet to attain the summit. ‘Our souls will not have reason to rejoice’ until, ‘restored to their place in the sky, they have regained the place which they held at the allotment of their birth’: Sursum illum vocant initia sua. Erit autem illic etiam antequam hac custodia exsolvatur, cum vitia disiecerit purusque ac levis in cogitationes divinas emicuerit. The soul is summoned upward by its very origin. And it will reach that goal even before it is released from its prison below, as soon as it has cast off sin and, in purity

and lightness, has leaped up into celestial realms of thought. (79.12)

As we saw in epistle 65, philosophy affords a liberation which anticipates the Platonic liberation of the soul after death. Seneca rejoices that he and Lucilius are undertaking this journey with all their might, and the rest of the letter is given over to reassurance that virtue always wins recognition in the end, even though contemporaries may be silenced by envy (livor, 79.17) – an argument made with a catalogue of philosophers neglected in life but celebrated after their deaths. A further comparison with poetic achievement (that other allegorical mountain) is woven in through the mention of livor : the earlier claim that virtue cannot be brought low by flames or by ruin recalled Ovid’s boast at the end of the Metamorphoses of his poem’s invulnerability, and livor here evokes the envy which Ovid repeatedly attributes, in the exile elegies, to those whom he imagines as having brought him into Augustus’ disfavour and as continuing to work against his recall. If we hear the Ovidian references, there is a delicate ambiguity as to whether Ovid’s boasted immunity and immortality are confirmed (which might glancingly acknowledge the way

in which Seneca’s ‘society of the imagination’ draws on Ovid’s exile epistles), or outdone by the truer immortality of philosophy. We are now in a position to see that, despite references to heaven and hell and quotations from Augustine, there is nothing exclusively Christian about Petrarch’s inward and upward turn in Fam. IV.i, to contemplate the soul, its divine origins and its ascent towards salvation, nor about the allegorical mode he employs. Different kinds of ascent, with different motives, are already played off against one another through allegory in Seneca. Juxtaposed in epistle 79 are the physical ascent in the service of scientific enquiry, the allegorical ascent of poetic achievement and the superior allegorical ascent of philosophy, by which the soul is liberated from its earthly captivity and returns to its divine origins. From Seneca’s Stoic

viewpoint,

scientific

understanding

of

the

providential order of the physical universe is part of wisdom, inseparable from knowledge of the divine and the summum bonum. Yet travel is not a good in itself – 34

all depends on how it is used, and it can be a positive evil, when it distracts us from the care of our own soul. (One 35

might even wonder whether the passage yielded by

Petrarch’s Augustinian sortes was itself informed by Seneca’s advice to Lucilius in epistle 104: ‘Travel will reveal to you mountains of strange shape, or unfamiliar tracts of plain, or valleys that are watered by everflowing springs … but this sort of information will not make better or sounder men of us’. For that, Seneca continues, you must turn inward and ‘wipe out from your own soul all traces of sin’ (104.15, 20).) In Petrarch, the laudable motive of scientific enquiry is more lightly touched on, with Petrarch’s curiosity ‘to see what the great height was like’, and other motives for physical mountain-climbing are introduced, with the references to Philip of Macedon (whose ascent is part of military preparations for his war against Rome) and Hannibal, ferus hostis romani nominis (‘ferocious enemy of the Roman name’), crossing the Alps to invade Italy. This kind of ascent, driven by military motives, is not addressed in Seneca’s epistle 79, but Philip and Hannibal are Seneca’s twin bêtes noire in the Natural Questions, because of their rapacious desire for conquest, which shows them to be slaves to their earthly passions, the very opposite of the Stoic sage. Their presence in Fam. 4.1 is as Senecan 36

moral

counterexamples

to

Petrarch’s

intellectual

curiosity, not as objects of his imitation. Petrarch may oscillate between attention to the terrestrial and to the divine at the top of his mountain, and the divine, or the soul, is certainly declared to be more worthy of attention, but it would be going too far to say that he repents of his curiosity or his climb. He descends because he is content that he has seen enough of the view, not because he considers his physical climb mistaken or sinful. It has, after all, brought him to his spiritual revelation at the summit (evoking the frequent moments of divine epiphany on Judaeo-Christian and classical mountains). He should perhaps have already obtained that revelation from reading Augustine or from reading Seneca, but the physical experience has brought spiritual truths home to him by analogy, which was necessary because ‘the movements of the body are in the open, whereas those of the soul are hidden and invisible’. Like Seneca and Lucilius, Petrarch is still a proficiens, midway on his journey, not yet entirely liberated from the body. Like Seneca, he must correct himself at the mid-point of his letter: quod amare solebam, iam non amo; mentior: amo, sed parcius; iterum ecce mentitus sum: amo, sed verecundius, sed tristius; iamtandem verum dixi.

(‘What I used to love, I love no longer. No, I am lying. I love it still, but more moderately. No, again I have lied. I love, but with more shame, more sadness; and now at last I have told the truth.’) But like Seneca and Lucilius, he 37

is on the path, devoting his energies to reaching the summit and attaining a full view of the light he has glimpsed as if through mist. In epistle 39, Seneca describes the man who directs the energies of his soul to such upward (excelsi ingenii, extollit) moral movement: felix, qui ad meliora hunc inpetum dedit! (‘happy is the man who has given it this impulse toward better things!’ 39.3). This is the only time the phrase felix, qui, with its distinctive elision of the verb, occurs in classical prose: it alludes unmistakeably to the makarismos of Virgil’s second Georgic, which Petrarch quotes near the end of his letter.

38

What is buried more deeply in Petrarch’s letter than in Seneca’s is the impulse to ascend the allegorical mountain of poetic achievement and fame. But so far we have been tracing similarities between our two texts, as though Petrarch were simply imitating Seneca’s epistle 79. A striking difference which would seem to vitiate 39

such a claim is that Seneca is asking Lucilius to climb

Aetna, whereas Petrarch is reporting his own completed climb. We might say that Petrarch’s letter does something akin to what Seneca wants Lucilius to do in his reply, writing a detailed report of his observations (si haec mihi perscripseris, 79.2). Of course, Ventoux (Mons Ventosus) is not Aetna (though Aetna is famously mons ventosus – Seneca apparently agrees with Lucretius that its volcanic activity is to be explained by subterranean winds escaping through it: 79.2���3); but Petrarch 40

cannot reach Aetna any more than he can reach Philip’s Mount Haemus, and does the best he can with what is close to hand. Thus Petrarch is putting himself in the 41

position of Lucilius, writing back to Seneca. Lucilius has his own plans too, and Seneca does not discourage his friend’s desire ‘to write something in the lofty style and on the level of the older school’, though he himself cares less for this poetic ambition, marred as it is by suspect connotations of pursuing popular acclaim. Petrarch is no stranger to that desire, impelling him especially to write his epic Africa. It is allegorized in another mountain42

climbing scene in his first eclogue (where his brother Gherardo, by this time a Carthusian monk, tries unsuccessfully to persuade him to abandon the heights of

poetry for the monastic life), and shortly after the ‘Ascent of Mount Ventoux’ will come the letter (4.4) rejoicing in the offer of a laurel crown, for ‘a young man’s mind craves glory more than virtue’ (ut est animus iuvenum gloriæ appetentior quam virtutis). This desire for earthly glory, which Seneca reproves in Lucilius, is called Petrarch’s worst fault by the apparition of Augustine who is his (deeply Senecan) interlocutor in the Secretum. It is the 43

aspect of Petrarch’s personality which he can square with neither Christianity nor Senecan philosophy, and yet cannot relinquish. If allowed to intrude visibly in Fam. 4.1, it would undermine the moral lesson of the letter.

44

Petrarch suppresses it, only allowing the suppression to be glimpsed by the reader, who sees that he is adopting the position of the ambitious young poet Lucilius, writing back to Seneca’s epistle 79. If there is a conflict here, it is between Petrarch’s Virgilian poetic ambitions and his Senecan (and Christian) moral convictions – not between Christianity and humanism. In fact, the overwhelming purport of the letter seems to be to demonstrate that humanist study is a valid path to Christian wisdom, and to insist on the fundamental unity and harmony of wisdom wherever it

is found, in Christian or in non-Christian philosophy, in Augustine or Seneca. This is what the letter is intended 45

to communicate to the sympathetic reader, familiar with, and herself toiling up, the path to wisdom via reading. It is possible, perhaps, that the immediate addressee, an Augustinian monk and Petrarch’s former confessor, may be intended instead to get a hazy impression of something akin to the conflicts Greene perceives, and to be pleased that Petrarch seems on some level to be casting off classical error for Christian truth. This is unlikely, though: Dionigi was a renowned scholar, who has been called the first humanist of the Augustinian order; he wrote the first commentary on Valerius Maximus, and possibly also commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil, and Seneca’s tragedies; and, if he gave Petrarch his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, he had also introduced Boccaccio (another of his friends) to Seneca. But whether or not Dionigi is intended to see it, 46

Petrarch ultimately makes him play Seneca to Petrarch’s Lucilius, as the closing prayer confirms. In an earlier pair of letters, Seneca urged Lucilius to ‘be deaf to those who love you most of all’, for when they pray that wealth and advancement, the gifts of Fortune, be heaped upon him,

‘they pray for bad things with good intentions’ (31.2). He should rather ‘entreat the gods that none of their fond desires for you may be brought to pass’, for Fortune’s gifts are not true goods, but rather snares. There is only one true good, and for this one should exert oneself: When a man is struggling towards honourable things … I shall shout my encouragement, saying: ‘By so much you are better! Rise (surge), draw a fresh breath, and surmount that hill (clivum istum exsupera), if possible, at a single spurt!’ (31.4)

To do this, he need not climb physical mountains or brave Scylla and Charybdis (though he has done all this ‘for the bribe of a petty governorship’, his post as procurator in Sicily); rather, the journey for which Nature has equipped him ‘is safe and pleasant’, for ‘she has given you such gifts that you may, if you do not prove false to them, rise level with God’ (par deo surges, 31.9). We are already encountering here the allegorical mountain of wisdom which will form the climax of epistle 79. The next letter, after repeating his exhortations, closes by circling back to the foolish prayers (vota) of 31.2, and replaces them with Seneca’s own, better prayer for Lucilius:

I myself pray that you may despise all those things which your parents wished for you in abundance… I pray that you may get such control over yourself that your mind, now shaken by wandering thoughts, may at last come to rest and be steadfast (ut vagis cogitationibus agitata mens tandem resistat et certa sit), that it may be content

with

itself

and,

having

attained

an

understanding of what things are truly good (veris bonis)—and they are in our possession as soon as we have this knowledge—that it may have no need of added years. (32.4–5)

Surely Petrarch expects a reader familiar with Seneca’s epistles to recognize this as effectively the same prayer which he begs Dionigi to make for him, ut [cogitatus] tamdiu vagi et instabiles aliquando subsistant, et inutiliter per multa iactati, ad unum, bonum, verum, certum, stabile se convertant. Like a belated poet approaching the well-worn theme of Aetna, he ‘finds already at hand words’ (specifically those I have underlined) he can ‘marshal in a different way’ (Seneca 79.6). What Seneca chiefly expects of Lucilius’ response to epistle 79, and to all of Seneca’s letters, is that he will devote the energies of his soul to striving with Seneca

towards this goal, this summit of wisdom; and this expectation is met by Petrarch’s response. Petrarch proclaims himself consciously engaged in the Senecan ascent to wisdom. In saying this, I do not mean to contradict all those who see him as identifying with Augustine, here and elsewhere. Some recent critics have gone beyond Greene’s unhelpful dichotomies, arguing that Petrarch saw no ‘antagonism between’ Augustinian Christianity and classical philosophy as ‘two monolithic bodies of thought’. I agree with Alexander Lee that 47

‘Petrarch viewed St Augustine as a bridge between classical and Christian culture’. My objection is only to 48

the will to prioritize and subordinate: in Lee’s book, for instance, Augustine is more often a ‘lens’ filtering and delimiting Petrarch’s view of the ancients than he is a ‘bridge’ connecting them, and Petrarch’s ‘appropriations of classical adages’ are ‘ancillary’ to an essentially Augustinian programme. There is no need for such a 49

tug-of-war. For those who believe (as Seneca did) that the discoveries of the wise are public property, that quod verum est, meum est (‘what is true, is mine’, 12.11), priority, chronological or otherwise, is irrelevant: those

‘who have attained wisdom’ are ‘equal and on a level’ atop Seneca’s mountain (79.9). In an earlier article, describing the epic Underworld as a locus of poetic memory, Philip Hardie puts a similar idea more wittily: ‘In the capacious kingdom of Death anyone who ever lived, anywhere in the world, is present in one place and one time. The traveler to Death’s kingdom has instantaneous access to a kind of worldwide web of the past.’ In the chapter which opens the present volume, he 50

focusses not on katabasis but on anabasis, not descent but flight, surveying a vast field of European art and literature from Horace to Milton to show how persistently yet variously imagery of flight has been used to explore ideas of poetic immortality. Both the poles of thought about fama foregrounded in the title of his book on the subject, Rumour and Renown, enter into this exploration, as flight is used to figure both the poet’s aspiration to the unchanging immortality of the astral realm, and the surrender of his words to the fickle winds of reinterpretation by future readers. Drawing out the self-conscious imitation of and allusion to predecessors which so often characterizes the trope – even (or

especially) when used to assert the originality of a poet’s flight into uncharted terrain – Hardie shows how poets use their creative reworkings to comment on their own and each other’s ambitions, and on the ambitions of the patrons they offer to immortalize, with vatic confidence or self-deprecating humour, for purposes of praise or parody, self-assertion or satire. Shifting from this diachronic perspective to a synchronic one, Stephen Hinds’s chapter reminds us of Latin’s status as a living language in the Renaissance, and the bilingual nature of the literary culture inhabited by Renaissance poets. His ‘diptychs’ are paired Latin and vernacular poems, like Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ and Hortus, in which a poet translates his own work, or else composes simultaneously in both languages. Tracing the equivalences and the differences within such pairs, the strategic choices and changes poets make as they step back and forth across the linguistic boundary, Hinds reveals what each poet felt to be the peculiar capacity and aptitudes of each language, and the areas of overlap and incommensurability in the cultural codes and traditions they evoke. Most strikingly, Latin and the vernacular languages bring different literary histories in their wake,

enabling poets to enter into different intertextual conversations with their predecessors. Turning to Latin translations of Milton’s Paradise Lost by other hands, Hinds show how choices made by each translator underline or create allusive connections between Milton’s text and classical epic, especially the Aeneid. His essay invites us to eavesdrop on conversations between poems, between languages and between cultures. The conversation struck up in a Renaissance imitation of a classical text may reverberate in later readings and reworkings, and Emma Buckley’s chapter offers a fine example in the lasting effect of Marlowe’s engagement with Lucan on literary representations of Julius Caesar by later authors. Into his translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia, Buckley argues, Marlowe injects a current of imagery of ‘conquering swords’ and literal thirst for blood drawn from his own Tamburlaine plays, which leaves an indelible mark on early modern reception of Lucan. Tracking the persistent afterlife of this imagery in the anonymous academic drama Caesar’s Revenge and the work of Thomas May, she shows how Caesar’s identity becomes merged with Marlowe’s overreaching heroes, and how, in the process, Lucan’s

political concerns are overshadowed by the amoral aesthetic of Marlowe, which ‘escapes the censorious moralising and committed fractures of Lucan’s text’ to revel in ‘a world lacking a coherent moral foundation’. Caesar’s Revenge is revealed as an unjustly neglected play, which anticipates the dark vision of Webster, while May’s attempts to use Lucan for political ends are shown to be undermined from within by Marlowe’s irresistible influence. Helen Lynch analyses Milton’s Samson Agonistes as a conversation with Shakespeare’s Roman plays, tracing a pattern of allusion to the Shakespearean suicides Antony, Cleopatra and Brutus which deepens our understanding of Samson’s final act. Here, the conversation is unabashedly political. Lynch’s chapter builds on her argument in Milton and the Politics of Public Speech that the seventeenth-century public sphere should be understood in Arendtian terms, as a revival of the Greek polis or Roman republic, centred on public speech as political action. For Milton, poetry is a form of oratory, and drama, the art-form of democratic Athens, both represents and embodies public speech. Pointing out that groups disenfranchized in the classical state became

metaphors for political disempowerment in early modern polemic (whether hurled as terms of abuse to delegitimize an opponent or protesting the indignity of political oppression), the essay uncovers a strong republican

undertow

in

ideas

of

effeminacy

in

Shakespeare and Milton, and brings a newly political perspective to their treatments of gender and sexuality. Yet Samson’s defining act, while fulfilling the republican ideal of selfless public service, and recalling the Senecan view of suicide as the ultimate assertion of individual liberty, goes beyond the masculinist terms of classical republicanism. For Milton draws on Shakespeare’s figuration of Antony’s and Cleopatra’s joint suicide as a ‘transcendent marriage’ to depict the regenerate Samson as androgyne in his union with God. Lynch’s essay at once reveals the availability to early modern readers of distinctively republican subcurrents in Shakespeare, and illuminates the ways in which Milton justifies Samson’s suicide in a Christian framework. My own chapter traces the recurrence of the figure of Adonis, mortal lover of Aphrodite and immortal god of vegetation, through the minor sub-genre of bucolic lament (or pastoral elegy) for a fellow poet, from the third

century

BCE

to Shelley’s Adonais, and reflects on the

intimate intertwining of poetic imitation and the theme of literary immortality in these poems. I shall not say more about it here, since I have said quite enough for the time being, except to excuse myself for taking the liberty of including a poet who falls well outside the temporal bounds set by the title of the volume. But if we choose to go along with the imagination of the writers discussed here, such temporal bounds seem less of a necessary constraint, for they see themselves as enjoying a kind of contemporaneity

atop

Seneca’s

mountain,

or

in

Petrarch’s Vaucluse or Herrick’s Elysium – or in their volumes, where we encounter them. And that encounter will always be in our own present. As my interloper Shelley says, whenever ‘lofty thought/Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair’, she will find ‘the dead live there/And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air’. (Adonais XLIV) The surest way of belonging to such a community is feeling you belong to it, as Shelley clearly does; and perhaps, when we say ‘Renaissance’, a large part of what we mean is simply that state of mind. 1

I do not exclude mediaeval literature from this single

object of study. It is at the boundary between what we call

‘mediaeval’ and what we call ‘Renaissance’ that some of the most trenchant recent criticism of the distorting effects of periodization has been heard. (See for instance Jennifer

Summit

and

David

Wallace

(eds),

Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization, special issue of JMEMS 37.3 (2007).) The idea of ‘rebirth’ in the term ‘Renaissance’ implies, of course, that something was previously dead; the terms ‘mediaeval’ and ‘Middle Ages’ similarly define the period between the end of the Roman empire and the beginnings of the humanist movement in trecento Italy purely negatively, as an in-between space, as if it were blank. (Compare ‘Enlightenment’, which casts the Renaissance as a Dark Age too.) But Renaissance humanists could study classical texts only because they had been preserved by mediaeval scribes and scholars. The alternative label ‘early modern’, meanwhile, distorts in other ways, not least by severing the connection to everything that came before. Periods are arbitrary constructs, which are sometimes useful to think with, but should be used mindfully, questioning the value judgements implicit in our labels and resisting any temptation to lazy oversimplification. 2

Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and

Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), 93. See also Philip Hardie, ‘In the Steps of the Sibyl: Tradition and Desire in the Epic Underworld’, Materiali e

discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 52 (2004), 143– 56, on ‘the Virgilian Underworld, as a place of tradition and memory’ in which poets can ‘represent their relationship to their predecessors’ (143, 151); also Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil (Cambridge, 1993), 59–65. 3

The poems today referred to as the Anacreontea were

first published by Henricus Stephanus as Anacreontis Teii odae (Paris, 1554): on this edition and its influence, see Patricia Rosenmeyer, The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), 3–7. On the Greek symposium, see Oswyn Murray (ed.), Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford, 1990). On Herrick’s engagement with Anacreon in the Hesperides, see David Campbell, ‘Herrick to Anacreon,’ in Mark Griffith and Donald J. Mastronarde (eds), The Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer

(Atlanta,

1990),

333–41,

and

Stella

Achilleos, ‘“Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon”: Robert Herrick’s Anacreontics and the Politics of Conviviality in Hesperides’, in Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain (eds), ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford, 2011), 191–219. 4

Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English

Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995), 71.

5

See Ch. 7, ‘Drinking and the Politics of Poetic Identity

from Jonson to Herrick’, in Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford, 2002). On the political connotations of drinking in the Civil War and Protectorate, see A. McShane Jones, ‘Roaring

Royalists

and

Ranting

Brewers:

the

Politicisation of Drink and Drunkenness in Political Broadside Ballads, 1640–1689’, in A. Smyth (ed.), A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge, 2004). On the ale-houses, see Peter Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in SeventeenthCentury History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978), 47–72. On literary responses to the suppression of traditional festivities, see Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, 1986). 6

On the Order of the Black Riband, see Nicholas

McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford, 2008), 13– 52, and on Herrick’s possible involvement, the same author’s ‘Herrick and the Order of the Black Riband: Literary Community in Civil-War London and the Publication of Hesperides (1648)’, in Connolly and Cain (eds), ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’, 106–126.

7

Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. G. M.

Crump (Oxford, 1962), 357, 360. 8

For the membership and activities of the Order of the

Black Riband, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, Ch. 1, and Stella P. Revard, ‘Thomas Stanley and “A Register of

Friends”’,

in

Literary

Circles

and

Cultural

Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, 2000), 148–172. 9

Revard, ‘“A Register of Friends”’, 168. See also Stella

Revard,

‘Translation

and

Imitation

of

Johannes

Secundus’s Basia During the Era of the Civil War and Protectorate in England’, in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Abulensis: Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Tempe, 2000), 553–561. 10

See my discussion in ‘Supping With Ghosts: Imitation

and Immortality in Herrick’, in Connolly and Cain (eds), ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’, 220–249. 11

Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca 12.13.2. Aristotle makes

the same point in Rhetoric 3.12.1. 12

For an indicative sample, see the opening volley of

verses from the second, ‘To his Muse’ (chiding his poetry as a ‘mad maiden’ for seeking publicity through print) through to the eighth, ‘When he would have his verses read’ (not ‘in sober mornings’ but at evening symposia) –

taking in a curse on any reader who uses the pages to wipe his bottom (‘Another’, H–5). 13

Josephi Fracassetti (ed.), Francisci Petrarcae Epistolae

de Rebus Familiaribus et Variae, 3 vols (Florence, 1859), Vol. I, 25. Translations from Petrarch, except those from Book 24, are from Morris Bishop, Letters from Petrarch, Selected and Translated by Morris Bishop (Bloomington, 1966),

occasionally

lightly

modified.

An

English

translation of the complete work is available in Aldo S. Bernardo (trans.), Letters on Familiar Matters, 3 vols (Baltimore, 1982). 14

On Petrarch’s use of allusion to create the sense of

community across time in Familiares 24, see two excellent articles by Stephen Hinds: ‘Petrarch, Cicero, Virgil: Virtual Community in Familiares 24.4’, in G. W. Most and S. Spence (eds), Re-Presenting Virgil: Special Issue in Honor of Michael C. J. Putnam, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 52 (2004), 157– 175; and ‘Defamiliarizing Latin Literature, from Petrarch to Pulp Fiction’, TAPA 135 (2005), 49–81. 15

English translations of Familiares Book 24 are from

Mario Emilio Cosenza, Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors (Chicago, 1910), which also includes a good commentary highlighting the many allusions. 16

See especially ep. 38. Seneca’s imagery of sowing words

like seed in 38.2 is perhaps an allusion to (and correction

of) Socrates’ praise of oral dialectic as opposed to writing at Phaedrus 276D–277A. 17

See A. Wilcox, The Gift of Correspondence in Classical

Rome: Friendship in Cicero’s Ad Familiares and Seneca’s Moral Epistles (Madison, 2012) for Seneca’s distinction between the true friendship described in his own epistles and transactional friendships in Cicero’s. 18

Translations from Seneca are by Richard M. Gummere,

Seneca: Ad Lucilium epistulae morales (London, 1925), lightly modified. 19

Girolamo Squarzafico, ‘Vita Francesci Petrarchae’,

Francisci Petrarchae Florentini…Opera que extant omnia (Basel, 1554), sig. ††6r; Ronald G. Witt, In the footsteps of the ancients: the origins of humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, 2003), 274. On the competing influences of Cicero and Seneca on Petrarch’s letters, see also John M. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, 1993), 25–30, and on Seneca’s influence, Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, 1993), 80–101; Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge, 2010), 79–95; Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago, 2017), ch. 3. 20

See Mark Davies, ‘Living With Seneca Through His

Epistles’, Greece & Rome 61 (2014), 68–90. Hinds traces

the ways in which Petrarch shows his own creation of a virtual community across time to be ‘complicit with Cicero’s own ways of speaking with, and for, the dead’ (‘Virtual Community in Familiares 24.4’, 174). I do not disagree, but would argue that Petrarch also recognizes and responds to Seneca’s much fuller development of ideas he had found in Cicero. 21

On Platonism in epistle 65, see David Sedley, ‘Stoic

Metaphysics

at

Rome’,

in

Ricardo

Salles

(ed.),

Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji (Oxford, 2005), 117–142; on the importance of various kinds of freedom in Seneca, see Brad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford, 2005), 302–321. 22

For Ovid’s use of the same pun in the Tristia, see

Stephen Hinds, ‘Booking the Return Trip: Ovid and Tristia I’, in Peter E. Knox (ed.), Oxford Readings in Ovid (Oxford, 2006), 416–417 (originally printed in The Cambridge Classical Journal 31 (1985), 13–32). However distant Seneca’s stern Stoicism in the moral epistles may seem from the exiled Ovid’s self-pity, Seneca may have found

inspiration

for

his

virtual

community

of

philosophers in the frequent passages in the exile epistles where Ovid asserts his participation in a community of friends and poets transcending physical separation and even death, and immune to political oppression. (See for

instance Tristia V.xiii.27–30, Ex Ponto II.x.43–52, and Syrithe Pugh, ‘Ovidian Exile in the Hesperides: Herrick’s Politics of Intertextuality’, RES 57 (2006), 753–757.) Seneca’s

descriptions

of

his

own

exile

in

the

Consolationes ad Helviam and ad Polybium are modelled on Ovid’s. See also Hinds, ‘Seneca’s Ovidian Loci’, Studi Italiani di filologia classica 9 (2011), 5–63, on the way in which Seneca’s allusions to Ovid’s mythological poetry in his tragedies are interfused with simultaneous allusion to the exile elegies. 23

On the influence of some of Seneca’s explicit

pronouncements about literary imitation on Petrarch, see Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1996), 25–31. 24

G. D. Williams, Seneca: De otio; De bruitate uitae

(Cambridge, 2003), 23 and 211. 25

Petrarch wittily draws attention to the fact that he is

quoting Cicero’s description of Arpinum at Tusculan Disputations V.74, in Arpinati nostro gelidis fluminibus circumfusum (‘in my Arpinum surrounded by ice-cold streams’) – a nice example of how self-consciously Petrarch uses allusion to create the illusion of presence. 26

Whether the climb actually occurred or is purely

fictional has been disputed, as has the date of composition

of the letter. The first question makes no difference to my reading.

The

second

adds

an

interesting

angle:

Billanovich argues that the letter was not composed until 1352–53, when the collection was being prepared and years later than the date of the supposed climb in 1336. Since the named addressee died in 1342, Fam. 4.1 would thus join the letters to the ancients in Book 24 as a letter to the dead in a very literal sense, as well as in the sense I am pursuing here. (See Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato. I: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome, 1947), 193– 198.) 27

It is thus a mistake (though a common one) to read the

Augustinian passage as a condemnation of tourism. See for example Zachary Schiffman, Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011), 162; Carol Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor, 1998), 142. Åke Bergvall suggests that Petrarch deliberately misrepresents Augustine’s text by excerpting so briefly (‘Of Mountains and Men: Vision and Memory in Wordsworth and Petrarch’, Connotations 7 (1998), 44–57), but I would argue that Petrarch expects the competent reader to remember the context and interpret correctly (along the lines of the Senecan quotation which quickly follows). His immediate addressee is after all the learned Augustinian monk who gave him this very copy of the Confessions.

28

Greene associates materialism with the classical side of

his dichotomy, taking Petrarch’s quotation of Virgil’s famous makarismos at Georgics 2.490–492 (‘Happy the man who is skilled to understand/Nature’s hid causes; who beneath his feet/All terrors casts, and death’s relentless doom,/And the loud roar of greedy Acheron’) as a reference to Lucretius, representing materialism and hostility to religion. 29

Greene, The Light in Troy, 109, 105, 106.

30

Ibid., 108.

31

Ibid., 111, 110.

32

The final sentence appears here in the manuscripts, but

is moved in modern editions to 88.12, a passage discussing land ownership. 33

Christopher Trinacty notes that this phrase recalls

Ovid’s

self-reflexive

comment

on

his

own

Metamorphoses at Tristia 2.555–6 – forming part of what he calls a ‘syncopated ars poetica’ woven into epistle 79 by allusions to Augustan poets – see Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry (Oxford, 2014), 10–13). 34

See Gareth D. Williams, The Cosmic Viewpoint: A

Study of Seneca’s ‘Natural Questions’ (Oxford, 2012). 35

Silvia Montiglio, ‘Should the Aspiring Wise Man Travel?

A Conflict in Seneca’s Thought’, AJP 127 (2006), 553– 586.

36

Williams, Cosmic Viewpoint, 33–37. Cp. Augustinus’

use of Hannibal to warn Petrarch against enslavement to his passions in the third dialogue of the Secretum. 37

The moment may be an ‘Augustinian winnowing of

truth’ (Schiffman, Birth of the Past, 159), but it is also Senecan – see Sen. Ep. 79.11, quoted above. 38

See Mark Davies, A Commentary on Seneca’s Epistulae

Morales Book IV (Epistles 30–41), Ph.D. thesis, University of Auckland, 2010, on ep. 39. 39

Gareth Williams interestingly considers Bembo’s

account of his own ascent of Etna at the end of the fifteenth century (the De Aetna) to be ‘in dialogue with Petrarch, emulating or perhaps rather rivalling the latter’s ascent of Mount Ventoux’, as well as engaging with classical treatments of Etna, including the Senecan epistle. (Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist (Oxford, 2017), 26–68 on the classical tradition, and 95–101 on Petrarch; quotation at p.95.) He does not, however, suggest any connection between Petrarch and those classical texts. 40

See also Natural Questions, VI.14.1, 21.2, 24.2 (on

subterranean winds as the cause of earthquakes), and Williams, Cosmic Viewpoint, 241–245. 41

As he says of Mount Haemus, ‘I shouldn’t have left the

question long in doubt if the ascent of that mountain were as easy as this one’.

42

On

Petrarch’s

‘oscillation

between

conflicting

evaluations of fame’, and on fame as the telos of his epic poem, see Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations

of

Fama

in

Western

Literature

(Cambridge, 2012), 439–484. 43

One might of course accuse Seneca of self-

contradiction, when he devotes the last half of epistle 79 to the promise of immortal fame for philosophers. For reflection on the differences between the good opinion of the good and praise by the many (the first following from the true immortality of wisdom, the second merely offering a false immortality) see epistle 102. 44

Lyell Asher reads the Ventoux letter as in itself a bid for

fame, though one simultaneously riven by anxiety and self-censure: ‘Petrarch at the Peak of Fame,’ PMLA 108 (1993), 1050–1063. 45

On Petrarch’s ‘Christianization of the humanist

movement’ see Ronald Witt, ‘Petrarch, Creator of the Christian Humanist’, in Petrarch and Boccaccio: The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-modern World, ed. Igor Candido (Berlin, 2018), 65–77 (quotation at p. 65); and In the Footsteps of the Ancients, 230–291. 46

‘First humanist of the Augustinian order’: A. Zumkeller,

‘Die Augustinerschule des Mittelalters: Vertreter und philosophisch-theologische

Lehre’,

Analecta

Augustiniana, 27 (1964), 167–262 (at 207). See also M.

Picone, ‘Dionigi amicus ymaginarius di Boccaccio’, in F. Suitner (ed.), Dionigi da Borgo Sansepolcro fra Petrarca e Boccaccio (Castello, 2001), 125–132. 47

Alexander Lee, Petrarch and St Augustine: Classical

Scholarship, Christian Theology and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy (Leiden, 2014), 54. Cp. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance; Robert Durling, ‘The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory’, Italian Quarterly 18 (1974), 7–28. 48

Lee, Petrarch and Saint Augustine, 38.

49

Ibid., 60–61.

50

Hardie, ‘In the Steps of the Sibyl’, 143.

2 Flying with the immortals: reaching

for

the

sky

in

classical and Renaissance poetics Philip Hardie

Afterlives may be lived either in the secret hidingplaces of the Underworld or in the open spaces of the skies above. In this chapter I will follow poets not on a katabasis, nor on the difficult journey of return from the Underworld superas ad auras, to the air of the world above, but in their exhilarating flights to the heavens and the stars, whether experienced in their own living selves, posthumously in the praises of

other writers, or by proxy in the fictional flights of characters in their works. The heavens may be populated by a galaxy of literary greats from the past, but in general poetic journeys to the sky seem not to be undertaken in order to meet stars of the past, much less to bring immortal poets back down to earth, in the way that katabasis is often used as a passport to a meeting with poets of the past and as a portal through which dead poets can be brought back to life. At least, so far I have not come across examples of meetings with immortalized poets in the heavens. One might 1

however think of the statues, if not the moving and speaking simulacra, of writers that Geffrey finds in the great hall of the palace of Lady Fame, in Chaucer’s House of Fame (HF 1429 ff. Josephus, Statius, Homer, Dares, Tytus, Lollius, Guido de Columpnis, English Gaufride, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Claudian). The castle is a lofty place, which Geffrey reaches only after a vertiginous flight on the back of an eagle, in a parody of celestial ascents in the Bible and Dante. Nevertheless, poetic flights are usually anything but leaps into the unknown. They follow in the footsteps

of predecessors, even if the claim is that this is a first step for mankind, as in the case of Horace’s claim in Epistles 1.19.19–22 to have been the first to plant his footsteps freely in the void, in contrast to the servile herd of imitators. But Horace’s uestigia are firmly imprinted in the footsteps of Lucretius, who in turn had stepped where Epicurus had gone before. In what 2

follows I shall have an eye for celestial flights that allusively acknowledge their dependence on earlier pioneers of flight, and in so doing implicitly aspire to join the canon of those who have made the ascent before. If it is a hard task and a hard labour to escape from the Underworld to the air above, it may be even harder to reach successfully for the upper regions of the heavens and of the stars. A second theme that will run through much of what follows is the anxiety of poets as to the possibility, and advisability, of reaching for the skies, potentially a reckless and even impious venture. A related concern is with the quality of what is achieved through a successful poetic flight. To attain to immortality, to be written in the stars,

should be ways of transcending the flux and impermanence of the world below, but fame is rarely immune to change. So much by way of preface. I will now draw out the implications of some of the major classical Latin statements of the poet’s aspiration to journey to the skies, before tracking a selection of Renaissance poetic flights. In the epilogue to the Metamorphoses Ovid combines the Ennian and (allusively) Virgilian figuring of poetic succession as metempsychosis with the image of an enduring afterlife secured through a journey upwards, rather than downwards, on the vertical axis. Ovid 3

claims that he will be immortal through his readers, ore legar populi (Met. 15.878). That phrase also hints at the popular belief that the life-breath of the dying person may be captured through a kiss, with the further implication that Ovid’s poetic soul will be reincarnated in the bodies of the populus, his readers. But before this point, Ovid has assured himself of a different location for his poetic immortality, looking

to the day when ‘with my better part I shall be borne everlasting above the lofty stars’ (875–6 parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis | astra ferar). This is a flight to, and beyond, the stars that is largely put together out of Horatian intertexts: in Odes 3.30, the epilogue to the first three books of the Odes, Horace had claimed 6–7 ‘I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape Libitina’ (non omnis moriar multaque pars mei | uitabit Libitinam), and boasted of building a literary monument ‘more everlasting’ (perennius) and ‘higher’ (altius) than material monuments, the pyramids (Exegi monumentum aere perennius|regalique situ pyramidum altius). Odes 3.30 works with a subtly stated measurement of poetic fame and immortality on the vertical scale: in addition to altius note 7–8 ‘I shall grow ever-renewed in the fame of posterity’ (usque ego postera | crescam laude recens), suggesting an eventual growth to the sky-reaching stature of Virgil’s Fama; and 8–9 ‘as long as the priest climbs the Capitol with the silent Vestal Virgin’ (dum Capitolium| scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex), aligning the poet’s

posthumous fame with the ascent of the central hill of Rome, home on earth of the sky-god Jupiter. Line 12 ‘from lowly origins powerful’ (ex humili potens), suggests a poetic power that soars free of the lowly earth, humus. Odes 3.30 is a tactful, toned-down rewriting of the brasher anticipations of poetic fame and immortality in Odes 1.1 and 2.20. Addressing Maecenas, Horace ends his first ode, 35–6 ‘But if you enrol me among the lyric bards, my soaring head will knock against the stars’ (quod si me lyricis uatibus inseres,|sublimi feriam sidera uertice), a consciously comic image to avert envy from this inaugural aspiration to a sky-reaching sublimity. Odes 2.20 uses the bizarre image of the metamorphosis of the poet’s body into the feathered and scaly-legged body of a swan (9–12) in order to launch his prospective poetic immortality from the earth into the upper air (2 per liquidum

aethera,

3–4

neque

in

terris

morabor|longius). There is a certain self-deprecating humour in the picture of the middle-aged poet turning into a swan, again to avert the envy to which Horace asserts – a little too confidently? – he is superior at 4–

5, ‘greater than envy, I shall leave the cities of the earth’ (inuidiaque maior| urbis relinquam). More straightforwardly sublime is the application of the image of the soaring poetic swan to another poet, Pindar, at Odes 4.2.25–7 ‘Many a breeze lifts the swan of Dirce, Antonius, whenever he soars into the tracts of cloud’ (multa Dircaeum leuat aura cycnum | tendit, Antoni, quotiens in altos | nubium tractus). This is followed immediately by Horace’s selfbelittling application to himself of the image of the low-flying busy bee. But this is a very ironic poem, only half-concealing Horace’s own ambitions to soar like the Pindaric swan, to fly with Pindar. The opening warning to Iullus Antonius that to attempt to rival Pindar runs the risk of suffering the fate of Icarus needs to be read in the awareness that in Odes 2.20 Horace had confidently predicted that in his swan’s flight of fame he would succeed where Icarus had failed, 13 iam Daedaleo notior Icaro.

4

The touches of the comic in Odes 1.1 and 2.20, and the ironic recusatio of Odes 4.2, are, it might be argued, signs of anxiety about lofty poetic ambition, a

venture experienced as a dulce periculum, ‘sweet danger’, the famous oxymoron with which Horace sums up his Dionysiac allegory of a sublime poetry in Odes 3.25. Here the sublimity is that of political and panegyrical lyric. But what the poet offers the princeps is (with the exception of participation in the consilium Iouis) a double of that which the poet aspires to himself, 4–6 ‘practising to set the deathless praise of glorious Caesar among the stars and in the council of Jupiter’ (egregii Caesaris … aeternum meditans decus | stellis inserere et consilio Iouis). [I]nsero is the verb Horace had used in Odes 1.1 of the canonization as a lyric poet by Maecenas for which he hoped, followed by the reference to knocking his head against the stars. At 3.30.13 Horace uses princeps of his claim ‘first’ to have introduced Aeolian song to Italian measures, but the implicit comparison with the

power

of

the

princeps,

Augustus,

is

unmistakeable. Horace alludes emphatically to Ennius in both Odes 2.20 and 3.30, punning on the name of his predecessor

in

the

first

line

of

3.30

Exegi

monumentum aere perennius. Ennius himself had proclaimed a posthumous existence in a flying, if not ascending, fame, Epigrams 10 ‘I fly alive over the mouths of men’ (uolito uiuus per ora uirum). Allusively Horace joins Ennius in a poet’s corner of fame, and follows him on the same flight-path of poetic

immortality.

In

the

epilogue

to

the

Metamorphoses, a passage as densely intertextual as any in the poem, Ovid alludes to both Ennius and Horace as well as to a number of other statements about fame and poetic immortality in Catullus and Virgil. This is one way by which Ovid inserts himself into the choir of poetic greats. In a brief digression from the textual, I will draw a comparison with the power of allusion in artistic acts of canonization and self-canonization, with reference to a visual depiction of the apotheosis of poetry, Ingres’ ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ of 1827, commissioned as a ceiling painting in the Louvre (fig. 1). Homer is crowned by the winged and levitating figure of Victory bearing a palm, in front of an Ionic temple façade, with inscribed on the frieze ΟΜΗΡΟΣ

ΘΕΟΣ. In the pediment a figure, with veiled head, is borne upwards by the eagle of Jupiter. In a painting that is almost the apotheosis of nineteenth-century neo-classicism, Ingres imitates and emulates a famous earlier painting of the elevation of the arts, Raphael’s ‘Parnassus’ (looking also to Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (fig. 2)). In Raphael’s ‘Parnassus’ (fig. 3) the setting is the top of a mountain, not the skies, but the skywards ambition, registered in the Ingres painting by the winged Victory and the eagle, is conveyed by Raphael through the upward gazes of Apollo, in the centre, and of the blind Homer, looking to spiritual realms beyond the reach of human sense.

Figure 1: Ingres, ‘Apotheosis of Homer’

Figure 2: Raphael, ‘School of Athens’ Raphael is one of the figures in Ingres’ painting, led by the hand by Apelles, so extending the classical

tradition back beyond the Roman Renaissance to antiquity. That sense of tradition is also expressed in the figures, behind Raphael, of Virgil and Dante (both also present on Raphael’s ‘Parnassus’, flanking Homer), Virgil higher than Dante, with Virgil’s gaze in turn fixed on Homer, higher in the pictorial field than all the flesh and blood figures other than the goddess Victory. This is the neo-classical judgement on the long-standing question of the relative superiority of Homer and Virgil. Ingres’ imitation of Raphael acknowledges Raphael’s position at the summit of classical art, and also asserts Ingres’ own claim to be a successor to Raphael, so claiming his own position in the pantheon of great classical artists.

Figure 3: Raphael, ‘Parnassus’ Ingres also knew the ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ relief by Archelaus of Priene (found in Italy, probably in 1658), with its Zeus-like figure of the divine Homer being crowned by Chronos (Time) and Oikoumene (the

inhabited world), reflecting the seated figure of Zeus, accompanied by his eagle, in the pediment-shaped upper register (fig. 4). With the 1827 ‘Apotheosis of 5

Homer’ compare the much later (1853) ‘Apotheosis of Napoleon I’ (fig. 5), painted for a ceiling in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The nude Napoleon is borne up on a 6

four-horse chariot, accompanied by Fame crowning him, with the eagle of Jupiter flying above.

Figure 4: Archelaus of Priene, relief of apotheosis of Homer

Figure 5: Ingres, ‘Apotheosis of Napoleon I’ The visual parallels show how naturally for Ingres, as for the Augustan poets, celebration of poeta mirrors celebration of princeps. The ‘Apotheosis of Napoleon I’ was propaganda for Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I: on the steps of the throne beneath the ascendant Napoleon is the inscription In

nepote rediuiuus, expressing the same renewal through succession that is represented in the ‘Apotheosis of Homer’ through the paired figures of Virgil and Dante, and Apelles and Raphael, and which is exemplified in the painting itself which asserts Ingres’ claim to be the successor to Raphael. Horace reveals his anxiety on the score of reaching for the sky in poetic fame through irony and humour. In the epilogue to the Metamorphoses Ovid uses (what else?) the theme of metamorphosis to point up a potential fracture in the solidity of his finished monument. In the first six lines he asserts the immunity of his work to destruction and the ravages of time, and a flight of his better part to a place above the stars, in other words above the mutable universe (cf. 15.454–5 caelum et quodcumque sub illo est,|immutat formas tellusque et quidquid in illa est). His poem is as indestructible as the human soul, according to Pythagoras’ teaching (15.156–9). At the same time the soul is subject to an endless cycle of reincarnations, a constant changing of bodies. That is the implication too of ore legar populi, as the poem

will be constantly re-embodied in different readers, readers from the untrustworthy populus at that. What constancy of meaning can there be in that? – Ovid seems to anticipate reader response theory. And in the last line of all he raises, for the last time in the poem, that Ovidian obsession, the matter of truth and fiction, and now fixes its instability to the substance of fama (not that fama is ever other than unstable). The moments both of the fixity and instability of fame find their point of origin in the first words of the poem, ‘My spirit is moved to sing of shapes changed into new bodies’ (In noua fert animus mutatas dicere formas | corpora). [F]ert is picked up in super alta […] astra ferar (‘I shall be borne above the high stars’), and it is also the verb, in the same form, used by Horace of his metamorphic swan’s flight in Odes 2.20, Non usitata nec tenui ferar | penna … (‘On no ordinary or slender wing shall I be borne …’). The hint of metempsychosis in ore legar populi, and hence of the ‘metamorphosis’ of the individual through the passage of his or her soul into new bodies, takes us back to the possibility of

reading In noua fert animus as hinting at the movement of the soul into new bodies.

7

Thus in the Ovidian epilogue there is an opposition between, on the one hand, the flight of the poetic soul to the heavens as translation to a place of fixed and eternal certainties, and on the other hand, the passage of the poet’s work into an afterlife marked by uncertainty and changeability (‘reception’, in the modern acceptance of the term). Ovid registers another kind of uncertainty about poetic flight, one that will be important for Renaissance poets, through his self-reflexive use of two myths of failed flight, the stories of Phaethon (Met. 2), and of Daedalus and Icarus (Ars 2, Met. 8). Alison Sharrock has explored at length the poetics of Daedalus and Icarus, and Alessandro

Schiesaro

has

revealed

the

full

implications of Ovid’s Phaethon story as comment on the failed sublimity of the philosophical and poetic flight of Lucretius, comment which at the same time is an admission on Ovid’s part of his own anxiously transgressive desire to follow Lucretius’ sublime flight-path. So far from being enrolled among the 8

stars, Phaethon’s flight is brought crashing to the ground by the terrifying monsters which have in the past found homes in the sky in the form of the constellations; he ends up as (like) a falling star (Met. 2.319–22). He is unable to follow the uestigia that Sol points out to him, 2.133 ‘there direct your course; you will see the clear tracks of the wheels’ (hac sit iter, manifesta rotae uestigia cernes). In his inability to follow the chariot-track of the Sun, Phaethon is unlike Lucretius who succeeds in following in the uestigia of Epicurus-Sol (following in Epicurus’ uestigia: DRN 3.3–4; Epicurus compared to the sun: 3.1043–4). ‘Orbit’, orbita, the word for the path of a heavenly body, originally means the track of the wheel (orbis) 9

of a chariot or wagon, used in that sense in a famous Virgilian passage on an upwardly aspiring poetics, Geo. 3.291–3 ‘But sweet love for Parnassus sweeps me through the deserted uplands; I delight to travel where none before me turned aside their chariot’s track on the soft slopes leading to the Castalian spring’ (sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis|raptat amor; iuuat ire iugis, qua nulla priorum|Castaliam

molli deuertitur orbita cliuo). Instead Phaethon ends up in a flight on pathless ways through the heavens. However, in Phaethon’s case these are not the trackless regions of successful Callimachean poetry, to which Lucretius had aspired before (!) Virgil, but as poet not as philosophical disciple. Met. 2.205 ‘(Phaethon’s horses) hurry the chariot away through pathless regions’ (rapiuntque per auia currum) alludes to Lucretius’ own description of Phaethon’s flight, 5.397–8 ‘when the headstrong might of the horses of the sun went off the track and hurried Phaethon through the whole sky’ (auia cum Phaethonta rapax uis solis equorum | aethere raptauit toto), but may also remind us of DRN 1.926– 7 ‘I wander over the pathless haunts of the Muses never before trodden by sole of man’ (auia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante|trita solo).

10

Few English poets have undergone as enthusiastic an apotheosis as Sir Philip Sidney. Gavin Alexander begins his study of the literary response to Sidney with the statement that ‘The most important event in the literary career of Sir Philip Sidney was his death in

1586 at the age of 31’. The premature nature of his 11

heroic death and the incompleteness of his works, added to the fact that during his lifetime they had circulated only in manuscript, prompted a campaign to lend him a posthumous existence, both on earth through the publication and completion of his works, and in a literary heaven through the elevation of the dead author to the stars or a celestial Elysian Fields. The determination to give life after death even extended to the resurrection of Sidney in ghostly form, as in Nathaniel Baxter’s Sir Philip Sydneys Ouránia (1606), in which the ghost of Astrophil (Sidney’s persona in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella), dressed for battle, comes to Cinthia (Mary Sidney) and her nymphs.

12

As well as resurrecting the recently dead Sidney, the almost hagiographic response to his death also sought to instal him in a hall of fame of a classical cast. Spenser laments and celebrates Sidney in The Ruines of Time, published in Complaints of 1591. Verlame laments the destruction of Verulamium, the Roman city of which she is the personification, and the deaths

of Leicester and Sidney, and then (344–469) consoles herself with the thought of the endurance of poetry. The section on Sidney (281–343) concludes with a version of the pastoral lament, one of the many imitations of Virgil’s fifth Eclogue, contrasting a before when Sidney used to sing in our forests and fields, and an after when Sidney sings in the afterlife (323–343): Yet will I sing, but who can better sing, Than thou thy selfe, thine owne selfes valiance, That whilest thou liuedst, madest the forrests ring, And fields resownd, and flockes to leap and daunce, And shepheards leaue their lambs vnto mischaunce, To runne thy shrill Arcadian Pipe to heare: O happie were those dayes, thrice happie were. But now more happie thou, and wretched wee, Which want the wonted sweetnes of thy voice, Whiles thou now in Elisian fields so free, With Orpheus, and with Linus and the choice Of all that euer did in rimes reioyce, Conuersest, and doost heare their heauenlie layes, And they heare thine, and thine doo better praise.

So there thou liuest, singing euermore, And here thou liuest, being euer song Of vs, which liuing loued thee afore, Which now thee worship, mongst that blessed throng Of heauenlie Poets and Heroes strong. So thou both here and there immortall art, And euerie where through excellent desart.

Like Virgil’s Daphnis in Eclogue 5 (56–7 ‘Shining bright, Daphnis marvels at the unfamiliar threshold of Olympus, and beneath his feet he sees the clouds and stars’, Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi | sub pedibusque uidet nubes et sidera Daphnis), the dead Sidney has gone to a place above (‘heauenlie layes’ 335, and ‘heauenlie Poets’ 341 locate the ‘Elisian fields’ in the heavens). There he enjoys the company of Orpheus and Linus: Spenser may think both of Virgil’s Elysian Fields in Aeneid 6, where Orpheus and Musaeus are to be found (Aen. 6.645– 7,667–8), and of the elevation of Gallus to Helicon to be greeted by Linus and the Muses in Eclogue 6; for the idea of ‘conversing’ with the legendary poets

Richard McCabe also refers to Socrates’ eager anticipation of the company (συγγένεσθαι) in Hades of Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer (Plato, Apology 41a). Unlike in Eclogue 5, the elevation of 13

the dead shepherd is not the immediate trigger for joyous celebration on earth, but the contrast in ‘But now more happie thou, and wretched wee’ is then partially overgone by the assertion that Sidney does continue to live on earth, through the worship afforded him in the form of poetic praise of the kind exemplified by the poem we are reading. Sidney’s poetic immortality is assured by two kinds of continuing poetic production, rather than by the corpus left at his death: the flow of poetic praise on earth (‘being euer song’), and the songs he sings ‘euermore’ in the Elysian Fields. By ‘heauenlie layes’ Spenser may have particularly in mind what seems to have been Sidney’s last literary project, his Psalm paraphrases, left incomplete at his death. If so, this 14

would be in keeping with what seems to be a Christianization of the classical topics of literary immortality and skywards elevation in fame, as

pastoral fictions incline towards Christian truth. Meeting Orpheus and Linus in the Elysian Fields may be a fiction of pagan poetry, but Sidney’s soul really does live in a higher realm. The statement that Sidney is ‘both here and there immortall’ is reminiscent of the Christian idea that a saint is alive and present both in heaven, at the right hand of God, and on earth in his relics and shrine. The conceit that literary immortalization allows the poet to continue with works left incomplete at his death is also found in Thomas Dekker’s description of Spenser’s own entry into the Elysian Fields in A Knight’s Conjuring (a reference I owe to Patrick Cheney): ‘Grave Spencer was no sooner entred into this Chappell of Apollo, but these elder Fathers of the divine Furie, gave him a Lawrel and sung his Welcome: Chaucer call’de him his Sonne, and plac’de him at his right hand. All of them (at a signe given by the whole Quire of the Muses that brought him thither), closing up their lippes in silence, and tuning all their eares for attention, to heare him sing out the rest of his Fayrie Queenes praises.’ But we on earth

will never get to hear the remaining books of The Faerie Queene. In her account of the enduring power of poetry Verlame reworks Horatian topics of the power of poets and poetry to immortalize, 400–27: For deeds doe die, how euer noblie donne, And thoughts of men do as themselues decay, But wise wordes taught in numbers for to runne, Recorded by the Muses, liue for ay; Ne may with storming showers be washt away, Ne bitter breathing windes with harmfull blast, Nor age, nor envie shall them euer wast. In vaine doo earthly Princes then, in vaine Seeke with Pyramides, to heauen aspired; Or huge Colosses, built with costlie paine; Or brasen Pillours, neuer to be fired, Or Shrines, made of the mettall most desired; To make their memories for euer liue: For how can mortall immortalitie giue? Such one Mausolus made, the worlds great wonder, But now no remnant doth thereof remaine: Such one Marcellus but was torne with thunder:

Such one Lisippus, but is worne with raine; Such one King Edmond, but was rent for gaine. All such vaine moniments of earthlie masse, Deuour’d of Time, in time to nought doo passe. But fame with golden wings aloft doth flie, Aboue the reach of ruinous decay, And with braue plumes doth beate the azure skie, Admir’d of base-borne men from farre away: Then who so will with vertuous deeds assay To mount to heauen, on Pegasus must ride, And with sweete Poets verse be glorifide.

This Horatian flight to perennial fame is the subject of one of the emblems, ‘Pennae gloria perennis’, in Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), which Whitney takes over from Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata (Antwerp, 1565) and applies to 15

the recently deceased Sidney (fig. 6). This is a 16

combination of Virgil’s Fama (the body dotted with eyes, and perhaps the clouds in which Virgil’s Fama hides her head, but beyond which this winged figure, with his unclassical trumpet, soars into a cloudless sky), with Horace’s hopes for literary sky-reaching in

Odes 1.1 (to the last line of which the last line of Junius’ verse alludes), while the pyramids come from Odes 3.30. The pyramids are of the elongated, spirelike, kind common in the Renaissance, and to which Spenser punningly refers in ‘Seeke with Pyramides, to heauen aspired’.

Figure 6: Pennae gloria perennis, emblem in Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, (Leiden, 1586) 196–197. After Verlame has spoken in the Ruines of Time, the poet sees six ‘tragicke Pageants’ of destruction and decay, and then an apocalyptic voice tells him that (584–5) ‘Ne other comfort in this world can be, | But hope of heauen, and heart to God inclinde’, in support of which the poet is told to cast his eye on ‘other sights’ that ‘afford visions of transcendence through images of stellification or apotheosis’ (McCabe 583), 589– 672. These visions are consolations for the death of Sidney, and combine classical and biblical imagery,

the elevation of poetic immortality, and the flight of the soul to God. This is the first vision, 589–602: VPON that famous Riuers further shore, There stood a snowie Swan of heauenlie hiew, And gentle kinde, as euer Fowle afore; A fairer one in all the goodlie criew Of white Strimonian brood might no man view: There he most sweetly sung the prophecie Of his owne death in dolefull Elegie. At last, when all his mourning melodie He ended had, that both the shores resounded, Feeling the fit that him forewarnd to die, With loftie flight aboue the earth he bounded, And out of sight to highest heauen mounted: Where now he is become an heauenly signe; There now the ioy is his, here sorrow mine.

Sidney’s is a very classicizing death and catasterism, as the proverbial swan-song is followed by the flight 17

of the Sidney-swan in the track of the Horatian swan of Odes 2.20, but flying higher to join the ranks of the stars, in the track now of a Virgilian swan, the metamorphosed Cycnus, lover of Phaethon, at Aeneid

10.187–93, a passage in which commentators have suspected

allusion,

and

homage,

to

Horace’s

skywards flights of poetry. But the classical swan also 18

bears the cygnet-ure of Sidney’s own name, the similarity of whose Latinized form Sidneius to cygnus, cygneus is the occasion for puns in the university Latin elegies for him, as in an elegy by Thomas Playfair beginning ‘Sidneius, sydus, signum, cygnusque; Philippus’. (There is a further pun in 19

Spenser’s ‘heauenly signe’.) These two stanzas are also a variation on the death and apotheosis contrast of the Eclogue 5 model. Spenser’s visions of the elevation and stellification of Sidney operate with the fixed certainties of panegyric and apocalyptic. In the rest of this chapter I look at two complex sequences from long narrative poems in the epic tradition, but where the themes of the flight of the immortal poet and the flight of the soul are combined with elements from Lucianic and Horatian satire. Astolfo’s journey to the moon in cantos 34 and 35 of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is the last stage in a

series of ascents that collectively constitute a miniature and parodic version of the journey of Dante in the Commedia. Canto 34 begins with Astolfo in a 20

cave that is a version of Inferno (signalled by 34.4.6– 8 ‘da pianti e d’urli e da lamento eterno’; 5.4 ‘le bolgie infernal’, 9.4 ‘fuoco infernal’), whither Astolfo has chased the harpies who plagued Presterjohn, and where he hears the story of the damned soul of Lidia (34.11–43), punished for her hard-hearted and ungrateful treatment of her lover. After making his way out of the cave with Virgilian difficulty and having a Dantesque wash in a fountain, Astolfo flies on the hippogriff up to the Earthly Paradise, where he finds a palace which is the dwelling of St John. Thither the saint had been assumed to join Enoch and Elijah. From there Astolfo ascends with St John in the chariot of Elijah to the moon. From Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso – but the moon, the first heaven of Dante’s Paradiso (cantos 2–5) is as far as Astolfo gets in his ascent. His mission is to recover the lost wits of Orlando, which are found in a valley on the moon. That done, St John shows Astolfo a palace by a river:

the palace houses the Fates, Parcae, who spin from fleeces the threads of individual human lives, lives which come to an end once the threads are wound on to the reel. The names of all the finished lives are printed on metal plates, heaps of which old man Time constantly carries away to throw into the turbulent stream of Lethe. Around the river fly crows and vultures and other birds, which flock to carry off the pickings of the plates, but they do not have the strength to carry them far, and the name plates fall back into the stream. These birds, St John explains to Astolfo in his exegesis of the ‘correspondences’ (35.18.3–4) between things seen on the moon and the realities of our world below, are flatterers, buffoons, minions, in short courtiers, who carry these names in their mouths for a while, only to let them fall once more into oblivion. But there are also two swans which pick up some of the names and carry them to the temple of Immortality on the bank of the river. A nymph, Fama, comes down to the river to take the name-plates from the swans, and affixes them to the statue of Immortality on top of a column in the centre

of the temple. The swans, St John explains, are poets, as rare birds (35.23.1 ‘Son, come i cigni, anco i poeti rari’) as are the two swans, who rescue worthy men from oblivion. The discovery of a temple of fame and immortality on a high hill at the zenith of Astolfo’s upwards flight is the culmination of a concern with fame that begins in the ‘underworld’ cave at the beginning of canto 34. At 34.10 Astolfo promises Lidia to bring ‘novella’ and ‘fama’ concerning herself to the world above, arousing in her ‘il gran desir’ (10.6) for the same: this is a further example of the interest shown by characters in the Inferno for reports of themselves to be conveyed by Dante back to the world above (cf. Inf. 13.52–4, 28.92). On the moon the first item mentioned in the Valley of Lost Things is fama, (34.74.5–6) ‘Molto fama è là su, che, come tarlo, | il tempo al lungo andar qua giù divora’ (‘Much fame there is up there, which the long passage of time, like moth, consumes down here’); and fama recurs at 76.3–8 ‘Vide un monte di tumide vesiche,|che dentro parea aver tumulti e grida;|e seppe ch’eran le corone antiche|e degli Assirii

e de la terra lida,|e de’ Persi e de’ Greci, che già furo|incliti, et or n’è quasi il nome oscuro’ (‘he saw a mountain of swollen bladders, which seemed to contain uproar and shouting; and he knew that these were the ancient crowns of the Assyrians and the Lydian land, of Persians and Greeks, who were once famous, and now even their names are obscure’). Ariosto himself is involved in the upwards flight of fame, in two ways. Firstly, he himself is a praise poet. 21

One of the fleeces that Astolfo sees in the palace of the Fates is a beautiful golden fleece, which St John tells him is that of Ippolito d’Este, Ariosto’s patron, extravagant praise of whom and of Ferrara is placed on the divine lips of St John himself. Secondly, in tracking the ascent of Dante through versions of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, to arrive at a temple of Fame, Ariosto comments on his own aspiration to poetic achievement and poetic fame. He too hopes to become another swan – St John does not identify the earthly poets who correspond to the two swans, but they may be Homer and Virgil – preserving

from oblivion the names of men worthy of the poets, for example Ippolito d’Este. But Astolfo ascends no higher than the moon; there is no mystic vision of the rose as culmination of his upwards flight. The immortality of fame turns out to lack the fixity and certainty of truth. In the last part of his exposition St John goes on to reveal that even men of bad character can emerge living from the tomb if they know how to make friends with the god of poetry (35.24), and that Aeneas, Achilles and Hector were not such great heroes as they are made out to be by poets who have been richly rewarded by those heroes’ descendants (26.1–2 ‘Non fu sì santo né benigno Augusto | come la tuba di Virgilio suona’, ‘Augustus was not as saintly or as benevolent as he is trumpeted by Virgil’). Conversely Dido only has a bad reputation as a ‘bagascia’, ‘whore’, because Virgil was not friendly to her. St John, as Astolfo’s guide in the ascent from the Earthly Paradise to the heavens, should be playing the part of Beatrice, but it turns out that he is more of a Virgil to Astolfo-as-Dante, when he breathtakingly says that he loves poets, and ‘properly so, since in your

world I too was a writer’. For this, he says, he has earned what neither time nor death can take from him; the Christ whom he praised (29.3 ‘mio lodato Cristo’) has rewarded him as he should, i.e. with a deathless existence in the Earthly Paradise. Ariosto’s relativization of fame, and his demotion of transcendental gospel truth to the status of merely human, and therefore unstable, writing, have been excellently laid bare by David Quint in his discussion of the episode. One might add that even the swans in 22

the moon no longer move in a straightforward upwards trajectory: 35.15.5–6 ‘Or se ne van notando i sacri cigni,|et or per l’aria battendo le piume’ (‘The sacred swans go on their way now swimming, and now beating their wings through the air’). Flight is an option, only. One might see in these alternative modes of locomotion acknowledgement of the vagaries of poetic fama: Virgil tells us that Phaethon’s lover Cycnus, metamorphosed into swan, ascends to the stars, while Ovid in his version ‘corrects’ Virgil, and says that Cycnus-swan does not take off into the sky, all too mindful that it was from there that Jupiter

hurled his thunderbolt at Phaethon, and keeps rather to ponds, lakes and rivers.

23

Milton engages in imitation and correction of poetic tradition when he reworks Ariosto’s Valley of Lost Things on the moon in the Paradise of Fools in Paradise Lost 3. This is a place that does not yet exist 24

when Satan alights on the outer ‘firm opacous globe’ of the newly created ‘round world’, the earth and its surrounding spheres, after his journey from Hell through Chaos. The Ariostan model is flagged near the beginning of the passage at 422–3 ‘a globe far off|It seemed, now seems a boundless continent’, alluding to the wonder (‘maraviglia’) experienced by Astolfo on arriving at the moon (a much smaller globe), 34.71.2–4 ‘che quel paese appresso era si 25

grande,|il quale a un picciol tondo rassimiglia,|a noi che lo miriam da queste bande’ (‘[marveling] that close up that country was so big, which seems like a small disk to us who look at it from these regions’). Milton locates the Paradise of Fools, 459–62 ‘Not in the

neighbouring

dreamed;|Those

moon,

argent

as

some

have

fields

more

likely

habitants,|translated

saints,

or

middle

spirits

hold|Betwixt th’angelical and human kind’. Ariosto’s fiction is relegated to the status of a poetic dream. At this point in Paradise Lost 3 Satan has completed the first part of his journey from the burning lake, an ascent through Chaos. From here he will launch himself on a descent, first to the sun, and then on down to earth. Paradise Lost is criss-crossed by numerous ascents and descents, in which Milton strives to keep a strict separation between the motions of divine providence and goodness, and motions of evil, error and deception. His own poetic flight mirrors that of his characters, for example at the beginning of Paradise Lost 3 in the invocation to ‘holy light’: 13–15 ‘Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,| Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained|In that obscure sojourn’. The first two books have been spent in Hell with the fallen angels. At one level this is a narratological trick, comparable to Ariosto’s transition from the episode of Astolfo in the moon to the continuing adventures of Bradamante on earth at 35.31.1–5 ‘Resti con lo scrittor de l’evangelo|Astolfo

ormai, ch’io voglio far un salto,|quanto sia in terra a venir fin dal cielo;|ch’io non posso più star su l’ali in alto.|Torno alla donna’ (‘Let Astolfo stay with the writer of the gospel for now, since I want to take a leap big enough to arrive on earth from the sky, because I cannot stay any longer suspended on wings on high. I return to the lady’). At another level Milton’s is a moral and theological ascent in a journey of redemption and salvation that mirrors that of Dante rather than that of Ariosto’s Astolfo. Milton says that he has been (3.19–21) ‘Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down|The dark descent, and up to reascend,| Though hard and rare’, following in the footsteps of Aeneas as instructed by the Sibyl, but in a Virgilian descent and re-ascent that has undergone a Christian metamorphosis. The passage describing Satan’s landing on the outer sphere of the world, his pacing up and down, and the proleptic description of the Paradise of Fools, of which this place is the future site as Evander’s Pallanteum in Aeneid 8 is the site of the future city of Rome, is framed by passages that show by contrast the

elevation of which the fallen Lucifer is no longer capable. Just before we have had the extensive hymn 26

to the Father and Son, after the episode of the exaltation of the Son, ending 412–17 ‘Hail Son of God, saviour of men, thy name|Shall be the copious matter of my song|Henceforth, and never shall my harp thy praise|Forget,

nor

from

thy

father’s

praise

disjoin.|Thus they in heaven, above the starry sphere,|Their happy hours in joy and hymning spent’. The poet Milton joins his harp to those of the angels, 365–6 ‘Then crowned again their golden harps they took,|Harps ever tuned …’ Milton begins with a 27

report of what the angels sang (372 ‘Thee Father first they sung’, 383 ‘Thee next they sang of all creation first …’), but then modulates into uninterrupted hymnic second person singulars that give the impression that Milton himself is singing along with the angels. In these last four lines (‘Hail Son of God …’) Milton addresses a hymn directly to Christ, but the first-person-singular adjectives, ‘my song’, ‘my harp’, show that Milton is not now singing with the angels. Rather, his present and future song follows in the

track of that original song of praise to the exalted Son, sung in the most exalted part of the heavens.

28

At 501 ff. Satan catches sight of stairs leading to the Gate

of

Heaven,

‘Ascending

by

degrees

magnificent|Up to the wall of heaven a structure high,|At top whereof, but far more rich appeared|The work as of a kingly palace gate’. ‘The stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw|Angels ascending and descending …’, with here a biblical rather than a Virgilian road-map for ascent and descent, John 1:51 ‘Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man’. Underneath Jacob’s ladder there is (518–22) a 29

sea ‘of jasper or of liquid pearl, whereon|Who after came from earth, sailing arrived,|Wafted by angels, or flew o’er the lake|Rapt in a chariot drawn by fiery steeds’. The alternatives of arriving by water or by air are perhaps a coincidental parallel with Ariosto’s swans, which either swim or fly; the fiery chariot of Elijah is the chariot in which St John ascends with Astolfo to the moon. But the ascent of the stairs to heaven is barred to Satan, perhaps, says Milton (524–

5) to ‘aggravate|His sad exclusion from the doors of bliss’: Satan as exclusus amator. The ‘Limbo’ of the ‘Paradise of Fools’ is ‘unpeopled and untrod’ at the time of Satan’s alighting at this place for the simple reason that its existence is the result of Satan’s as yet uncompleted journey to earth. Its population is the product of an ascent to the skies of a kind that can only begin when sin has entered the world: 444–50 ‘but store hereafter from the earth|Up hither like aerial vapours flew|Of all things transitory and vain, when sin|With vanity had filled the works of men – |Both all things vain, and all who in vain things| Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame,|Or happiness in this or the other life’. As in Ariosto’s lunar Valley of Lost Things, glory or fame is the first thing to be specified as the motive force of the impetus upwards to this lofty region, and the importance of the desire for fame is emphasized in the following lines, 451–3 ‘All who have their reward on earth, the fruits|Of painful superstition and blind zeal,|Naught seeking but the praise of men …’

The detailed catalogue of the inhabitants of the Paradise of Fools begins with examples of a false pursuit of fame and renown: 464–5 ‘First, from the ancient world those Giants came,|With many a vain exploit, though then renowned’.

30

As well as the

biblical giants of Genesis 6, Milton may have in mind the sky-aspiring Giants of the classical ‘ancient world’. Secondly, the builders of Babel, whose purpose Michael will tell Adam in book 12 is (43–7) ‘to build | A city and tower, whose top may reach to heaven; | And get themselves a name, lest far dispersed|In foreign lands, their memory be lost –|Regardless whether good or evil fame’. The Tower of Babel is a sky-reaching work of human art in a tradition, its prototype being ‘the ascending pile’ (1.722) of Pandaemonium, the fallen-angel architect Mulciber’s replication in hell of the ‘towered structure[s] high’ (1.733) that he had formerly built in heaven. We might also think of another celestial work of art created by Mulciber (Vulcan) that is a storehouse of poetic tradition, the Shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8. In the immediate context of the Paradise of Fools, the Tower

of Babel is contrasted as a work of architecture with the Stairs of Heaven (501 ff.). This is an attempt on the wrong track to follow, or rival, sky-reaching artists and works of art. Milton now turns to individuals who flew up to the Paradise of Fools, 469–73 ‘he who to be deemed|A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames,| Empedocles;

31

and he who, to enjoy|Plato’s Elysium, leaped into the sea,| Cleombrotus’. An ascent of a mountain and an 32

attempt to mount to Elysium, each of which ends in a vertical descent, respectively a leap into fire and a leap into water, which put together might remind us of Lucifer’s fall into the burning lake; Callimachus’ epigram (23) puts it that Cleombrotus ‘leapt off a high wall into Hades’. For the pairing of Empedocles and 33

Cleombrotus the commentaries point to Lactantius Divine Institutes 3.18 ‘On Pythagoreans and Stoics who, believing in the immortality of the soul, foolishly persuade a voluntary death’ (where Empedocles and Cleombrotus are non-adjacent members of a more extensive list of pagan suicides), but Milton will also have been very familiar with Horace’s satirical

account of the death of Empedocles at Ars poetica 464–6 ‘While Empedocles wished to be regarded as an immortal god, frigid he leapt into burning Etna’ (deus immortalis haberi|dum cupit Empedocles, ardentem

frigidus

Aetnam|insiluit).

Milton’s

phrasing runs close to the Horatian. Elsewhere I have argued that Horace’s satire at the end of the Ars poetica conceals comment both on Lucretius’ and on Horace’s own sky-reaching ambitions as poets. And 34

it is Horatian satire that continues to inform Milton’s account of the Paradise of Fools, in the climactic account of PL3.478–80 ‘they who to be sure of Paradise,|Dying put on the weeds of Dominic|Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised’. They succeed in making it as high as the gate of Heaven, when (487– 8) ‘a violent cross wind […] blows them transverse’, making of all their Roman Catholic clutter, (480–96) ‘cowls,

hoods,

and

habits’,

‘reliques,

beads,

indulgences’ etc. ‘the sport of winds: all these, upwhirled aloft,|Fly o’er the backside of the world far off|Into a limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools’. The wind that blows all these vain

people over the backside of the world is a large-scale version of the fart with which Priapus at the end of Horace Satires 1.8 sends flying the witches and their appurtenances, including Sagana’s wig, caliendrum, like the cowls and hoods of the friars, Sat. 1.8.46–50 ‘For as loud as the noise of a bursting bladder was the crack when my fig-wood buttock split. Away they ran into town. Then amid great laughter and mirth you might see Canidia’s teeth and Sagana’s high wig come tumbling down, and from their arms the herbs and enchanted love-knots’ (nam, displosa sonat quantum uesica, pepedi|diffissa nate ficus; at illae currere in urbem.|Canidiae

dentis,

altum

Saganae

caliendrum|excidere atque herbas atque incantata lacertis|uincula cum magno risuque iocoque uideres; with the last four words compare PL 3.489 ‘then might ye see’). Aspiration to ascent is blown sideways into ‘transverse’ horizontal motion; satire, we may reflect, is a genre that does not aim for the heights, the product of a musa pedestris.

35

There is much more to be said on the flights of the characters in Paradise Lost, and on the flight of the

poet, who announces at the outset that his ‘adventurous song […] with no middle flight intends to soar|Above the Aonian mount’, confidently defiant of Daedalus’ instructions to his doomed son Icarus. But to expatiate on this would be to follow the flightpath of David Quint’s brilliant analysis of the theme of failed and successful flight, in the chapter on ‘Fear of falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius’, in his Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton and Oxford, 2014), ch. 3. For my purposes I will draw attention only to Quint’s identification of Milton’s allusive exploitation of the long tradition of poetic flights, a chain that reaches from Lucretius through Virgil, Ovid, Dante and Tasso (not to mention the biblical sources for flight and ascension) – a team of poetic Red Arrows. Quint concludes (p. 91), ‘[t]he poet and the Son are the only characters of Paradise Lost to achieve successful flight’: as bold an equation as one would expect in Milton of the flights of poeta and princeps. I will end with one of the poems in praise of Milton’s sublime flight that allude recurrently to the Lucretian

model of the flight of Epicurus’ mind through the infinite

void.

The

risk

associated

with

the

Epicurean/Lucretian flight that Alessandro Schiesaro has subtly brought out recently in his article on the Phaethon episode in Metamorphoses 2 is also seen in Thomas Gray’s praise of Milton in his Pindaric ode ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754), vv. 95–102: Nor second he [to Shakespeare], that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of the abyss to spy. He passed the flaming bounds of place and time: The living throne, the sapphire-blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night.

Milton did succeed in attaining to a vision of that which the angels tremble to gaze on (‘He saw’), but then suffered the fate of those who fly or climb too high, a Phaethon, a Giant, a Capaneus. ‘Closed his eyes in endless night’ is a reference to Milton’s blindness, but also, I think, to his mortality. This is perhaps a proto-Romantic view of Milton as the

audacious genius who pays the penalty for aspiring too high – whether that was Milton’s view of his poetic soaring is another matter. 1

Dante meets the poet Folco da Marsiglia in the

course of his ascent through the spheres of Paradiso (9.64 ff.), but Dante is not on a quest to meet famous dead poets. 2

See Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History,

The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009), 54–55. 3

For full commentary see Philip Hardie (ed.), Ovidio:

Metamorfosi Vol. 1: Libri XIII–XV (Rome, 2015), 617–628. 4

But see R. G. M. Nisbet and Margaret Hubbard, A

Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II (Oxford, 1978), Od. 2.20, for the difficulties, and potential ironies, of reading notior. 5

R. Rosenblum, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

(New York, n.d.), 130, refers to ‘a Hellenistic basrelief that Ingres knew’, presumably the Archelaus relief. In Ingres’ painting Herodotus burns incense; in the Archelaus relief Mythos as a boy stands in attendance with a sacrificial jug, while the female figure of Historia sprinkles incense on the altar.

6

The painting itself was destroyed in the fire of 1871;

a modello is preserved in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris. See A. C. Shelton, Ingres and his Critics (Cambridge 2005), 203–204, citing the descriptive text in the artist’s notes. 7

Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge,

2002), 95 n. 77, picked up by Alessandro Barchiesi (ed.), Ovidio: Metamorfosi Vol. 1: Libri I–II (Milan, 2005), 134. 8

Alison Sharrock, Seduction and Repetition in Ovid’s

Ars

Amatoria

2

(Oxford,

1994),

Alessandro

Schiesaro, ‘Materiam superabat opus: Lucretius Metamorphosed’, JRS, 104 (2014), 73–104. On the Lucretian aspects of Ovid’s Daedalus and Icarus see also

M.

Hoefmans,

‘Myth

into

reality:

the

metamorphosis of Daedalus and Icarus, Ovid Metamorphoses VIII 183–255’, AC 63 (1994), 137– 160. 9

In the astronomical sense: Aetna 231 orbita lunae;

Seneca NQ 7.10.2 lunaris illa orbita. Of a ‘beaten path’: Quintilian 2.13.16 si tamen rectam uiam, non unam

orbitam

monstrent;

Juvenal

14.37

et

monstrata diu ueteris trahit orbita culpae. 10

[A]uia in DRN also at 2.145 nemora, 2.346 nemora,

4.1, 5.1386 nemora. In the Pythagorean account his

catastrophic flight is memorialized in the sky by the long track of the Milky Way (Manilius 1.735). 11

Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The

Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford 2006), xix. 12 13

Alexander, Writing After Sidney, 1. Richard McCabe (ed.), Edmund Spenser. The

Shorter Poems (London, 1999), 588. 14

Alexander, Writing After Sidney, 85–86.

15

Junius no. 60 (Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne,

Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart 1967), 1536– 1537), PENNA BEAT CAELO, PENNA VOLARE FACIT ASTRA SUPER. ‘Oculata, pennis fulta, sublimem uehens|calamum aurea inter astra Fama collocat.|[I]llustre

claris

surgit

e

scriptis

decus,|feritque perpes uertice alta sidera.’ 16

Philip

Hardie,

Rumour

and

Renown:

Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge, 2012), 627–8. 17

Plato, Phaedo 84e–85a, etc.

18

Virg. Aen. 10.189–93 namque ferunt luctu Cycnum

Phaethontis

amati,|populeas

inter

frondes

umbramque sororum|dum canit et maestum Musa solatur amorem,|canentem molli pluma duxisse

senectam|linquentem

terras

et

sidera

voce

sequentem. At 193 linquentem terras et sidera uoce sequentem Stephen Harrison (ed.), Vergil. Aeneid 10 (Oxford, 1991) sees an echo of Horace, Odes 2.20. 3– 5 neque in terris morabor | longius inuidiaque maior|urbis relinquam. Cf. also the sky-soaring swans in the omen at Aen. 1.393–8 aspice bis senos laetantis agmine cycnos, | aetheria quos lapsa plaga Iovis ales aperto | turbabat caelo; nunc terras ordine longo | aut capere, aut captas iam despectare videntur: | ut reduces illi ludunt stridentibus alis, | et coetu cinxere polum, cantusque dedere. 19

Alexander, Writing After Sidney, 78–81 on the

frequent and varied use of the swansong in Sidney’s own poetry, and in the poetry written on him after his death, and the repeating swan on the lace cuff in a portrait of Mary Sidney. 20

See D. Quint, ‘Astolfo’s voyage to the moon’, Yale

Italian Studies 1 (1977), 398–409; A.R.Ascoli, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1987), 264–304. 21

Ariosto also claims that his wits have been stolen,

like those of Orlando, necessitating a journey to the sky to reclaim them, 35.1–2 (addressed to Alessandra

Benucci) ‘Chi salirà per me, madonna, in cielo | a riportarne il mio perduto ingegno?’ 22

D. Quint, ‘Antitype: Astolfo’s voyage to the moon’,

in Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven and London, 1983), 81–92: ‘The vertical dimension characteristic of epic fiction, transcending the world of human action and lending it intelligibility, has been effectively collapsed and eliminated from the Furioso’ (82); ‘The depiction of the Gospel as the product of a patron–writer relationship reduces its testimony to the status of a literary fiction’ (91). 23

Met.

2.367–80;

377–80

nec

se

caeloque

Iouique|credit, ut iniuste missi memor ignis ab illo;| stagna petit patulosque lacus ignemque perosus, | quae colat, elegit contraria flumina flammis. 24

I now develop some brief comments in Rumour and

Renown, 544–546. 25

For the typically Miltonic play with scale and

dimension (always bigger in Paradise Lost) cf. 2.1051–3 (Satan’s view of the distant ‘empyreal heaven’) ‘And fast by hanging in a golden chain|This pendant world, in bigness as a star|Of smallest magnitude close by the moon’: when he gets to the

outer sphere it is of course much bigger than the moon itself. 26

On the contrast between the angelic praise and the

Limbo of Vanity see J. P. Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh, 1987) ch. 1, in the context of a discussion of kabod ‘divine glory’, with the basic meaning ‘weight’. 27

If the implication is that in some sense Milton is up

there with the angelic orchestra, cf. perhaps the Praefatio to Claudian’s ‘On the sixth consulship of Honorius’, in which the poet dreams that he was singing before Jupiter in the heavens, to wake up and find that his dream was true, since he is singing before the emperor, the Jupiter on earth, Praef. 6consHon. 13 ff. namque poli media stellantis in arce uidebar|ante pedes summi carmina ferre Iouis, 21– 2 additur ecce fides nec me mea lusit imago,|inrita nec falsum somnia misit ebur. 28

Cf. the merging of poet’s and characters’ voices in

the hymn to Bacchus at Ovid Met. 4.16 ff.: see Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002), 171–172 with note 58, referring to Aen. 8.293–302 (hymn to Hercules). 29

My italics.

30

Gen. 6:4 ‘There were giants in the earth in those

days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown’. 31

Empedocles is also to be found in Dante’s Limbo,

Inf. 4.138. 32

For a mistaken belief in the growth of Platonic

wings of the soul cf. PL 5.9.1009–11 ‘They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel Divinity within them breeding wings Wherewith to scorn the earth’. 33

Cicero, Tusc. 1.84 Callimachi quidem epigramma

in Ambraciotam Theombrotum est, quem ait, cum ei nihil accidisset adversi, e muro se in mare abiecisse, lecto Platonis libro. 34

Philip Hardie, ‘Horace et le sublime empédocléen’,

in S. Franchet d’Espèrey and C. Lévy (eds), Les Présocratiques à Rome (Paris, 2018), 263–282. 35

But note the upwards movement of Sat. 2.6.16–17

ergo ubi me in montis et in arcem ex urbe remoui,|quid pedestri?

prius

illustrem

satiris

musaque

3 In and out of Latin: diptych and virtual diptych in Marvell, Milton, Du Bellay and others Stephen Hinds

A case can be made (as it has by Denis Feeney) that European literature comes into being not with the invention of Greek literature, but with the invention of a relationship between Greek literature and Latin. Mutatis 1

mutandis, this relational paradigm continues to energize and to delimit poetic innovation across language and culture in the Western tradition through early modernity and beyond. The present chapter offers access to the kinds of conversation with antiquity made possible by instances of parallel Latin and vernacular composition in certain early modern poets. Less obviously, I extend this approach

through

parallelism

to

embrace

Latin

translations by others of vernacular texts (with Paradise Lost as a key case), arguing that such Latin paratexts acquire their own complementary intertextual energy, which can extend and complicate the conversations of their ‘originals’ with the classical tradition. My discussion will be driven by Marvell and Milton in the English tradition, and in the final pages will glance briefly at Ronsard and Du Bellay in the French. Let me define my interests a little more narrowly. As a contributor to this book of sermones, I want to direct some sustained attention to cases of cross-linguistic poetic ‘twinning’ in which the correspondences are so close as to approach the condition of translation, without quite being the same thing as translation (a problematic formulation, right at the outset …), and where the very issue of movement between languages, and at times between cultures and eras, is somehow central, or even thematized. I am especially interested in poets – and readers – who find literary reasons to be literal. And that is why the most extended section of my chapter will set out two seventeenth-century cases of parallel English and Latin poems, written by a single author, Andrew Marvell, and arguably meant to be read

as in some sense simultaneous pairs, with a consequent potential to comment and to editorialize on each other. We do have examples of bilingual ‘parallel texts’ from antiquity, of course, mostly subliterary; but, as a classicist looking for early modern novelty, I have chosen to focus on a form of cross-linguistic correspondence which we almost never get in antiquity, the high-concept, single-author, poetic diptych. That a mid-seventeenth-century English poet like Marvell should have a corpus of Latin poetry (some eighteen pieces, ranging from brief epigrams to an epistle of 134 verses) is of course no surprise. And there is 2

context too for what I shall argue to be his particular interest in linguistic cross-reference. As is finely explored in Estelle Haan’s 2003 study of the Latin verse, exercises in translation from Latin to English and back again into Latin (standard educational fare for the time) will have been part of Marvell’s own schooldays, and also part of his later work as a tutor to a child of the aristocracy. And 3

no less relevant to his linguistic profile is his period in the 1650s as Assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary for Foreign Tongues (commonly known as the Latin Secretary), a job in which he served and to which he was

recommended by none other than John Milton. That is, like Milton, Marvell had first-hand experience of Latin as the language of diplomacy and of other high-end communication; indeed, this impinges directly upon his Latin poetic oeuvre in pieces written to frame and accompany a Cromwellian mission to the Queen of Sweden.

4

Literal

Latin:

the

Ad

Regem

Carolum

Parodia Before proceeding to poetic pairs, we may begin with a stand-alone Latin piece written when Marvell was fifteen years old and already a student at Cambridge: iam satis pestis, satis atque diri fulminis misit pater, et rubenti dextera nostras iaculatus arces terruit urbem

5

On the occasion of the anticipated birth of a fifth child to King Charles I in 1636–1637, several students put together (as was customary) a book of celebratory verses. Together with an epigram in Greek (his other debut publication), Marvell contributed the longer poem whose

opening stanza is quoted above, a Latin piece in Sapphics, in sustained imitation of the second poem of Horace’s first book of Odes. Indeed, if we now set alongside Marvell’s stanza the opening stanza of the Horatian model (Odes 1.2.1–4), with the language directly borrowed by Marvell in bold italics, it will immediately be clear that Marvell has written a poem not so much in the style of Horace Odes 1.2 as in the words of Horace Odes 1.2: a translation from Latin into Latin.

6

Hence Marvell’s title, a Parodia to King Charles, where parodia means not so much ‘parody’ as ‘parallel or sideby-side ode’. Not quite a stand-alone poem, then, after all.

7

iam

satis

pestis,

satis

iam satis terris nivis atque

atque diri

dirae

fulminis misit pater, et

grandinis misit pater, et

rubenti

rubente

dextera nostras iaculatus

dextera sacras iaculatus

arces

arces

terruit urbem

terruit urbem

The conceit of the Parodia is that there is a supernaturally charged crisis afoot in which the epiphany of the royal baby, like the epiphany of Augustus in the

Horatian Ode, promises to bring succour and salvation. The Marvellian crisis closely follows the pattern of the Horatian one: the city (Cambridge rather than Rome) is beset by an emergency (for Rome, civil strife or its aftermath; for Cambridge, an outbreak of plague, historically attested for 1636); in both cases the crisis involves ominous river floods (13–14, 18–20; Marvell on left):

8

vidimus Chamum fluvium

vidimus

retortis

retortis

litore a dextro violenter

littore Etrusco violenter

undis …

undis …

… vagus et sinistra labitur

ripa,

flavum

… vagus et sinistra Iove

labitur

ripa,

comprobante,

probante u-

tristior amnis.

xorius amnis.

9

Tiberim

Iove

non

Now it would be a mistake to say that there is no work here for the intertextualist critic to do: the very literalism of the typology is partly what makes the Parodia fascinating as an instance of lived seventeenth-century Latinity. But for a reader interested in the give and take of verbal transformation, the pickings may seem slim. An

almost cento-like congruence of imitation to model, and 10

without the cento’s creative processes of selection and recombination. Only by special pleading will this shadow-poem yield the crackle of originality that we associate with the mature Marvell.

11

And yet even in this exercise in intertextual minimalism (or maximalism?), a closer look would reveal the Marvell of the Parodia to be one who finds possibility in the word-for-wordness of word-for-word appropriation: textually, contextually, metapoetically, 12

13

even metaprosodically … e.g. between line 19 and 20 (quoted above), the mimetic ‘overflow’ enjambment of the word u/xorius, a Greek metrical licence admitted only on rare occasions in Horace, is ‘corrected’ by 14

Marvell’s non-enjambed tristior (‘sadder’), a word which can also in the terminology of stylistic choice mean ‘stricter’. Now, there is a special moment towards the end of the poem when Marvell’s customized panegyric briefly (37– 44) puts enough space between the Parodia and its original to approximate a normal relationship of allusion, culminating in a cameo of allusive self-annotation (41–4; Marvell on left):

sive felici Carolum figura

sive

mutata

iuvenem

figura parvulus

princeps

imitetur,

ales

in

terris

imitaris

almae

almae

sive Mariae decoret puellam

filius Maiae, patiens vocari

dulcis imago

Caesaris ultor

15

16

The winged Mercury’s ‘imitation’ of Augustus becomes in the royal English remake an anticipated prince’s ‘imitation’ of his father Charles, or an anticipated princess’s of her mother Henrietta Maria: two kinds of ‘imitation’ of the ruler, then, one via divine typology and the other via filial inheritance (though the Horace has an undertow of filial inheritance too: Caesaris ultor). On a metapoetic reread, from mutata figura to felici figura Marvell himself has ‘changed’ or ‘refigured’ the original conceit to achieve, as it were, a ‘felicitous’ display-piece of imitatio: in short (via the princess alternative), a dulcis imago. But similar kinds of interpretative traction are hardly less available in the more characteristic parts of the poem in which repetition reigns. Take the lines in which the nation’s depleted youth (24 rara iuventus) uses the

language of anxiety about an eastern ‘other’ to contemplate its crisis (21–2; Marvell on left): audiit

coelos

acuisse

audiet

17

cives

acuisse

ferrum,

ferrum,

quo graves Turcae melius

quo graves Persae melius

perirent ...

perirent ...

18

Alongside that shift from ‘oppressive Persians’ to ‘oppressive

Turks’,

modern

commentators

have

registered Marvell’s intervention in Horace’s wording in 21 to edit out a potentially disquieting reference to civil war (cives > coelos): armed ‘citizens’ become armed ‘heavens’, in a figuration of the Cambridge plague as divine punishment. ‘The depoliticization of Horace in this Ode is noteworthy’ (so Haan). But can we really be 19

sure that those warring Horatian cives do not still register for Marvell and his readers sous rature? McQueen and Rockwell say: ‘…the reminiscence of the original gives the modern reader pause as he reflects that this was written only five years before open war between King and Parliament’.

20

All in all, then, the youthful exercise of the Parodia gives us a licence to weigh every word when the fully formed poet takes the enterprise of literal Latin to a

higher level – in the parallel English and Latin poempairs to which I now turn.

Marvell’s

pairs:

translation(ese)

and

transcendence In the contemporary case of Milton, a conversation about parallel English and Latin composition can take its bearings from the published collection of 1645, the culmination of some twenty years of Milton’s early work, in which a vernacular volume of English ‘Poems’ (plus a handful in Italian) is followed by a volume of Latin ‘Poemata’ (plus a couple in Greek) with its own separate title page: a double book, paratextually framed as such. In Marvell’s case, authorial book design is off the agenda, for the simple reason that most of his verse remained unpublished until after his death. But what we can talk about are individual pairings of English and Latin poems, probably conceived together and clearly, as has been put beyond doubt by the work of Estelle Haan, meant to be read together.

21

Here are the opening and closing lines of On a Drop of Dew, one of Marvell’s best-known pieces (1–3, 37–40); and here alongside them are the opening and closing

lines of Ros, the Latin version of On a Drop of Dew which stands right after it in the posthumous Miscellaneous Poems of 1681 (1–2, 43–6): See how the orient dew

cernis ut Eoi descendat gemmula roris,

Shed from the bosom of

inque rosas roseo transfluat

the morn

orta sinu …

Into the blowing roses … Such did the manna’s sacred

haud aliter mensis exundans

dew distil;

manna beatis

White, and entire, though

deserto iacuit stilla gelata

congealèd and chill.

solo:

Congealed on earth; but does,

stilla gelata solo, sed solibus

dissolving, run

hausta benignis,

Into the glories of th’Almighty

ad sua qua cecidit purior

Sun.

astra venit.

22

With its line-by-line and even word-by-word tracking (a literalism equal in its own way to that of the Parodia) this is Marvell’s clearest and most closely studied display piece of diptych composition. For the present brief discussion it suffices to register (first) that the theme of the twin poems constitutes a programmatic distillation

of Marvell’s interest in transcendence (drop of dew comes down from heaven to earth but aspires to return to heaven); and (second) that the multiple word-plays in and between English and Latin in the two versions (see my added emphases) show how an interest in transformation and transcendence can be negotiated through acts of translation. This is a ‘textbook’ example of how Marvell uses Latin to think with; in the poems’ opening and closing movements from heaven to earth and from earth back to heaven, the Latin puns provide the armature and (almost) close the gaps between the opposed terms: ‘dew’ is to ‘rose’ as ros is to rosa; ‘earth’ is to ‘sun’ as solum is to sol; and finally (this time implicitly) ‘dew-drop’ is to ‘sun’ as stilla is to stella.

23

In a sense, then, the Latin poem drives the agenda of its English ‘twin’. Not that that is the only linguistic trajectory taken: as Haan shows, sometimes (or even at the same time) the thought may be driven by an English pun (‘th’Almighty Sun’ implicitly evokes ‘th’Almighty Son’), or by macaronic punning between the two languages (in English line 19, not quoted above, ‘So the soul, that drop, that ray …’ reaches sonically across the

boundaries of language, poem and analogy to elicit the adjacent Latin sol [= sun]).

24

In a larger sense (though I do not intend to pursue the matter here) there are moments when the English poem seems to seize a broader conceptual initiative from the Latin, with pieces of conventional and classically Roman imagery in the Latin version transformed in the vernacular into something newer, more distinctive and (well) more Marvellian.

25

And this is what more systematically happens in Marvell’s other sustained exercise in cross-linguistic pairing, The Garden and Hortus, positioned adjacent to one another in the posthumous book of 1681, and both perhaps to be dated (though this has become controversial ) to Marvell’s years at the Fairfax estate of 26

Nun Appleton, Yorkshire, in 1650–1652. To begin with a tendentious paraphrase, the Garden stages its rich and playful debate between sensory and more-than-sensory pleasures in a poem which offers a self-consciously metaphysical rereading and reinvention of the classical and Ovidian landscape tradition. And what the far-lessfamous Hortus does, in part, in a parallelism which is sometimes as strict as that between On a Drop of Dew

and Ros, but sometimes much freer, is to allow the details of that Ovidianism to be seen at closer quarters, in a treatment

alongside

which

the

Garden

seems

simultaneously invested in patterns of similarity and in patterns of difference. An in nuce characterization of the interrelationship might go straight to the most famous lines of The Garden, ‘Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in

a

green

shade’

(47–8),

which

represent

a

transformation of Hortus lines 10–11, in a different context, longe/celarant plantae virides et concolor umbra. The change from ‘green plants’ to ‘a green 27

thought’ encapsulates the English poem’s shift from physical to metaphysical – perhaps via the mystical, modern

(and

non-Roman)

mathematics

of

zero

(‘annihilating …’) – and inaugurates a new chapter in 28

the history of the locus amoenus. But let me not get 29

ahead of myself: this pair of poems will repay a closer look, from the beginning. Despite (or because of) the modern celebrity of The Garden, many twentyfirst century readers of Marvell do not even know that the Hortus exists. The majority of the academic criticism of The Garden is at best perfunctory

in noticing the Hortus (nothing, for example, in the Cambridge Companion to Marvell, in which it is hard, indeed, to find two consecutive sentences on any of Marvell’s Latin poetry). That said, the work that has been done merits attention well beyond neo-Latin specialist circles: as has been established (and as I will try to argue further in what follows) the English poem would not be what it is without its Latin twin. One long-debated question is about the order of composition: more commonly, the Latin poem is seen as the precursor to the English one, less commonly as a subsequent development from it: my own hunch is that the poems are designed to be simultaneous and interactive. Another key issue is this: for stanzas 1–4 of the English poem, and again for the final stanza 9, the Latin poem prefigures (or refigures) the English one closely, sometimes very closely; but there is no Latin to correspond to stanzas 5–8 of the English poem. To add interest to this circumstance, in the posthumous edition of Marvell’s verse, the 1681 folio, this big ‘gap’ in the Latin poem is editorially marked with the words desunt multa (‘much is missing’). Now coincidentally (or not) stanzas

5–8 are where Marvell’s English poem moves from the physical to the metaphysical, from the mythological to the neoplatonic, and ultimately from the Greco-Roman to the biblical. So for Marvellians who pay attention to Hortus, this paratextual mark points up the controversial question of whether the Latin ‘for’ stanzas 5–8 has been lost or whether it never existed, and whether the omission (if it is an omission) is significant or not. Let us retrace our steps to the beginning (Garden 1–2; Hortus 1–2): How

vainly

men

quisnam adeo, mortale genus,

themselves amaze

praecordia versat

To win the palm, the oak,

heu palmae laurique furor vel

or bays

simplicis herbae?

30

Alike in the opening stanza of the English poem and in the first six hexameters of the Latin, the misguided ambitions and desires of men are invoked as a foil to set up the garden as a place of escape, repose and contemplation; in both the English and the Latin the opening image brings the two contrasted terms close together by setting the tired symbolism of the leafy wreaths which mark such ephemeral distinction (‘the palm, the oak, or bays’) against our poet’s much fuller

commitment to the vegetative world. The opening line of The Garden ends with a pun to evoke the idea of losing one’s way in garden-specific terms: ‘how vainly men themselves amaze’ (a-maze). That pun is unavailable in the Latin version…whose opening verb, as it happens, is versat: as we shall see (and as we have already seen in 31

‘Dew’/Ros), neither of Marvell’s languages has a monopoly on word-play. The second stanza of the English poem pursues the idea of the garden as a place of withdrawal from human society; so too, but at greater length, lines 7–19 of Hortus. English lines 9–12 and Latin lines 7–9 map closely on to one another, Fair Quiet, have I found

alma Quies, teneo te, et te,

thee here,

germana Quietis,

And Innocence thy Sister

Simplicitas! vos ergo diu per

dear!

templa, per urbes

Mistaken long, I sought

quaesivi, regum perque alta palatia

you then

frustra

32

In busy companies of men

…except that ‘busy companies of men’ damps down the quasi-classical specificity of the templa, urbes and

palatia in the Latin version. So too in Hortus 17–18 the vocabulary of retreat from civic society continues to have a concrete specificity absent from the English version’s ‘Society is all but rude,/To this delicious solitude’ (15– 16), and this time the specificity is very clearly Roman, with references to the ‘circus’ in 17 and the ‘forum’ in 18: non armenta iuvant hominum circique boatus, mugitusve fori …

33

Indeed, ‘the uproar/lowing of the forum’, mugitusve fori, as well as completing the Latin figuration of thronging humans as herds of cattle (armenta), wittily names a famous public space in ancient Rome itself (Forum Boarium, the Cattle Market by the Tiber).

34

Now, both poems are at this point concerned with withdrawal from society. However, in the longer treatment of the conceit in the Latin (with no equivalent in the English), even the solitude to which the poet withdraws from civic society sounds (well) both civic and social (12–15):

35

O mihi si vestros liceat violasse recesssus erranti, lasso, et vitae melioris anhelo! municipem servate novum votoque potitum,

frondosae cives optate in florea regna.

36

[M]unicipem…novum, frondosae cives, florea regna: what is going on here? If the Latin version precedes the English one, Marvell ‘damps down’ the civic vocabulary in the rewrite (as suggested above); if the English precedes the Latin, he amps up the civic vocabulary in the rewrite. In either case one can perhaps ask whether there is an element not just of linguistic but of cultural codeswitching in play here across the two versions: in Marvell’s conception, is Latin a language more predisposed than English to the language of civic administration and statecraft? (Remember the Assistant Secretaryship in his immmediate future, or in his past … ). Is he using Latin to write a poem more Latinate in 37

its ways of thinking than is his parallel English poem? This question lies at the centre of a suggestive 2001 article by Daniel Jaeckle, who writes of Bakhtinian ‘chronotopes’ in this connection; I have already cited this piece more than once.

38

Alike in the third and fourth stanzas of the English poem and in the corresponding (but notably less concise) sections of the Latin (Hortus 20–48), it emerges that the garden is a place not just of retreat from society but of

retreat from sexual love: here Marvell marks a major departure from the classical locus amoenus; a locus which is preeminently, in etymological terms and in literary practice, a place of amor. Stanza 4, in fact, finds The Garden simultaneously at its most Ovidian and at its most post-Ovidian: When we have run our passions’ heat, Love hither makes his best retreat. The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race: Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a Nymph, but for a reed.

Famously, Marvell invokes two myths from the first book of the Metamorphoses; but in so doing he reinterprets the purpose of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, and of Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx, in a reading which replaces erotic with environmental desire. And what about the Latin Hortus at this point (38, 39–48)? laetantur superi … et licet experti toties nymphasque deasque, arbore nunc melius potiuntur quisque cupita:

Iuppiter annosam, neglecta coniuge, quercum deperit; haud alia doluit sic pellice Iuno. Lemniacum temerant vestigia nulla cubile, nec Veneris Mavors meminit si fraxinus adsit. formosae pressit Daphnes vestigia Phoebus ut fieret laurus, sed nil quaesiverat ultra. capripes et peteret quod Pan Syringa fugacem, hoc erat ut calamum posset reperire sonorum.

39

I must abbreviate; but the argument would be that at this juncture, where the English poem is at its most classical, the parallel Latin version maintains its difference through a sort of hyper-classicism in its profusion of mythic and iconographic detail. It may be hard to warm to the wordiness of the Latin here alongside the perfect economy of the English; but it does enable one or two felicitous touches of post-Humanist wit.

40

Take another look (for instance) at the second line of Garden stanza 4, along with the extended passage of Latin (not quoted in the block above) which corresponds to it (Hortus 32–7): When we have run our

hic Amor exutis crepidatus inambulat alis,

passions ’ heat, Love

enerves arcus et stridula tela reponens,

hither

invertitque faces, nec se cupit usque timeri;

makes

aut exporrectus iacet indormitque pharetrae,

his best

non auditurus quamquam Cytherea vocarit,

retreat.

nequitias referunt nec somnia vana priores.

41

‘Love hither makes his best retreat’: in contrast to this vestigially personified Love, Hortus offers a fully personified Amor, whose ‘retreat’ is visualized in six lines of detail with the full iconographic apparatus of shed wings,

unstrung

bow,

extinguished

torches

and

discarded quiver. When read alongside this much fuller Latin treatment, the English line (unremarkable in itself) can be felt to nod self-referentially at its own ‘retreat’ from the panoply of Ovidian mythological eroticism; a panoply which is discarded in the Latin version too in the sense that, here too, Amor takes a break, but which is also in a sense restored and reinforced in that version, in that Amor’s weapons, even as they are discarded, are catalogued one by one, in full Ovidian detail. Ovid is very much in point here: as Amor is freed from recollection of his nequitias…priores (37), the use of a trademark noun unmistakably footnotes the literary

historical point of origin of those ‘profligacies’ (cf. Amores 2.1.2 ille ego nequitiae Naso poeta meae). And in

another

sense

too

this

undoing

of

Ovidian

mythological eroticism represents a perpetuation of Ovidian mythological eroticism, in that the disarmament of Amor here in Hortus recalls Ovid’s own poems about Amor-in-retreat, Amores 3.9 (the funeral of Tibullus) and perhaps Ex Ponto 3.3 (Amor’s visit to Ovid in exile); the divestment is itself an Ovidian topos.

42

In the big picture, both the English and the Latin poems enact a pledge by Marvell to transcend the love poet’s traditionally instrumental use of nature for erotic ends; but (for all that) the Latin remains much more mired than the English in all the trappings of traditional eroticism. At the end of Garden stanza 3 a similar imbalance is to be found (Garden 23–4; Hortus 28–31): Fair trees! Wheres’e’er your

ast ego, si vestras unquam

barks I wound,

temeravero stirpes,

No name shall but your own

nulla Neaera, Chloe, Faustina,

be found.

Corinna legetur, in proprio sed quaeque libro signabitur arbos.

o carae platanus, cyparissus, populus, ulmus!

43

Here, already (just before the ‘retreat’ of Love), the contrast between two versions of a resolution against carving mistresses’ names on trees verges on the parodic (and not just in the 1636–1637 sense): the Latin Marvell works through an entire pastoral elegiac Rolodex before arriving at the same place as his minimalist English counterpart; a significant amount of literary history is transacted along the way.

44

So (to ask a general question which can be asked about any of the Latin corresponding to Garden stanzas 2, 3 and 4), is the point of Marvell’s diptych enterprise that the English thought comes into its own when it loses the clutter of classicism, or is it rather that the English thought is sustained and strengthened by a hidden armature of classicism? … Or a bit of both? A sequential reading now brings us to Garden stanzas 5–8, the section of the English poem of which Marvell never intended to do a Latin version, or never got around to doing one, or for which a Latin version got lost before the posthumous edition of his poetry. First, however, a look at the final stanza of The Garden, in which direct

dialogue between the English and Latin versions is apparently reestablished (stanza 9, Hortus 49–58). Both poems end with a meditation on time, involving a modern architectural ‘feature’ in Marvell’s garden, a floral sundial and zodiac, which carries a certain freight of cosmic allegory…and a certain number of puns. Taking as read the famous play between two different kinds of ‘time’ (Garden 69–70), unavailable in the Latin,

45

And, as it works, th’ industrious Bee Computes its time as well as we

as also another between hortus, hora and horologus (Hortus 49, 51, 56), unavailable in the English, let me pause on just one vegetative sundial pun (Garden 65–8, Hortus 49–54): How

well

the

skilful

nec tu, opifex horti, grato sine

gard’ner drew

carmine abibis,

Of flow’rs and herbs this

qui brevibus plantis et laeto

dial new;

flore notasti

Where from above the

crescentes

milder sun

intervalla diei.

Does

through

fragrant zodiac run

a

horas

atque

sol ibi candidior fragrantia signa pererrat,

proque truci Tauro, stricto pro forcipe Cancri, securis

violaeque

rosaeque

allabitur umbris.

46

‘…the milder sun/Does through a fragrant zodiac run’. ‘Fragrant zodiac’ maps literally on to fragrantia signa (‘fragrant signs’) in Hortus 52; but the Latin has something extra to offer. Where does the bold English phrase ‘fragrant zodiac’ come from? Well, it is clearly a piece of ‘translationese’, formed by Marvell on the basis of his parallel Latin fragrantia signa. And fragrantia signa? A new locution too, but this time we can see Marvell’s transformative phrase-formation in action: behind fragrantia lies a word commonly used to refer to actual constellations in classical Latin poetry, namely flagrantia (‘flaming’); a word which would aptly describe ‘fierce’ and menacing star-signs like the Bull and the Crab specified in Hortus 53. That is to say, it is from Marvell’s own Latinate literalism (perhaps complicated by a lurking Virgilian metathesis) that one of his most distinctive English locutions derives.

47

And so to English stanzas 5–8, the thirty-two lines for which no corresponding Latin is to be found: desunt multa, as the editorial mark has it in 1681. The

hypothesis that the English poem deliberately ‘takes flight’ here, leaving the Latin poem behind in order to move into conceptual territory which Marvell feels to be more appropriate to his ‘own’ language and Muse than to the ancient one, has deservedly found some traction.

48

Arguably, these stanzas are the most distinctive parts of the English poem, and the most personal. Indeed, Marvell may mark them as such with a pun in the first line of stanza 5 (33; my italics): What wondrous life is this I lead!

‘Wondrous’: that is, marvellous. In a sense, then, this section of The Garden is the poet’s sphragis, his poetic ‘signature’. What does it mean that he chose (if he chose) not to render these parts in Latin? Well, as we saw in stanzas 2–4, even where the two versions are at their closest, Hortus shows a stronger gravitational pull than The Garden towards Ovidian, Roman and classical ways of thinking. So when Marvell’s English poem proceeds in the ensuing stanzas to the metaphysical, the neoplatonic and finally the transcendentally Christian, these are perhaps directions in which Marvell’s Latin poem (as he has conceived it) would be inclined not to go.

Now it has to be allowed that this interruption of the Latin parallel, whether staged or accidental, has confirmed most modern critics of The Garden in the verdict that relegates Hortus to a curiosity which, if noticed at all, is assumed to make no lasting demands upon the interpretation of The Garden. But what if ‘diptych reading’ continues to be central to Marvell’s conception of the now-unaccompanied English poem even in the unparalleled stanzas 5–8? One way to make this case would be to argue that the Latin for stanzas 1–4 and 9 reaches beyond its points of overt correspondence to include elements of specific cross-reference with the English-only stanzas too: there are details for which such a case can be, or has been made. However, I should like 49

to take a different and perhaps bolder approach to the ‘finding’ of the Latin poem in the English-only stanzas. Consider the recurrent and much-analysed vocabulary of replication, mirroring and doubling which dominates stanzas 6 and 8 of the English poem, including in the latter a comparison that ‘twins’ Marvell’s garden with the Garden of Eden, and then counterfactually multiplies Eden itself by two (Garden 41–4, 57–64): Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find … Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walked without a mate: After a place so pure, and sweet, What other help could yet be meet? But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two Paradises ’twere in one To live in Paradise alone.

‘Two Paradises ’twere in one’ (my italics). The Greek word paradeisos means not just ‘paradise’ but also ‘enclosed park’, ‘pleasure garden’ or (in Latin) hortus: at one playfully metapoetic level, then, and amid the many other things that can be said about these intensely scrutinized

lines,

does

Marvell’s

garden-doubling

imagery flag the English poem as itself a double … of its Latinate poetic twin, the Hortus?

50

Since my reading is an abbreviated one, let that suffice for the unparalleled stanzas 6 and 8. But what about the unparalleled stanza 5 (Garden 33–40)? What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarene, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Insnared with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

‘What wondrous life is this I lead …’ The poet communes almost erotically with the fifth stanza’s cornucopia of fruit; and the profusion of apples, nectarines, peaches and melons makes this into a supercharged locus amoenus, an extreme version of Golden Age bounty. Too extreme to be expressed also in Latin? Well, hardly: the rhetorical elaboration is itself of a piece with a landscape rooted in the Latinate tradition. But if we really want to find a reason why Marvell might apportion this stanza to his modern English sensibility rather than to his classicizing Latin sensibility, here is one possible – and pedantic – angle. Suppose we took the gap implied by the editorial desunt multa as a challenge, and tried to reconstruct a lost Latin version by Marvell of stanza 5: how would we render ‘apple’, ‘nectarene’, ‘peach’ and ‘melon’?

Well probably, give or take a modifier or two, as malum, malum, malum … and malum. It is not unfair to say that four of the five kinds of fruit in these lines (i.e. all but the grapes, and including the very seventeenthcentury ‘nectarene’) most obviously translate into Latin as one single undifferentiated word. So in this first 51

stanza in The Garden not to have a Latin equivalent, is there perhaps a linguistic joke about a profusion of fruit so unprecedented that it is beyond the resources of the Latin language to give it expression? Now I have skipped over another way of talking about the ‘untranslateable’ modernity of this profusion, namely through the poetics of new-world exploration (there are affinities with the ‘eternal spring’ of Marvell’s own Bermudas), and in general I may be at risk of presenting 52

all of the above as a philological game being played by a seventeenth-century poet engaging in a time-free way with a kind of abstract Latinity. But of course one of the joys and challenges of early modern Latin is that it comes so multiply and deeply embedded in its own time. So, to return for a moment to On a Drop of Dew and Ros, a closer look guided by Estelle Haan’s rich treatment would confirm that none of the word-plays marked in

and between those twin poems happens in isolation: as social practice, their movements in and out of Latin need to be plotted not just alongside contemporary pedagogic display but in terms of their many close ties to the metaphorics of contemporary doctrinal disputation.

53

And, even on the purely philological side, classicists like myself risk missing half the conversation if we do not have post-antique interlocutors on hand (as in the present volume) to educate us about the vernacular particulars of the seventeenth-century English lexicon, to probe (say) the contemporary resonance of a word like ‘orient’, historically unavailable to its Latin ancestor oriens, within the aesthetics and economics of the period’s infatuation with imported Near Eastern and Indian pearls: ‘see how the orient dew …’ (i.e. the orient, exotic, brilliantly and preciously pearl-like dew…).

54

To step back (and with an eye upon my tactic with Garden stanza 5), perhaps one way to ‘use’ these episodes of literal confrontation between closely matched Latin and non-Latin poems is to find in them an invitation to imagine a virtual diptych for any vernacular poem in the classical tradition: that is, to ask oneself what any such poem would look like in a hypothetical Latin version,

even in the 99.9% of cases where no Latin version exists…

‘Virtual diptych’: Paradise Latinized One early modern author for whose poetry a ‘virtual diptych’ approach might be good to think with is Marvell’s great contemporary Milton. Milton’s own first definitive collection of his poetic work in 1645 was (as noted earlier) a double volume of English and of Latin, arranged as a matching pair. So it is not wholly inapposite to conjure with the idea of a hypothetical Latin version of Paradise Lost, an epic for which (two decades later, in 1667) Milton did not of course compose a Latin ‘twin’, but which he wrote in a famously Latinate style whose effect upon English poetic language was to be enduring; an epic, too, which, not least in its account of 55

the Garden of Eden, stages its complicated relationship with the classical tradition in some very overt ways (PL 4.268–75): … Not that fair field Of Enna, where Prosérpin gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired Castalian spring, might with this Paradise Of Eden strive …

If one were to imagine a parallel Latin version by Milton of the already very Latinate locus amoenus that is the extended treatment of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost, defined in the lines above through negative exemplum,

56

where would the English version mark its differences? Well (to offer a tendentious answer to this tendentious question), consider a key phrase in Milton’s set-up as Satan approaches the border of Eden more than a hundred lines earlier (PL 4.146–53): …a circling row Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit, Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed: On which the sun more glad impressed his beams Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow, When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed That landscape…

‘So lovely seemed/That landscape …’: Alastair Fowler’s commentary rightly flags ‘landscape’ as still in the 1650s

a ‘hard word’, ‘a recent borrowing from Dutch art terminology’.

57

But a classicist will want to apply

philological pressure to ‘lovely’ too – in a way that connects with my recent reading of The Garden. In its combination with ‘landscape’, and as a summation of preceding and succeeding topoi of trees, blossoms, fruit and vernal breezes (PL 4.146–59), ‘lovely’ is surely here functioning as a properly literal translation of amoenus, as in the Roman etymology of locus amoenus as a place of love, amor. That is, in a virtual Latin version of these 58

English lines, locus amoenus both would and would not be an exact translation of ‘lovely landscape’, probing, more searchingly than the English, the emotional and potentially sexual resonance of ‘lovely’, but missing out on the post-Dutch painterly visuality of the new word ‘landscape’ (landschap). It is fair to say that, not just here but often in Milton’s epic, an intensification of classical Latin topoi is apt to 59

trigger a concomitant gesture of resistance to (or at least differentiation from) the thought-worlds of classical antiquity that looks – and sometimes is – programmatic. Take a look at the lines which immediately follow (4.152– 63),

… so lovely seemed That landscape: and of pure now purer air Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires Vernal delight and joy, able to drive All sadness but despair: now gentle gales Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense Native perfúmes, and whisper whence they stole Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozámbic, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Arabie the blest…

in which the ‘gentle gales’ felt by Satan on his approach to Eden are compared to the perfumed breezes which blow from the ‘spicy shore’ of Arabia Felix as experienced by sailors proceeding northwards from the Cape of Good Hope and past Mozambique. The classical locus amoenus rubs up once more against the geography of early modern exploration; and the extra tease is that it is not in themselves the exotic breezes that yield the ‘difference’ – the ‘Sabean odours’ are in fact drawn by Milton from the Greek of Diodorus Siculus – but the fact that

they

are

experienced

by

sailors

who

are

approaching from the southerly tip of the African

continent, voyaging on an early modern trajectory unimaginable to a geographical writer in antiquity.

60

If one way to explore the limits of Latinate English and of classical ‘toposness’ in Paradise Lost is to imagine how Milton could – or could not – have written the same epic in Latin, another approach is to see what Paradise Lost looks like when it actually does get translated into Latin, as it does several times in the century following Milton’s death. (Why, by what kind of translator, for what audience, and to what effect? All good questions, mostly to be left hanging in the brief remarks which follow.)

61

Here, then, in a kind of development of the ‘virtual diptych’ idea, is part of the address to the Muse in the first sentence of Paradise Lost (1.6–10) along with the Latin version of Michael Bold (1702): Sing

heavenly

Muse,

Musa

62

mihi

memora,

quae

that on the secret top

quondam per iuga sacra nunc

Of Oreb, or of Sinai,

Sinae

didst inspire

>nunc Sinae, nunc Orebi, dum

That

shepherd,

who

curat ovile,

first taught the chosen

pastorem

seed

carmine Mosen;

In the beginning how

carmine quo docuit, charam

the heavens and earth

magis omnibus unam,

primo

stimulabas

Rose out of chaos…

dilectamque

Deo

gentem,

primordia mundi, eque Chao tener ut rerum surrexerit ordo, fati arcana ferens…

The English lines from the epic’s opening invocation give immediate notice of Milton’s usual brilliant negotiation between traditions; that negotiation is sometimes replicated,

sometimes

reconfigured,

sometimes

extended and sometimes flattened in Bold’s Latin version. Milton’s metabiblical ‘in the beginning’ becomes not something with principio – as in the Latin Vulgate – but instead a paganized Lucretian-Ovidian primordia mundi. On a different and this time Christianizing 63

trajectory, Milton’s artful suspension of ‘that shepherd’ between an unnamed Hesiod (the Muse-encountering poet of cosmogonic ‘chaos’ at Theogony 116 ff.) and an unnamed Moses (pictured up on Mount Oreb or Sinai) is disambiguated by Bold’s named specification of Moses – a pagan Greek resonance lost to a Christian Latin gloss. Along the way Bold’s line-structure draws attention to something new that his naming has added to the mix: a paronomastic bond between Musa and Mosen, enclosing the first three lines of the Latin address above.

64

Yet Bold’s decision to name Moses does not betray any lack of awareness of Milton’s simultaneous, oblique allusion to Hesiod. Far from it: an accompanying emphasis works in the opposite direction to amplify that allusion, viz. Bold’s supplementation of Milton’s singleword ‘shepherd’ with an added line and a half of circumstantial detail in the Latin, italicized above: ‘you Muse…who once upon a time…, while he cared for his flock, inspired with song the shepherd, Moses’. What 65

this expanded wording does is to back-fill Milton’s Hesiodic allusion by ‘translating’ the key words of the Theogony vignette evoked but not translated by Milton himself: cf. Theog. 22–3 ‘[the Muses] once upon a time (αἵ νύ ποθ’) taught Hesiod beautiful song (ἀοιδήν) while he was shepherding his lambs (ἄρνας ποιμαίνονθ’) under holy Helicon’. And also, in the act of consolidating the allusion to Hesiod, Bold’s expansion has elicited from the ‘shepherd’ a more sustainedly pastoral note than Milton himself had sounded, thus adjusting the balance between genres in the epic’s proem and, in effect, emphasizing a continuity between the opening lines of Paradise Lost and Milton’s previous poetic career in pastoral; even, perhaps, because Bold is writing in Latin, in Latin

pastoral, with specific evocation of the poem which had closed Milton’s earlier, 1645 book, his Epitaphium Damonis. In short Bold’s Latin translation at this point, at once commentary on and complement to Milton’s, renders concrete the kinds of conversation across codes which are integral to Paradise Lost, and which are already (perversely) reimagined in my appeal above to nonexistent cases of English and Latin diptych. Let me offer a second glimpse of ‘Paradise Latinized’ (PL 1.125–6), this time in two versions, one by Michael Bold and the other by Thomas Power (1691):

66

(Bold) angelus haec effatus apostata mente dolores So spake the apostate angel,

comprimit

ingentes,

though in pain,

ficta fronte serenat

spem

Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair (Power) talia iactanti, talem se voce ferenti,

quamquam animum ardentes curaeque dolorque coquebant

This is a transition at the close of Satan’s first speech, to Beelzebub, and may offer a glimpse of a different area of intertextual possibility. Here in PL 1.125–6 Milton modulates between speeches in a way that feels not just Latinate but specifically Virgilian. And what can be discovered via the two accompanying translations, perhaps, is a sense not just of Virgilianism but of hyper-Virgilianism, in Milton and in his readers. Let me explain, through some comparanda: talia

voce

refert

curisque

ingentibus aeger spem vultu simulat, premit altum

Aen.

corde dolorem

1.208–9 (Aeneas)

… et maestam dictis adgressa sororem consilium vultu tegit ac spem

Aen.

fronte serenat

4.476–7 (Dido)

talia iactanti …

Aen. 1.102 (Aeneas)

quam…/femineae

ardentem

curaeque

iraeque

coquebant Aen. 7.344–5 (Amata)

The suggestion in this gathering of Aeneid quotations,

67

pointed up by my emphases linking them with the Latin versions of PL 1.125–6 above, is that between them Bold and Power have had recourse to no fewer than four Virgilian passages – perhaps more – to render the two lines of Paradise Lost at the exit from Satan’s first speech. And what is striking is how verbally and contextually provocative all these Virgilian intertexts can be argued to be as potential models for Milton. The detailed case would go something like this (via my italics and underlinings). Individually and together, the Latin versions fold together the emotions of winner and loser in the Aeneid to add complication to this early glimpse of ‘the apostate angel’: Bold’s hexameters deliver a Satan who is at once Aeneas and Dido, in a fusion already intratextually Virgilian; in Power the mix is of Aeneas and Amata, Dido’s ‘double’ as victim in the second half of the Aeneid, accessed at a moment of (yes)

quasi-Satanic possession by the hellish Allecto. One 68

might also press the positional sensitivity common to the two allusive accessions of Aeneas himself: each translator ‘finds’ the Virgilian protagonist at the ‘same’ incipitatory moment as Milton’s anti-hero, namely the exit from an early Book 1 speech (Aeneas’ first speech in Power, his 69

second in Bold). I could go on; but I have probably said enough. At one level, this all makes for a fascinating exercise in reverse-engineering:

these

contemporary

Latin

translations (and they are not the only ones) offer a way to reconstruct the detailed machinery of Milton’s own allusions to Virgil, and thus to gain fast-track access to the building blocks of Milton’s Grand Style. But that is 70

perhaps to draw the lesson too narrowly. Irrespective of which or how many of these four Virgilian passages (or others) Milton himself actually had in mind here, the important point is that he has written in a sufficiently Virgilian way to set up a kind of echo-chamber of Virgilian association in his translators and readers. This could be the start of a much larger conversation about questions of linguistic hierarchy, about the hazards of intertextual strait-jackets, and about the arguably

greater ability of the vernacular – as opposed to Latin – to facilitate a more open kind of epic intertext.

Comparative post-Virgilianism But that is another day’s work. Other early modern vernacular epic poems are available to think with here, of course… all the more so when they too are equipped with near-contemporary Latin translations. Consider, almost a century earlier (1572), the opening lines of the Franciade of Pierre de Ronsard (1.1–12), alongside a Latin version of lines 7–12 by Ronsard’s great mentor Jean Dorat,

71

Muse

qui

tiens

les

sommets de Parnasse, Entre en ma bouche, et me chante la race Des Roys Françoys yssus de Francion, Enfant d’Hector Troyen de nation, Qu’on

appelloit

en

sa

jeunesse tendre Astyanax, et du nom de Scamandre.

De ce Troyen conte moy les

huius Troiugenae tu dic mihi

assaulx,

Musa labores,

Guerres,

discours,

et

proeliaque:

invita

quoties

combien sur les eaux

Iunone, et iniquo

Il a de foys en despit de

Neptuno

Neptune,

pericula vicit,

Et de Junon, surmonté la

ante

fortune,

moenia conderet urbis

terra,

pelagoque

Parisiacae

quam

Et sur la terre eschappé de périls, Ains que bastir les grands murs de Paris

72

or the start of the Lusiads of Luís Vas de Camões, published in the same year as the Franciade, and fully and freely rendered by Thomas de Faria fifty years later: As armas e os barões

Arma virosque cano, nostro

assinalados

qui e littore quondam

Que da Ocidental praia

occiduo,

Lusitana,

carbasa ventis

Por mares nunca de

intrepidi,

antes navegados,

tempestatibus acti

Passaram ainda além

sulcarunt tumidi metuendas

da Taprobana…

aequoris undas

74

rapidis

solventes

variis

et

littoraque antiquis nunquam bene cognita nautis,

73

altaque Taprobanae tetigerunt littora terrae…

I linger on these ‘pairs’ no longer than it takes to register a common trait in the two Latinizations, namely the adjustment of an already Virgilianizing vernacular original in the direction of even fuller engagement with the Aeneid’s own proem language. Dorat’s ante Parisiacae quam moenia conderet urbis

75

renders

Ronsard’s ‘Ains que bastir les grands murs de Paris’, but with added insistence on a citational relationship with Aen. 1.5 dum conderet urbem, 7 altae moenia Romae, and 33 Romanam condere gentem. So too, mutatis 76

mutandis, with the correspondence between de Faria’s sixth line above and its Portuguese original (line 4): after the near-quotation of the Aeneid incipit in Camoes’ opening As armas e os barões…cantando (1.1.1 with 1.2.7), confirmed in de Faria’s arma virosque cano, the translator’s altaque Taprobanae tetigerunt littora terrae (hyper-) Virgilianizes ‘Passaram ainda além da 77

Taprobana’

through

assimilation

to

Aen.

1.2–3

Laviniaque venit/litora and (note the adjective) 7 altae moenia Romae.

78

In the case of the Ronsard we may adduce, parenthetically, with Philip Ford, a notable intervention by Lambinus – Denys Lambin – to whose 1567 edition of Horace we owe the quotation of Dorat’s Latin translation of the Franciade proem, 1.1–16 (one of two passages he is known to have rendered), before the publication of the 79

original. Commenting on line 141 of the Ars poetica, Horace’s version of the opening of the Odyssey, dic mihi, Musa, virum…, Lambin writes (in Ford’s translation): I should like at this point to take the chance and opportunity to excerpt some lines in French by that most illustrious royal poet Pierre de Ronsard, from the Franciade, a French epic which is clearly comparable to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. I also wish to make them available to be read by the readers of my commentaries in the Latin translation of Jean Dorat, royal poet and a man endowed with rare learning, so that foreign nations may understand the existence and quality of the geniuses produced by our France, and the extent to which literary works and liberal education flourish amongst our people (… ut intelligant exterae nationes quae et qualia ingenia efferat nostra Gallia, et quantopere

apud

nos

liberalesque doctrinae).

80

floreant

bonae

litterae,

Lambin uses Dorat’s Latin to anchor the Franciade in pan-European tradition (so Ford). But also, through paratextual association with the famous Horatian lemma to which it is keyed, Ars Poetica 136–42 at 141, his note 81

particularizes

that

claim,

signalling

an

advance

alignment of Ronsard’s poem with the canons of successful Homeric and post-Homeric epos (140 quanto rectius…), and its dissociation from the bad kind of epic inflation deplored in Horace’s immediately preceding verse (139): parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Not all readers of the Franciade have seen it that way. [S]ed nunc non erat his locus: this is not an essay on the Ars Poetica, nor indeed on the Franciade. However, to resume the matter of Latin-twinned readings, here is a post-Horatian question that one might ask, not so much about Ronsard’s and Camões’s high-prestige national epics themselves as about the many other contributions to the genre (good, bad and indifferent, vernacular and Latin) which lie behind and in front of them. If the incipit of an early modern epic sets up an echochamber of hyper-Virgilianism, here accessed in a novel way through the early readings of classicizing translators, is this a cause for celebration or for claustrophobia?

I think that some of my early modernist colleagues, faced with the sheer quantity of unfiltered literary production available to them from their period, including post-Virgilian epics by the bushel, would say that there are

points

where

hyper-Virgilianism,

however

fascinating (and, personally, I always find it fascinating), can become something pathological, the sign of a genre trapped by an ancient code rather than transcending it. And they might add something even more disturbing to the philological sensibilities which we classicists tend to bring to our own small corpus of surviving epic texts, namely that increasing subtlety in such Virgilianism may not always be an index of rising quality but sometimes an index of deepening pathology. Others, however, might push back by affirming the continuing cultural work done by hyper-Virgilianism as an engine of intertextual community across national and linguistic boundaries, with diptych consciousness (if we may so term it) functioning as a diplomatic passport to guarantee free movement for poets and readers across frontiers of space and time. Both groups might agree in urging attention not just to the aesthetics but also to the sociology of hyper-Virgilianism – which does indeed get more

interesting

as

the

quantity

available

for

study

proliferates. I close with a return to true single-author diptych, and a nod to Ronsard’s fellow Pléiade-poet Joachim Du Bellay, author of a literary manifesto on the importance of responding to the classical tradition not in Latin but in a certain kind of French (La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise, 1549); but/and an author whose actual poetic life was lived, or staged, with engaging contradictions, between Latin and French. Here is the opening couplet of Du Bellay’s poem of praise to Ronsard, published both in French (À Pierre de Ronsard) and in Latin (Ad P. Ronsardum, lyrae Gallicae principem = Elegiae 6); the Latin version was probably written first (but probably, in the initial compliment to be considered here, resumes an earlier poem’s address in French):

82

Ronsarde,

Aoniae

merito

pars maxima turbae,

Ronsard, le plus grand’ part de nostre docte bande,

pars animae quondam

Et de mon ame encor’ la partie

dimidiata meae…

plus grande…

83

And here is the closing couplet of the same poem, in the Latin (73–4) and in the French (75–6):

scribe, aude, atque aliquid iam

Escry, ose, et fay tant,

tandem Gallia iactet,

Ronsard, à ceste fois,

Graecia cui cedat, cedat et

Que le Grec et Latin cede à

Ausonia.

nostre François.

84

Intertextually, these poem-bracketing couplets have something in common: Du Bellay has begun and ended his praise-poem with Virgilian allusions: not this time (as in the preceding pages) allusions to verses by Virgil but allusions to verses about Virgil, in the first instance by Horace and in the second by Propertius. Let me explain. As Geneviève Demerson notes, the opening profession of long-term fellowship, with its deft intraBellayan adjustments of proportion and time (pars … quondam dimidiata; ‘encor’ la partie plus grande’), is a citation and reapplication of Horace’s famous statement of fellowship with Virgil at a moment when his fellow-poet is about to embark on a hazardous voyage (Odes 1.3.5– 8):

85

navis, quae tibi creditum debes Vergilium, finibus Atticis reddas incolumem precor, et serves animae dimidium meae.

86

The effect is to superimpose Ronsard upon Virgil, and the Pléiade upon the poetic community of Augustan Rome. But more is involved here than a generalized award of ‘classic’ status to an admired contemporary. Du Bellay’s balancing exhortation to Ronsard at the close (scribe, aude etc., quoted above), at a point where his poem’s attention

has

unmistakably

turned

to

the

Franciade,

upon

Propertius’

draws

complimentary

reordering of the epic canon (2.34.63–6) to encompass the Aeneid: Vergilio (61) … qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat arma iactaque Lavinis moenia litoribus. cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite, Grai! nescioquid maius nascitur Iliade.

87

More than that, however, Du Bellay’s near-quotation of this Propertian prediction summons up a very specific moment in the mid to late 20s

BCE

when the not-yet

Aeneid is the talk of the town, a transformative epic on the horizon but not yet realized. And when the allusion at the start of ‘To Ronsard’ is understood as the ‘twin’ of the allusion at the end, we may be prompted to make a connection with a longstanding interpretation of Horace Odes 1.3, itself published in 23

BCE,

which reads that

envoi to a Virgil about to set sail on a dangerous voyage as a ship-of-poetry allegory, concerned to hint at the hazards of the unprecedented and (yes) in-progress Aeneid.

88

This is, then, a carefully curated allusive pairing, which mobilizes, not once but twice, a very particular moment in Augustan literary history, and a very particular kind of interaction between major poets, allowing Du Bellay to figure his contemporary not as the French Virgil, but as the French not-yet (but-soon-to-be) Virgil: what results is a poetic statement not so much about achieved classicism (which would be too easy), as about classicism as process. We may observe, finally, that in a pattern already seen in other pairs of texts quoted in these most recent pages (but this time with a poet who is his own translator) Du Bellay’s opening and closing allusions to his Roman intertexts are a little less insistent in the vernacular version, a little more insistent (verging, as noted, upon verbatim quotation) in the Latin version – whether this be a conscious choice or just a matter of some natural dilution of Latinity in vernacular translation. Maybe in this case the former. Let us note (with Geneviève

Demerson ) that at a key moment Du Bellay’s self89

referentially parallel French version of his own poem to Ronsard does indeed measurably ‘background’ and even mute the Virgilian model (Ad Ronsardum 63–4, À Ronsard 65–6), quicquid agis (nam te nunquam

Bref, tout ce que tu fais (car

cessare

quoy que Ronsard face,

putandum est) omnia

divino

digna

Ronsard

Marone sonas.

ne

temps)

90

perd a

point

tousjours

bonne grace.

perhaps as a programmatic assertion of Francophone independence (the narrative favoured by mainstream French

critical

tradition)

or

perhaps

just

in

acknowledgment of an inevitable decentering of the engagement with Rome in the vernacular version of the praise poem. Will Ronsard be more likely to finish the Franciade with ‘divine Virgil’ as his task-master, or driven by his own French self-motivation? Is it better to work with literary history in or out of Latin? ‘Enfant, prens accroissance …’. The conversation continues. 91

1

My thanks to Syrithe Pugh for putting together the 2015

symposium of early modernists and classical Latinists

from which the present volume arises; we classicists owe an especial debt to Syrithe for the ways in which she is bringing Latin back into the conversations of a great Scottish university. Since Aberdeen, shorter versions of my own chapter have been presented in 2017 in a panel on ‘Renaissance multilingualism’ at the Renaissance Society of America (organizers Roland Greene and Vanessa Glauser), and in 2016 at UNC Chapel Hill and at the Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Graduate Research Group of the University of Washington. In the months before Aberdeen, versions were presented at UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and in the panel ‘What can Early Modernity do for Classics?’ at the Society for Classical Studies (organizers Ariane Schwartz and Pramit Chaudhuri). Some of these ideas have their farthest origin in my 2013 J. H. Gray Lectures for the University of Cambridge (and indeed in a Latin lecture at the Cambridge Triennial back in 2011). Various elements have been aired elsewhere as part of my larger project Poetry across Languages, funded by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, held in 2014–15. For generous feedback at every stage I am indebted to fellow-participants and audience members in all venues, as also to Maggie Kilgour, Susanna Braund, Erick Ramalho, and, as always, Denis Feeney. I quote Marvell from the 2007 revised

Longman edition of Nigel Smith (my translations of the Latin poems are taken or adapted from the 2003 monograph of Estelle Haan), and I quote Milton’s Paradise Lost from the Longman 2nd edition of Alastair Fowler; I follow the modernized orthography of these editions, and apologize for any inconsistencies of orthographic practice elsewhere in my chapter. My opening sentence invokes Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature (Cambridge MA, 2016); cf. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge, 1998), 74– 75. 2

A Letter to Dr Ingelo …, number 53 in Nigel Smith (ed.),

The Poems of Andrew Marvell (rev. edn, Harlow, 2007). 3

Estelle Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From

Text to Context (Brussels, 2003), esp. 11–14 and 57–72, including discussion of the curriculum at Hull Grammar School, probably attended by Marvell in 1629–1633, and also of the poet’s tutoring of Mary Fairfax at Nun Appleton in 1650–1652. 4

Numbers 53 and 58 in Smith’s edition; Haan, Andrew

Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 121–167, with Philip Hardie, ‘Ovid and Virgil at the North Pole: Marvell’s ‘A Letter to Dr Ingelo’, in J. Ingleheart (ed.), Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile after Ovid (Oxford, 2011), 135–152.

5

‘Enough of plague, and enough of his dreadful

thunderbolt has the father already sent, and, with right hand aglow, smiting our citadels, he has terrified the city.’ 6

Minor points of divergence (marked by absence of

typographical emphasis): the Horatian model had enough ‘snow’ and dreadful ‘hail’ sent ‘to earth’; ‘our’ citadels (Marvell) were in Horace ‘sacred’ citadels. 7

For my limited purposes here I do not put this in the

context of other contemporary exercises of this kind, many of them worked upon this same Horatian Ode: see the extraordinarily rich discussion of the Ad Regem Carolum Parodia in Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 19–56, esp. 23–35. 8

Further typographical signalling here and below: I have

employed unbolded italics where an element recurs, but is displaced within its line or stanza. 9

‘We have seen the river Cam, his waves violently cast

back from his right-hand shore… and straying over his left bank with Jupiter’s sanctioning he glides, a sadder river.’ In the Horatian original the river was the ‘tawny Tiber’, the shore was ‘Etruscan’, and the river was ‘uxorious’ (towards Ilia, mentioned in Horace line 17); I give unbolded italics to ‘uxorius’ because Marvell’s own recustomization of the river erotics had already yielded uxorem earlier in the stanza (in a sedes where Horace had ultorem). More on uxorius below.

10

The Latin cento: Scott McGill, Virgil Recomposed: The

Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity (Oxford and New York, 2005); Martin Bažil, Centones Christiani: Métamorphoses d’une forme intertextuelle dans la poésie latine chrétienne de l’Antiquité tardive (Paris, 2009); cf. Sarah Knight and Stefan Tilg (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin (Oxford, 2015), index s.v. cento. 11

Another way to get critical traction on the Parodia is to

put it into intertextual dialogue with Marvell’s later ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return From Ireland’, a fruitful approach: see again Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 19–56, this time at 49–56. 12

I abbreviate a little here, but plan to return to the

Parodia in a later publication. 13

For example, in line 19, quoted above, Marvell’s

adjustment of Horace’s non probante (‘not sanctioning’) to comprobante irons out an inconsistency with the previous Horatian emphasis (1–4) upon Jupiter’s acts of supernatural disruption, which seems already to have worried Porphyrio (R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, A Commentary on Horace, Odes Book 1 (Oxford, 1970) on Hor. Carm. 1.2.19). 14

Nisbet–Hubbard ibid., with intro. xliv; so too Odes

1.25.11 (inter/lunia, like u/xorius a special effect), 2.16.7.

15

‘Whether in his felicitous features a little prince imitates

Charles or whether the sweet image of nurturing Mary graces a daughter …’ 16

‘Whether with changed features you, winged, imitate a

young man on earth, son of nurturing Maia, deigning to be called the avenger of Caesar …’ 17

First century

BCE

foreign policy issues with Parthians

(poeticized by Horace as Persians: Nisbet–Hubbard, see n. 13), recycled as seventeenth-century foreign policy issues with Turks (Turkish pirates in 1636–1637): Smith (ed.), Poems of Andrew Marvell numbers 53 and 58; Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 40n.102. 18

‘[Youth made sparse] have heard that the heavens have

sharpened a sword by which the oppressive Turks should better be perishing’; in Horace, ‘will hear that the citizens …the oppressive Persians…’ (see below). 19 20

Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 40. Quoted by Smith (ed.), Poems of Andrew Marvell

numbers 53 and 58, against the equivocations of McQueen and Rockwell (William A. McQueen and Kiffin A. Rockwell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell (Chapel Hill, 1964), 10). 21

Along with the two pairs to be considered in this section,

see the complementary Latin and English dedicationpoems to Dr Witty (numbers 36 and 37 in Smith (ed.), Poems of Andrew Marvell), with Haan, Andrew

Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 95–111, esp. 100; also the two poems to Fairfax on the topography of Bilbrough Hill (Smith 47 and 48), the Latin and English versions of an epigram ‘upon Blood’s attempt to steal the crown’ (Smith 65 and 66), and the Latin version of one of its stanzas printed at the end of Eyes and Tears (Smith 10). 22

Opening lines: ‘You see how a little gem of Eastern dew

descends and, sprung from a rosy bosom, flows onto roses?’ Closing lines: ‘Not otherwise did manna, overflowing with a blessed feast, lie as a frozen drop upon the deserted ground. A frozen drop on the ground but, drawn by kindly suns, it returns, purer, to its own stars from which it fell’ (tr. Haan). 23

For the first two puns see Haan, Andrew Marvell’s

Latin Poetry, 77–8 and 80–1; on the third, my suggestion is that (alongside its correspondence with ‘distil’) stilla combines with ad sua … astra (46) to evoke stella. As the implicit stilla/stella modulates between two Latin vowelsounds, so the explicit ros/rosa and solum/sol each modulate

between

different

(and

metrically

distinguished) qualities of Latin ‘o’. Still in the area of sound and verse structure, the verbatim resumption of stilla gelata solo in the Latin (same hemiepes closing the pentameter and opening the hexameter of successive couplets) reverberates in the English in a resumptive

pattern across the equivalent line-break involving a cognate of gelata: ‘congealèd … congealed’. 24

For these word-plays see Estelle Haan, ‘From neo-Latin

to vernacular: Marvell’s bilingualism and Renaissance pedagogy’, in Gilles Sambras (ed.), New Perspectives on Andrew Marvell (Reims, 2008), 53–54; for Sun/Son cf. Daniel Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual dialogues: Marvell’s paired Latin and English poems’, Studies in Philology 98 (2001), 378–400 at 382. On cross-linguistic punning add also Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 78n.112 on Ros 1– 2: ‘It is tempting to see in orta (2) a further pun, this time macaronic, on the English verb (in its perfect tense) “rose”’. 25

Thus Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual dialogues,’ 381: ‘…the Latin

poem is more pagan, more likely to refer to Roman culture, and more interested in the mundane world that the dewdrop wishes to leave behind, whereas “On a Drop of Dew” is more comfortable with including references to Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophy and is more prone to formal and figural innovations’; excellent discussion at 381–386 (anticipating his own treatment of Hortus and The Garden, of which more below). 26

On the ‘strong’ but ‘not absolutely convincing’ proposal

to redate The Garden to c.1668 (based upon intertextual similarities with works of the late 1660s) see Smith, Poems of Andrew Marvell, 152.

27

‘…far off, the green plants and the like-coloured shade

had concealed you’. Cf. Haan, ‘From neo-Latin to vernacular,’ 58–59. 28

On the facts of mathematical history which give to the

imagery of ‘naught’ and ‘nothing’ an inherently nonRoman or post-Roman skew see Robert Kaplan, The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford, 1999) on the ‘history of zero’, as suggestively cited by Denis

Feeney,

‘Doing

the

numbers:

the

Roman

mathematics of civil war in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra’, in B. Breed, C. Damon and A.Rossi (eds), Citizens of Discord: Rome and its Civil Wars (Oxford, 2010), 273–292, at 284–285, in a comparative discussion of Roman mathematics of civil war in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and its ancient sources. Among early modern passages cited by Kaplan himself (99) to illustrate the continuing frisson surrounding the idea of zero is the following from John Donne in the 1620s: ‘The less anything is, the less we know it: how invisible, how unintelligible a thing, then, is this Nothing!’ 29

As for the ‘green shade’, that finds an agreed point of

origin in Virg. Ecl. 9.19–20 quis humum florentibus herbis/spargeret aut viridi fontis induceret umbra? (‘who would strew the ground with flowery herbage or clothe

the

springs

with

green

shade?’):

see

H.M.Margoliouth, P. Legouis and E.E.Duncan-Jones, The

Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (3rd edn, Oxford, 1971) on Garden 47–8, tracking the image from Virgil, who ‘seems to have been thinking of the colour of the foliage of the trees affording the shade’, to the early modern poetic idea that ‘the shadow cast by the foliage also had a greenish hue’. 30

‘What madness, alas, for the palm and the laurel or for

the simple grass sways your hearts, o mortal race?’ 31

That is, does versat in the Latin incipit-line encode a

mildly macaronic self-annotation, flagging Hortus as a ‘version’ of The Garden? (Cf. OED s.v. version 1a (since 1582) ‘a rendering … from one language into another’). No ‘maze’ in the Latin; but, after versat (turns, bends, sways), a series of –plex (‘–fold’) words runs through the opening lines: 2 simplicis (‘onefold’), 5 implexi (corresponding to ‘weave’ in line 8 of The Garden), 8 Simplicitas (where line 10 of The Garden has ‘Innocence’). 32

‘Kindly Quiet, I hold you, and you, Simplicity, sister of

Quiet! For it is you that I have long sought in vain through temples, through cities, through the lofty palaces of kings.’ 33

‘The herds of men and the bellowing of the Circus do

not please me, nor the uproar of the forum …’ 34

This is to extend a point made by Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual

dialogues,’

390–391.

Note

in

this

the

punning

collaboration of boatus, itself suggestive of bos and its derivatives. 35

The contrast registered here and below is of a piece with

the complication of English ‘delicious Solitude’ in Latin consortia sola (19), ‘solitary communities’, well flagged by Haan, ‘From neo-Latin to vernacular,’ 60 as an ‘oxymoronic phrase’. 36

‘O if I may be allowed to have violated your retreats as I

wander, wearied and panting for a better life! Look after your new countryman and, o leafy citizens, elect me, having obtained my wish, into your flowery kingdoms.’ 37

On the 1650–1652 dating for the poem, in the

immediate future; on a later 1660s dating, already in the past. 38

Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual dialogues’, a key discussion. On his

application of the Bahktinian chronotope (alongside Bakhtinian dialogism) to Marvell’s paired English and Latin poems, see esp. 379–380 (on the Latin versions): ‘[Marvell] imagines his speaker in classical Rome, both spatially and temporally, so that the places and events to which he refers are more likely to be associated with the age of Augustus than with his native England…His Latin poetry also tends to make fuller use of classical mythology than does his English poetry, as if he thought those stories and their meanings fit more comfortably within a Latin context…One should not press these differences too far…’;

cf. 399–400. My one reservation about Jaeckle’s clearly mapped approach is that his commitment to the English version as the clear linguistic winner in each case, ‘more open and flexible’ (378), sells the post-Humanist play of the Latin versions, and esp. (in my view) the close attentiveness of the English versions to the Latin versions, a little short. 39

‘The gods above rejoice … and although they have

known both nymphs and goddesses so many times, now each attains a superior desire in a tree. Jupiter, neglecting his wife, is dying with love for an ancient oak: Juno has not grieved thus for any other rival. No traces defile the marriage-bed of the Lemnian god, nor does Mars remember Venus if the ash is present. Phoebus pressed upon the trail of the beautiful Daphne so that she might become a laurel, but nothing beyond that had he sought. And as to the reason why the goat-footed Pan pursued the fleeing Syrinx, this was so that he would be able to discover the sonorous reed.’ 40

On Hortus 32–48 at large, see Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual

dialogues,’ 392–394; in what follows I press lines 32–7 anew. 41

‘Here Love, divested of his wings, walks about clad in

sandals, laying aside his unstrung bows and his hissing weapons, and he upturns his torches and does not wish always to be feared; or else he lies stretched out and falls

asleep upon his quiver; not inclined to listen even though Cytherea calls, nor do vain dreams relay his previous profligacies.’ 42

For non-operational wings, bow, torches and quiver cf.

Ov. Am. 3.9.7–9; with Hortus 34 invertitque faces (‘inversion’ of weaponry) cf. Am. 3.9.7 eversamque pharetram. Equally but differently neutralized in his iconography is the disgraced Amor of Pont. 3.3.13–20, who appears to the exiled Ovid in a kind of dreamepiphany (3.3.3–4, 11–12); cf., though differently, the somnia vana of Hortus 37. 43

‘As for me, if ever I have violated your stocks, no Neaera,

Chloe, Faustina, Corinna will be read, but each tree shall bear its own seal on its own bark. O dear plane tree, cypress, poplar, elm!’ 44

For key incidences of these female names in classical

sources (especially pastoral and elegiac) and in the classical tradition, see McQueen and Rockwell, Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, 26, as also for the Latin play at 30 in proprio … libro between ‘bark’ and ‘book’ (a favourite among Roman poets). 45

‘Computes its time [~thyme] …’: although the English

pun (sharpened by the available seventeenth-century spelling of ‘thyme’ as ‘time’) cannot be replicated in the Latin, it is nonetheless glossed in the Latin (Hortus 56 horologo sua pensa thymo signare videtur ‘…seems to

mark its tasks by means of thyme, its horologe’); see Margoliouth, Legouis and Duncan-Jones, Poems and Letters on Garden 70. Moreover the Latin poem offers its own (ring-compositional) play between two kinds of tempora, ‘times’ (as in 57 temporis…lapsus) and ‘brows’ (as in 4 tempora nec…praecingat), a favourite of Ovid’s, as Marvell perhaps knew. [T]empora (4) are also picked up by templa (8), a Latin juxtaposition unlocking an English pun (temples of head, temples): so, felicitously, Haan, ‘From neo-Latin to vernacular’, 55. 46

‘Nor will you, the garden’s maker, depart without a

pleasing song, you who in brief plants and abundant blossom have marked out the growing hours and the intervals of day. There a brighter sun traverses the fragrant signs; and in place of the fierce Bull, in place of the drawn claw of the Crab, it glides towards the carefree shades of the violet and the rose.’ 47

[F]ragrantia signa in Hortus 52 as a variation upon an

expected flagrantia signa: so too Smith, Poems numbers 53 and 58. But also, this punning transformation may owe something to a famous (and twice-repeated) line of Virgil about (precisely) honeybees and fragrant thyme, already on contextual grounds recognizable as a source, and in particular to an orthographic peculiarity of that line: Geo. 4.169 = Aen. 1.436 fervet opus redolentque thymo fraglantia mella (‘the work seethes and the fragrant

honey is scented with thyme’). This exotic spelling (rather than fragrantia) has strong support from the oldest MSS on, and is decisively favoured by current editors of Virgil. More generally, conflations and confusions in Latin among flagro, fragro and fraglo are ancient, persistent in MSS, and in principle accessible to Marvell (Thesaurus Linguae Latinae 6.1.1237.61–1238.8; Robinson Ellis (ed.), Catulli Veronensis Liber (Oxford, 1867), 344–349; cf. in English OED s.v. flagrant 6). 48

William A. McQueen, ‘The missing stanzas in Marvell’s

Hortus’, Philological Quarterly 44 (1965), 173–179; Jaeckle, ‘Bilingual dialogues,’ 390 and 395–398; cf. Haan, ‘From neo-Latin to vernacular’, 56–60. 49

Haan, ‘From neo-Latin to vernacular’, 56–60,

developing McQueen, ‘Missing Stanzas,’ 177–179. I began my own discussion by considering Hortus 10–11 as a Latin ‘set-up’ for Garden 47–8. So too, one can argue a case for reading Hortus 32–7 as a set–up for Garden stanza 7. Back where the Latin poem and garden offers its full visualization of winged Amor at rest, the English (as we saw) responds with only the most vestigial of personifications. But later, in the unparalleled stanzas, the English Garden ‘finds’ its own winged creature at rest, Marvell’s bird-like neoplatonic ‘soul’ (52–6 ‘My soul into the boughs does glide:/There like a bird it sits, and sings,/Then whets, and combs its silver wings;/And, till

prepared for longer flight,/Waves in its plumes the various light’). A mythological creature had shed his wings (32 exutis…alis) in the Latin Hortus. Now a winged creature is preparing for flight again (Garden 55–6); but in the meantime it has been transformed into something more metaphysical than before: from Cupid into Psyche (as it were …). 50

Note that it is right after the sentence about ‘two

Paradises’ that the Latin Hortus and English Garden resume their step-by-step engagement. My suggestion is of course incompatible with the tentatively revived idea (Smith, Poems on Hortus, intro. n.; cf.C.E.Bain, ‘The Latin poetry of Andrew Marvell’, Philological Quarterly 38 (1959), 438–443) that the English poem was composed before the Latin one. 51

For malum as a catch-all Latin word for tree-fruit see

OLD s.v. 1 (citing Gk. μᾶλον, μῆλον), with 2, incl. malum Persicum ‘peach’. Marvell’s ‘melon’ (though of course not a tree-fruit) sustains and ‘annotates’ the pattern: cf. Lat. melo-pepo, Gk. μηλο-πέπων. For the smooth-skinned ‘nectarene’ as a new word, and a new variety of peach, in seventeenth-century England see OED s.v. nectarine n.1, including this 1629 quotation ‘… although they have beene with us not many yeares …’ 52

Bermudas 13–14 ‘He [i.e. God] gave us this eternal

spring,/Which here enamels ev’rything’, with17–24: ‘He

hangs in shades the orange bright,/Like golden lamps in a

green

night./And

does

in

the

pom’granates

close,/Jewels more rich than Ormuz shows./He makes the figs our mouths to meet,/And throws the melons at our feet;/But apples plants of such a price,/No trees could ever bear them twice’. For Marvell’s vision here of a newworld Eden given by God’s providence see Smith, Poems, 54–56, with a delicious caveat at 55: ‘The melons of l. 22 were planted by the first settlers, not found naturally growing on the islands as the poem implies’. 53

Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry, 66–94.

54

OED s.v. orient B.1.a, with Smith, Poems, on Drop of

Dew 1 ‘orient’: not just ‘morning (because from the east, and hence associated with daybreak)’ but ‘brilliant, lustrous, shining (applied to precious stones, especially pearls, from the East)’. Cf. Miriam Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England, (Philadelphia, 2014), 162–172, esp. 162–166 and at 164, ‘…orient pearls were the pearliest pearls: merchants with the Goldsmith’s company in London frequently used the term orient to indicate a pearl particularly high in nacre and thus high in value’. 55

…and enduringly controversial (not least in its capacity

to generate disciplinary anxieties within English): John K.

Hale,

Milton’s

Languages:

The

Impact

of

Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge, 1997), 105–107

and 129–130; cf. Estelle Haan, Both English and Latin: Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Milton’s Neo-Latin Writings (Philadelphia, 2012), 167–168; Thomas N. Corns, Milton’s Language (Oxford, 1990), 30–32, 88–91 and esp. 95–100; Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), 63–65 and 107–111. 56

Negative exemplum: Charles Martindale, John Milton

and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (London, 1986), 171–175; Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, 125–126 and 148– 149; cf. Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London, 1971), 264 (from a 1960 essay): ‘[Milton] is constantly disclaiming these heathen fancies, but as constantly putting them in; in poetry all buts are partly ands, and an elaborate demonstration of the total difference between x and y is undertaken only if they are in some occult manner very alike. This is commonly admitted: no passage in Paradise Lost is more admired than that in which Milton explains that Proserpina’s ‘‘faire field of Enna’’ (iv.268–9) was not Eden …’. 57

Fowler (ed.), Paradise Lost on 2.491 and 4.153; OED

s.v. 58

Stephen Hinds, ‘Landscape with figures: aesthetics of

place in the Metamorphoses and its tradition’, in P. Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (Cambridge, 2002), 131.

59

An intensification: see already in the preceding lines

Milton’s famous restaging of a famous Virgilian ecphrasis loci, flagged by a moment of close Latinate citation: PL 4.140–2 ‘A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend/Shade above shade, a woody theatre/Of stateliest view’; cf. Virg. Aen. 1.164–5 tum silvis scaena coruscis/desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra (‘above, too, is a backdrop of shimmering woods with an overhanging grove, black with bristling shade’). 60

Diodorus 3.46.4, cited by Fowler on 159–165. For Satan

as merchant trader cf. PL 2.636–43 with Fowler ibid. 61

Some answers: John K. Hale, ‘The significance of the

early

translations

of

Paradise

Lost’,

Philological

Quarterly 63 (1984), 31–8 and 49–51; cf. Estelle Haan, ‘“Latinizing” Milton: Paradise Lost, Latinitas and the long eighteenth century’ in Angelica Duran, Islam Issa, and Jonathan R. Olson (eds), Milton in Translation (Oxford, forthcoming 2017; non vidi). 62

Latin translation of Book 1 only, with facing English

text: publication history and biographical information traced by John T. Shawcross, ‘A note on Milton’s Latin translator, M.B.’, Milton Quarterly 21.2 (1987), 65–66 (‘…a Fellow of Trinity Hall [Cambridge], 1688–92, as a student of civil law. He was ejected as a nonjuror and left without a degree’).

63

[P]rimordia mundi ‘first elements of the universe’: cf.

Ov. Met. 15.67, with Philip Hardie, Ovidio: Metamorfosi, Volume VI: Libri XIII–XV (Milan, 2015), 15.67; primordia is found seventy-two times in Lucretius. 64

Muse and Moses: a pun perhaps helped by the long-

traditional identification of Moses with the mythical Greek proto-singer Musaeus (OCD s.v. Musaeus (1)), first promulgated by Hellenistic Jewish writers. 65

My English translation of Bold’s expanded Latin

phrasing. 66

Thomas Power: a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,

in 1684–1691, who later assisted Dryden in the translation of Juvenal: John T. Shawcross, ‘A note on T.P.’s Latin translation of Paradise Lost’, Milton Quarterly 21.2 (1987), 66–68; cf. Hale, ‘Significance’, 32 and 34–35. Power’s translation of PL 1 was printed in 1691; further published excerpts followed, and Power’s manuscript translation of the whole poem is confirmed by Shawcross (67) as still existing in the library of Trinity College, where its presence is first mentioned in 1739. 67

Translations of these Aeneid passages: 1.208–9 ‘such

things he spoke; and sick with weighty cares he feigns hope on his face, and deep in his heart he stifles his anguish’; 4.476–7 ‘…and, accosting her sorrowful sister, she hides her plan with her face and shows clear hope on

her brow’; 1.102 ‘as he flings forth such words…’; 7.344–5 ‘a woman’s cares and passions were searing her, aflame’. See Aen. 7.341–3 exim Gorgoneis Allecto infecta

68

venenis/… tacitum … obsedit limen Amatae (‘forthwith Allecto, imbued with Gorgons’ poisons, … besieged the silent threshold of Amata’); for Allecto’s provenance in the infernis … tenebris (‘nether darkness’) cf. Aen. 7.325, 561–71. As it happens Allecto’s attack on Amata in Aeneid 7 was a locus classicus for Renaissance epicists looking for language to represent the workings of the devil: Tobias Gregory, From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic (Chicago, 2006), 68–76, a reference I owe to Pramit Chaudhuri. Jim O’Hara points out to me the (cento-like) ‘rewriting’

69

of

Virgil’s

talia

iactanti

in

Power’s

verbatim

appropriation. For Power iactare here renders Milton’s ‘vaunt’, a meaning the verb often has in Virgil but not, as it happens, here at Aen. 1.102, where the sense is rather ‘cry despairingly’. 70

Such translations parallel and supplement, in their way,

the corpus of early commentary upon Paradise Lost: thus (e.g.) the 1749 variorum edition of Thomas Newton adduces Aen. 1.208–9 for PL 1.125–6: Earl Miner, William Moeck and Steven Jablonski (eds), Paradise Lost, 1668–1968: Three Centuries of Commentary (Lewisburg, 2004), 60.

71

Both quoted from Philip Ford, The Judgment of

Palaemon:

The

Contest

between

Neo-Latin

and

Vernacular Poetry in Renaissance France (Leiden, 2013), 162–163. 72

‘Muse who dwells on the heights of Parnassus, enter my

lips and sing for me of the race of French kings descended from Francion, the son of Trojan Hector, called in his tender youth Astyanax and by the name of Scamander. Tell me of this Trojan’s attacks, wars, speeches, and how often on the seas, in spite of Neptune and Juno, he overcame fortune, and escaped dangers on the land, before building the great walls of Paris’ (tr. Ford). 73

This Latin version of the Lusiads (there were others), by

Thomas de Faria, published in 1622, is accessible in an on-line facsimile from the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal: http://purl.pt/14108/3/#/21; I owe to Matthew Gorey my knowledge of the translation and of the on-line link. 74

‘Arms are my theme, and those matchless heroes/Who

from Portugal’s far western shores/By oceans where none had ventured/Voyaged to Taprobana and beyond…’ (tr. Landeg White). 75

‘…before he could found the walls of the city of Paris.’

76

Just below, Ronsard’s ‘En vostre honneur j’entreprens

cet ouvrage/De long labeur’ (‘In your honour I undertake this toilsome work’; Franciade 14–15, addressed to King

Charles) becomes Dorat’s in vestros opus hoc mihi surgit honores,/argumentum ingens; the last two words (‘a mighty theme’) allow the Franciade to channel a famous (Quint. Inst. 5.10.10) Virgilian phrase, which, in similarly enjambed apposition, designates the shield of Turnus at Aen. 7.791, argumentum ingens, in its own way a micronarrative of national lineage. 77

‘[T]ouched the lofty shores of the land of Taprobana’ (=

Ceylon). 78

Note how ‘passaram ainda além…’ (‘passed far beyond

…’) is overruled by tetigerunt to give the voyage a clearer and more Virgilian end-point. 79

According to Ford, Judgment of Palaemon, 160–161,

Lambin reproduces 1.1–16 and ‘a passage of 104 lines, which did not find its way into the printed text, containing Cassandre’s prophecy concerning Francus’. 80

Translation of Lambin’s scholarly Latin commentary

from Ford, Judgment of Palaemon, 161. 81

Horace, AP 136–42 (emphases mine) nec sic incipies ut

scriptor cyclicus olim:/‘Fortunam Priami cantabo et nobile bellum.’/quid dignum tanto feret hic promissor hiatu?/parturient

montes,

nascetur

ridiculus

mus./quanto rectius hic qui nil molitur inepte:/‘Dic mihi, Musa, virum, captae post tempora Troiae/qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes’. (‘And you are not to begin like the cyclic poet of old: “Of Priam’s fortune will I

sing and war illustrious.” If he opens his mouth as wide as that, how can the promiser bring forth anything to match it? The mountains shall be in labour, and there shall be born – a ridiculous mouse. How much better was the way of that poet whose every endeavour is apt: “Tell me, Muse, of him who, after Troy had fallen, saw the manners and the towns of many men.”’) 82

For that ‘earlier poem’s address’ see the opening line of

Regrets 8: ‘Ne t’esbahis Ronsard, la moitié de mon ame…’ (‘Do not wonder, Ronsard, you who are half my soul…’); text and tr. quoted from Richard Helgerson, Joachim Du Bellay: ‘The Regrets’, with ‘The Antiquities of Rome’, Three Latin Elegies and ‘The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language’ (Philadelphia, 2006), 58–59 (this edition also contains the Ad Ronsardum). The relative chronology is uncertain since the French À Pierre de Ronsard was published only posthumously (in 1568). The Regrets and the Latin Elegiae were among several works published by Du Bellay in 1558; again the chronology of composition (and revision) is unclear. 83

‘Ronsard, you who by merit hold the highest place in the

Aonian troop, you who were once the half part of my soul …’; contrast the French ‘still the greater part …’. 84

‘Write, be bold, and let France boast at last of something

to which Greece may yield, and Ausonia (=Italy) yield as well.’

85

Cf. Geneviève Demerson (ed.), Joachim Du Bellay:

oeuvres poétiques VII: oeuvres latines: poemata (Paris, 1984) on Ad Ronsardum 2 with Geneviève Demerson, ‘Joachim Du Bellay traducteur de lui-même’, in Grahame Castor and Terence Cave (eds), Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France (Oxford, 1984), 118 and 122. (She offers no corresponding note on Ad Ronsardum 73–4.) 86

‘O ship, who owe back Virgil, entrusted to you, I pray

that you restore him safe to Attic coasts, and preserve half of my soul.’ 87

‘Virgil … who now wakes to life the arms of Trojan

Aeneas and the walls established on the Lavinian shores. Yield, writers of Rome, yield, writers of Greece! Something (I know not what) greater than the Iliad is coming to birth.’ 88

An interpretation of the Horatian ode likely to have

been congenial to Du Bellay, no stranger himself to allegorical ships of poetry (see esp. Elegiae 1 with Stephen Hinds, ‘Black-Sea Latin, Du Bellay, and the barbarian turn: Tristia, Regrets, Translations’, in J.Ingleheart (ed.), Two Thousand Years of Solitude (Oxford, 2011), 75 and n.30). On Horace, Odes 1.3, the Aeneid and ‘the dilemma of writing’ see Joseph Pucci, ‘The dilemma of writing: Augustine, Confessions 4.6 and Horace, Odes 1.3’, Arethusa 24 (1991), 257–281, esp. 258, 269–270,

276; cf. Stephen Harrison, ‘The primal voyage and the ocean of epos: two aspects of metapoetic imagery in Catullus, Virgil and Horace’, Dictynna 4 (2007) https://dictynna.revues.org/146, para. 31. 89

Demerson, ‘Joachim Du Bellay traducteur de lui-

même’, 121. 90

‘Whatever you do (for we must suppose that you are

never inactive), all that you sing is worthy of divine Maro’; contrast the French, with the reference to Virgil omitted: ‘whatever you do…is in all ways full of grace’. 91

I quote, tendentiously, from À Ronsard 53. The Latin

version of Du Bellay’s poem to Ronsard has seventy-four lines, the French version seventy-six: a perfect diptych, matched couplet for couplet, except for one archly selfreferential ‘growth spurt’ at the point where the Muse Calliope gives a blessing to the baby Ronsard at his birth: briefly in the Latin (52 et blandum arridens: sis mihi natus, ait [‘and fondly smilingly said: “Be my son”’]), but with an expansion in the French (53–4 ‘Et dict en souriant: enfant, prens accroissance,/Puis que tu es, dict elle, à moy de ta naissance’). ‘Son message, en français, s’est allongé’: so Demerson, ‘Joachim Du Bellay traducteur de lui-même’, 116 – without I think registering the fact that her annotation has been pre-empted by this ‘gloss’ from the French Muse (Latin 51–2 correspond to

French 51–4, after which the poems’ couplet-for-couplet matching resumes).

4 Reviving

Lucan:

Tamburlaine,

and

Marlowe, Lucans

First Booke Emma Buckley

Introduction In Bellum Ciuile 5, Julius Caesar – who has already cut a swathe through Italy and conducted a destructive campaign in Spain – finally ends up battling with nature itself, when he attempts to sail from Brundisium to Dyrrachium. In the confident expectation that with Fortune on his side a storm will prove no obstacle to his desires, he embarks upon the sea in a tiny boat, amidst the protests of the owner, the lowly Amyclas (BC.5.476– 721). Before setting off, however, he attempts to impress and bribe the humble sailor:

Expecta uotis maiora modestis, Spesque tuas laxa iuuenis, si iussa secutus Me uehis Hesperiam, non ultrà cuncta carinæ Debebis, manibusque inopem duxisse senectam. Ne cessa præbere Deo tua fata, uolenti Angustos opibus subitis implere Penates. BC.5.532–7

1

Enlarge thy hopes, poore man, expect to haue More wealth from mee then modesty can craue: Only transport mee to th’Italian shore, This trade of liuing thou shalt neede no more, No more shall labour thy poore age sustaine. Yeild to thy fate; a godd is come to raine 2

Downe showres of wealth thy little house vpon. May, Pharsalia (1627) sig. I2v

In general, May is a very close translator of Lucan, dedicated to replicating as economically as possible the Latin text and not given to flourishes or divagations into ‘free’ translation. Nevertheless, when he translates the 3

final line as ‘to raine/Downe showres of wealth thy little house vpon’, May opts for a striking image not in the Latin, but rather inspired by Christopher Marlowe, whose Tamburlaine showcases another all-conquering overreacher intoxicated by his own relationship with Fortune and certain of his privileged place in the cosmos.

Early in Tam. I, the Scythian shepherd attempts to sway the Persian general Theridamas over to his side with words obviously reminiscent of the Julius Caesar of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile: Forsake thy king and do but join with me, And we will triumph over all the world. I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about, And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome. Draw forth thy sword, thou mighty man-at-arms, Intending but to raze my charmèd skin, And Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven To ward the blow and shield me safe from harm. See how he rains down heaps of gold in showers, As if he meant to give my soldiers pay; Tam. I, 1.ii.171– 4.

4

In the brief glimpse of Tamburlaine that we see in Thomas May’s Caesar here, we find another example of the ‘blood-brother’ relationship between Marlowe’s Scythian anti-hero and Lucan’s rampaging general that has been traced elsewhere in the literature of early modern England: a relationship already authorised when

Tamburlaine explicitly models himself on Caesar (I Tam. 3.iii.148–65).

5

This chapter will take a close look at two texts which offer far more than an ‘imaginative connection’ between Tamburlaine and Caesar. Turning first to the revival of Lucan offered in Christopher Marlowe’s Lucans First Booke, I will argue that Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlainian’ Caesar is not simply ‘translated’ but rather infused with a literary blood-transfusion, inviting a super charged, hybrid Caesar into early modern English literature. I then trace the effects of this literary resurrection in one later Lucanian author faced with the prospect of killing off Caesar again, in the anonymously authored academic tragedy Caesar’s Revenge. Lucan’s role in early modern debates concerning ‘poetry’, ‘history’ and ‘truth’, his epic’s close association with the establishment of a Republican

literary-political

tradition,

and

the

provocative status of Bellum Ciuile in contemporary questions attending to the nature of freedom, tyranny and the ethics of power and necessity, have been well established. In this chapter, however, I trace the path of 6

a more intimate conversation between classical poet, early modern translator and imitator, exploring the

peculiarly charged implication of author, poet and character which occurs when the powerful dark matter of Lucan’s epic, together with his charismatic anti-hero, is first brought back to life and then killed off again. And I will conclude that for both Marlowe and the author of CR the pleasure of engagement with Lucan is exploring the extent to which their protagonists overreach strategies of legitimation and justification. Indeed, such overreach is 7

so successful that even perhaps the most ‘politicised’ Lucanian author of them all, the monarchist-turnedRepublican Thomas May, has real problems killing Caesar and ‘completing’ Lucan. And when he does finally manage it, he is able to accomplish his task only by appropriating Lucan’s regressive poetics of repetition, adopting the politics of personal vengeance and appropriating the blood-transfusion metaphor first trialled in Lucans First Booke: a literary strategy serving not to liberate him from Lucan’s pessimistic analysis of both sides in civil war, but to implicate him fully in Lucan’s confusion.

‘Drunk with Latin blood’: reviving Caesar in Lucans first booke

Bella per Emathios plus quam ciuilia campos, Iusque datum sceleri canimus, populumque potentem In sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra: Cognatasque acies: & rupto foedere regni Certatum totis concussi uiribus orbis, In commune nefas: infestisque obuia signis Signa, pares aquilas, & pila minantia pilis. Quis furor o ciues? quæ tanta licentia ferri, Gentibus inuisis Latium præbere cruorem? BC.1.1–9 Wars worse then civill on Thessalian playnes, And outrage strangling law & people strong, We sing, whose conquering swords their own breasts launcht, Armies alied, the kingdoms league uprooted, Th’affrighted worlds force bent on publique spoile, Trumpets, and drums like deadly threatning other, Eagles alike displaide, darts answering darts. Romans, what madnes, what huge lust of warre Hath made Barbarians drunke with latin bloud?LFB 1– 9

8

Lucans First Booke, named in tandem with Hero and Leander, appeared in the Stationers’ Register in 1593, the year of Marlowe’s death, but it was not until 1600 that the translation, a line-for-line rendering of Bellum Ciuile

1, was published for the first time. And while Lucan was 9

part of the university syllabus, Marlowe would not have had an English text to work from. The importance of 10

Lucan more broadly to early modern England is well attested,

11

and LFB has now been subsumed into

arguments about the proto- and pro-Republican sensibility of Marlowe himself. But what strikes the close 12

reader of Marlowe’s translation, as J. B. Steane first recognised, is how Marlovian this translation is: the aggression, pace and hyperbolic thrust of Lucan’s Latin has been matched by an English rendering which achieves similar concision and energy by the deployment of strong verbs and assertive statements, all within a distinctively ‘mighty line’. This does not mean that 13

Marlowe is inattentive to the Latin. Marlowe recognises from the beginning a crucial motif within Bellum Ciuile, Lucan’s Neronian rhetoric of amplification, when he declares that the war is not just more than civil, but worse than civil; and the early modern translator is 14

careful to preserve the shape of the introductory sentence, a poised seven lines in a tradition that signals its epic roots. From the beginning, in other words, the voices of Marlowe and Lucan join in what Steane has

called ‘a kinship of rare closeness’, as the programmatic 15

verb of performance, now conspicuously at the start of the second verse, alerts: Marlowe’s ‘We sing’, Lucan’s canimus, is now a true plural. Marlowe and Lucan are not, however, simply ‘yokefellows’, reiterating Lucan’s partnership with Caesar in Bellum Ciuile: rather, he infuses the text with a different 16

kind of energy by incorporating a cluster of selfquotation of his own previous work. He first hyperbolises the suicidal right hand of the Roman people, ‘turned against its own guts’ (In sua uictrici conuersum uiscera dextra, BC.1.2), and re-imagines the blood-image of v.9 (in which Latin blood is offered as sacrifice – praebere – to Rome’s foreign enemies) as an intoxicating, barbarous blood-thirst. But Marlowe also supplants Lucan’s programmatic dextra with one of his own phrases – ‘conquering swords’ (v.3), fundamental to Tamburlaine

17

– together with the literal bloodthirstiness and thirst for rule that constantly go hand in hand there. Of course 18

Tamburlaine, like Lucan’s Caesar, is a dynamo of power, seeking to know the world and conquer it. He too courts Fortune, arrogates Jove to his cause and frequently contemplates his own mastery of his destiny and

figurative elevation to the stars. And Tamburlaine had conspicuously compared himself to the Roman general ‘already’: Our conquering swords shall marshal us the way We use to march upon the slaughtered foe, Trampling their bowels with our horses’ hoofs – Brave horses bred on the white Tartarian hills. My camp is like to Julius Caesar’s host, That never fought but had the victory; Nor in Pharsalia was there such hot war As these, my followers, willingly would have.(I Tam. 3.iii.148–155)

Tamburlaine’s overt self-identification with Caesar has been long recognised, but the riposte of Bajazeth to this vaunting –‘let us glut our swords/That thirst to drink the feeble Persians’ blood!’ (I Tam.3.iii.164–5) – is just as important translation

in

terms

strategy.

of

understanding

Bajazeth’s

words

Marlowe’s ‘anticipate’

Lucan’s claim that the Carthaginian shades may drink the blood of the Romans (as Marlowe puts it in LFB ‘And now Carthage souls be glutted with our bloods!’; & Poeni saturentur

sanguine

manes,

BC.1.39)

and

this

anticipation is itself dependent on the association with

Lucan already in Tamburlaine’s previous words, which press his ambitions to be a plus quam Julius Caesar in a play which will outdo not just the battle of Pharsalus but also Lucan’s Pharsalia. Indeed, Tamburlaine himself 19

frames the issue this way when he boasts that his soldiers would gladly take on ‘hotter’ wars than Pharsalus (‘Nor in Pharsalia was there such hot war/As these, my followers, willingly would have’), punning, not just as many have noted, on the metaliterary resonance of ‘Pharsalia’ here, but also co-opting the plus quam framing of Lucan’s text. In other words, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine creates a complex hybrid imagecomplex, deliberately collapsing ‘Marlovian’ and ‘Lucanian’. It is not enough to see, as Cheney puts it, a ‘glance towards Lucan [that] strengthens the inference that Marlowe’s knowledge of the Pharsalia contributed to the tonalities of violence in Tamburlaine’: rather, Marlowe reanimates Lucans First 20

Booke with his own literary life-blood, transfusing Marlovian imagery of blood and the sword with the imagery already to be found in Bellum Ciuile. Now when Marlowe invites the Carthaginian shades to be sated with blood, talks of the infant walls of Rome as steeped in the

blood of brothers and recalls that Carrhae’s walls have filled with blood at the death of Crassus, we must see such imagery as a hybrid Lucanian-Marlovian mix (LFB 39, 95, 105). To the much used figures for translation and of poetic succession in Marlowe’s literary career – metempsychosis, rebirth, transfiguration – we must also 21

add, then, the notion of literal ‘blood-transfusion’, as the sustained allusion to Tamburlaine through the proem transfuses Lucan’s verse with a more hyperbolic, tyrannical and potent blood mix.

22

Indeed, such an image is symbolic of the dark poetics of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, and emblematised in the necromancer-witch Erictho, a terrifyingly powerful figure for nefas, vile counterpart to Virgil’s Sibyl and, as has long been noted, a figure for the poet Lucan himself.

23

The centre of the poem hinges on Sextus Pompeius’ desire to know the future, and his visit to the night-witch, whose obsession is death and corpses, and whose ability to communicate with the dead is expounded at length (BC.6.507–68). Erictho obliges by reanimating the body of a dead soldier of the Pompeian side, first filling his corpse with fresh blood, then making an infernal prayer which brings new life into his veins (‘Then with warme

blood, opening fresh wounds, shee fills/His breast: and gore to th’inward parts distills […] Then straight the clotted blood grows warme againe/Feedes the blacke wounds, and runnes through euery veine/In his cold breast: and lifes restored heate/Mixt with cold death through partes difused runns,/And to each ioint giues trembling motions’, Phars. (1627) sigL4v–L6r). Yet the 24

soldier, when commanded, offers no glorious vision of the future on the Virgilian model, but rather a dismal vision of the Underworld in which the discordia of civil war has disrupted the very boundaries of Hell itself. The ‘happy’ denizens of the fields of Elysium now weep in sorrow, and those condemned to Tartarus for their wickedness rejoice, applauding and demanding the plains of the blessed for themselves (Constrictæ plausêre manus:

camposque

piorum/Poscit

turba

nocens,

BC.6.798–9).

25

Erictho’s blood-transfusion resuscitated a nameless soldier; Marlowe reanimates Lucan; Tamburlaine energises Caesar. And with the first appearance of Caesar, the intrusive blood-image appears once again: Caesars renowne for war was lesse, he restles, Shaming to strive but where he did subdue,

When yre, or hope provokt, heady, & bould, At al times charging home, & making havock; Urging his fortune, trusting in the gods, Destroying what withstood his proud desires, And glad when bloud, & ruine made him way: (LFB 145–51)

In the Bellum Ciuile, ruin alone is the source of Caesar’s joy (gaudensque uiam fecisse ruina, BC.1.150). But Caesar’s change in characterisation and presentation is indeed more far-reaching. Marlowe’s Caesar is now more dynamic and impressive: while Lucan introduces Caesar after crossing the Alps ‘conceiving’ future war in his mind, Marlowe’s Caesar is actively aiming at it (BC. 1. 184– 5; LFB 186). As E. J. Paleit has shown, Marlowe 26

implicates Caesar more personally in the exploits and sufferings which he attributes to his friends, the soldiers (BC.1.299–304; LFB 300–4), and while in Lucan his men are stricken by fear, in Marlowe they are a ‘wrastling tumult’ motivated by respect and love (LFB 299; cf. LFB 356–7 with BC.1.355–6). Such a charismatic ability to form friendships and inspire men to fight is distinctly Tamburlainian. More Tamburlainian, too, is Caesar’s 27

heightened awareness of his help from destiny and his

eventually fated success in war. Now war will not be Caesar’s ‘judge’ (BC.1.227), but will ‘try [his] cause’ (LFB 229): and even the gods now collude with Caesar, in a deliberate unbalancing of the famous sententia ‘The victorious cause pleased the gods, the losing one Cato’ (Victrix causa deis placuit sed uicta Catoni, BC.1.128). Marlowe’s gods don’t just ‘like’ Caesar’s cause, they actively assist it: ‘Caesars cause,/The gods abetted; Cato likt the other’ (LFB 128–9; cf. LFB 264–7/BC.1.262–5).

28

Marlovian blood transfuses the programmatic poetics of the proem; it inhabits the charismatic figure of Caesar himself. It also infects the causes of war in Marlowe’s broader re-framing of the conflict in Bellum Ciuile. Now the legitimacy of the war – as a political, moral and legal issue – has been reframed as an argument between competing individuals, and Lucan’s careful articulation of separate causes – moving from the relationship between the main antagonists, to more general reflections on the causes for civil war (the paradox common from the moralising historiographical tradition that it was Rome’s very success that ensured her downfall) – is once again pointedly remodelled as

personality-led,

and

generalising

conflict,

which

culminates with an inevitable supplement to the Latin:

29

Non erat is populus, quem pax tranquilla iuuaret, Quem sua libertas immotis pasceret armis. Inde iræ faciles, &, quod suasisset egestas, Vile nefas: magnúmque decus, ferróque petendum, Plus patria potuisse sua: mensuráque iuris Vis erat: (BC.1.171–6) Againe, this people could not brooke calme peace, Them freedome without war might not suffice, Quarrels were rife, greedy desire stil poore Did vild deeds, then t’was worth the price of bloud, And deem’d renowne to spoile their native town, Force mastered right, the strongest govern’d all …(LFB 172–7)

Once again we see the intrusive blood-motif overlay the iconic sword (ferrum) of Lucan: and once again, Marlowe hyperbolises and then expands on Lucan’s final point. While it is plausible to see, then, as E.J.Paleit suggests we should, a ‘pro-Caesarian’ interpretative potential in the text, or as Patrick Cheney prefers, a ‘troubled Republicanism’, a close reading that pays attention to the

blood-motif in LFB reveals a translation strategy that is obsessively and personally implicated. Of course, Marlowe never had the opportunity to address the most critical negative interjections Lucan makes against Caesar (expressed most strongly before the battle of Pharsalus, BC.7.207–13), and his focus on the first book alone means that his Caesar is not left stranded, alone and in peril, as in Lucan’s famously unfinished epic. Instead Marlowe’s Caesar, like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, embraces a world lacking a coherent moral foundation, free from censorious narratorial perspective, and released from the avowedly self-defeating captivity of the Lucanian model. In 1884 John Addington Symonds 30

argued that Marlowe ‘is in deadly earnest while creating them [sc. his fictional characters], believes in their reality, and infuses the blood of his own untameable heart into their veins’. Powering Caesar through just the same kind of authorial implication with which his Tamburlaine storms heaven, he is not so much interested in legitimating Caesar as he is in equipping him, through a newly potent Marlovian characterisation and destiny, with the means to escape the censorious moralising and committed fractures of Lucan’s text.

31

Blood and death: killing Caesar in Caesar’s Revenge Hearke how the Romaine drums sound bloud & death, And Mars high mounted on his Thracian Steede: Runs madding through Pharsalias purple fieldes. The earth that’s wont to be a Tombe for Men It’s now entomb’d with Carkases of Men … (CR Prol.1– 5)

32

As Lisa Hopkins most recently has shown, Caesar and Tamburlaine are commonly associated in many early modern works after Marlowe: and his interventionist translation, which revitalises a hybrid TamburlaineCaesar, results in many further Tamburlainian-inflected versions of Caesar (e.g. Thomas Lodge’s (1594) The Wounds of Civil War and George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (composed 1604)).

33

But perhaps the most

unsettling exploration of the consequences of Marlowe’s remodelling instead comes in the anonymously authored academic drama entitled The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar’s Revenge first published in 1606 (composed 1592–1596).

34

The title-piece of the 1607

printed edition tells us that it was privately acted by the students of Trinity College, Oxford, and the play has

many of the elements of academic drama: Discord presides over the play, and the text has clearly been crafted from Plutarch, Dio, but above all Appian.

35

Read on its own terms, however, the reception of CR has been less successful. Its exuberant relationship with the popular stage has struck modern critics – The Spanish Tragedy, Locrine and Tamburlaine are just three obvious vernacular influences – but no sustained interpretative analysis of the play yet exists, and modern critics criticise loose plotting, lack of stylistic flair and ‘ideological’ confusion. Perhaps some of the discomfort 36

with the play – for historicising readers accustomed to ‘taking political sides’ when reading the Roman republic in early modern England, at least – arises from the very lack of evidence of explicit authorial investment in the project. It has not been strongly stressed enough, however, how closely the author of CR perceives and reacts to a Lucanian poetics of repetition, hyperbole and paradox. And once again this Lucanian sensibility combines with a clearly hyperbolising Marlovian cast of characters. Here, however, we find not just a Tamburlainian Caesar, whose supercharged blood-lust continues even beyond the frame of his mortal life, but

also a ‘Faustian’ Brutus whose actions unwittingly confound Hell in Elysium. From the moment that Discord takes to the stage, promising another reiteration of the fall of Rome that hyperbolically exceeds the conflict that will ‘Disolve the engins of the broken world’ (LFB 79–80; BC.1.79–80), and from the moment that 37

Brutus reminds his audience that this is a war in which ‘’twas best be ouerthrowne’ (CR I.i.103), we find ourselves within a highly ironised articulation of the ‘justice’ to be found in civil war and in revenge tragedy, one which will eventually collapse the cosmos in on itself. And in this respect, though it is claimed that the author of Caesar’s Revenge borrows heavily on the language and structures of 1580s and 1590s revenge tragedy, the pessimistic representation of the fall of the republic he achieves – one which implicates everyone in guilt and finally achieves the complete disintegration of the categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – is distinctly explorative. Closer in its moral ambivalence to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the cynical aesthetic of CR is more anticipatory of the dark vision of Webster than derivative of the ‘wild justice’ of Kyd.

Caesar’s Revenge obsessively restages the aftermath of Lucan’s Pharsalus in its first Act, replaying in dramatic form Pompey’s flight (I.i.39–184; cf. BC.7.677ff.) and reformulating the deluded dreams of the general before the battle (BC.7.7ff; cf. 1.129–42) into reflective regret (I.i.129–43). Caesar too is written through acute combinatorial imitation, collapsing description of the horrific familial violence at Pharsalus (BC.7.626–10), his own recollection of the horrifying violence of the battle of Pharsalus

(BC.7.626–10;

cf.

7.570ff.),

and

his

introduction in Lucan’s epic, the confrontation with the mournful imago patriae, Roma, at the Rubicon (BC.1.185–90): Cæsar Pharsalia doth thy conquest sound Ioues welcom messenger faire Victory, Hath Crown’d thy temples with victorious bay, And Io ioyfull, Io doth she sing And through the world thy lasting prayses ring. But yet amidst thy gratefull melody I heare a hoarse, and heauy dolfull voyce, Of my deare Country crying, that to day My Glorious triumphs worke her owne decay. In which how many fatall strokes I gaue, So many woundes her tender brest receiu’d.

Heere lyeth one that’s boucher’d by his Sire And heere the Sonne was his old Fathers death, Both slew vnknowing, both vnknowne are slaine, O that ambition should such mischiefe worke Or meane Men die for great mens proud desire.(CR I.ii.216–31)

In this arresting moment of hesitation (perhaps inspired by BC.1. 193–4), Caesar identifies the root cause of the tragedy: the ambition of great men, which ensures the mass carnage enveloping all others. In the next scene, he continues to rue the ‘heaped hils of mangled Carkases’, and laments the fate of ‘Rome our natiue Country, haples Rome,/Whose bowels to vngently we haue peerc’d’, evoking the programmatic mass impulse to suicide that Lucan had identified at the beginning of his poem as distinctly Roman (I.iii., 265, 295–6; BC.1.2–3). But such ‘womanish compassion’ (as Antony puts it) does not last long. Instead Caesar’s supporters are at hand to re-orient their leader and stoke his blood-lust again, reframing Pharsalus as ‘Reuenge, strange wars and dreadfull stratagems’ which are not yet complete (I.iii.283–7). By the time Caesar returns to Rome, in a conspicuous and highly ominous reimagining of the final act of I Tam.,

he has cast off any doubts about his actions. Act 2 of CR also ends with the fearful anticipation of citizens awaiting the arrival of a conqueror, and in CR Cicero now ‘plays’ the Governor of Damascus (who before had hoped for a compassion that would ‘melt his fury into some remorse,/And use us like a loving conqueror’, I Tam. V.i.22–3; cf. V.i.55–61):

38

Cæsar although of high aspiring thoughtes, And vncontrould ambitious Maiesty, Yet is of nature faire and courteous, You see hee commeth conqueror of the East: Clad in the spoyles of the Pharsalian fieldes, Then wee vnable to resist such powre: By gentle peace and meeke submission, Must seeke to pacify the victors wrath. (CR II.iv, 1028– 35)

Given that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine ends the play by declaring that he has achieved a ‘truce’ with all the world’ (V.i.530) – but only after displaying the ‘slaughtered carcasses’ of the Virgins on Damascus’ walls and putting the rest of the citizens to the sword – Cicero is right to be worried. Even more strikingly, as Lisa Hopkins has noticed, his arrival comes after the unmistakably

Tamburlainian wooing of Cleopatra, a love affair hinted at but not explored fully in the extant Bellum Ciuile.

39

Indeed, CR does not just replicate a distinctly Marlovian conflation of the language of love and conquest, but also hints, with reprise of the hyperbolising approach of Tamburlaine, that Cleopatra is a plus quam Zenocrate, fit to be rewarded with more than the Persian queen was given by Tamburlaine (I.vi.507–22): And to exceed the pompe of Persian Queene, The Sea shall pay the tribute of his pearles. For to adorne thy goulden yellow lockes, Which in their curled knots, my thoughts do hold, Thoughtes

captiud

to

thy

beauties

conquering

power.(CR I.vi.518–22)

CR’s Caesar also frames himself with such competitive hyperbolism. Imagining the victorious outcome of war with Parthia, he anticipates turning rivers red with blood, filling the plains and hills of Media and Armenia with Scythian corpses and returning to Rome in triumph, with Parthian princes ‘Chained in fetters to my charriot wheeles’ (III.v, 1441). Accompanied in his mind’s eye by a band of conquering soldiers whose very looks can put the Parthians to flight (III.v.1446–50), Caesar cuts an

irresistibly Tamburlainian dash here. History of course does not permit that next Tamburlainian step – the acquisition of a crown – but the author of CR plays with the conceit, in Antony’s repeated efforts to crown Caesar (via appeal to the Sybilline books, III.v, 1459–63). And 40

while Caesar first pays lip-service to the notion that ‘Vertue’ is the only motivation for such ‘high attempts’ (III.v.1468–72), his disavowal of the sign of monarchy ends up illustrating how far CR’s Caesar is determined to outdo Tamburlaine: Content you Lordes for I wilbe no King, An odious name vnto the Romaine eare, Cæsar I am, and wilbe Cæsar still, No other title shall my Fortunes grace: Which I will make a name of higher state Then Monarch, King or worldes great Potentate. Of Ioue in Heauen, shall ruled bee the skie, The Earth of Cæsar, with like Maiesty. This is the Scepter that my crowne shall beare, And this the golden diadem Ile weare, A farre more rich and royall ornament, Then all the Crownes that the proud Persian gaue. (CR III.v.1504–15)

In this exemplary self-fashioning, this Caesar completes the

circle

of

emulous

outdoing

that

Marlowe’s

Tamburlaine had already evoked with Julius Caesar, emphatically putting even the specious name of virtue aside as he does so. It is only fitting, then, that even in death this Caesar refuses to slow down, serving not as appeasing sacrifice for a lost republic, but agent of further violence. Indeed, he literally continues to haunt the play – and in particular his target Brutus – in a frenzied desire for revenge that appeals to the justice of heaven and draws heavily on the wronged ghosts of earlier revenge tragedy. Such reframing of the play’s ambitious tyrant – who now appeals to ‘a iust reueng’ and punishment for the shedding of ‘guiltles bloud’ (CR IV.iii, 2052, 2096) – an obvious reprise of the justice-seeking Hieronimo of The Spanish Tragedy – might at first glance seem disconcerting and contradictory. But the author of CR has

pitted

against

the

overreaching

Caesar

a

manipulative Cassius and a pliable Brutus, pre-emptively crowding out a space for legitimate virtue. Indeed, it is Brutus’ confrontation with Caesar at the beginning of the play – a meeting in which Caesar shows mercy to the man

for whom he declares a ‘firm settled loue’, which ‘can neere bee turn’d to hate’ (I.ii.,188–231, 209) – which provides Caesar’s own sense that he has been wronged and deserves ‘just’ revenge. Drawing on accounts of 41

Brutus’ capture and pardon after defeat at Pharsalus – accounts which speculate on the compromise to Brutus’ honour, approve Caesar’s ‘humanity and uprightness’, and stress Caesar’s love for Brutus – the author of CR 42

provides a particular challenge to an elite early modern audience, conditioned to see ingratitude not just as moral failing but also a dangerously destabilising force attacking the bonds of friendship and social hierarchy.

43

If Brutus is weak and ungrateful, Cassius is compelled to act by the more traditional motivations of revenge tragedy: visions of blood and death (Prol. III.1157–61). When the conspirators vow to act, Cassius renounces Jove, instead subjugating himself to the goddess Revenge, who, he claims, is ‘borne in Hel, yet harborest heauens ioyes:/Whose fauor slaughter is, and dandling death, / Bloud-thirsty pleasures and mis boding blisse’ (III. vi., 1536–8). In his vow to kill Caesar, Cassius styles himself as Marlowe’s amoral Guise, who declares to the audience at the outset of the Massacre at Paris that he

will use the excuse of religion in order to advance his own interests: What glory is there in a common good, That hanges for every peasant to atchive? That like I best that flyes beyond my reach: Set me to scale the high Peramides, And thereon set the Diadem of Fraunce, Ile either rend it with my nayles to naught, Or mount the top with my aspiring winges, Although my downfall be the deepest hell. For this, I wake, when others think I sleepe, For this, I waite, that scorn attendance else: For this, my quenchles thirst whereon I builde, Hath often pleaded kindred to the King. For this, this head, this heart, this hand and sworde, Contrive, imagine and fully execute Matters of importe, aimed at by many, Yet understoode by none. (MP. Sc.2, 40–55)

44

Compare Cassius’ vow, whose explicit desire to punish Caesar’s ambition conveys clear echoes of the Guise’s far less virtuous promise: We come not Lords, as vnresolued men, For to shewe causes of the deed decreed,

This shall dispute for mee and tell him why, This heart, hand, minde, hath mark’d him out to die: If it be true that furies quench-les thirst, Is pleas’d with quaffing of ambitious bloud, Then all you deuills whet my Poniards point, And I wil broach you a bloud-sucking heart: Which full of bloud, must bloud store to you yeeld, Were it a peerce to flint or marble stone: Why so it is for Cæsars heart’s a stone, Els would bee mooued with my Countries mone. They say you furies instigate mens mindes, And push their armes to finnish bloudy deedes: Prick then mine Elbo: goade my bloudy hand, That it may goare Cæsars ambitious heart.(CR III.vi.1573–88)

It should come as no surprise, then, that the author of CR conspicuously departs from Appian, who writes Brutus and Cassius as independently coming to an agreement that Caesar’s tyranny needs to be stopped (Civil Wars 2.113). Instead, Brutus is first railroaded by anonymous notes, daring him to take action to prove his ancestry,

45

and then exhorted by Cassius to wake up: No Brutus liue, and wake thy sleepy minde, Stirre vp those dying sparkes of honors fire,

VVhich in thy gentle breast weare wont to flame: See how poore Rome opprest with Countries wronges, Implores thine ayde, that bred thee to that end, Thy kins-mans soule from heauen commandes thine aide: That lastly must by thee receiue his end, Then purchas honor by a glorious death, Or liue renown’d by ending Cæsars life. (CR III.iv.1402– 10)

Brutus’ response – which channels and reforms Cassius’ exhortation – is telling: I can no longer beare the Tirants pride, I cannot heare my Country crie for ayde, And not bee mooued with her pitious mone, Brutus thy soule shall neuer more complaine: That from thy linage and most vertuous stock, A bastard weake degenerat branch is borne, For to distaine the honor of thy house. No more shall now the Romains call me dead, Ile liue againe and rowze my sleepy thoughts: And with the Tirants death begin this life. (CR III.iv.1411–20)

Brutus’ own declarations that he will wake and respond to his patria’s distress – words that in themselves may

indeed be an honourable statement of commitment to liberty – are also clearly here the parroted response of a malleable figure under Cassius’ sway. It is inevitable, then, that though the conspirators claim that Caesar’s death is a simple act of restorative justice, done ‘for to quite Romes wrongs’, (III vi.1704, cf.1730), this action does not bring resolution. Indeed, while Trebonius declares that justice in the universe has been rebalanced (‘How heauens have iustly on the authors head/Returnd the guiltles blood which he hath shed’, III.vi.1736–7), the killing of Caesar is immediately reframed and repurposed as simply the next phase of yet another repetition and re-animation of obviously Lucanian civil war by Discord. She names Brutus not just ‘author of Romes liberty’, but also the possessor of ‘murthering hand and bloody knife’, fitting to be revenged by Octavian and Antony. Indeed, her words explicitly repackage the next phase of violence as more Lucanian civil war:

46

Thessalia once againe must see your blood, And Romane drommes must strike vp new a laromes, Harke how Bellona shakes her angry lance: And enuie clothed in her crimson weed,

Me thinkes I see the fiery shields to clash, Eagle gainst Eagle, Rome gainst Rome to fight, Phillipi, Cæsar, quittance must thy wronges, Whereas that hand shall stab that trayterous heart. That durst encourage it to worke thy death, Thus from thine ashes Cæsar doth arise As from Medeas haples scatered teeth: New flames of wars, and new outraigous broyles, Now smile Æmathia that euen in thy top, Romes victory and pride shalbe entombd, And those great conquerors of the vanquished earth, Shall with their swords come there to dig their graues. (CR Prol. IV, 1773–88)

Discord’s predictions will come true. The Lucanian cycle will continue as the battle of Philippi promises to rerun the Battle of Pharsalus with interest. The author capitalises on the already common geographical conflation of Pharsalus and Philippi, exploited by Lucan and now seized upon by Cassius, who imagines the final battle of the play as staged on already blood-drenched ground (V.i.2201–5).

47

The conventions of academic

tragedy contribute with a further weakening of the structures of the cosmos, as Discord emerges again at the

beginning of the final act to anticipate Brutus’ downfall, predict the dire cosmological phenomenon of the sun’s eclipse and finally invite the dissolution of the boundaries between hell and earth (Prol. V, 2145–9). But even as the body-count begins to mount – the traditional end to a revenge tragedy pressed to absurdity – the play 48

maintains its internal logic, as it works through the implosion of semantic distinctions between right and wrong accompanying this cosmic collapse. Such collapse is literally signalled, indeed, when Cato (son of Cato the Younger) enters, wounded, to die on-stage. The ancient accounts celebrate his valorous death in battle at Philippi: but amidst the distorting prism of this tragedy, this Cato’s end is also bitter and disillusioned, rejecting the notion that virtue is any kind of proper category at all: ‘O vertue whome Phylosophy extols./Thou art no essence but a naked name,/Bond-slaue to Fortune, weake, and of no power./To succor them which alwaies honourd thee’ (V.ii.2238–41).

49

The combined pressure of Lucanian repetition and Marlovian energy are finally channelled into the final confrontation of the play. Brutus – tormented by the effects of his decision to act in the conspiracy, and driven

mad by the pursuing ghost of Caesar – ends the play as he had begun it, begging for death. But now he is allusively re-embodied as Caesar, his anguish framed in exactly the same terms Caesar himself had suffered in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, plagued by visions after the battle of Pharsalus in Lucan’s seventh book (V.i.2270–80; cf. BC.7.776–80). His actual death becomes not the tragicheroic final action of a tyrannicide, but almost tragiccomic hyperbole, as he invites the Ghost to slake his blood-thirst, drag down his body to Hell, ‘Boyle … or burne, teare … hatefull flesh,/Deuoure, consume, pull, pinch, plague, paine [h]is hart’, and feed on his soul endlessly (V.v.2502–25). Indeed, when he invokes the ‘rights of Hell’ (‘Hell craues her right, and heere the furyes stand,/And all the hellhounds compasse me a round/Each seeking for a parte of this same prey …’ V.v.2516–8) he too positions himself as Marlovian copy, echoing the cry of the doomed Faustus: ‘Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die!/Hell calls for right, and with a roaring voice/Says, “Faustus, come, thine hour is come.”/And Faustus will come to do thee right …’ (Faustus ‘A’ V.i.49–52).

50

The shadow that Marlowe’s Hell casts over the end of CR is not accidental. The Ghost of Caesar exults in the spectacle of Brutus’ death, and ends the play boasting that he shall henceforth enjoy the pleasures of sweet Elysium, in an emphatic reiteration of The Spanish Tragedy that recalls the Ghost of Andrea’s anticipation of welcoming his friends to Elysium, and condemnation of his enemies to Hell (CR V.v.2555–70IV.5; cf. TST IV. 5.45–8). Yet while TST offered a moral eschatology separating the virtuous in Elysium from the wicked in Hell, a bipartite Underworld with distinctions between good and evil, CR confounds the expectations of final ‘justice’ set by The Spanish Tragedy by recalling the pressure such divisions had already come under in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and Marlowe’s Faustus. And in 51

CR too the sheer volume of violence finally results in the cosmic dissolution that had been predicted at the outset by Discord: I, now my longing hopes haue their desire, The world is nothing but a massie heape: Of bodys slayne, The Sea a lake of blood, The Furies that for slaughter only thirst, Are with these Massakers and slaughters cloyde,

Tysiphones pale, and Megeras thin face, Is now puft vp, and swolne with quaffing blood, Caron that vsed but an old rotten boate Must nowe a nauie rigg for to transport, The howling soules, vnto the Stigian stronde. Hell and Elisium must be digd in one, And both will be to litle to contayne, Numberles numbers of afflicted ghostes, That I my selfe haue tumbling thither sent. (CR Epil. 2531–44)

Caesar’s Revenge thus runs the attractions to negative repetition in Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile and the energy of Marlovian tyranny to their natural endpoint. Marlowe’s Faustus had scoffed at damnation, optimistically but mistakenly assuming that he could confound Hell in Elysium (Faustus ‘A’ I.iii.60–1). But as CR envelops its 52

cast in a ruthlessly repetitious cycle of violence which culminates not just with the ‘heaped hils of mangled Carkases’ of Lucan’s Pharsalus/Pharsalia (I.iii.265) but rather with the world itself as ‘nothing but a massie heape:/Of bodys slayne’, it is the overreaching Caesar whose dynamic self-belief allows him the pleasure of an Elysian existence. The result – a literal mess – is a pointed reflection of a Lucanian poetics unable to contain

its dynamic protagonist and the completion of the eschatological confusion anticipated in Lucan’s own vision of discord in the Underworld. It is also, pointedly, a clear recognition that this chaos arises from a conflict lacking any explicit moral vantage point or political positioning.

Completing Lucan: venturi me teque legent … The anonymous author of CR, exploiting to the hilt the amoral potential of a Tamburlainian Caesar inhabiting a Lucanian world, ‘completes’ Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile by transforming the story of Rome into full-on revenge tragedy, one that is resolved not by the arraignment of the dead in Hell, but through the dissolution of the cosmos and the confusion of its moral eschatology. Such demonic energy was only available and authorised by his recognition of Lucans First Booke’s own life-giving literary blood-transfusion, one which powers a serious and pessimistic articulation of the possibility of finding a ‘right side’ in civil war. Such a close reading, deliberately avoiding the broader historicist approach often taken to early modern ‘Lucanian’ works, nonetheless reveals that

such poetics are political: that while Lucan could be the poet of historical ‘truth’, early modern authors recognised a much messier, less clear-cut moral picture in his regressive and repetitive poetics. CR, so often read as an outlier ‘looking back’ to Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy, should be seen instead (and like much academic drama) as at the forefront of the new, darker explorations of human character and the nature of justice that look ahead to the cynicism of Webster: a dark vision authorised by his immersion in Lucan and Lucans First Booke together. So how to close off and complete the story of Caesar? Perhaps the most famous attempt is made by Thomas May, who not only wrote the tragedy Cleopatra and translated Lucan (1626–1627), but also provided continuations of the unfinished Neronian epic in both English and Latin, which he re-edited through the 1630s and 1640s. A crucial case-study in David Norbrook’s ‘cult of Lucan’, May’s changing political allegiances have powered interpretation of his work, though E. J. Paleit’s 53

fresh reading of translation and continuation together well identifies how the continuing intertextual presence of Lucan undercuts any clear-cut ‘Augustan’ attitudes to

monarchy and dynastic rule, making any definition of ‘republican’ translation versus ‘courtly’ continuation highly problematic. The critics have noted, too, how 54

much less aggressive May is than Marlowe and Lucan.

55

Yet he was certainly not unaware of Marlowe, for traces of LFB can be seen in his own Pharsalia, and even in his 56

translation Pharsalia May is unable to resist rescuing Caesar from the extreme peril that he finds himself in as the Bellum Ciuile breaks off. Supplementing after Sulpitius (with an ending itself derived from Plutarch) with an extra twenty-five verses, May allows his Caesar to swim to safety, powering through the water to find safety in the ships of his that have come to meet him. May’s 1630 A Continuation expands markedly, ranging in seven books through Egypt, Africa and Spain, making its centre-piece Cato’s suicide at Utica, and its climax Caesar’s assassination at Rome: and it is adorned with the same kind of historical notes that attend his earlier translation and ‘prove’ his adherence to the truth of history, via Hirtius, Dio and Plutarch.

57

But A

Continuation also emphasises and indeed enlarges upon the characteristics of Caesar that we have seen in Lucan – above all his boldness, swiftness and his wrath – in

ways quite obviously also Marlovian. In particular, Caesar’s comfort with Jovian associations and his delight in the triumphal ‘celebrations’ on his return to Rome (which fill nearly the whole fifth book of A Continuation) have a clearly Tamburlainian flavour. And Caesar’s love 58

for Cleopatra, played out in a banquet-scene at Alexandria in book 2 of A Continuation, offers a clear refraction of the combined thirst for sovereignty and erotic union that is at the heart of Tamburlaine, though 59

now Cleopatra – hyperbolically exceeding even Marlowe – is Caesar’s match, a more willing and complicit partner in ‘Ambitious pride, and Soueraignties dire loue’ than Tamburlaine’s Zenocrate (Cont.2, sig. C6r). May struggles not to write a superhuman Caesar, then, even as he aims to kill him off; he cannot resist Lucan’s unresolved, repetitive poetics even as he ends Lucan’s epic. And he is also compelled to frame the further battles in the civil war in Africa and Spain as not just a repetition of Pharsalus/Pharsalia, but also as a theatre of revenge. The battle of Thapsus is a ‘fatall Tragedy for Libyan ghosts to view/And glut their dire reuenge with Roman blood’ (Cont. 3, sig. D5r–D5v), and Brutus takes the stage as ‘An Actor now in Caesar’s Tragedy’ (Cont. 7, sig. K1r).

Such impulses converge most conspicuously in the final episode of A Continuation, the death of Caesar. Here we find, on the one hand, satisfactory repetition-as-reversal, as Caesar re-enacts closely in his own demise the fate that befell Pompey in Bellum Ciuile, together with final 60

words that frame his death as appropriate expiation to the Republican Roman constitution (so often figured by Lucan via the symbolic toga, and rendered almost always by May as ‘gowne’): a pointed development of Lucan’s own prediction that Caesar would one day become Brutus’ sacrificial victim (uictima, BC.7.596):

61

Through many wounds his life disseized, fled At last; and he, who neuer vanquished By open warre, with blood and slaughter strew’d So many lands, with his owne blood embrew’d The seat of wronged Iustice, and fell downe A sacrifice t’ appease th’ offended gowne. (Cont. 7, sig. K6v).

The death itself, combining the covering of his face, suppression of speech and internal revolving of ‘silent thoughts’ is another example of the repetitioncompulsion of the work, for this is exactly how Pompey died in Lucan (Cont. 7, sig. K6r–K7r; BC.8.613–36). But

where Pompey was content to concentrate on his own fama in the manner of his death, and to serve as an exemplum to his wife and son, Caesar’s thoughts are still aspiring, as now he prepares for translation to the heavens: Yet has not Fortune chang’d, nor giuen the power Of Caesar’s head to any Conquerour; By no Superiours proud command I die, But by subiected Romes conspiracy: Who to the World confesses by her feares, My State and strength to be too great for hers, And from earths highest Throne, sends me to be By after-ages made a Deitie: (Cont. 7, sig. K7r)

For May’s Caesar, death is not the end but rather the opportunity to take up an eternal afterlife in heaven, in an escape from mortality exceeding human law and literary closure alike. And, as May has already acknowledged, he is right, for there will be no ‘clean’ ending with the death of Caesar: rather, ‘instead of freedome

now/More

desolation,

Tragedies

and

woe/After this slaughter must againe ensue;/And all the people that dire action rue/Which they desir’d. Philippi’s balefull day,/Perusia’s siege, and fatall Mutina,/With

Leuca’s fleet shall make afflicted Rome/Truly lament ore slaughter’d Caesar’s Tombe’ (Cont.7, sig. K3r). As both David Norbrook and E.J.Paleit have explored, Thomas May’s difficulty in closing off the Bellum Ciuile also manifested itself in continuing recalibrations of the supplement, as he offered revised editions of A Continuation in 1633 and 1650, together with a Latin reimagining, the Supplementum Lucani, published first in 1640 and again in 1646. Changes to the prefatory poem, ‘The Complaint of Calliope against the Destinies’ (deprecating Lucan’s early demise because of Nero’s tyranny, and modelled after Statius), in concert with a 62

striking new frontispiece to accompany later editions of the work in Latin and English, together creatively redetermined the reception of his work. Calliope moves from (vernacular) regret at Lucan’s passing in the first editions of A Continuation to an active revivification of his dead corpse via blood-sacrifice in the 1640 Supplementum, an act of revival authorised by May’s move closer to Lucan in his dense, dark and more ‘Lucanian’ reimagining of A Continuation.

63

This

prefatory poem was accompanied by a striking engraving depicting Calliope’s blood-offering, which was placed

after the dedicatory poem in the 1640 Supplementum (first printed in Leiden by Willem Christiaensz van der Boxe), but which in the 1646 subsequent Latin edition had made its way onto the front page. May’s final effort at completion – the 1650 A Continuation – now too incorporated

that

picture

as

frontispiece,

and

retranslated into English the dark act of revivification authorising the supplement as ‘The Mind of the Picture, or Frontispiece’: Huc venit, magicis instructaque ritibus, Umbram Excivit Vatis Calliopea sui. Inferno taurus mactatur Victima Regi; Et tibi, Persephone, casta juvenca cadit; Lanigerum Eumenides placantur cæde bidentum: Pocula tum sacro plena cruore capit, Et sic Calliope, charæ dum porrigit Umbræ; O dolor Aonii Marce, decusque chori, Hoc bibe; non aliud jam dat tibi Nectar Apollo, Nec possunt vitam reddere fata tuam; Sic vocem reddunt. hoc saltem munere metam Attingat tandem magna Camoena suam. Non hanc, Cæsareo madeat dum sanguine Roma, Claudito; vindictae parsque sit illa tuæ, Ut cujus dederit victoria sceptra Neroni,

Manibus occumbat Victima caesa tuis. Dixerat, at Cyathum dextra pallente recepit, Hausit, & Aoniæ paruit Umbra Deæ. Suppl. (1640) sig.*3v To this dark thicket did the Muse descend To raise her Poet’s Ghost; and to that end Prepar’d the sacrifice. Pluto, to thee A Bull was kill’d, to thy Persephone A Virgin Heifer; to th’ Eumenides A two-year sheep. Then with the bloud of these She fill’d a cup, and gave it to the hand Of her dear Poets Ghost, with this command; Thou, once the Glorie of th’ Aonian Wood, But now their sorrow, Lucan, drink this Bloud. No other Nectar Phoebus gives thee now; Nor can the Fates a second life bestow: A second voice by this charm’d cup they may, To give some progress to that stately Lay Thou left’st unfinish’d. End it not until The Senates swords the life of Cæsar spil; That he, whose conquests gave dire Nero Reign, May as a sacrifice to thee be slain. The Ghosts received the cup in his pale hand, Drunk, and fulfill’d Calliopes command. Cont. (1650) sig. A4r

David Norbrook reads this as a final declaration of political allegiance, May’s use of the blood-sacrifice paradigm an endorsement of regicide. E. J.Paleit suggests that this frontispiece and poem together provide focus for the broader pessimism of the Supplementum, which damns both the virtus of Caesar and the libertas of his opponents equally. Both, however, recognise the peculiar level of implication of Caesar, Lucan and May himself here, an implication also encouraged via the titlepage of the Latin Supplementum, with its slogan venturi meque teque legent: future ages will read Lucan and 64

Caesar in the Pharsalia, Lucan and May in the Supplementum. In sum, May’s Continuations bring to a fitting close the programmatic bloodtrope first encoded by Marlowe in Lucans First Booke and then exploited by the exuberant author of Caesar’s Revenge, who was content to allow his Caesar an everlasting and Elysian exultation amidst the wreckage of the world. Perhaps May’s Lucanian supplement ends the story of Caesar less with a bang than a whimper: the fusion of the voices of May and Lucan in Latin, a corollary of the literal blood-transfusion required to give the Poet’s Ghost a ‘second voice’, is a poor and

feeble reflection of the hyperbolic energy authorised by the Marlovian-Lucanian blood-mix. Yet in its way, this blood image is an equally fitting encapsulation of the conversation between ancient and early modern. For while the gift of a second voice to Lucan is characterised as the merciful gift of the Muse Calliope, it surely cannot fail to remind its audience of the debased necromancy of Erictho, together with the dismal prophecy of the soldier of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile: a voice that speaks only under compulsion, and can provide no glorious prediction of the future. Nor does the 1650 Continuation offer any sense that it has escaped the repetitious modes of reciprocal violence characterising both civil war and Bellum Ciuile. In what must be a deliberate challenge to the end of the Continuation ‘proper’, and a satisfying Lucanian paradox in itself, Caesar’s death is not now an act of appeasement to satisfy the ‘gowne’ – symbol of civil, legitimate, constitutional Rome – but merely the catalyst for the archetypally worst tyrant, Nero, and a sacrifice only to Lucan himself. From this point of view, 65

Caesar’s death is simply and no more than an act of personal revenge, while May’s composition of it is an act that implicates him in precisely the same behaviour as

his characters. In the end May’s struggle to re-animate 66

a voice that does not want to be heard, to complete the story of a Caesar who refuses to die, all the while failing to find any firm moral or political vantage point, proves just as firmly as Marlowe and the author of CR that to appropriate the Lucanian voice is to be implicated in it.

67

1

I use the Latin text of Thomas Farnaby, M. Annaei

Lucani Pharsalia, siue, De bello ciuili Caesaris et Pompeii libri X. Adiectis ad marginem notis T. Farnabii, quae loca obscuriora illustrent (London, 1618) and the translation of Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia: or The civill warres of Rome, betweene Pompey the great, and Iulius Caesar The whole ten bookes. Englished (London, 1627) throughout. 2

[T]hey 1627: corrected in subsequent editions (1631,

1635, 1650). 3

Discussion of May’s translation tends to focus on

political/historical issues, but for some remarks on style see Roma Gill, ‘Marlowe, Lucan, and Sulpitius’, RES 24 (1973), 401–413; Gerald MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Wisconsin, 1990), 26–44; Philip Hardie, ‘Lucan in the English Renaissance’ and Susanna Braund, ‘Violence in translation’, in Paulo Asso (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Lucan (Brill, 2011), 491–506, 507–524; E. J. Paleit, ‘The

“Caesarist” Reader and Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, CA. 1590 to 1610’, RES 62 (2011), 212–240. May makes sporadic but noticeable use of earlier English drama and poetry, and displays particular knowledge of Marlowe’s works: see Emma Buckley and Edward Paleit (eds), Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia (1627), Tudor and Stuart Translations, 18 (Cambridge, forthcoming). 4

J.S. Cunningham (ed.), Tamburlaine the Great.

Christopher Marlowe (Revels edition, Manchester, 1981). 5

Cf. esp. William Blissett, ‘Lucan’s Caesar and the

Elizabethan Villain’, Studies in Philology 53.4 (1956), 553–575. More recently Lisa Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Farnham, 2008), 55–78, remarks the ‘imaginative connection’ between the two figures but concentrates on the

geopolitical

resonances

of

Tamburlaine’s

Russian/Scythian ethnicity, and the tension produced by similar figures representative of an ‘empire of savagery’ and the ‘civilisation’ represented by Rome; Allyna E. Ward, ‘Lucanic Irony in Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine”’, The Modern Language Review 103.2 (2008), 311–329 argues that Lucan’s vision of cruel providence informs the Tamburlaine plays. 6

See esp. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic:

poetry, rhetoric, and politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999); E. J. Paleit, War, Liberty and Caesar. Responses

to Lucan’s ‘Bellum Ciuile’, ca. 1580–1650 (Classical presences: Oxford, 2013). For an excellent survey of some of these plays see

7

Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 155–186. 8

I use the edition of Roma Gill (ed.), The Complete Works

of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1987). 9

For speculation about the intended scope of the project

see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (New York, 2009), 6–9: the seminal argument for late authorship of Lucans First Booke is James Shapiro, ‘“Metre meete to furnish Lucans style”: reconsidering Marlowe’s Lucan’, in Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, Constance Brown Kuriyama (eds), ‘A poet and a filthy play-maker’: new essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York, 1999), 315–325. 10

The first full translation was produced by Sir Arthur

Gorges in the 1610s, and the first really successful complete translation, Thomas May’s Pharsalia, first came out in 1627. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s small Latine & lesse Greeke, vol. 1 (Champaign, Ill., 1944), 104: Roma Gill, ‘Marlowe, Lucan, and Sulpitius’, RES 24 (1973), 401–413 has shown that Marlowe was using Sulpitius’ commentary very closely. On Marlowe, Gorges and May more generally, see Paleit, War, Liberty, and Caesar, 219–253.

11

David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic, esp.

33–53, identifies a ‘cult of Lucan’, in which ‘republican’minded elites cleave to Lucan’s Pharsalia as a vehemently anti-Caesarian text. Paleit’s War, Liberty, and Caesar has complicated that picture, arguing that seventeenthcentury writers are less distinctively ‘ideological’ in their use of Lucan than Norbrook’s model acknowledges, and that often Lucan also offers a strong attraction for ‘Caesarist’ readers, who are not just fascinated by the martial charisma of Caesar but also prepared to revise judgements about his behaviour in the light of contemporary discourse concerning force, self-interest and necessity. Cf. also by the same author ‘Lucan in the Renaissance, pre–1625: An Introduction’, Literature Compass, 1.1 (2004), 1–6, which stresses the pedagogical context in which Lucan was accessed in the form of rhetoricised excerpts, militating against architectonic or ideological readings. 12

See esp. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican

Authorship, who makes Lucans First Booke the nexus of a broader Lucanian engagement in Marlowe’s mature dramaturgy, and argues that throughout his work Marlowe exhibits a ‘troubled’ republicanism. 13

J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge,

1964), 269–271; cf. esp. also Dan Hooley, ‘Raising the Dead: Marlowe’s Lucan’, in Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda

Zajko (eds), Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (Oxford, 2008), 243– 260: Hooley concludes (253) that ‘Marlowe…effects an appropriation of Lucan’s text in the most literal sense of “making it one’s own”. 14

Contrast Gorges’ (1614) ‘A more then ciuill warre I

sing,/That through th’ Emathian fields did ring’ (STC /1386:02 p.1); Thomas May’s ‘Warres more then civill on Aemathian plaines/We sing’ (1627, sig. A1r). 15

Steane, Marlowe, 257.

16

Philip Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in

the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge, 1993), 107 notes that Lucan and Caesar are already ‘yoke-fellows’ in Bellum Ciuile when the poet addresses his anti-hero to proclaim Pharsalia nostra/Viuet, & à nullo tenebris damnabitur æuo (BC.9.985–6: ‘No age shall vs with darke oblivion staine,/But our Pharsalia euer shall remaine’, May (1627) sig. S2v). 17

‘…Where

you

shall

hear

the

Scythian

Tamburlaine/Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms,/And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword …’ (I Tam. prol.4–6): see also I Tam. 1.ii.220; 3.iii.31; 3.iii.148; 3.iii.230; 4.iv.137; 5.i.56; 5.i.515; II Tam 1.iii.97,

and

cf.

Cheney,

Marlowe’s

Republican

Authorship, 44–5, who also (231) notes that the ‘Trumpets and Drums’ that Marlowe gives us for signa

opposing signa comes from Tamburlaine. On dextra (BC.1.3, 1.14), the right hand that, instead of guaranteeing kinship between Pompey and Caesar via marriage is paradoxically turned ‘victoriously’ in suicidal slaughter, see Paul Roche (ed.), Lucan: De Bello Civili, Book I. Edited with Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Oxford, 2009), 58, 99. 18

Cf.I.Tam 1.ii.146; 2.vii.12; 3.iii.165. This substitution is

pointed: Marlowe chooses to avoid these images when they return again later in the apostrophe to Rome (Heu, quantum terræ potuit, pelagique, parari/Hoc, quem ciuiles hauserunt, sanguine, dextræ! (BC.1.13–14: ‘Alas, what Seas, what Lands, might you haue tane,/With what bloods losse, which ciuill hands had drawne?’ May (1627) sig. A1v) is instead rendered ‘Ay me, O what a world of land and sea,/Might they have won whom civil broiles have slain’ (LFB 13–14). 19

Tamburlaine is obsessed more generally with rhetorical

plus quam framing, both in his evocation of love for Zenocrate (see esp. 1 Tam.1.ii.82–105, 3.iii.117–31) and in hyperbolic figuration of his own power: see e.g. 1 Tam 2.iii.6–24, esp.21; 3.iii.1–10 (esp.3–4); 3.iii.117–131; 5.i.135–90, esp. 155f.; 5.i.446–79, esp.446f.; II Tam. 1.iii.12–34, esp.18f.; 1.iii.43–53, esp.50f., 1.iii.150–72, esp.156, 159f.; 3.iii.1–26, esp.12–16. 20

Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship, 104.

21

See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession:

Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997); on implication with and tension between ‘self’ and ‘character’ see

esp.

Stephen

Greenblatt,

Renaissance

Self-

Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); Marjorie Garber, “‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Superscription in Marlowe’s Plays”, Theater Journal 36 (1984), 301–320. 22

Blood-language dominates Marlovian tragedy: to focus

only on I Tam., it is besmeared (1.i.80), quenches (2.vi.33), it is wept (5.i.24, 85), sweated (5.i.227) and bathed in (5.i.439). Elsewhere in the tragedies blood is quaffed, written in and even swum in. 23

Cf. esp. Jamie Masters, Poetry and Civil War in Lucan’s

Bellum Civile (Cambridge, 1992), 179–215: ‘To denounce Erictho is to denounce Lucan; to come to terms with Erictho is to come to terms with Lucan; she has been the very emblem of the poem, a compact consummation of all that we hate or love about the poet’ (179). 24

Pectora

tum

supplet/Vulneribus

primùm

feruenti

sanguine

laxata

nouis:

tabóque

medullas/Abluit: […] Protinus astrictus caluit cruor, atráque fouit/Volnera, & in uenas extremaque, membra cucurrit./Percussæ fibræ:/Et

noua

gelido

trepidant

desuetis

sub

subrepens

pećtore uita

medullis,/Miscetur

morti.

tunc

omnis

palpitat

artus./Tenduntur nerui: BC.6.667–9, 750–5). 25

Cf. the complaint of the ghost of Julia, who informs

Pompey (in a dream) that she has been expelled from Elysium and forced to mingle with guilty shades: Sedibus Elysiis, campósque expulsa piorum/Ad Stygias (inquit) tenebras, manesque nocentes,/Post bellum ciuile trahor: (BC.3.12–14). See Neil Bernstein, ‘The Dead and their Ghosts in the Bellum Civile: Lucan’s Visions of History’ in Paulo Asso (ed.), Brill’s Companion to Lucan (Leiden, 2011), 257–279, and below. 26

Cf. similar hyperbole and added sense of purpose at

BC.1.206–7/LFB 211–2: while Lucan rounds the simile off with satisfying paradox (the lion ‘unconcerned about such a great wound leaves through the sword’) Marlowe’s Caesarian lion keeps his objective in sight and ‘runs upon the hunter’ (LFB 214). 27

As Paleit ‘The “Caesarist” Reader’, 216–219 notes, both

Julius Caesar and Tamburlaine have the quality of inspiring ‘love’ and ‘unconditional loyalty’. In the same scene in Caesar’s own Bellum Ciuile (1.7) there is no mention of any support from an individual centurion: Caesar claims that his speech inspires the acclamation of the army. Cf. Matthew Leigh, ‘Neronian Literature: Seneca and Lucan’, in Miriam Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (Chichester, 2009), 239–251, esp. 243.

28

Cf. Ward, ‘Lucanic Irony, in Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine”,

The Modern Language Review, 103 (2008), 311–329. 29

Cf. esp. the famous concordia discors (BC.1.97),

referring to the first triumvirate in Lucan but now attributed directly to the warring Caesar and Pompey themselves: (‘Caesars, and Pompeys jarring love soone ended,/T’was peace against their wils’, LFB 98–9; contrast

Temporis

angusti

mansit

concordia

discors,/Paxque, fuit non sponte ducum, BC.1.98–9). And: ‘These were the causes with respect to the leaders; but the public seeds of war, which always overwhelm powerful peoples, were also underlying… (Hæ ducibus causae suberant: sed publica belli/Semina, quae populos semper mersêre potentes, BC.1.158–9) becomes ‘Such humors stirde them up; but this warrs seed,/Was even the same that wrack’s all great dominions’, LFB 159–60). Note too personalisation at LFB 161–3 versus BC.1.160– 2. 30

See Masters, Poetry and Civil War, esp. 90 on the

fractured voice of Lucan: ‘It is, therefore, mimicry of civil war, of divided unity, of concordia discors, that has produced this split in the authorial, dominating, legitimising persona, this one poet many poets, this schizophrenia, the fractured voice’. 31

On identification and implication of Marlowe with his

overreaching

characters

see

Patrick

Cheney,

‘Biographical Representations: Marlowe’s life of the Author’, in Takashi Kozuka and J.R.Mulryne (eds), Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New directions in biography (Burlington, 2006), 183–204: Cheney quotes Symonds, 194: originally in John Addington Symonds, Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama (London, 1884 repr. 1908), 484. 32

I use the fascimile edition of F. S. Boas, The Tragedy of

Caesar’s Revenge (Oxford, 1911). 33

Hopkins, Cultural Uses, 55–78.

34

A helpful introduction to the play by Lisa Hopkins’ MA

student Sharon McConnell, via the e-resources of Sheffield

Hallam

University,

may

be

found

at

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/renplays/Caesars_Re venge_Introduction.htm. 35

See esp. F. S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age

(Oxford, 1914), 267–276. 36

The other line of enquiry is the extent to which

Shakespeare may have been influenced by Caesar’s Revenge in turn (of course in Julius Caesar, but also, possibly, Richard II): see Ernest Schanzer, ‘A Neglected Source for Julius Caesar’, Notes & Queries 199 (1954), 196–197; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume 5: The Roman Plays (New York, 1964), 33–57, 196–211; Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Shakespeare and Caesar’s Revenge’, Shakespeare

Quarterly 32 (1981), 101–104; William Poole, ‘Julius Caesar and Caesar’s Revenge again’, Notes & Queries 49 (2002), 226–228. Imke Pannen includes Caesar’s Revenge in her survey of prophetic aspects in early modern drama, When the bad bleeds: Mantic Elements in English Renaissance Revenge Tragedy (Bonn, 2010). 37

Let Rome, growne proud, with her vnconquered

strength,/Perish and conquered Be with her owne strength:/And

win

breake,/Consume,

all

powers

confound,

to

disioyne

dissolue,

and and

discipate/What Lawes, Armes and Pride hath raised vp. CR. Prol. 34–8. 38

For Tamburlaine’s ‘aspiring mind’ see e.g. I Tam.

2.vii.18–20. 39

Hopkins, Cultural Uses, 60–61. See also e.g. I Tam

3.iii.117–20. 40

On Caesar’s reaction to being named ‘king’ and offered

the crown, cf. Suetonius’ Julius Caesar 79; Plutarch’s Julius Caesar 60; Dio 44.10–11. On crowns in Tamburlaine see, for example, M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions in Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, 1980), 137–138. Cf. Graham Hammill, ‘Time for Marlowe’, English Literary History 75.2 (2008), 300, on the

‘radical

metaphysics’

and

‘deeply

materialist

understanding of sovereignty’ in Tamburlaine.

41

Lucan also provides a (wholly invented episode) in

which Brutus, disguised as a plebeian, tries to kill Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus – failing, Lucan comments, because Caesar had not yet reached the zenith of his ambition (BC.7.586–96): see O. A. W. Dilke (revised from the edition of J. P. Postgate), Lucan, De Bello Civili VII (Bristol, 1960), 31. Caesar does not mention this episode in his own memoirs. 42

See esp. the late first-century CE historian Appian, Civil

Wars 2.111–113, the major source here for CR, who openly questions the motives of the tyrannicides and criticises the ingratitude displayed by Cassius and Brutus, even as he recognised that they might have been motivated by a genuine desire to restore the Republic. He also dwells on Caesar’s particular love and affection for Brutus: an episode which clearly underpins the clemency-scene at the start of Caesar’s Revenge. 43

See e.g. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, The Culture of

Giving: Informal Support and Gift–Exchange in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008), who emphasises the importance of reciprocity and indebtedness in elite early modern friendship. I quote here an expanded version of her use (p. 260) of Ludowick Bryskett’s (1606) A Discourse of Ciuill Life, containing the ethike part of morall philosophie. Fit for the instructing of a gentleman in the course of a vertuous life (who in turn quotes Seneca

on ingratitude): ‘And accordingly Seneca was of opinion, that no vice was more contrary to humanitie, or did sooner dissolue the vnitie of mens minds then ingratitude, more abhominable before God, or more odious to al vertuous & honest minds. […] [G]ratitude or thankfulness is the ornament of all other virtues from which proceedeth the love between the child and the parent, betweene the scholer and his master, the charitie towards our countrey, the honour toward God, the friendship betweene men, and the reverence towards our superiors: so no doubt ingratitude cannot be but directly contrary to all these, and therefore the foulest of al other vices; from which all the euils in the world proceed, to the perpetuall infamie of him that is vnthankful’ (233–234). 44

The Massacre at Paris with the Death of the Duke of

Guise, Edward J. Esche (ed.), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe vol.4 (Oxford, 1998). 45

This detail does come from Appian: cf. esp. III.iv.1379–

85 and Civil Wars 2.112. 46

See BC.1.1–7 (already quoted p.94 above).

47

Other inversions: Antony takes on Cassius’ vengeful

role, calling upon Nemesis to ‘Raine downe the bloudy showers of thy reuenge’ and vowing that ‘Dread, horror, vengance, death, and bloudy hate:/In this sad fight my murthering sworde awaite’. (V.iii.2381–93).

48

Note in particular the series of errors by which Cassius

and Titinius die: Cassius, in the mistaken belief that Brutus is already dead, commits suicide in a way that shows he is still committed to a Guise-like scheming: his end is framed as a tragedy not just for Rome but also for himself, in a self-heroising epitaph that draws on Virgil’s Aeneas (V.v.2435–2447; cf. Aen.1.94–101); Titinius, appearing just too late to let Cassius know that Brutus is still alive, proceeds to commit suicide himself, offering a sententious address to his knife highly reminiscent of Lucanian paradox (V.v.2495–8). 49

Cf. e.g. Plutarch Brutus 49.9; Cato the Younger 73.3;

Appian BC.5.135. 50

D. M. Bevington and E. Rasmussen (eds), Dr. Faustus:

The A– and B– texts (1604, 1616) (Manchester, 2014). Cf. Boas, University Drama, p. 270. 51

On Marlowe’s debts to Lucan for this vision of the

Underworld see Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: a study of his thought, learning, and character (New York, 1974), 150–157. This is not to downplay the complexity of the nature of resolution in The Spanish Tragedy: see, e.g., Geoffrey Aggeler, ‘The Eschatological Crux in The Spanish Tragedy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 86 (1987), 319–331. 52

Cf. C. L. Barber, ‘The Form of Faustus’ Fortunes Good

or Bad’, The Tulane Drama Review 8 (1964), 92–119,

especially 116: ‘The extraordinary pun in “confounds hell in Elysium” suggests that Faustus is able to change the world by the way he names it, to destroy or baffle hell by equating or mixing it with Elysium’. 53

A Continuation was first produced in English in 1630

and revised in three subsequent editions (the final publication in 1650). A translation of A Continuation into Latin, the Supplementum Lucani, was first produced in 1640 and revised in 1646. See Birger Backhaus (ed.), Das Supplementum Lucani von Thomas May. Einleitung, Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar (BAC 65, Trier, 2005). 54

Paleit, War, Liberty and Caesar, 269–282, arguing

against R .T. Bruère, ‘The Latin and English Versions of Thomas

May’s

Supplementum

Lucani’,

Classical

Philology, 48 (1949), 145–163; Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London, 1983), 184–185; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 225– 228. 55

See Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship, 42–43;

Yanick Maes, ‘Haec Monstra Edidit. Translating Lucan in the Early Seventeenth Century’ in Emma Buckley and Martin Dinter (eds), A Companion to the Neronian Age (Chichester, 2011), 405–424. 56

Cf. esp. ‘Let dire Pharsalia grone with armed

Hoasts,/And glut with blood the Carthaginian Ghosts’

(May (1627) sig. A2r) with LFB 38–9, ‘Pharsalia grone with slaughter;/And Carthage soules be glutted with our blouds’; also the entrance of Caesar and his conversation with the imago of Rome (May (1627) sig. A4r), LFB 185– 192). 57

On May’s ancient sources see Backhaus, Das

Supplementum Lucani, 63–67. 58 59

Cf. esp. Cont. 5 (1630) sig. G4r–G4v. Cf. e.g. ‘Let Ioue my warrant be; whom powerfull

loue/So oft has forc’d from Heauen; or let it proue/The Thunderers excuse to future times/That Caesar now partakes the Thunderers crimes …’ (Cont. 2, sig. C5r) with ‘The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,/That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops/To thrust his doting father from his chair/And place himself in th’empyreal heaven,/Moved me to manage arms against thy state./What better precedent than mighty Jove?’, I Tam. 2.vii.12–17). 60

‘The date of Caesar’s glory was expir’d,/And Fortune

weary’d with his Triumphs now/Reuolts from him; more ruine and more woe/Was yet behinde for wretched Rome to tast/Nor can their quiet happinesse out-last/The life of Caesar, whose approaching Fate/More Ciuill warres and wounds must expiate/No vertue, bountie, grace, nor clemency/Could long secure vsurped Soueraignty …’ (Cont. 7. sig. J8r). For the same complex of fate, ruin and

fortune, together with Pompey’s similar veiling of his head at the moment of death, see esp. BC.7.85–90, 242ff. 61

For a sensitive reading of the Continuation and its

resolution see E. J. Paleit, War, Liberty and Caesar, 269– 282. 62

On a later moment in the afterlife of the Statius poem,

see Pugh, ‘Adonis and literary immortality in Pastoral Elegy’, in this volume. 63

May pointedly signals the change in the first words of

the reworked Latin elegy: Fleverat Annæi fatum miserabile Vatis/Calliope (‘Calliope had wept for the wretched fate of her poet Lucan’, Suppl. (1640) sig.*3v): and it is worth remarking that the title-page of the 1630 Continuation is ‘Olympian’ in perspective, featuring an arch displaying Apollo, Mercury and Historia. On the conditions of May’s composition of the Supplementum during a period of time spent in the Netherlands, together with analysis of the differences between the ‘Complaint’ of A Continuation and its Latin counterpart in the Supplementum see Paleit, War, Liberty and Caesar, 285–296; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 225– 228. 64

Suppl. (1640) sig. *3r: see Paleit, War, Liberty and

Caesar, 290–291; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 80–81.

65

On Nero see Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics

and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.1590–1630’, in Kevin Sharpe (ed.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994), 21–44; Paulina Kewes, ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74 (2011), 515–551. 66

See esp. the half-line not translated by May in his 1650

version Non hanc, Cæsareo madeat dum sanguine Roma,/Claudito; vindictae parsque sit illa tuæ,/Ut cujus dederit victoria sceptra Neroni,/Manibus occumbat Victima caesa tuis... (‘Don’t end this poem while Rome is yet steeped in Caesarian blood; let this be part of your revenge, that he whose victory granted power to Nero, fall a victim/sacrifice slain for your shades’). 67

I would like to thank Edward Paleit for allowing the use

of forthcoming but as yet unpublished work, and in particular Syrithe Pugh for her many helpful suggestions in revising this chapter.

5 Citizenship

and

suicide:

Shakespeare’s Roman plays, republicanism and identity in Samson Agonistes Helen Lynch

Introduction When Milton revives the classical past in Samson Agonistes, he undertakes a double necromancy, by reviving – or at least engaging in a conversation with – Shakespeare. Novelist Margaret Atwood characterises all writing as ‘negotiating with the dead’, using this as the title for her book on writing, although her publisher, pace Harold Bloom, initially thought it far too depressing, preferring to add the subtitle ‘A Writer on Writing’.

1

Samson Agonistes enacts a negotiation not only with but also between Shakespeare’s Roman plays, especially, I’m going to claim here, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra

(although

also

Coriolanus

and

Titus

Andronicus, as well as Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III … of which more elsewhere).

2

This is a negotiation

undertaken by a ‘strong reader’ with his own political and related religious preoccupations, concerns which centre on notions of oratory, identity, death and immortality. These are addressed not least through the question of suicide, classical and otherwise, Samson being ‘selfkilled/Not willingly but tangled in the fold/Of dire necessity’ (SA, 1664–6). Whether or not Samson in the 3

drama is deliberately killing himself, he is certainly killing everyone else: or, at least, Milton is careful to specify, the most culpable, the idolatrous lordly and priestly caste of the Philistines. Only ‘the vulgar’ are allowed to escape, saved indirectly by the exclusionist tendency of the ruling class to hog all the best seats, with the heaviest casualties suffered by those closest to the ‘spectacle’ so beloved of that corrupt ‘non-polity’ as a whole.

4

Milton possessed plenty of direct classical knowledge of his own, and there is no shortage of engagement with a broad range of classical sources in his work, so by rights he had no need of the mediation of Shakespeare who, at least in Jonson’s presentation of him, had relatively little; and I’m not putting forward a Bloomian argument 5

here, according to which Milton would have to revive Shakespeare to address his own inheritance anxiety – reductively speaking, to dig up the poetic father in order to kill him off properly. Rather, I’m approaching this question as a fiction writer and a Milton scholar, more than a classicist or an expert on Shakespeare, knowing from experience that when it comes to writing as writing, or writing as necromancy, many if not all writers think in images, often associatively, and that their own preoccupations govern those associations and manifest themselves through imagery. In the case of Samson Agonistes, suicide – in the classical sense of an act which summarises life at the point of and in the manner of leaving it, the ultimate form of speech-act which inscribes the actor’s immortal fame onto the future, completing and bequeathing his story in a single action – is aligned with identity in the assertion that the hero

‘hath quit himself/Like Samson’ (SA, 1709–10). ‘Like’, moreover, signifies the fundamental rhetorical-poetic device of simile, the springboard of imagery. Indeed, it would be possible to chart the drama’s entire narrative – both in terms of plot and thematically – by tracing the appearance of ‘like’ in the verse, since the term and the statements governed by it provide an effective synopsis: Samson returning to God and thus to himself, God’s Champion. The drama effectively ends when God ‘speaks’ thunderously through Samson’s act ‘As with the force winds and waters pent’ (SA, 1647): Samson’s journey is over, he becomes at last ‘like’ himself and indeed simultaneously ‘like’ the self-regenerating phoenix (SA, 1697–1707) and God, it seems, is in charge of the imagery now. Conversely, along the way, ‘like’ is shown also to signify false semblance, allied to notions of seeming and appearance, especially in relation to Dalila and Harapha, and set up in binary opposition to ‘good’ seeming and appearance: the kind of public performance before God, the political courage of the true actor to become the mouthpiece for divine utterance, whether prompted

dissembling

or

deafening

vengeance.

6

Willingly and actively subjecting himself to God’s will,

Samson, unlike the Philistines he challenges, ‘dar[es] to appear’ in the ‘light’ of public space, witness to and witnessed by the true deity in the false god’s temple.

7

Thus, although in a fallen world everything may be a simile, or at least a simulacrum, the task for the virtuous 8

citizen, the rational Christian soul, is to recognise and align itself with the ‘right’ manifestation in each case:

9

Samson illustrates and enacts the godly politics of interactive, revelatory and persuasive speech through which this may be achieved. I will be examining in this regard the intertextual relationship of Milton’s drama with the classical and Shakespearean orators and suicides, Brutus and Mark Antony, the well-known Hercules subtext in both Antony and Cleopatra and Samson Agonistes, where it forms the basis also for a Hercules Gallicus parallel; and, through the paradigm of the strong man/orator led astray by sensuality, the identification of Dalila with Shakespeare’s Antony’s foreign

enchantress-mistress

but

wife-in-suicide,

Cleopatra (and through her Virgil’s Dido, Spenser’s Acrasia, the enslaving, cross-dressing, ‘barbarian’ Lydian queen, Omphale, of classical myth), and indeed, to use 10

Samson’s telling words to his wife, ‘all women false like

thee’ [my italics] (SA, 749). Dalila, Cleopatra and Antony’s first wife Fulvia Flacca Bambalio (according to both Plutarch and Shakespeare) may be depicted as ‘emasculating’ usurpers of their husband/lover’s political role, and yet Milton diverges from Shakespeare to create yet

another

emphasis

particular

to

his

own

requirements: preferring Plutarch’s and other classical accounts which see Antony and Fulvia as directly responsible for the death of Cicero, with whose public service and philippic voice Milton identifies in his polemical prose from ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ (1642) to the daring intervention ‘A Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth’ on the very eve of the Restoration.

11

Section I The argument I will be making here grew out of work on Samson Agonistes for a monograph on Milton and the idea of oratory. Milton and the Politics of Public Speech (Farnham, 2015) looks at Milton’s polemical prose alongside that of many of his contemporaries, and then examines how the imagery of classical citizenship (and more specifically imagery of groups explicitly excluded

from citizenship of the Greek polis and Roman res publica) plays out in his later poetry, above all in his Hebreo-Greek drama. Milton famously equates ‘poetry, and all good oratory’ in his note on the verse of Paradise Lost and one of the original features of my book is the use of the political theory of Hannah Arendt to examine this distinctive connection between speaking out of the self in public – which is the freedom accorded to the citizen (and which Arendt herself links to the ethos of Homeric epic, Sophoclean tragedy and the practice of Socrates and his predecessors) – and the divinely inspired utterance, triumph over his people’s enemies, self-inflicted death and immortality apparently achieved by Samson at the close of Milton’s dramatic poem. Arendt’s political thought grows out of her own reviving of the dead – most obviously in The Human Condition: in fact her enthusiasm for pre-Socratic Greek 12

political praxis occasioned the jibe that she suffered from polis envy. My book proposes using Arendt rather than Habermas as a tool for understanding politics and political writing, classical republican and otherwise, in the seventeenth century. The book puts forward various arguments why this is appropriate, not least the fact that 13

Arendt’s depiction of the classical public sphere equals the enthusiasm of Leveller polemicists such as Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne, the debaters at Putney, or writers like Parker, Nedham, Milton and Algernon Sidney, captures and elucidates the excitement at the first experience of the political exercised through public discourse. While deploying ‘timeless’ political theory better to comprehend works written long ago, albeit in a period defined and motivated by its own attempts to inhabit, theorise and generate classically inspired politics, might seem like a somewhat un-historicist endeavour, I trust the book does not ignore social and cultural history and manages to achieve the aim, as Stephen Zwicker and Keven Sharpe have it, ‘not to confine to the past’ early modern authors and their works, ‘but to release them into the rich complexities of their historical moment’.

14

Others, such as Victoria Kahn, have also made use of twentiethcentury political and social thinkers, such that some have discerned in this the beginning of a current trend with its own dangers. Notwithstanding these 15

perils, I’m proposing that a similar framework and methodology with regard to Shakespeare’s Roman and

history plays might well prove useful, not simply in discerning and probing the elements of Renaissance republicanism

others

have

detected

there,

but

specifically in offering insight into how these works might have been read and alluded to by later writers with more overtly classical republican agendas. Arendt insists on the distinctive Greek conception of public utterance: It is the function of the public realm to throw light upon the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do. (HC, 179–180)

In the Greek polis, public speech, verbal intervention, persuasion (to the goddess of which there was a temple in Athens) is itself a form of action constitutive of identity and freedom: The stature of the Homeric Achilles can be understood only if one sees him as the ‘doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words’. In distinction from modern understanding, such words were not considered great because they expressed great thoughts. Thought was secondary to speech, but speech and action were

considered to be coeval and coequal, of the same rank and the same kind; and this originally meant not only that most political action, in so far as it remains outside the sphere of violence, is indeed transacted in words, but more fundamentally that finding the right words at the right moment, quite apart from the information or communication they may convey, is action. (HC, 25–26)

Furthermore, the space of appearance of the public realm in which speech defines and constitutes action is most akin to the drama, with the protagonist, the main agonist, an ‘actor’ in all senses: The theatre is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art. By the same token, it is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others. (HC, 188)

Samson’s divine election to act on behalf of his people in accordance with God’s will is central to Milton’s drama, but for the Greeks, this opportunity to speak persuasively on matters of state is afforded to – indeed is a responsibility enjoined upon – all citizens. Yet the polis, consisting of adult males so empowered, rested on the

strict exclusion, at least theoretically, of several distinct groups: women, children, slaves, foreigners (aka barbarians – who to some extent overlap with slaves, who were often war-captives) and merchants. Similar (though not identical) exclusions characterised also the Roman res publica. Arendt emphasises the ties of all of these categories to the ‘household’, the oikia, defined in direct opposition to the polis as in thrall to biological necessity and the needs of survival (a feature they share with the democratic citizen’s opposite, the tyrant). These slaves, women, children, domestic beasts, whom Aristotle alike terms ‘stable companions’, are merely living rather than living well; instead of ‘noble deeds’, they are bound to repeated action without significance or durability, like feeding and washing, or, in the case of the merchant, gaining money to enable such physical survival.

16

Above all, they are defined by their relation to language and therefore the means of identifying themselves, of using words that are deeds – freedom. Slaves and animals are, says Aristotle, aneu loghon, without speech: they are not free, and indeed are unworthy of 17

freedom, because of this condition, which, by a circular logic also renders them incapable of attaining or

exercising the liberty they are denied. Masculinity, citizenship and freedom are thus inseparable and set up in opposition to these unworthy and excluded categories of being (unworthy because excluded and vice versa) as well as to the tyrant, who is also not free: living in fear of his own overthrow and death, a slave to his own most servile lackeys, a wild beast to his people and in thrall to his own unchecked vices and power. The adult male citizen, crossing the domestic threshold to represent himself and deploy his ‘voice’ in public space, defined by the Greeks, resonated across the centuries. For those arguing to enlarge the franchise in the Putney Debates of the Civil War, ‘slavery’ is the sole and clear alternative to having a ‘voice’ or ‘say’ (terms which meant an actual vote throughout the medieval period until, significantly, the end of the seventeenth century, when they began to acquire their subsequent, more passive meanings). Indeed, the word for a ‘vote’ in many languages remains the same as that for ‘voice’. Not only for classical republicans, but, it appears, for polemicists of all hues in the 1640s and 1650s, the depiction of their own utterances as public speech went along with an unease about the clamour of multiple voices and rhetorics

unleashed by the current debates, and a penchant for derogatory

characterisations

of

their

opponents’

interventions as noise: ‘barking’, gibbrish’, ‘babble’, ‘clamouring’, ‘jabberment’, ‘buzze’, ‘janglings’ etc.

18

Tyranny, pamphleteers of the period concur, while supported and concealed by such noise, is nonetheless notable for its silence: at the opposite end of the spectrum from public speech is the tyrant’s violence, at once deafening and mute. The ‘perfet Turkish tyranny’ of Charles I partakes of its prototype, as conceived by the Greeks and fully delineated by Aristotle, that of the ‘Oriental despot’ or ‘Asiatic tyrant’ whose state embodies, induces and is enabled by ‘effeminacy’, ‘bestiality’, ‘barbarism’,

infantilism

and

also,

for

some,

mercantilism. ‘softest, basest, vitiousest, servilest, easiest to be kept under; and not only in fleece but in mind also sheepishest’ ‘the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government’ ‘painted freedom […] fit to coz’n babies’ ‘more like boyes under age then men’ ‘effeminate and Uxorious’ ‘soft effeminacies of the Court’ ‘not to be babies, but to be men in good earnest’ ‘a perfet Turkish tyranny’ ‘asses saddled with new panniers of slavery’ ‘how much better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old

and elegant humanity of Greece, then the barbarick pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian statlines’ ‘persuasion is certainly more winning, and more manlike way to keepe men in obedience than fear’ ‘tyrants […] swallow the people’s prerogatives, and like the Beasts of the Forrests […] grow fat, by devouring the poor man’s Corn’ ‘Turkish galley-slaves’ ‘Biting cannibals’ ‘Judaizing beasts’ ‘as a roaring lion and a raging bear so is a wicked ruler over the poor people’ ‘inchanted herds’ ‘credulous herds’ ‘hapless herds’ ‘swinish multitude’ ‘not yet had the

common

people,

maddened

by

priestly

machinations, sunk to barbarism fouler than that which stains the Indians, themselves the most stupid of mortals’ ‘like brute beasts that have no understanding’ ‘wolfish cannibal and inhuman intents against their neighbours […] veil’d, gilded and covered over with such various, fair and specious pretences’ ‘beagles and […] prowling varlets’ ‘a sort of clamouring and fighting brutes, broke loos’ ‘shew themselves to be by nature slaves, and arrant beasts; not fit for that liberty which they cri’d out and bellow’d for’ ‘Hebrew bondslaves’ ‘to whose polite wisdom and letters we ow we are not yet Gothes and Jutlanders’ ‘And this is the old law of England, and that which enslaves the people of England: that they should be bound by laws, in which they have no voice at all!’ ‘Then, I say, the one part shall make hewers

of wood and drawers of water of the other five, and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved […] They have now nothing to say for themselves’ ‘troubl’d sea of noises and hoars disputes’ ‘barking curses’ ‘frothy, immeritous undeserving discourse’ ‘clamouring debate of utterles things’ ‘heathenish Battologie of multiplying words’ ‘metaphysical gargarisms’ ‘barbarous sophistry’ ‘the buzze … of the State Theologues’ ‘bauling whippets, and shin-barkers’

‘jangling

opinions’

‘Mercenary

noisemakers’ ‘hir’d maisters of tongue-fence’ ‘vain babble’ ‘jabberment’ ‘gibbrish’ ‘Frivolous pusrsuits and vain janglings’ ‘flattery, and court shifts and tyrannous aphorisms’

The illustration above, which consists of a selection from 19

prose by Milton and a variety of other pamphleteers of the period, gives just a small sample of this ubiquitous terminology, and shows the propensity for yoking one or more

non-citizen

groups

in

attacking

political

opponents, and the inseparable preoccupation with language: accusations of effeminacy, servility etc. accompanied by references to linguistic indistinctness, an undifferentiated din, a racket lulling, befuddling or clamouring the hearers into submission. This versatile imagery not only provides opportunities to combine

biblical and classical resonances but is notable for its reversible properties: pamphleteers are almost as likely to depict themselves or ‘the people’ as an ill-treated wife, gullible or abused child, a preyed-upon animal, members of deluded native tribes of conquered territories or enslaved victims of Turkish piracy. In short, their opponents are tyrannically disenfranchising them. Those who claim Milton is not a misogynist because he says similar or worse things about animals, or children, or foreigners are missing an important point. These noncitizen groups are all despised for the same reason, and likening an adversary to one of them or, better still, linking two together, automatically invokes all the others. They are each part of a single rubric of condemnation, and the combined effect forms a powerful subliminal rhetoric of its own within the polemical writing of the time. This mesh of images of women, children, beasts, barbarians, slaves with their lack of comprehensible or meaningful language is, moreover, also coupled with charges of ‘timorousness’, ‘sloth’, ‘unmanlike’ weakness: in short lack of courage, which Arendt, citing Machiavelli and Livy, identifies as the essential component of republican virtù, that belonging

to a man. While this may be especially marked in the 20

seventeenth century, in a print culture forged in the crucible of vehement political debate in which the participants

saw

themselves

as

orators,

this

interconnected web of simile, metaphor and their overarching association was already so well-established in Renaissance writing, not least in its response to the classical past, that it may help us better to discern their resonance and their implications for the perceived ‘republican force field’ of Shakespeare’s plays (as indeed for other sixteenth-century writing).

21

Reading and teaching Shakespeare while writing the book, I found that I was noticing some very similar things happening around this cluster of images and the ways they interacted, or certainly that I could see things there that would have been likely to resonate with a politically committed reader like Milton. At the same time, I was analysing

some

very

specifically

Shakespearean

allusions, often extended ones, in the language of Samson Agonistes, in particular speeches, or particular similes. I ended up devoting a substantial portion of a chapter, ‘Trade Wars at Sea: Milton’s Herculean Struggle with Romance’, to the intertextual implications of

Milton’s use of Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Faerie Queene, and in this essay 22

I’m going to use an example, Act V scene iv from Julius Caesar, that came to my attention then, but which seemed to require more expanded reflection than I could at that time afford.

23

Shakespeare of course is, politically, notoriously hard to pin down: Blair Worden says that Shakespeare gives us ‘maps rather than directions’, and that’s even if we eschew the nineteenth-century view that Shakespeare stages political arguments but never takes sides.

24

Quentin Skinner declares that it used to be taken as an implied ‘insult to his genius to suggest that Shakespeare harboured any serious interest in the local political issues of his day’ but that, in counterbalancing this, ‘it would be little better than absurd to piece together the scattered observations in his oeuvre in such a way as to equip him with a settled body of political beliefs’. Milton, on the 25

other hand, is a writer with a complex but notable and well-documented set of political beliefs and their inseparable religious counterparts. It might therefore be easier to work out the terms in which Milton could have read Shakespeare’s work, how Milton’s drama might

engage intertextually with the Roman plays, than to determine any notion of what Shakespeare’s drama might be ‘actually saying’ (even aside from the dubiousness in literary theoretical terms of the latter enterprise). In doing so, the argument may incidentally illuminate some aspects of Shakespearean drama, though, not least with regard to its engagement with the world of classical politics and oratory. Hadfield’s Shakespeare and Republicanism identified in the plays a kind of republican force field, viewed them as emerging from ‘a culture saturated with republican images’. Using everything from Lucan’s Pharsalia to the 26

writings of Scottish divine George Buchanan, Hadfield situates the plays in a historical context – anxiety over the succession, for example, or protestant resistance theory and Mary Queen of Scots. In providing accounts of the plays, Hadfield, and others, encounter imagery of the excluded groups of non-citizens mentioned above along the way, but I’m suggesting using this distinctive web of metaphor and simile as a litmus test for the presence of republican thought and a crucial way into understanding – rather than simply a side-effect of – republican concerns. The imagery of non-citizens, the

associated accusations of ‘effeminacy,’ ‘barbarism’ etc. and their requisite adjectives (slavish, childish, slothful etc.) are such apparent classical commonplaces that it is easy to miss them or fail to note the central connection they make between citizenship and language – meaningful, persuasive utterance – and thus the poetry and rhetoric at the heart of writing itself. Scrutinising these clues at the level of imagery is, I suggest, fruitful in interpreting Shakespeare’s drama, a means of further interrogating that republican force field, irrespective of whether such-and-such a king is ‘actually’ a tyrant, Julius Caesar is ‘really’ an enemy of the republic, or indeed whether or not the plebeians are represented as a bunch of fickle eejits swayed by every orator who addresses them. In her book Tyranny in Shakespeare, Mary Ann McGrail says she is trying to ‘indicate that there is more extreme subversion occurring in the plays than is recognized, even by those who are looking for it’. I’m 27

proposing looking at Shakespeare through the eyes of a later poet for whom the questions about tyranny she highlights feed directly into contemporary concerns of the Civil War, the Commonwealth and especially the

Restoration: what is tyranny, what are the aims of the tyrant, how does one strive against tyranny etc.? In Arendt’s terms, how can ‘men in dark times’ reconstitute a polity? It might seem a lot easier to make assumptions about what a politically committed but complex writer like Milton might have derived from Shakespeare’s engagement with these questions than to unpick Shakespeare’s supposed ‘answers’ to them. Even so, it is necessary to proceed with care, and recognise that any biographical reading of Milton’s ‘thoughts’ can only be speculation, and any direct correlation between any such ‘thoughts’ and the poetic works he produced spurious. We might deduce that he was familiar with Shakespeare’s plays early in his career, since he wrote a poem for the Second Folio, and that, even when blind, he had plays 28

read to him, and discussed Shakespeare with visiting friends. Would Milton have considered his predecessor 29

to have been living and writing under an absolute Elizabethan and Jacobean monarchy, and thus subjected to the oppression similar to that of Charles I or of the Restoration conditions in which he himself wrote? Did Milton, then, view Shakespeare as a kindred republican spirit as well as a poetic one, a purveyor of

political wisdom that was necessarily halfconcealed? Or as an artist from a less enlightened time than his own whose genius enabled him to comprehend more than he was aware? It is impossible to know: Milton’s sense of 30

the recent past, as distinct from his largely pejorative depiction of the Catholic Middle Ages, is hard to pin down. Labriola’s claim to find in Milton’s portrayal of 31

Eve echoes of sixteenth-century iconography of the English Queen as virgin moon goddess surrounded by adoring male courtiers, including poets such as Sir Phillip Sidney, might lend weight to this. Certainly 32

Satan’s address to Eve and the terms of his temptation draws heavily on romance motifs, at the very least to pave the way for the final layer of the generic hierarchy, classical oratory, to effect the ultimate persuasion (‘As when som orator of Greece or Rome’). The only form in 33

which the kneeling posture of supplicant male lover of courtly romance is admissible in a poet, for Milton, is in relation to the Heavenly Muse, the source of true oratorical inspiration. Though Milton depicted himself in his polemics as courtly champion for England’s commonwealth, engaged in combat with Salmasius and Alexander More, even while he mocked his opponents for

their chivalric pretensions, Samson Agonistes appears largely dismissive of Harapha, that composite of fairytale ogre and biblical giant with his challenge to single combat.

34

What a writer retains, consciously and otherwise, of another writer’s work, or the sense of a forerunner’s circumstances and positions, are mostly intangible and difficult to trace, as are the form in which such perceptions may come to mind at what Derrida calls the ‘scene of writing’.

35

My contention will be more

straightforward than this, however: that Milton is explicit in his claim that the work of the poet is (good) oratory (it is an overt and recurrent preoccupation in his writing, from the characterisation of Satan, the effective evil orator of Paradise Lost, to the master of sophistic rhetoric Belial and the Jesus of Paradise Regained, who finally brings about the Arch-fiend’s dialogic defeat); that Samson and Shakespeare’s Mark Antony are connected through intertextual allusion in Samson Agonistes; and not only that Brutus and Mark Antony are connected historically, or in classical sources such as Plutarch, but that the distinctive way Shakespeare draws that connection in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra

is of interest politically and poetically to Milton, and informs his work in ways I hope to show.

Section II Like Brutus and Mark Antony, Samson is, my argument contends, an orator. As well as being suicides, Shakespeare’s Brutus and Antony are unsuccessful, erstwhile or degenerate orators, while it is central to the argument of Milton and the Politics of Public Speech that Milton depicts Samson first as a failed public actor/divinely elected champion, then as regenerate orator, in the sense that Arendt claims the Greeks to have understood the term, enacting words as deeds, or rather God’s Word as cataclysmic action. Arendt is adamant that The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. (HC, 199)

The drama in part enacts this process through the protagonist’s interactions with the Chorus, those ‘friends

and equals of his tribe’ (SA, The Argument) who are ‘neither for nor against him’ forming a proto-public 36

realm which enables the trajectory for political recovery, for him and for them. However misguided themselves, the Danites hold their ‘deliverer’ to account, requiring him to clarify his former and his current positions and actions, in ways that critics have rightly discerned to debate tenets of political theory from Aristotle, Livy and Machiavelli to the finer points of Roman law.

37

And it is these preconditions, the presence of this nascent public space (with Samson ‘Retiring from the popular noise’, able to exercise ‘choice of Sun or shade’, and ‘relieved from task of servile toyl’) which enable him to ‘feel amends’, to benefit from ‘The breath of Heav’n fresh-blowing, pure and sweet,/With day-spring born’;

38

and it is this verbal process of enlightenment that moves Samson from lying carelessly diffuse to standing erect between the pillars of Dagon’s temple, from ‘restless thoughts’ and self-pity, bemoaning ‘what once I was/Am now’ to taking responsibility for that change and finding the way to reverse it. The self-analysis in which he engages, initially with the Chorus’s help, elucidates the distinction between being ‘separate to God’ and isolation,

which Arendt discusses in her treatment of the nature of collective political action. Examining republicanism’s ‘one strong man delusion’ and using Hercules as her example, she argues that ‘a single individual, Hercules for instance, can of course ultimately act, if the gods help him to accomplish great deeds, and he needs other people only to ensure that news of his deeds will be spread’. However, the ‘spontaneity’ shown by such as 39

Hercules is, on the whole, she says, ‘pre-political’ since ‘power’, which she distinguishes from ‘strength’, exists 40

between people acting in concert; Arendt insists that: Whoever, for whatever reasons, isolates himself and does not partake in such being together, forfeits power and becomes impotent, no matter how great his strength and how valid his reasons. (HC, 201)

It is within the context of this ‘talking cure’ that the three 41

big ‘temptations’ take the form of verbal engagements, public debates, each one an enticement to a form of nonpublicness. Just as Samson understands his previous ‘fall’ to have been a retreat to the oikia, the household, with all the attendant references to effeminacy, slavishness, bestiality etc., the propositions of Manoa and Dalila patently involve the same, and provide the

opportunity for him to recognise and verbally refute their arguments and spurious persuasions (albeit, some might say, with limited success). This aspect is explicit in Harapha’s depiction as ‘tongue doughty giant’, a walking ‘rougher tongue’ (SA, 1181, 1066), whose challenge enables

Samson

to

examine

his

former

false

understanding of his role as God’s champion, to draw out the differences between immortal fame and the mere celebrity he enjoyed before. While Harapha performs the traditional goading of Arthur’s knights, especially by oversized or supernatural beings, he also provides an opportunity for Samson to redefine chivalry for himself, while spurning the Catholic, superstitious, medieval version, which Milton decries in his prose or ridicules in Paradise Lost.

42

Like that of Manoa, the central

temptation, that of Dalila, is a temptation to privacy, to confinement in the oikia, exposed with all the attendant non-citizen imagery of infantilisation, servility, animality and effeminacy in Samson’s response. By her own admission, Dalila has sought to prevent her husband exercising the adult male citizen’s freedom to cross the threshold into the public realm to act and to speak, claiming to fear that he would be drawn forth to ‘perilous

enterprises’, thus compromising both the political virtue 43

of courage and his godly purpose. Her account of her own projected memorial decisively demonstrates that she has taken on her husband’s role, as champion of her people and their god.

44

Approaching ‘like a stately ship of Tarsus’, her description invokes, as I argue elsewhere, a whole web of allusions to Cleopatra, and her barge, to Spenser’s Acrasia, the Indian princess of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the weeping Dido imploring Aeneas to stay – a litany of foreign women, ‘false’ wives, distracting temptresses.

45

The association with the East, which

seventeenth-century political writing took from classical sources, including Aristotle, to signify the realm of Oriental despotism, Asiatic tyranny, alleging an innate servility in its people bred, according to later protestant polemicists, from exposure to the fecund luxuriance of the habitat, inducing indolence and effeminacy, an overindulgent

mother-mistress.

46

These

intertextual

references raise the question of what Milton is doing with the genre of romance, and what its presence means in this largely classical milieu. Clearly the delaying Circean fairy-mistress figures perform a function by infusing a

sexual element into what is otherwise a political temptation. Dalila is, as others have pointed out, a perfectly effective rhetorician, yet by invoking the Spenserian sorceress in this passage Milton supplements the tears, sighs and non-verbal elements of a supposedly feminine form of persuasion with the image of the predatory soul-sucker of the Bower of Blisse, whose enchantments emasculate, enervate and ultimately liquefy her knightly victims, dissolving them from within, their sexual exhaustion realised as literal dissolution, their weapons and shields hung useless on a tree, as once were Hercules’ when in thrall to Omphale. Samson may 47

dispute Dalila’s arguments but he cannot persuade or alter her (not least because of her allegiance to the false water-god, Dagon), hence his Guyon-like rage at her attempt to touch him. The inclusion of romance temptresses brings to the interaction with Dalila a moral and sexual colouring, a fuller dimension to the Choice of Hercules between pleasure and virtue which Samson faces, even aside from the link to Tarsus, where tradition held that Hercules had suffered his imprisonment.

48

It is of course no secret that there is a Herculean subtext in Samson Agonistes, and this not only because,

like the Greek demi-god, Milton’s protagonist is faced with a choice which defines him, a strong man led astray by sensuality and, by his own account, ‘effeminately vanquish’d’ into a condition of ‘effeminacy’. Hercules famously engages in some cross-dressing, rather as his self-styled descendant, that ‘Herculean Roman’ (AC, I.iii.84), Mark Antony, does with Cleopatra: ‘I drunk him to his bed;/Then put my tires and mantles on him, whilst/I wore his sword Philippan’(AC, II.v. 21–23). In 49

his period of enslavement to ‘Oriental’ Lydian queen Omphale, she dons the hero’s lion-skin and carries his club while he wears women’s clothing and sorts out her knitting. ‘Barbarian’ Lydia was a region noted for its 50

gold refining and its mercantile success, instituting the first coinage, its shipping prowess, and its recurrent unchecked

political

Moreover,

Hercules’

‘villainies’ marital

and

history

oppression.

51

is

similarly

unfortunate, his second wife, Deianira, ‘the destroyer of her husband’ unwittingly causing Hercules’ apparent death when she uses Nessus’ potion in an attempt to bind her husband to her and prevent his straying abroad (in this case largely into the path of other women, but also to complete his public role). Deianira too is a suicide and

some versions of the hero’s story have Hercules encountering her in the Underworld rather as Aeneas does Dido and achieving some form of resolution.

52

Antony’s famous ancestor’s departure may or may not be signalled by the music from underneath the stage in Shakespeare’s play, but Samson and Hercules do not 53

simply share an association with pillars and lions. Nor is it merely that the Samson-Hercules-Antony axis (and the corresponding enthralling

female

mistresses

nemeses, Dalila,

false

Deianira,

wives

and

Omphale,

Cleopatra) help to form the intersection with romance in Milton’s otherwise carefully classical-Hebraic drama to form a composite of classical/romance goddesses and enchantresses, or as Samson would have it, ‘all women false like thee’ (SA, 749). The classical Hercules is not 54

only ‘grand suppressor of Tyrants’ but, even more 55

importantly from the point of view of this argument, through the Hercules Gallicus tradition, a famous orator whose eloquence leads his listeners by the ears.

56

Figure 7: Hercules Gallicus from Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, CLXXX (p. 580): `Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior’, (Antwerp, 1577). In Andrea Alciato’s illustrated Emblem, captioned ‘Eloquence trumps strength’, Hercules is depicted leading the crowd of his hearers by chains extending from his mouth to their ears. The motto ‘Eloquentia 57

fortitudine praestantior’ is one Samson discovers in himself, and exemplifies in his encounter with Harapha. Even though the hero’s readiness to engage in physical trials of strength is apparent, there are surer ways to be ‘God’s champion’ and embracing romance single combat is presented as at least potentially a false step. Whether 58

or not the drama posits an alternative, ‘true’ Christian knighthood, Samson has arrived at an understanding that differentiates ‘strength’ and ‘power’ (and their relation to the use of violence) in somewhat Arendtian terms. Though his earlier claim that ‘all the contest is 59

now/Twixt God and Dagon’ may have been a sign of defeated withdrawal, it is in fact no less than the truth, and has been all along, albeit such a struggle, like that of God and Satan, is ultimately no contest at all. The retreat into privacy is over, and Samson is now ready with his

oaken staff of faith to fight physically or verbally, according to divine will. Aside from a shared interest in emasculation and hairstyling – Milton’s Samson, famously ‘shorn/Like a tame wether’, and Shakespeare’s Antony heading off to Cleopatra’s barge ‘barber’d ten times o’er’ – the two texts play with some very familiar features and preoccupations of the Greek and Roman worlds. Milton’s inter textual references to Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra’s barge elide Shakespeare’s Egyptian ‘gypsy’ as her barge (and later as her own fleeing ships at Actium) with Dalila ‘Like a stately ship of Tarsus’, the city situated on the river Cydnus, where Antony and Cleopatra first meet. Indeed 60

Milton has most of the actors in his drama described as varieties of shipping, from Samson’s self-description as ‘like a foolish Pilot’ who ‘shipwrack’t,/My Vessel trusted to me from above,/Gloriously rigg’d’ (SA, 198–200) to 61

the mocking ‘his giantship’ of Harapha (SA, 1244). Cleopatra’s portrayal – tricksy, manipulative arguments, harangues, mood swings, alternate sensual appeal and withholding – establishes her rhetorical modus operandi as ‘female’ just as Dalila’s is based on tears, sighs, proffered

touch

and

‘jangling’

‘tongue

batteries’

(harrying male reason into acquiescence). Embodying a 62

mercantile, despotic East of sorcery and fecundity,

63

Cleopatra breathes power even (or rather especially) by panting. When Antony, as visiting Roman general, sits 64

in the forum (which is tellingly, in Egypt, a ‘marketplace’ anyway) expending his potential voice in ‘whistling’, he is no longer a ‘proper’ Roman, neither public man nor orator, not least because he has no audience that cares to listen to him, all the people being ‘poured out’ upon the spectacle on the river. Antony is a fallen orator even before he takes the decision to reverse the roles of power and visit Cleopatra on her undulating waterborne territory – which for Milton is the element, the medium of fish-god Dagon and moon-governed (treacherous) femininity alike. Cleopatra prevailing upon Antony to 65

fight at sea, and its consequences, would undoubtedly have made sense to Milton in this latter respect. Still, as Coppelia Kahn has pointed out, Antony in fact decides to fight at sea (III.vii. 27–39) because Octavius has dared him to: Antony ‘For that he dares us to’t’/Enobarbus ‘So hath my lord dared him to single fight’), and the decision is thus part of the central dynamic of homosocial

competition which the play makes inseparable from masculine Roman identity.

66

Yet Antony is more than a fallen orator – moving to become a killer and dismemberer of orators, specifically that model of eloquence and ‘philippic’ voice’ denouncing tyrannical ambition, Cicero. At least, this is the case in Plutarch/North’s account, widely emblematised in the Renaissance. Alciato’s Hercules Gallicus emblem of the power of utterance can be seen to be balanced by his illustration of ‘Etiam ferocissimos domari’, even the fiercest are tamed’, showing Mark Antony driving a chariot drawn by (ancestral Herculean) lions. The text explains: ‘After Antony, that grievous bane of his country, had destroyed eloquence by slaying Cicero, he mounted his chariot in triumph and yoked to it lions, forcing their necks to bow to the harsh yoke, desiring by this symbolic act to indicate that great leaders had given way before his military might.’

67

Figure

8:

Mark

Antony

from

Andrea

Alciato,

Emblemata, XXIX (p.152): ‘Etiam ferocissimos domari’, (Antwerp, 1577).

For Plutarch, and it seems for Milton, Cicero dies as a direct result of his oratory not just for offending Antony in his Philippics but specifically through the agency of Fulvia, Antony’s wife, whose politically usurping role is referred to by Shakespeare, following Plutarch, as having softened her husband, such that he is ready for the yoke of the dominating mistress Cleopatra.

68

Plutarch’s

account, as Milton would have been aware, has Cicero murdered on the orders of Fulvia, dismembered, his head and hands nailed to the rostrum in the forum – his tongue indeed impaled with Fulvia’s hairpin, in an enduring image of ‘female usurpation’ (SA, 1060), emasculation and silencing.

69

Shakespeare, however, has Cicero die as part of the fall-out from Cassius and Brutus’s conspiracy against Caesar.

70

Though

Plutarch/North

lay

it

was behind

long

assumed

Shakespeare’s

that ‘self-

contradictory’ Cicero, recent studies have argued for a more general ‘Renaissance account’ informing his characterisation, and that the Cicero who seems to have absorbed some of the epicureanism which Plutarch’s ‘Life’ of Brutus ascribes to Cassius (Cicero the ‘agnostic’ or sceptic, who will participate in nothing that he does

not himself instigate, with his touches of elitism, eccentricity, vanity and cowardice) owes something to a wider available tradition, albeit largely unspecified.

71

Milton is explicit about his own Ciceronian polemical mission in his prose writing, his identification with Cicero is well-documented, from ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ to ‘A Readie and Easie Way’, and his stylistic debt in terms of sentence structure and vocabulary is hard to miss; likewise his apparently lifelong fascination with sparagmos and his recurrent and, following the Restoration, realistic fear of dismemberment. From the invocation of Osiris as the 72

‘lovely form’ of divine truth hewn into a thousand scattered pieces in Areopagitica or, from his earliest oratorical deliberations in his youthful Prolusions, the recurrent figure of Orpheus, the singer-poet-orator torn apart by frenzied women, to the female Orphic figure of the Lady in Comus and Milton’s poetic identification with the Matron of Gibeah, his self-characterisation in his political writing as (deliberately) exposed, sexually threatened or assaulted female, the poet elides the distinction between female virginity and male chastity, rendering these often inseparable from the notion of

poetic utterance and power, or oratorical vocation. In his analysis of Milton’s rhetorical manoeuvres, Daniel Shore points out the use of a device favoured by Cicero, of fluctus or trembling, whereby the rhetor enacts, indeed dramatises, the frisson of terror involved in speaking out. This not only makes manifest the courage required to make this case to his audience, but indeed performs the potential price of such public speech in order to augment the effectiveness of his persuasion. I would argue that, 73

allied

to

these

related

mythic

and

biblical

preoccupations, there is a specific dismembered Roman orator whose presence it is possible to trace throughout Milton’s work, namely Cicero. This web of Antony and Cleopatra allusion so important to the central ‘temptation’ of Samson Agonistes also has implications for Milton’s drama’s end, where suicide as ultimate performance in political defeat cheats tyranny of its triumph. I will return to this in the discussion of suicide in the next section, but for now will simply highlight some of the more obvious features of Shakespeare’s treatment that might have struck Milton: the circularity (‘I am again for Cydnus/To meet Mark Antony’ (V.ii.227–8)), rejuvenation (expressed not least

through references to hair)

74

and rebirth (‘immortal

longings’, V.ii.280), and a culmination of an imagery of liquefaction that has run throughout (this time not just Antony has dissolved and lost shape, but at the end all things ‘dislimm’, grow ‘indistinct/As water is in water’, IV. Ix.10–11), and it is the world that ‘melts’ (IV. xv.63).

75

Cleopatra’s words link the lovers’ ‘end’ with their beginning, their first meeting, whereas for Milton the Cydnus scene with resplendent eastern woman on opulent barge becomes woman as Tarsan merchant vessel, and thus Samson’s end is anchored in the centre of the drama, in his exposure to female temptation and his rejection/divorce/dissolution of his own marriage.

76

Above all, though, the characterisation of the joint suicide as a transcendent form of marriage – ‘Husband, I come’ (V. ii. 286) ‘I come, my queen’, ‘But I will be/A bridegroom in my death’, (IV.xiv.99–100) – may provide an impetus for Milton’s portrayal of Samson’s final act as one of submission to divine will in which the champion replaces his own ‘fallacious bride’ in cataclysmic union with God.

77

Nonetheless, any gender-fluidity or indeed androgyny manifested by Samson at this point is also figured as

recovered masculinity. At the climax of the drama, Samson ‘stands’, Milton’s favourite posture, in a moment of maximum freedom, and masculinity, public utterance, pure action, the figure of stasis, adamantine hardness and resolve, the upright lightning conductor for The Word, while also the Pauline and Demosthenean ‘vessel’, by the sound of which the orator, the man, may be ‘known’. Yet Samson also submits, and in this embodies Milton’s other counterweight to ‘standing’ in service to the divine will, whether in the citizen waiting for a worldaltering life-mission or a poet awaiting inspiration. ‘They also serve’, as Milton has long asserted, ‘who only stand and wait.’

78

Samson’s stance between the pillars

nonetheless includes bowing his head in submission, waiting patiently to receive, conduct, indeed deliver God’s vengeance. He becomes a true ‘actor’ before God precisely by doing nothing, at least for a while. There is then much straining of manly sinew (it is Samson whose God-given strength brings the pillars down), but there is also a birth enacted here, even if it is displaced slightly onto Samson as the female phoenix who Christ-like gives birth to herself.

79

In becoming God’s mouthpiece, it seems, the loss of manhood involved in the ‘foul effeminacy’ of sensual bondage is replaced by a ‘virtuous effeminacy’ in relation to God that fuses a new kind of hyper-masculinity with an über-femininity that overcomes the traits of that catalogue of ‘all women false’ earlier embodied in Dalila. Whether this state of being subsumes or entirely replaces the feminine as exhibited by actual women may not be clear, or whether it is an idealised Platonic fusion, where, as in Antony and Cleopatra a new, emblematic composite of East and West, Pleasure and Virtue, is born. Cleopatra, like Dalila, is identified with all false wives and treacherous femininity as Antony’s ‘shirt of Nessus’ cry reminds us, and yet her ability to move beyond this in her death and her death’s performance provides a powerful and attractive model for one with Milton’s concerns. In a drama that seeks to fuse biblical and classical, transpose Old Testament into New, the hero’s cruciform posture and composite gender bear out the words of St Paul, the ‘good’ Tarsan orator, Christ’s promise to all that love and follow him that at the Resurrection: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither

male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’ (King James version, Galatians 3:28). If Dalila was Samson’s ‘fallacious bride’, how is the reader to discern that Samson is God’s true one? The phrase ‘eyes fast fixed’ (SA, 1637), a plain piece of description unlike the more ambiguous interpretative tag which follows it (‘as one who prayed/Or […]’), is a clear allusion to that central point in the drama, taking the reader back to Dalila whom the Chorus tells Samson ‘stands and eyes thee fixt […] and now with head declined’ and ‘About to have spoke’, and through her to 80

the Circean sorceress, Acrasia, with her ‘false eies fast fixed’ (FQ, II.xii.77). Yet Spenser is echoing Virgil’s depiction of Dido – most specifically Dido after her suicide when she encounters Aeneas in Hades: illa solo fixos oculos tenebat (Aeneid, VI. 476). As Dryden translates the moment, she ‘fixed her eyes unmoved upon the ground’ while Aeneas ‘In vain […] attempts her mind too move/With tears, and prayers, and late-repenting love’. His words have no impact on his erstwhile lover, 81

who resembles flint or cliff of marble (470–75). In a decisive reversal of the earlier dynamic between the lovers and her earlier pleas, Dido recoils from Aeneas’

attempts to reach out and touch her, and her downcast eyes signal her rejection of their earlier relationship and her previous claims to be Aeneas’ wife as she returns to her first and her true husband, Sychaeus. The significance of this scene would not have been lost on Milton, who has Samson reject the touch of his false foreign wife, only himself to end as Dido, the penitent, true, returnee spouse. Antony’s reference to joining the ‘troops’ of Dido and Aeneas as though the pair are joint monarchs in Hades (IV.xiv.50–54) is often taken as an oversight on Shakespeare’s part, or possibly to be a telling error on the part of the speaker, or simply an artistic choice indicating that, in spite of Virgil, Dido and Aeneas belong together irrespective of claims of matrimony, rather as readers may infer Antony and Cleopatra will do. Antony and Cleopatra may enact a suicide-marriage that transcends the world and even the moral and legal claims of Octavia, but to make the transition from mistress to ‘that name’ of wife involves a fair bit of assertion: ‘Husband, I come:/Now to that name, my courage prove my title!/I am fire, and air; my other elements/I give to baser life’ (V.ii.286–89). Cleopatra may claim that ‘courage’– that

male, ‘political virtue par excellence’, as Aristotle, Machiavelli and Arendt insist – that her courageous, selfinflicted death has earned her that ‘title’; yet for Milton perhaps most vital is the fact that the cosmic thunder-god before whom Cleopatra performs her final act and whose approval she seeks appears to be the Colossus whose ‘legs bestrid the oceans, his rear’d arm/Crested the world’ able to ‘shake the orb’ like ‘rattling thunder’, the man with ‘realms and islands’ dropping like plates from his pocket (V.ii.82–92) she has herself evoked, namely Antony himself. Maybe Cleopatra becomes the true wife, certainly the partner in immortal fame afterwards, by finally exemplifying Milton’s ‘she for God in him’ maxim that characterises the pre-lapsarian marriage of the first true wife to her husband.

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It is often observed that issues of gender-swapping and oppositions of Roman and Egyptian which have recurred in the play are replaced at the denouement with Antony let down by his sword, recognising himself outmanned, and Cleopatra apparently renouncing her womanhood (‘nothing/Of woman in me’: V. ii. 237–8): she dies as a triumphantly Egyptian queen yet ‘after the high Roman fashion’ (IV.xv.87) as a martial Roman. Nonetheless, this

stage is also marked by intensification of the qualities of gender and geopolitical nationality in the dialogue of the scenes: for example in Antony’s insistence on his status as ‘a Roman by a Roman/Valiantly vanquished’ (IV. xv. 57–8), addressing Cleopatra as ‘Egypt’ (IV.xv.18, 41), or the number of times Cleopatra uses the terms ‘girls’ and ‘women’ of the trio of herself, Iras and Charmian, who will together effect the very female-inflected scene of attiring and metaphorical breast-feeding of the suicide itself. She is flanked by her pair of handmaidens just as she was on her barge in Enobarbus’ description, giving a sense of this jointly managed suicide as a rhetorical tableau not only for Caesar but also for posterity – retreating into death and, as Arendt has it, ‘making’ her own and Antony’s story above all as a pair, a fused and single entity, and, whether moral emblem or reunited 83

Platonic whole, achieving their immortal significance as such. The fact that Shakespeare’s alone of the thirteen plays in both English and French on this topic between 1553 and 1635 is named after both characters indicates that this is central to his whole conception of the story.

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The appeal for Milton of this example is not hard to fathom, and he incorporates some of the same elements

in creating the ‘scene’ of Samson’s final act as true actor, agonistes, when called upon to perform before his conquerors in their temple. Avoiding the wrong kinds of ‘uplift’ (with hammer and rules by halitosis-ridden ‘mechanic slaves’ (V.ii.208)), false balladry and dramatic misrepresentation by ‘quick comedians’ (V.ii.215), or being led in triumph, the humiliating spectacle of the politically defeated, staged, ‘shown’ and ‘hoisted’ to the view, Antony and the now ‘marble-constant’ Cleopatra (V.ii.239) effect the Roman’s ascent (‘hoisted’ aloft to that edifice of Egypt’s enduring fame, a pyramid). Leaving behind the world, which now has ‘nothing left remarkable’ in it (IV.xv.67) and which dissolves behind them, the pair cheat the calculating tyrant and ‘Sole sir o’ the world’ (V.ii.119) of his victory, deny the worth of the ‘sty’ he has gained and control the staging and the subsequent narrative: thus Antony and his selfproclaimed true spouse move beyond apparent binaries and oppositions into a realm where these may be harmonised and even the Herculean choice of pleasure and virtue may be reconciled.

Section III

There are many things to be said here but I’d like to home in on one very small example which might provide some fruitful points of comparison. This begins with Lucilius’ words concerning Brutus in Julius Caesar Act V scene iv, which occur at a point at which issues of identity, suicide and service to country are to the fore much as they are in Samson Agonistes: I dare assure thee that no enemy Shall ever take alive the noble Brutus: The gods defend him from so great a shame! When you do find him, or alive or dead, He will be found like Brutus, like himself. (JC, V.iv.21– 5)

And subsequently, after Brutus has engineered his own assisted suicide, he adds: I thank thee, Brutus, That thou hast proved Lucilius’ saying true. (JC, V.v.59– 60)

We can compare this with the speech highlighted earlier in which Manoa concludes that there is no cause for mourning in his son’s arguably self-inflicted death, observing that ‘Samson hath quit himself/Like Samson’,

with the double meaning of ‘quit’ fully operative: acquitted himself, behaved, acted (especially before a judge or an audience), and left, disappeared (in contrast to all the many references to ‘appearing’ and acting in the theatrical sense which I’ve argued elsewhere are central to the comparison between Samson’s ‘suicide’ and Cleopatra’s Roman one).

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Manoa. Come, come, no time for lamentation now, Nor much more cause, Samson hath quit himself Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish’d A life Heroic, on his Enemies Fully reveng’d, hath left them years of mourning, And lamentation to the Sons of Caphtor Through all Philistian bounds. To Israel Honour hath left, and freedom, let but them Find courage to lay hold on this occasion, To himself and Father’s house eternal fame; And which is best and happiest yet, all this With God not parted from him, as was fear’d, But favouring and assisting to the end. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. (SA,1708– 24)

The statement pivots on the word ‘Like’, and, as mentioned previously, tracing the word ‘like’ through the whole drama reveals a condensed version of the plot as well as a rather interesting set of character maps: Harapha accuses Samson of being ‘like a Robber’(SA, 1187); a composite of treacherous femininity, according to Samson, Dalila is ‘every woman false like thee’ (SA, 749). Indeed the issue with Dalila is precisely identifying what she ‘is’ (‘What thing is this?’ as distinct from the many things she resembles). It is easy for the Chorus to spot that she is ‘Like a stately ship of Tarsus’, or ‘like a fair flower surcharged with dew’ (SA, 714–15, 728). It takes a whole sentence and fifteen lines of surmise before settling on ‘Dalila thy wife’ (SA, 724). Dalila’s actual identity (as distinct from how others see her or how she sees herself) is at the centre of a force field concerning the verb to seem, which pervades the drama as a whole. Whether or not Milton exhibits a rather Spenserian preoccupation with the dislocation of appearance and reality in the fallen world through the question of ‘seeming’, much hinges on the two meanings of ‘appear’ which in Milton’s binary schema has both a bad – demonic – signification, and a divinely benign one, of

‘standing’ up and acting before the final arbiter of one’s life performance, of truly being an actor, an agonist, at last. Yet even Samson’s ‘unmasking’ of Dalila, a declaration which he clearly feels has nailed her identity once and for all, is nicely ambiguous: is Dalila a summation, a conglomerate of every woman who is false (after all, her allusive ‘sisters’ are interwoven through the passage, as many have noted)? Or are all women false as 86

she is? If the former, it makes perfect sense for Samson’s words and gestures to enact a ‘divorce’ here, as some critics have claimed. If the latter, then it becomes not 87

merely advisable but necessary for God’s champion to repudiate all women, indeed to replace or subsume them, achieving

a

kind

of

virtuous

‘effeminacy’

to

counterbalance his previous condition. Through the chastity

which

Milton

recurrently

equates

with

poetic/prophetic/oratorical potency, and in contrast to his own ‘fallacious bride’, Samson will become God’s (recovered virgin) bride at the drama’s denouement. ‘Like’ is also important at the thematic and structural level, being the term that both signals identity and creates simile. In recurrent analeptic reference to the time preceding the action of the drama (and to behaviour

seen as causing his present plight) Samson has been ‘like a foolish pilot’, shorn ‘like a tame wether’, has ‘walk’d about admired of all/Like a petty God’, but in the end is ‘like’ nothing but ‘himself’ (SA, 1709–10) – a conduit for an imageless, elemental super-language of divine vengeance. Not only is ‘God not parted from him’, but he recovers the God-given gift of riddling which attended the favoured days of his youth, attains even the ‘prudent ambiguities’ which were often seen to characterise divine linguistics and pedagogy.

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Then, apparently praying

(again Milton couches this in carefully ambiguous terms, ‘as one who prayed’, and offers an alternative interpretation ‘or some great matter in his mind revolved’ (SA, 1636–8)), channelling the thunderous Word of God, distributing potential freedom to his people (even if we, like his contemporary readers, know they don’t take it), generating his own fame with his example, ‘heroicly’ finishing his heroic life. Does Samson ask in his supposed ‘prayer’ to be allowed to ‘die with the Philistines’ as in the biblical account, or is that what 89

‘revolves’ in his own mind? Does he simply ask to be allowed to conform completely to God’s will, to ‘stand’ (the

poet’s

favourite

posture)

conducting

divine

lightning, a vessel receiving and purveying the Lord’s terrifying utterance, visiting it in a devastating synaesthesia of light and fire, winds, waters and thunderclaps on the heads of God’s, his own and his people’s enemies? It is far from clear. Milton knows that every public act, every actor’s performance will be seen from multiple perspectives, even if only one of these ultimately matters. Consciousness of the ‘great Taskmaster’s eye’ is evidenced from early in his poetic career,

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conceived in marked contradistinction to the ‘spectacle’ that is the hallmark of idolatry. Crucially, along the way to this complete selfsemblance,

however,

Samson

refuses

Dalila’s

temptation: ‘be not unlike all others’, she begs him, ‘not austere as thou art strong, inflexible as steel’; he refuses 91

to let his captors trail him through the streets ‘like a wild beast’ (reminiscent of both Antony and Cleopatra’s expectations of their treatment on return as captives to Rome). This insistence that Samson is like himself reinforces – or by a circular logic proves – the point that his death is not suicide in the technical sense. When first told of his son’s death, Manoa exclaims: Self-violence? What cause

Brought him so soon at variance with himself Among his foes? (SA, 1584–6)

Suicide is being at variance with oneself, whereas Samson has been involved in a very special kind of ‘accident’ – he has allowed God to kill him while acting in complete accordance with God’s will: ‘all this/With God not parted from him, as was fear’d’ (SA, 1718–19). I argue elsewhere that this is a political as well as a spiritual condition, that part of the learning process enacted by the drama involves differentiating the state of being ‘separate to God’ from isolation from the people in whose name he acts, a recurrent theme in republican discussion of the role of the ‘single strong man’ from Aristotle’s Politics to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.

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With Hercules often cited as an example, the redemptive possibilities for the polity, especially if the people (the ‘material’, as Machiavelli has it) have themselves become corrupt, as well as the dangers of such an individual, with the potential for hubris, are to the forefront. In the Renaissance, classical and specifically Stoic suicide may be represented as self-mastery, not variance at all, the point at which a compromised life, such as Seneca’s, tainted by his association with the tyrant Nero,

his failure to exemplify his own noble sententiae, is reconfigured in light of the manner of its ending. Seneca staged his suicide, as did Socrates, each summing up the values he espoused but had either failed to put into practice or to make prevail. Shakespeare, and indeed 93

Milton, may prefer to represent the Roman and Greek worlds, or that of the Old Testament rather than the New, as bleak or primitive or incomplete. Hadfield observes Shakespeare’s stress on the otherness of his Romans, republican or not, while Burrow points out that Plutarch’s Greek outsider’s perspective on Roman practices and beliefs allows Shakespeare to create a Rome permeated by superstition, outlandishness and gore,

94

while containing some obvious Christian

signifiers, such as the serpent in the orchardgarden of Brutus’s temptation.

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In allowing God to determine his death, the only thing Samson is admitted to resemble apart from himself is the phoenix – with all the obvious connotations of rebirth, Christ imagery and other, critically much-discussed possibilities. Samson is ‘like that self-begotten bird in 96

the Arabian woods’. Yet wait a minute – ‘O Antony, O thou Arabian bird!’ Agrippa says in Act III scene ii of

Antony and Cleopatra, and this phrase is used to indicate that, as a phoenix, Antony is sui generis, unique, one of a kind, like no one or nothing else. Ironically, then, Samson in this act of being totally identified with himself, is in allusive, intertextual terms, notably ‘like’ someone else (and specifically someone else who’s like no one else).

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Or, perhaps, rather Samson subsumes that

someone else, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare’s representation, the sensualist fallen orator ‘reborn’ through suicide as transcendent marriage.

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If Samson becomes himself only when he submits of his own free will entirely to the Lord’s will, he becomes the great orator and poet/maker of his own story only at the point that language ceases altogether and words (including his own final recovery of riddling metaphor) are subsumed in The Word, the thunderous synaesthesia of divine language which the poem is careful to specify is what lands on the heads of and overwhelms the Philistines.

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Arendt’s analysis of Greek attitudes to

immortality takes Achilles as the paradigm of how to ‘finish’ a ‘life Heroic’: Therefore whoever consciously aims at being ‘essential’, at leaving behind a story and an identity which will own

‘immortal fame’, must not only risk his life but expressly choose, as Achilles did, a short life and a premature death. Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness, because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began. (HC, 193–194)

By this account, Milton has grasped perfectly the classical fusion of early, self-selected death and identity: Eudaimonia can only be bought at the price of life and one can make sure of it only by forgoing the continuity of living in which we disclose ourselves piecemeal, by summing up all of one’s life in a single deed, so that the story of the act comes to its end together with life itself. (HC, 194)

It may well be a classical commonplace that suicide and identity are connected in death just as speech as action in the public sphere is inseparable from any kind of meaningful life and any kind of identity for the citizen. My point is that Shakespeare plays with this notion through the use of ‘like’ in a way that Milton seems also to do (whether this similarity occurs because of Shakespeare’s participation in Hadfield’s ‘republican

force field’ or by means of deliberate or even unconscious allusion on the part of Milton). The two scenes at the end of Act V in which Antony is assured by Lucilius that, whether alive or dead, Brutus ‘will be found like Brutus, like himself’ (V.iv.25) provide several suggestive verbal and thematic echoes for readers of Milton. If, as I suggest, the question of suicide is closely involved in Milton’s intertextual engagement with Antony and Cleopatra, this may be no less true with regard to the patrician republican, erstwhile orator and Stoic suicide, Brutus. The presence of Mark Antony in these scenes may indeed infer a three-way ‘conversation’ between the dramas in question. Not only is Antony (a pervasive figure in the Herculean Samson/Cleopatran Dalila dynamic operative in Milton’s drama) present in both scenes, but an oratorical subtext is at least implied in the representation of Cato’s son (‘the son of Marcus Cato, ho!/A foe to tyrants and my country’s friend’ (JC, V.iv.4– 5)) and, in Brutus’ phraseology before his suicide, which contains echoes both of his own oratorical performance and that of Antony on which the dramatic action earlier turned: ‘Yet, countrymen, O, yet hold up your heads!’ and

‘Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock’ (JC, V.iv.1; V.v.1). Brutus is crucially a failed orator in the terms of the play, and Skinner has provided a convincing analysis of just why he fails to convince the crowd after the assassination

of

Caesar

by

omitting

the

basic

prerequisites of successful forensic rhetoric. While many critics have focussed on the figures of rhetoric in the competing

speeches,

Skinner

identifies

Brutus’s

shortcomings and Antony’s success in the ‘invention’ and ‘disposition’ which underlie the construction of their respective utterances.

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It has long been a feature of

accounts of Brutus’ characterisation and of the dynamics of this scene that Brutus is simply too cool, too rational, too patrician, too sure of the (abstract) rightness of the argument itself to stoop to actually persuade the crowd he has before him (even before we get onto the question of whether the plebeians are up to the job of being classical citizens in Shakespeare’s portrayal or not). According to Skinner, though, Brutus does persuade them. In eschewing the rhetorical ‘tricks’ Antony might be seen to resort to (but which Skinner points out are the fundamental response recommended to any forensic

orator dealing with an audience already convinced by a previous speaker), Brutus does not achieve the third Ciceronian aim of any speech, namely permovere, to sway the emotions of the hearers. In this sense, Brutus at this point is the opposite of Milton’s Satan, the evil orator effective in a bad cause, namely the virtuous man ineffective in a good one. In any case, Casca’s ‘hands, speak for me’ at the assassination of Caesar signal the end of the res publica or any true public realm (irrespective of whether Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators may have hoped to rescue or reinstate it) and the start of public speech’s opposite – warfare and tyranny. Cicero, 101

the ultimate orator, dies as part of the resulting suppression of dissent in Shakespeare’s version, appearing on the infamous list of the proscribed in Act V scene iv, though Plutarch and Milton, as previously mentioned, hold Antony more directly responsible.

102

In fact, despite Lucilius’ claim, these final scenes and moments of Brutus’ life, played out in part in front of Antony, are full of doubt about the question of identity: where is Brutus (is he present or absent)? How is Brutus (alive or dead)? What is Brutus (is he a man, his country’s friend, his ancestor’s true inheritor–and if so what is

that?); and even who/which one is Brutus? Lucilius is at first pretending to be Brutus, or shaping the soldier’s assumption at least: Brutus is ta’en, Brutus is ta’en, my lord. (V.iv.18) LUCILIUSI yield only to die There is so much that thou wilt kill me straight: [Offering money] Kill Brutus, and be honour’d in his death. (V.iv.12–14)

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It is Lucilius, then, who is trying to die ‘like Brutus’ or at least as Brutus in order to protect the ‘real’ Brutus, until Antony’s declaration, ‘This is not Brutus, friend’ (V. iv. 26), puts an end to the pretence and the confusion. While only Antony can identify his fellow orator and patrician, Brutus’ own assertions of motive and identity seem to involve rather too much protestation: And I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I; Brutus, my country’s friend; know me for Brutus! (V.iv.7–8)

104

Throughout the play the action has hinged on who Brutus ‘really’ is – this is the basis of Cassius’ manipulation and Brutus’ own self-doubt, his dubious reasoning/self-

persuasion at various points. Is he ‘like’ his tyrantbusting ancestor, or a mere copy, even a parody, as Hadfield argues in his account of the play in its relation to

republican

concerns?

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As

Burrow

observes,

Shakespeare’s are anxious, ‘modern’ Romans, forever trying to live up to a past that it is impossible and probably unwise to emulate, a condition that might well have resonated with the playwright’s own Elizabethan actors and audience.

106

Lucius Junius Brutus feigned

madness, appeared a fool, a lunatic, a brute beast, as his name implies – and Hadfield sees Shakespeare’s recycling of this plot material to signal similar preoccupations in Hamlet. What does it mean to be like 107

someone who pretended to be like something he was not in order to be his true political self, in order to attain true freedom and identity, not merely for himself but for all citizens, the whole republic? Hadfield, moreover, views the absence of Cicero – the Renaissance’s ultimate model orator and champion of public life – as giving audiences a sure sign that Shakespeare’s conspirators are not in tune with the true interests of Roman republicanism. From the perspective of a dramatist, however, it also makes perfect sense to

avoid the inevitable upstaging of the other dramatis personae, not to mention the unnecessary pressure of writing imaginary speeches for such a figure, every syllable of whose preserved rhetorical utterance and observations on oratory was pored over by every grammar schoolboy in the land. Milton, on the other hand, made no bones about applying Cicero to the political conditions of 1630s, 40s and 50s, not simply adopting a Ciceronian style in his polemical writing, but deploying Ciceronian arguments and Roman law in support of the right of subjects to depose an unjust monarch. Explicit about the necessity of speaking out in 108

defence of the virtuous republic in his role as polemicist for the Commonwealth and his battles with Salmasius and Alexander More, Milton also conceived his duty as warning his fellowcitizens of encroaching tyranny, in the manner of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon, or Cicero’s Phillippics against Antony, for which the Roman senator paid with his life. Writing ‘A Readie and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth’ on the eve of the Restoration, and indeed re-issuing it thereafter, Milton was assuredly attempting to be England’s Cicero, and the fate of such an orator under conditions of tyranny

concerned him personally. He cannot but have entertained a realistic expectation that it might prove to be his own. Etiam ferocissimos domari indeed. In

Julius

Caesar

various

‘standard

classical’

definitions or justifications of suicide and its results are posited, from the claim that ‘It is more worthy to leap in ourselves/Than tarry till they push us’ (JC, V. v. 24–5) to the declaration that ‘Brutus only overcame himself/And no man else hath honour by his death’ (JC, V. v. 57–8). Such a death is ‘safety’ (JC, V. iv. 20, 27), the ultimate victory and patriotic act: ‘I shall have glory by this losing day’, Brutus insists, ‘More than Octavius and Mark Antony/By this vile conquest shall attain unto’ (JC, V. v. 36–7). Very similar arguments are made in Antony and Cleopatra in relation to political defeat – and it would be easy to see the appeal for Milton in the context of postRestoration stoicism/despair through which his closet drama is often read. The portrayal of the Philistines as a post-public sphere, whose business is conducted ‘Either at home, or through the high street passing’ (SA, 1458) by means of patronage and feminine intercession, ruled by a priestly caste and aristocratic, self-interested lords, maps almost too easily onto the Restoration court. For

Antony and especially Cleopatra, the theatricality of their staged demise provides a deliberate contrast to the imagined humiliation of spectacle (a familiar opposition to readers of Samson Agonistes in which the Philistines’ love of spectacle connotes idolatry): ‘the quick comedians extemporally will stage and present/Our Alexandrian revels, Antony/Shall be brought drunken forth and I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ the posture of a whore’ (AC, V. ii. 215–20). Cleopatra’s act does indeed cheat Octavian and leave him (and arguably also Antony) out-Roman-ed. ‘Lass unparallel’d’ One: ‘ass/Unpolicied’ Nil.

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By their final act, whatever inadequacies and errors have gone before, Antony and Cleopatra have written their own story into human history. Arendt uses Achilles as an example once more in characterising the relation of the actor to the commemorative words that form the posthumous oratory of his deed, the sense in which he ‘heroicly hath finished/A life Heroic’: Though even Achilles remains dependent on the storyteller, poet, or historian without whom everything he did remains futile […] he is the only ‘hero’, and therefore the hero par excellence, who delivers into the

narrator’s hands the full significance of his deed, so that it is as though he had not merely enacted the story of his life but at the same time also ‘made’ it. (HC, 194)

Like Samson as Arendtian classical orator, Brutus reserves the right simultaneously to end and to be the author of his own story: So fare you well at once; for Brutus’ tongue Hath almost ended his life’s history: (JC, V.v.39–40)

As with Samson Agonistes the preoccupation with utterance and with moving beyond utterance with and by the final act is foremost until the end: Sit thee down, Clitus: slaying is the word; It is a deed in fashion. (JC, V.v.4–5)

And then, ‘Peace then! no words.’ (V.v.7) It seems that for the Greeks and Romans – as, some might argue, for contemporary academics – the main feature of being dead is that you stop talking. As the suicidal moment approaches, there are references to weeping and vessels, and a preoccupation with posture, sitting and standing, familiar to readers of Milton. It is Antony who speaks Brutus’ epitaph, Brutus’ fame being

encapsulated and reputation ensured in the words of his opponent in some very familiar terms, namely republican motives, the common good, masculinity: He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’ (JC, V. iv. 72– 76)

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Manoa envisages a very classical memorial and immortal fame for his dead son, involving both physical monument and poetic commemoration which together will serve to remake the people – both the valiant young men and the virgins will be inspired by and learn from his example. Manoa: … there will I build him A Monument, and plant it round with shade Of Laurel ever green, and branching Palm, With all his Trophies hung, and Acts enroll’d In copious Legend, or sweet Lyric Song. Thither shall all the valiant youth resort, And from his memory inflame thir breasts To matchless valour, and adventures high: The Virgins also shall on feastful days

Visit his Tomb with flowers, only bewailing His lot unfortunate in nuptial choice, From whence captivity and loss of eyes. (SA, 1733–44)

Samson doesn’t only get his wife’s monument and fame (as she earlier envisaged for herself): his own monument immortalises Dalila as a negative model of matrimony and induces a reassertion of marital relations in the next generation, with warrior young men and submissive virgins. Unlike Dalila’s manipulative tears these virgins will be weeping for Samson (a whole host of posthumous would-be brides). In short, posterity is still ‘about’ matrimony. Milton is at pains to make Dalila ‘wrong’ in the drama not because she’s a woman but because her god and therefore the inspiration/source of her actions is false. Biblical heroines like Samson’s fellow-judge Deborah, or Judith or Esther, can of course legitimately arbitrate, act or persuade, but implicitly only a false god would enjoin a wife to reverse the natural order as Dalila has and first seek to curtail and then usurp her husband’s public agency. Esther and Judith are prompted to move on behalf of God’s chosen people and their husbands are misguided or oppressive foreign men of power. Dalila’s justification is persuasive only to the extent that it would

have been correct had she and not Samson been God’s chosen champion and deliverer of his tribe. As noted, Arendt observes that ‘the theatre is the political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art […] it is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others’ (HC, 188). Pericles’ epideictic oratory for the dead of Athens (as rendered by Thucydides) encapsulates this. The slaughtered warriors have by their actions won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchres – not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men’s minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people’s hearts, their memory abides and grows. (The Peloponnesian War, II.iv.121)

In Shakespeare, and even more overtly in Milton, ‘tongues’ and ‘swords’ are related, indeed often stand in for one another or are interchangeable: both are signifiers of masculinity and, for Milton, both are in the

political service of God’s truth and church (CPW, I.804– 5). It is also a premise of classical rhetoric that tongues are instead of swords, and persuasion instead of warfare or other violence (and therefore constantly referred to in terms of metaphors of combat and masculinity): Ong points to the conception in classical rhetoric of ornatus, whereby the activity of the rhetor preparing his effective linguistic moves is denoted using the same verb as that for polishing weapons for battle. Milton’s recurrent identification of tongues or pens as swords, clubs, daggers, words as blows and parries are part of this tradition, even while he allies it with references to Pauline armour and advocacy of the saint’s mental ‘warfare not carnall, but mighty through God’ (CPW, I.848). Whether defending God’s Church or a godly 111

republic, his models are the Tarsan Saint and orator/preacher St Paul, and Augustine, who eschewed studied rhetoric (in which he was classically trained) while valorising spontaneous, divinely inspired utterance as the greatest persuasion of all and considering aspiration to effective speech as justified in preaching. Above all, Milton aims to follow the example of Jesus, the ‘fountain of meekness’ who nonetheless ‘found acrimony

enough to be […] galling and vexing’, well equipped to ‘rip up the wounds of Idolatry and Superstition’ (CPW: I .903). Brutus’s botched suicide is in keeping with his character throughout, his failure as an orator (and, some would say, as a husband – but that’s another whole Samson-related story ) – as indeed Antony’s will be. 112

Antony has a spot of bother with his sword at the crucial moment, and is outdone by the very feminine-inflected death of Cleopatra – the honourable, Roman suicide of the foreign, eastern woman. Indeed, their suicide is only 113

successful in its effects as a joint enterprise – as is often observed, a marriage – and it is Shakespeare who gives so powerfully the transcendent marriage model for classical suicide, with all the attendant imagery of rejuvenation and rebirth as accompanying immortality.

114

Moseley’s

argument

regarding

the

recurrent

representation of (specifically political) Wisdom (as Colossus with zodiacal spheres) and Prudentia (Queen holding snake) in books of Emblems from the period draws attention to one way that a Shakespearean audience might have been expected to read the ‘speaking picture’ of the drama before them. These Emblems’ 115

manifestation of the Renaissance preoccupation with self-governance

and

virtuous

political

leadership

(themes familiar to readers of Milton and above all of Samson Agonistes) strike Moseley as, like the ‘bi-polar structure’ of the play’s organisation of scenes, with their rapid juxtapositions of Egypt and Rome, the most effective way to encapsulate and discuss the Choice of Hercules as moralised and understood in the period, and as played out in the life of Hercules’ self-styled descendant, Antony. For most of the drama, of course, any such emblematic references in the recurrent imagery of the play are redolent with irony, since Cleopatra shows few signs of prudence and Antony certainly does not embody selfregulation and wisdom but rather their opposites: far from reconciling pleasure and virtue through suffering in the Herculean manner, he abandons Roman virtues, acknowledging ‘I have not kept my square’, for the East where ‘my pleasure lies’. Nonetheless, the play does not enlist the audience’s sympathy for the chilling incipient tyranny of Octavius, or the ‘still conversation’ of his virtuous Roman matron sister, nor are the erstwhile republican values of Rome presented as likely to

characterise the absolutist reign of the Emperorgod, Augustus. While Hercules ascends to Olympus, Antony is instead uplifted onto an emblematic ‘symbol of durability and fame, a pyramid’, to join Cleopatra, who explicitly 116

stages her death as the emblem of Prudentia, as Egyptian Queen/Bride and embodiment of Roman martial courage and honour. Cleopatra’s grandiloquence in praise of Antony as Colossus implies that wisdom has after all been achieved, albeit at cost of the world and all worldly power, and the immortal longings she expresses point towards a realm or state beyond the world in which pleasure and virtue are customarily seen as antithetical, to a ‘higher’ wisdom and prudence in which the two might be in complete concord. From the point of view of the influence of this Shakespearean manoeuvre on Milton’s drama, however, perhaps the most important element is the way that the pair only work as a conjoined symbol – as the lovers themselves stress, each is unthinkable, one cannot exist without the other: wisdom with

prudence

assumes

true

power

only

upon

renunciation of earthly power and withdrawal into death/immortality. As Egypt and Rome, as political East and West, even though they have swapped the

geopolitical spheres they represent, and arguably swapped genders as well, Antony and Cleopatra, in their 117

ultimate significance, like Milton’s Samson, depend on the fusion, the co-exchange, the composite that emerges. Brutus, like Antony, has ‘sword-trouble’ – in his case finding a sword, or rather someone to wield it. It had long been a perceived problem of Roman suicide, that this ultimate act of freedom and self-control, of citizen-like masculinity and identity, was often so dependent on slaves. Brutus is till the last a potential failure as a suicide,

undignified,

even

slightly

ridiculous,

as

companion after companion refuses his request. Is this a mirroring, an ironic reversal of the multiple stabbing of Caesar? Poor Brutus can’t get anyone to stab him. One way of reconciling the not-untypical Renaissance admiration of classical suicide with self-slaughter’s place as a deadly Christian sin, is to render it in this unglamourised manner, depicting the male suicides at least as incompetent. The bleakness of Stoicism, as depicted in Julius Caesar, or its only partial adequacy as an ethical world view, as well as the Christian elements in the play’s portrayal of Brutus’s ‘temptation’, are hard to miss. The Roman milieu is one soaked in superstition,

and Burrow has pointed out that the pervasive references to blood and the omnipresence of the uncanny draws on Plutarch’s Greek outsider’s perspective on Roman ritual practice and religious belief. The Romans within Shakespeare’s play, like the Elizabethan audience, feel themselves ‘late’ and possibly diminished. Brutus’s doubts, as well as his dilemma and its outcomes, foreground the question of whether a supposedly superior or glorious past should or can be emulated by current humanity.

118

Milton’s treatment of Samson’s active/passive death, couching it as a form of marriage, collapses time, by making his protagonist ‘early’, a precursor, forerunner of Christ, but also ‘late’, ‘like’ a phoenix, an immortal symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and rebirth.

119

Milton’s

contemporaries, and his current readers, are therefore belated in relation to Christ’s life on earth and thus both fortunate beneficiaries of his sacrifice and enjoined tirelessly to imitate him, and yet unfortunate, dwelling in the time before the Second Coming. Milton retrieves a classical immortality for his hero, reframing it within eternity, so that Samson achieves both. As God’s true bride Samson attains the posthumous fame his own

‘fallacious bride’ Dalila predicted for herself. His cruciform posture between the pillars and his willing sacrifice make him Christ-like even as he is ‘like’ the phoenix, giving birth to herself, obedient to her Godgiven and unique nature, in total compliance with God’s will. The usurpation of God’s role makes suicide sinful, an act of pride, but Samson the agonist acts the role God gives him, speaks God’s Word, and thus is ‘not selfkilled’, even while he reaps the benefits of the Roman suicide or Greek warrior hero by ending his life with one single act. Samson subsumes and transcends these two flawed, human manifestations of greatness, but his act is not suicide (any more than Christ’s is) because, as all mortals must, he is allowing God to determine the time and the means and the purpose of his death precisely. If Burrow’s characterisation of the Roman past as a ‘cultural field’ which is able to denote simultaneously both noble principle and bloody terror for the Renaissance in general and Shakespeare in particular, then for Milton this in turn provides, as Arendt would have it, a language which reclaims ‘immortality’ as the culmination of the vita activa from the post-Socratic and, she opines, anti- or post-political preoccupation

with ‘eternity’. Arendt argues that Plato’s Dialogues, and indeed the portrait of Socrates that we have (as distinct from anything that can be deduced from these and other sources about his actual practice) arises out of Plato’s reaction to the failure of persuasion manifested in Socrates’ death, failing to convince either the state at his trial or his friends of the rightness of his course of action thereafter. This resulted in Philosophy, as defined by Plato, putting contemplation (and withdrawal from the political world) before persuasion, while Christianity likewise eschews earthly fame and worldly ambition, placing goodness – virtue with an e – before virtù in the classical Livian and Machiavellian sense – that ‘belonging to a man’ as a citizen.

120

Samson’s

very

classical

and

Milton resituates

specifically

Greek

immortality within a providentially ordered eternity – notably through the notion of rebirth, in which the phoenix simile and the ‘Arabian bird’/Antony allusion play their part.

121

Shakespeare may also be affected by the question of the sinfulness of self-slaughter: suicide is invested with all the laudable features of control over oneself, freedom and masculinity which define citizenship yet are often

botched and undignified, the male ones at least. Only Cleopatra really manages suicide as performance as Samson does before God. It is a critical truism that for Renaissance writers, the ‘ancients’, because preChristian and unenlightened, are poised between veneration and censure, able to be portrayed as savage and other, while at the same time admirable, and this is still the tenor of much discussion of Shakespeare and republicanism or other early modern political thought. Milton indeed refers to them as ‘those illustrious Greeks and Romans whom we particularly admire’ (CPW, IV. 550–51), but Milton is doing something else: Samson in the Philistines’ temple is giving the performance of his life before the ultimate audience and judge – and, as an actor (in both the theatrical and political senses earlier discussed) has the ultimate director. For Milton the divine imperative is what makes this work – ultimate freedom lies in submitting to God’s will through one’s own free will, and such a death in freedom incorporates and supersedes classical immortality within a framework of eternity, just as Samson’s act subsumes Roman suicide, and the Hebraic and Greek traditions which give this poetic drama its form and much of its content. It is

my contention that he is able to do this because of his precursor, Shakespeare, and that he does so in part through his engagement with these Roman tragedies. The intertextual conversation with Shakespeare’s play, in which Antony and Cleopatra’s deaths figure as transcendent

marriage,

the

lovers

trading

characteristics, nationalities and genders in a manner reminiscent of St Paul’s account of Christ’s promise to all who love and follow him at the resurrection (KJV Galatians 3:28), is a prime example.

Conclusion Milton’s exercise in reviving the dead ultimately returns to Pericles’ point about the dead citizen-warriors of Athens, to the question of poetic immortality and to the conclusion that the dead do not need reviving because they co-exist simultaneously with us, the living, in a state of immortality – and their monument is words.

122

Shakespeare, Milton addresses the dramatist in his first published poem, ‘in our wonder and astonishment/Hast built thyself a live-long monument’.

123

In lines that

combine echoes of Antony and Cleopatra’s final moments (‘Or that his hallowed relics should be

hid/Under a star-ypointing pyramid?’) with the claim that Shakespeare’s work is the classical source of divine truth (‘each heart/Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book/Those Delphic lines with deep impression took’), it’s us – or rather Milton himself as aspiring poet in 1630 – that Shakespeare’s wondrous facility, his flowing easy numbers and inexhaustible imagination, turns into clumpy

stone:

‘Then

thou,

our

fancy

of

itself

bereaving,/Dost make us marble with too much conceiving’. It is hard not to lend a Bloomian colouring to this claim, which has Shakespeare as some kind of over-impregnating father whose overstimulation of the imaginative ovaries of his poetically inclined readers renders them paradoxically infertile or unable to deliver. Socrates may have insisted that he was a barren, elderly birth-attendant, coaxing truth out of the multiple opinions of his interlocutors, but Milton’s poem would 124

have Shakespeare as midwife only at the twin birth of poetic aspiration and anxiety, a phantom pregnancy leading to no delivery at all. If this poem reveals the young Milton grappling with his precursors (and there is a decidedly Spenserian, pseudo-Chaucerian register to ‘star-ypointing’), it is

interesting that the young scholar-poet with direct access to the very Latin and Greek sources which Jonson’s prefatory comment on his contemporary ensured posterity believed the Stratford dramatist to lack, nonetheless credits Shakespeare with the ability to communicate the classical past to the ‘hearts’ of his successors, to inscribe the concerns of the past in the imagination of the present: his words are carved (‘deep impression’) on ‘our’ stone. This may lend credence to Burrow’s point that classical antiquity is at work in Shakespeare not primarily through influence or allusion but in what he did with it, in his exploration of deeply embedded classical preoccupations through dramatic scenes, images, language: What Shakespeare ‘knew’ about classical literature is inseparable from the ways he used it, and he often used his knowledge in ways that create complex implied dialogues between characters onstage and between his own writing and his reading. These effects all suggest that we should think of Shakespeare’s knowledge of classical writing dynamically, as a changing and theatrically inflected resource rather than simply a static body of learning which he acquired during his teens and then used throughout his career.

125

Whether in creating uncomfortable moderns of his Romans, forever comparing themselves to a more admirable past, and thus resonating with his sixteenthcentury actors and audience, or considering topics of enduring and contemporary political relevance, it is Shakespeare’s Roman republicans and would-be orators who speak to Milton of the questions of tyranny, freedom, identity, public utterance and individual responsibility, how to live and how to die. It is from the somewhat unfashionable ‘unvalued book’ (whether referring to Shakespeare’s sonnets or his oeuvre as a whole),

126

then, that ‘each reader’ and by

extension the poet of this verse derives the Delphic injunction to Know thyself. From being overpowered by 127

Shakespeare’s imaginative breadth and eloquence, the poet whose long-standing determination ‘to leave something so written to aftertimes that they will not willingly let it die’ imbibes both the poetic vocation and 128

the apparent impossibility of fulfilling it. Perhaps, like Socrates, whose encounter with the Delphic oracle enables him to deduce that true wisdom resides in knowing that one knows nothing, Shakespeare’s monument teaches the poet to begin from nothing,

acknowledging this. Yet Shakespeare, like Samson at the end of Samson Agonistes, and with a final Miltonic sideswipe at monarchs, ‘so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,/That kings for such a tomb would wish to die’. In a clear echo of Shakespeare’s own assertion in Sonnet 55 that ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme’, Milton acknowledges that the Elizabethan poet’s assurance of his own verbal power to outlast all else simultaneously stimulates, stultifies and ensures the imaginative endurance of his anxious successors.

List of abbreviations AC

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. M.R.Riley, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1995).

CPW

Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953–82), 8 volumes in 10.

FQ

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1980).

HC

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; repr. Chicago, 1998).

JC

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, Arden Shakespeare (London, 2004).

MPPS

Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech (Farnham, 2015).

PL

John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford, 2007).

PP

Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2005).

PR

Paradise Regained, Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London, 2009).

SA

Samson Agonistes, Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London, 2009). 1

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer

on Writing (Cambridge, 2002). 2

Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech

(Farnham, 2015), chap. 5; also forthcoming monograph, Citizenship and Suicide: Republicanism, Oratory and Identity in Shakespeare and Milton. 3

John Milton, Samson Agonistes, in The Compete

Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn, Longman Annotated English Poets (New York, 2007).

4

For the features of the Philistine state which define it as

pre-political non-polity, see Lynch, MPPS, 70, 200, 202– 203. 5

Ben Jonson, eulogy included in First Folio of

Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies (1623) in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols, Martin Butler, Ian Butler, David Bevington (eds), (Cambridge, 2012). For the contention that the ‘small Latin and less Greek’ claim is not as invidious as it sounds and that, in the eulogy as a whole, Jonson ‘is not simply saying what it sounds as though he is saying’, see Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 2013), 1–2. 6

Milton thus fuses a distinctive perception of public

speech central to Greek politics and Greek drama with the Hebraic biblical tradition of the nabi (‫ – )איִבָנ‬the prophetic mouthpiece (e.g. Exodus 4:10–16; 7:1; Amos 3:8; Jeremiah 1:7,17; Ezekiel. 3:4, Deuteronomy 5:5, 34:10; 1 Samuel 9:9). Used by the Hebrew writers most frequently of the three terms subsequently translated into Greek as prophet (pro phemi – to speak before or for, one who speaks for another, an interpreter, messenger or expounder), nabi has its roots in the verbs nabu and naba’a ‘to call’ or ‘to announce’, but literally means to bubble up (like the waters of a fountain), pour forth or boil over, and thus when stirred by the spirit ‘to declare’

on behalf of God. Other terms (ro’eh and hozeh) rendered in Greek as ‘prophet’ both mean ‘seer’, deriving from Hebrew verbs ‘to see’ or ‘to see in a vision’. All three of these designations are used of the prophet’s office in 1 Chr. 29:29; Samuel – Ro’eh; Nathan – Nabi’; and Gad – Hozeh. Milton’s conception of Samson’s and of the poet’s role as mouthpiece for the divine shadows that of the opening lines of Psalm 45 ‘My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer’. For ‘inditing’ the Hebrew gives ‫ – שחר‬rachash, a unique usage in the Bible, and meaning, as one nineteenth-century commentator had it, ‘boileth or bubbleth up: It is a metaphor taken from a fountain that sends up its waters from the earth in this way’. Adam Clarke, ‘Commentary on Psalms 45:1’, ‘The Adam Clarke Commentary’, https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/acc/psalms45.html. 1832. 7

SA, 1628. Unlike his cowardly foes who, Samson

recurrently observes, ‘durst not’ (SA, 1110, 1113, 1255, 1256). The political virtù of courage is thus interwoven with a strand of the poem which identifies true and false versions

of

‘appear’

(false

‘seeming’

versus

the

appearance of the true actor and true orator in public space), linked in turn to an account of light and darkness as political as well as/inseparable from moral and

spiritual

categories.

Interestingly,

when

former

appearances resolve themselves, ‘as seem’d’ acts as a pivot, governing both the ‘self-begotten bird’ and Samson’s resurgent ‘virtue’, which is the true subject of the simile instigated by ‘Like’. 8

All this in the Platonic and catechistic Augustinian

rather than the post-modern sense of Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (Paris, 1969; New York, 1990), 291–316. 9

For Milton’s deployment of Augustinian and other

notions of right reason and operation of human rationality in relation to the divine etc. see Phillip J. Donnelly, Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge, 2009). 10

Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas

North in Ten Volumes (1579) (London, 1910), vol. 9, 5; Ovid, Fasti, trans. James G. Frazer, revised G. P. Goold (Cambridge MA, 1931), II. 303–62. Other ‘emasculating’ classical women are, of course, available. Indeed, there seems to be a template for the characterisation of the powerful women in the lives of public men in antiquity (especially those who have access to public life themselves and any reputation for eloquence), and the terms in which they are castigated or ridiculed in their lifetimes and depicted in accounts thereafter, not least by linking them all together in a chain of ‘women false like’ each other. A case in point, Aspasia, the Miletan-born partner of

Pericles and mother of his surviving son, is called by Aristophanes a ‘new Omphale’ (‘The Acharnians’, 525), and recurrently equated with Deianira, Hera and Helen (Charles W. Fornara and Loren J. Samons, Athens from Cleisthesnes to Pericles (Berkeley, 1991), 162–166), attacked for her foreign birth (which excluded her from citizenship and marriage with Pericles), her undue influence and supposed continued native loyalties, which are blamed for both the Samian and Peloponnesian Wars (Aristophanes, ‘The Acharnians’, in The Eleven Comedies, trans. Anonymous (New York, 1927), 523 –527). Likened by Plutarch, in his life of Pericles, to the famous Persian mistress Thargelia, Aspasia is variously depicted as being originally a Carian prisoner of war-turned-slave, with being a prostitute and brothel-keeper, charged with impiety, with corrupting Athenian women and with distracting her lover from his public duty, leading him, Hercules-like, to choose a life of pleasure over virtue (not least by Antisthenes, of whose dialogue bearing her name only fragments survive). Acknowledged ‘extremely clever with words’ and a teacher of rhetoric, she is supposed to have founded a school for Athenian girls: Aeschines Socraticus, too, names a dialogue after her, averring that she was originally responsible for the Socratic dialogic method, Cicero terms her a ‘female Socrates’ (De Inventione, I, 51–53), and Lucian lauds her political

astuteness and as ‘a model of wisdom’ (A Portrait Study, XVII). It is this ambivalence in the classical reputations of influential, public-speaking women which is inherited by writers of the medieval and Renaissance periods, and blends so well with the biblical foreign wives, idolatry and treachery narratives of Solomon and Samson. Even when the orator himself has retained a largely positive profile, as in the case of Pericles, the ambivalent ‘consort-of-theorator’ motif remains available from the classical sources. Aspasia may be credited with providing the model for Diotima in Plato’s Symposium and, in his ‘Menexenus’, with teaching the art of rhetoric to Pericles and others of the Athenian intellectual elite, including Socrates (a claim which Plutarch echoes in his account of Pericles), with being the true composer of the famous funeral oration, yet is derided in satirical attacks on Pericles: even some of these plaudits – such as the claim voiced by Socrates that Pericles is the better orator because taught by Aspasia rather than Antiphon: Plato, ‘Menexenus’, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge MA, 1925), 236a – can be seen as heavily ironic, or are subsequently used to discredit her (as well as the orator himself). Scholarly opinion remains divided as to whether Aspasia was, or must have been, a hetaera or courtesan/companion, and whether her unwed and non-citizen status combined with her relationship with

Pericles to permit her much fuller access to public life than that available to Athenian wives. Insubordinate, and capricious (Hera, subversive wife of the thunder-god Zeus, to whom, as orator, Pericles is often compared), seductive and disastrous in their impact on domestic and foreign affairs (Helen) or killing their otherwise mighty and eloquent husbands in an attempt to bind them to them (Deianira), the persuasions of the upstart wives or mistresses of the leaders of antiquity, whether Fulvia Bambalio or Cleopatra, are ordinarily viewed as both dubious in their female motivation and malign in their effects. The more involved in instruction, particularly when it comes to speech, the more dangerous they are perceived to be. For the centrality of Helen as type of linguistic and rhetorical double-ness and duality in the classical

tradition,

from

Homer

and

Hesiod

to

Stesichorus and Gorgias, ‘both woven and the weaver of speech, both subject of the song and figure within the text for the poet’s own activity’, see Ann Bergren, ‘Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought’, Hellenic Studies Series 19 (Washington, 2008), IV, ‘Helen as Female/Rhetorical Logos’. 11

Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas

North vol. 9, 5 xv.178, while Cassius Dio’s account of Fulvia piercing the tongue of the dead Cicero with her hairpin specifically connects the orator’s philippic speech

with his arch-enemy’s very female revenge (Cassius Dio, Roman History, Books 46 –50, Vol. 5, trans. Earnest Cary (Cambridge MA, 1917), 47. 8.4. Milton’s concern with the dismemberment and sacrificial fate of Cicero, as his model and classical republican orator par excellence, runs throughout his work. For Milton’s long-standing preoccupation

with,

and

justified

anxiety

about,

dismemberment and sparagmos and its role in his political aesthetic and poetics, see Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, 1994), chap. 4, and Rachel Falconer, Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (Sheffield, 1996). 12

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; repr.

Chicago, 1998). 13

Lynch, MPPS, 7–16, 24–37.

14

Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Politics of

Discourse: The Literature and History of SeventeenthCentury England (Berkeley, 1987), 20. 15

Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political

Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago, 2014). 16

Arendt argues for an etymological association of

megaron and atrium, locations denoting the oikia or household,

with

darkness,

as

bearing

‘a

strong

connotation of darkness and blackness’: Theodor Mommsen, History of Rome (Leipzig, 1854–56), 22, 236, cited Arendt, HC, 71. She contrasts this with the light of

the polis: ‘Action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm’ (HC, 180). 17

Aristotle. Politics, I.1253a1–18; Nichomachean Ethics,

1142a25, 1178a6; Lynch, MPPS, 4. 18

For the expression of this anxiety on the part of all sides

in the political debates of the period at this outbreak of multiple competing voices through the image of Babel, and its implications, see Elizabeth Sauer, Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics (Montreal, 1998) and Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994). 19

Text illustration compiled by the author, consisting of a

collage of quotations from Milton’s Complete Prose Works, as well as pamphlets and speeches by John Lilburne, Marchamont Nedham, Richard Overton, Henry Parker, Thomas Rainsborough, Edward Sexby and William Walwyn. For further examples and analysis, see The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge, 1998); Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998); and Lynch, MPPS, chap.1. 20

Arendt, HC, 39, 186–187. The idea that the slave, often

a captive in war, had already demonstrated his ‘love of his own life’ by failing to die in battle is expressed by Aristotle

in support of his claim of natural slavishness in some peoples (specifically non-Greeks, from whom the word ‘barbarian’ is derived), as well as in defining the servility induced by the condition of being a slave (Politics, I.v.1254a17, and vi.1255a3). For a Roman expression of the same idea, see Seneca, Epistles, (77.13): ‘vita si moriendi virtus abest, servitus est’. The notion that the vita activa requires courage, energy and ‘manliness’ becomes

a

commonplace

of

republican

thought

transmitted to the Renaissance, not least via Livy: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson (Harmondsworth, 1986), II.xiii; also, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth, 1981), chap. 6. Milton redefines the classical political virtue of courage against ‘the cowardise of doing wrong’ (CPW, II. 409): see Lynch, MPPS, 50–51, 178. ‘Courage is the earliest of all political virtues, and even today is still one of the cardinal virtues of politics, because only by stepping out of our private existence and the familial relationships to which our lives are tied can we make our way into the common public world that is our truly political space’ (Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2005), 122). 21

Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism

(Cambridge, 2005), 13. 22

Lynch, MPPS, 99–204.

23

Lynch, MPPS, 179n50.

24

Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare and Politics’, Shakespeare

Survey, 44 (1992), 1–15; David Armitage, Conal Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice (eds), Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2009), 7. For the Renaissance schoolroom as site of intensive training in just such practices of composition, and enactment of speeches in utramque partem, see Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s

Schoolroom:

Rhetoric,

Discipline,

Emotion (Philadelphia, 2011); and for the creation of a deliberately outlandish and exotic language of classical eloquence by Renaissance writers and pedagogues, see Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and

Eccentricity

in

the

English

Renaissance

(Philadelphia, 2013). 25

Quentin Skinner, ‘Afterword’ in David Armitage, Conal

Condren and Andrew Fitzmaurice eds, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 2009), 278. 26

Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 1, 13.

Hadfield credits Pocock and Skinner with the insight that republicanism was both ‘a language and a belief system’ with its own ‘fund of stories and potent images’ and declares that it ‘might also be regarded as a collection of topoi, or, in terms of Renaissance rhetorical theory, “places”, examples or triggers that stood for a larger argument

or

set

of

beliefs’.

J.G.A.Pocock,

The

Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), I, chap. 6. 27

Mary Ann McGrail, Tyranny in Shakespeare (Lanham,

2001), 5. 28

Milton’s sonnet, first published, albeit not under his

name, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, Published according to the true Original Copies (London, 1632) and reprinted in his own 1645 Poems, has been variously designated: ‘On Shakespear. 1630’ and ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. SHAKESPEARE’. For some of the issues surrounding this, see Gordon Campbell, ‘Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton’ in Milton Quarterly (1999), 33.4. 29

Barbara Keifer Lewalski, John Milton: A Critical

Biography (Oxford, 2003); Neil Forsyth, John Milton: A Biography (Oxford, 2013); Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, Thought (Oxford, 2008). 30

Hadfield

in

Shakespeare

and

Republicanism

(Cambridge, 2005) and David Colclough, ‘Talking to the Animals: persuasion, counsel and their discontents in Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, Armitage, Condren and Fitzmaurice (eds).

31

See Lynch, MPPS, 227–231, Milton and the Middle

Ages, ed. John Mulryan (London, 1982), and Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence, 224. 32

Albert C. Labriola, ‘Milton’s Eve and the Cult of

Elizabeth I’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 95 (1996) 38–51. 33

PL, IX.670 ff. For some of the implications of Milton’s

use of this genre hierarchy in the temptation ‘scene’, see Lynch, MPPS, 98–100; and for Satan’s use of Ciceronian body language, see Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2012) chap. 5. 34

Milton’s attitude to single combat may have been

influenced in the 1640s and 50s by a growing public awareness of the tendency for duelling among displaced and defeated cavaliers (often derided as ‘Hectors’), along with drunkenness and other forms of petty crime. For an account of this phenomenon, see Lena Liapi, ‘Turning Cavaliers into Rogues: Crime Pamphlets and Polemic in the Interregnum’, paper delivered at Pamphleteering Culture, 1558–1702 Conference, University of Edinburgh, September 2016, and Liapi, ‘“The Talk of the Towne”: News, Crime and the Public Sphere in SeventeenthCentury London’, Cultural and Social History, 2017. Milton records in his commonplace book the opinion that duels are ‘not certain in deciding the truth’ (CPW, I.374) and the fashion for duelling among rakes at the

Restoration court may have contributed to his dislike of the practice, at least at the point of the work’s publication (see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 360). Samson’s evident willingness to fight is often cited as a counterargument to the claim that verbal contest is paramount in this encounter, but the crucial factor is that this readiness is subjugated to divine will. The status of the assertion that ‘all the contest is now/Twixt God and Dagon; Dagon hath presum’d/Me overthrown, to enter lists with God’ (SA, 461–63), and Milton’s apparent redefinition of the notion of being God’s knight is also relevant in this debate. For the centrality of homosocial emulation in Shakespeare’s representation of the Roman republic, and the ‘basically agonistic, highly competitive nature of the Roman ruling elite’ operating within republican ideology, see Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (New York, 1997), 88–96. 35

Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in

Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978). 36

Arendt, HC, 180: ‘This revelatory quality of speech and

action comes to the fore when people are with others and neither for nor against them – that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure […] Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act,

action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory and which is possible only in the public realm.’ 37

Victoria Kahn, ‘Political Theology and Reason of State

in Samson Agonistes’, South Atlantic Quarterly 95, no. 4 (Fall 1996), 1065–1097; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism

(Cambridge,

1998);

David

Norbrook,

‘Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies, 42 (2003), 122–148; Martin Dzelzainis ‘“In These Western Parts of the Empire”: Milton and Roman Law’ in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds) (Cambridge, 2002). 38

SA, 5, 16, 10–11.

39

Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 127.

40

Lynch, MPPS, 193.

41

This phrase describing the method which subsequently

formed the basis of psychoanalysis, was coined by Freud’s patient, Anna O., though used here in the loosest sense to allow for the political reading to incorporate a broadly ‘psychological’ but not a strictly psychoanalytic account of Samson’s ‘recovery’. Evidently, drama is inherently speech-based and dialogic but Milton is at pains to draw attention to the talkative nature (and premise) of the unfolding process from the outset: ‘Sam. I hear the sound of words, their sense the air/Dissolves ere it reach my

ear./Chor. He speaks, let us draw nigh’ (SA, 176–78). Prominent in Arendt’s account of the rise of the Greek polis is the place of Greek poetry and drama, with the great words and deeds, the ‘agonal spirit’ of the Homeric epics displaced onto and preserved within the practices of the public sphere. The political actor speaking out of the self in public and the conception of persuasive words as themselves deeds, maintains for her the fundamental principles of Greek drama: ‘Speech in this sense is a form of action, and our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish. Greek tragedy – its drama, its enacted events – is based on this fundamental conviction’ (PP, 125). 42

Milton jibes at romance, in terms both of its content and

its form: from the self-pitying, lamenting lays of the fallen angels in Book II to the ‘tilting Furniture, emblazon’d Shields,/Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds’, the ‘tinsel Trappings’, and effeminate, women-worshipping ‘gorgious knights’ (PL, IX.34–36). In prose, despite attacking ‘Knight Salmasius’, deriding him as a ‘mounted grammarian’ and knight of the blackboard (CPW, IV, 580, 476), Milton frequently characterises himself in his polemics as sole chivalric defender of his country’s honour and divine truth, wielding his pen as lance or sword. His general disapproval of ‘knight-errantry’, and its association with kingly posturing and ‘Heathenism’

(CPW, III.367) in his prose may hold, however. In short, Milton may consider polemical single combat, though worthy, as ultimately a less elevated use of oratorical gifts than the contribution of the divinely inspired orator-poet he aims to become (CPW, I.810–12), or God means Samson to be. Like Milton in his own writing – as depicted by Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2012), chap. 4 – Samson seems to represent his own previous rhetorical techniques and positions for the purpose of subjecting them to criticism, preserving error in order to confront and defeat it. For Milton’s complicated and often ambivalent relationship to the genre of romance, to which his objections are more structural than might appear from the above, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms

(Princeton,

1985),

and.

Patricia

Parker,

Inescapable Romance (Princeton, 1979), chap. 3. 43

SA, 804, while she ‘at home sat full of cares and fears’

(804–5). 44

SA, 975–996.

45

Lynch, MPPS, chap. 5.

46

See, for example, Algernon Sidney, Discourses

Concerning Government, ed. T. West (Indianapolis, 1990), 350, Aristotle, Pol., III.xiv.1285a16, Henry Parker, Jus Populi, 21, 48–49 and Milton, CPW, III.202–203.

47

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.xii. Milton’s

shorn protagonist, his head laid in the ‘harlot lap’ of Dalila, has obvious parallels with Spenser’s Verdant, the epitome of the recreant knight, prostrate in the lap of Acrasia, ‘his warlike armes, the idle instruments/Of sleeping praise […] hong upon a tree’. Spenser’s depiction of the Bower of Blisse shares with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra an interest in liquefaction, and with Samson Agonistes a graphic sense of the connection between ‘dissolving’ and ‘dissolution’ in theological terms. The OED charts an increasing tendency in the seventeenth century to deploy ‘recreant’ to denote religious apostasy, as indeed Milton does in his prose works. In Paradise Regained Jesus declares mankind (and by extension Satan himself) to have ‘Turn’d recreant to God, ingrate and false,/And so of all true good himself despoil’d’ (PR, III.138–9). This speaks of an apostasy which,

like

Samson’s,

involves

presumption:

‘sacrilegious, to himself would take/That which to God alone of right belongs’ (PR, III.140–41). 48

Hetty Goldman, ‘Sandon and Herakles’, Hesperia

Supplements

8

(1949):164–454.

The

folkloric

imprisonment tradition may represent a displaced account of the incorporation of Tarsus’ solar fertility god, Sandon, into the figure of the Greek Herakles, whose prototype he may have been. Sandon’s connection with

the sun, lightning and immolation, as well as his lion and club signifiers, are features he shares with both Herakles and Milton’s Herculean Samson. 49

Plutarch describes Antony’s ancestral claims as perhaps

largely a matter of self-presentation, appearance, hairstyling and couture: ‘He had also a very good and noble appearance; his beard was well grown, his forehead large, and his nose aquiline, giving him altogether a bold, masculine look that reminded people of the faces of Hercules in paintings and sculptures. It was, moreover, an ancient tradition, that the Antonys were descended from Hercules, by a son of his called Anton; and this opinion he thought to give credit to by the similarity of his person just mentioned, and also by the fashion of his dress.’ Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North Vol. 9, 5. 50

Omphale, queen of Lydia, a country famous for its

enormous mercantile wealth, enslaves the hero, making him hold baskets of wool while her women do their spinning. Ovid (Fasti, II.305) relates the episode with some voyeuristic pleasure, though Sophocles (‘The Trachiniae’, 69ff, 250) insists that servitude to an oriental, barbarian woman constitutes utter disgrace: “Trachiniae” in Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, trans. Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge, 2010).

51

The connection between Tarsus, capital of Cilicia, and

the renowned lovers, as well as with shipping, is clear, as the city famously provided the location not only for their first meeting but also the banquets in 41

BC

which

accompanied the construction of their fleet. See Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North, Vol. 9, 5. The location sets up an interplay between the Tarsus of sensual enslavement of Hercules/Antony/Samson (with Dalila as ‘stately ship of Tarsus’), a place of avoidance of martial, or oratorical duty and the virtuous Tarsan orator, St Paul, originally Saul of Tarsus, whose utterances contain the antidote and the meet reply to the issues the drama raises concerning speech and conformity to divine intention. Paul is another kind of ‘vessel’ altogether: ‘This man is to me a chosen vessel to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel’ (Acts 9:15). He suffers his own shipwreck (traditionally on Malta) when, as a prisoner of the Romans, sailing from Caesarea via Cilicia and Pamphylia, the men ignore his warnings and fail to shelter at the harbour of Phoenix, on Crete. This shipwreck, however, is part of God’s plan for Paul to be brought to testify in speech before Caesar, and an angel assures him that not a hair will be permitted to fall from the heads of any of the men on board – a message he passes on to their great comfort (Acts 27: 1–34).

52

Milton was perhaps not tongue in cheek when citing

Hercules and Deianira as instructive for marital relations, recommending the reading of Sophocles’ ‘Trachiniae’ ‘not for its mythical grandeur but for its insight into “household

matters”’,

Richard

Rowland,

Killing

Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (London, 2017), 5, and for further analysis, chap. 5. Ovid’s Heroides imagines a denunciatory letter to Hercules from Deianira in which she denounces his domestic aggression and infidelity and focusses especially on the deviance of crossdressing her husband engaged in with Omphale, thus linking the fabric of the shirt that finally kills him with the gender-swapping, dress-code-flouting of trading club for distaff and lion-skin for female attire. For this Ovidian ‘obsession with fabrics’ and its relationship to Augustus’s regulation of dress-code and sexual behaviour in Heroides IX, see Rowland, Killing Hercules, chap. 2, and for the various representations and interpretations of Deianira’s suicide, 33–71; also Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge MA, 1991). In ‘The Trachiniae’ Hercules at the end describes himself as womanish in his pain, begging Hyllos to finish him off (suicide), though Sophocles does not follow earlier versions of the story which emphasise Deianira’s supposedly masculine

qualities and preferred pursuits (such as chariot-driving), a choice sometimes seen as a commentary on Aeschylus’ portrait of Clytemnestra. There may be deliberate echoes of Seneca’s own suicide in the depiction of Hercules in Hercules Oetaeus, for centuries ascribed to Seneca himself, and alluded to in Tacitus’ Annals. In some versions of the story, Deianira, like Dido, is reunited with her husband after death, while later writers veer between (Sophoclean and Ovidian) sympathy for Deianira (with her ‘devastating critique’ of a marital ‘double-standard’ against a domestic tyrant inclined in many situations to resort to violence whenever his oratory fails), and a desire to uphold the strongman as a figure of martial prowess and (recovered) masculinity, regaining self-control and achieving apotheosis at the last (Rowland, KH, 49, 51). For the medieval tradition of Hercules the wronged husband, like biblical David or Samson, and the adoption of the story in discussion of Renaissance and seventeenthcentury marriage, see Rowland, KH, 103–152, 153–210. It is not hard to see how these concerns impinge upon Milton’s in several respects. For an analysis of the wider, linguistic signification of the rape-abduction-marriage element which forms part of so many of these stories of classical women, from Deianira to Helen (and of possible interest to Milton in light of the preoccupations

highlighted in this chapter), see Bergren, ‘Weaving Truth’, III ‘Women as Sign in Marriage Exchange’. 53

AC, IV. iii.11–21 For discussion of both possibilities, see

Peter Hollindale, ‘Music under the Earth: The Suicide Marriage in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Critical Essays on Antony and Cleopatra, Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey (eds) (Harlow, 1990), 28–40. 54

For Euripidean and Senecan precursors, see Joseph

Wittreich, Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes (Pittsburgh, 2002); also Stella P. Revard, ‘Dalila as Euripidean Heroine’, Papers on Language and Literature, 23 (1987), 291–302. For Milton’s echoes of wider Greek drama, see The Complete Works of John Milton: Volume II: The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford, 2009). For an exploration of the Virgilian component in Samson’s encounters, and some parallels between Dido and Dalila, see Maggie Kilgour, ‘Heroic Contradictions: Samson and the Death of Turnus’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 50 (2008), 210– 234. 55

Milton, quoting Seneca, Hercules Furens, II.922–4,

and insisting in his translated epigraph to Areopagitica that ‘Ther can be slaine/No sacrifice to God more acceptable/Then an unjust and wicked King’ (CPW, III.213).

56

For the significance of the political Hercules who lies

behind such similes as England as ‘a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks’ (CPW, II.557–58), see Stella P. Revard, ‘The Politics of Milton’s Hercules’, Milton Studies, 32 (1995), 217–245. 57

The image is reproduced with kind permission of

Universitätsbibliothek, Mannheim. 58

For an account of the ‘structures of emulation’ and

characterisation of masculine rivalry in Antony and Cleopatra, see Coppelia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 112– 121. 59

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York, 1970), 35, 38,

44, 55–56; Lynch, MPPS, 191–197. 60

The central, punning word-play, of course, centres on

shipping and the idea of the ‘vessel’, with Samson Agonistes offering an extended analysis on the heroic individual as the right kind of vessel, combining Demosthenes’ metaphor of the orator – ‘As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeches, whether they be wise or foolish’ – with the example and the teachings of St Paul, Tarsus’s presiding Christian figure, God’s ‘chosen vessel’ who always ‘spoke wisdom’ (1 Corinthians 2:26). The preaching and prophesying Christian is an empty vessel to be filled by the spirit so that their speech, instead of

signifying nothing, will resonate with truth. In his commentary

on

Saint

Paul,

Aquinas

is

explicit

(‘Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians’, in Aquinas Scripture Commentaries, trans. Matthew L. Lamb (Albany, 1966)): a true vessel such as Paul is defined by his construction, contents, use and fruits. It was the direct correlation between what the divine spirit poured in and what poured out of Paul that rendered his utterances effective. Cleopatra (barge) and Dalila (stately ship) are spurious and ill-intentioned vessels, bent on seduction, who disempower and ‘effeminate’ men, turning them into ‘leaky’ vessels. Even so, as is evident from 2 Timothy 2:21, a man can expunge such dishonour and become ‘a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work’. Pregnancy offers the most obvious analogy of woman as ‘vessel’, and Milton’s androgynous, bride-bridegroom, poet-orator, too, must ‘deliver’, both God’s message and chosen people. 61

The repeated analogy between individuals and

shipping, and as such as microcosms of the ship of state, is notably present in Coriolanus, whose protagonist is recurrently likened to Hercules and furnishes another example of the maverick, republican ‘one strong man delusion’. The power of his mother, as against that of his wife, is played out in terms of speech and silence and the

paradigms of republic/tyranny, civility/barbarism are very much to the fore. While the appeal of Antony and Cleopatra, from Milton’s point of view, may reside in its mingling of political plot and romance, the allusive possibilities and attraction of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar as classical republican tragedies also form part of the subliminal conversation played out in Milton’s drama. 62

This perception is not confined to the past: recent

research on the pitch of female voices and speaking styles in board and other management meetings indicates that these are often perceived by male colleagues as ‘shrill’, annoying or ‘defensive’, and women’s interventions as easy to ignore or ‘just noise’ (Kathryn Heath, Jill Flynn, Mary Davis Holt, Harvard Business Review, June 2014), with a plethora of guides and courses now offered to women to make their voices lower-pitched and more even in tone, as well as encouraging the use of fewer and more ‘muscular words’. For women’s utterance seen in the period as partaking of the features of continuous, undifferentiated noise, lulling or befuddling, or an animal harshness and thus part of their non-citizen status, see Lynch, MPPS, 41–42, 48. 63

The ‘gorgeous East’ (PL, II.3), as over-indulgent

mother-mistress,

inducing

luxuriance,

effeminacy,

softness, infantile sloth, servility etc. in her inhabitants by the very ease of existence in her fertile climate, forms part

of the Orientalist narrative from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance. She ‘showers’ her people with plenty, and their willingly accepted tyrants with splendour (‘Barbaric Pearl and Gold’ PL, II.3–4), without the necessity for industry, in direct opposition to ‘that honest poverty, which is the mother and nurse of modesty, sobriety, and all manner of virtue’ (Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, 350). Aristotle asserts that ‘barbarians are by natural character more slavish than Greeks (and Asiatics than Europeans)’, seeing this as the explanation for their propensity to ‘tolerate despotic rule without resentment’ (Pol., III.xiv.1285a16). Parker opines that ‘Asia being more rich and fertile, bred a people more effeminate and disposed to luxurie, and so by consequence more ignoble, and prone to servilitie’ and quotes Plutarch on ‘unmanly Slavish customs among the Persians’, observing that, as a whole, ‘the Asiaticks were ever extreamly despicable in the eyes of more magnanimous nations, especially the Greeks, for adoring and prostrating themselves with so much devotion before their Princes’ (Henry Parker, Jus populi, 48–49). Milton includes the Jews in the list of servility-prone nations, who ‘especially since the time they chose a King against the advice and counsel of God, are noted by wise Authors much inclinable to slavery’ (CPW, III.202–203). For Milton’s use of ‘a perfet Turkish tyranny’ (CPW, III.312),

and the Asiatic tyrant/Oriental despot element in the portrayal of Satan ‘exulted’, ‘High on a Throne of Royal State, which far/Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind’ (PL, II.1–2, 5) in Pandaemonium see Lynch, MPPS, 51–54. 64

AC, II. ii. 228–32. Plutarch stresses the queen’s

scintillating conversation and facility with foreign languages: ‘But the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself, as to the Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and many others, whose language she had learnt.’ See Plutarch’s Lives, trans. North, Vol. 9, 35. It is just possible that Shakespeare in fact considers the discourse he gives to Cleopatra to be scintillating female conversation, though, or at least the embodiment of Plutarch’s ‘something bewitching’. The contrast with Octavia’s ‘still conversation’ is apparent, however, just as Cleopatra’s hopping through the street opposes the ‘holy, cold and still’ demeanour of Caesar’s sister (AC, II vi.119–

20). Milton’s recurrent use of the term ‘conversation’ to describe the companionship of marriage, intellectual as well as physical attraction, the ‘apt and cheerfull conversation of man with woman’ (CPW, II.235), to some extent ‘reclaims’ the term from its more overtly sexual connotations and usage. 65

For the belief that water is a feminine medium and

woman inherently cold and moist in nature according to Aristotelian, Galenic and Hippocratic medical treatises, published collectively as Gynecaea in the sixteenth century,

see

Ian

MacLean,

‘Medicine,

Anatomy,

Physiology’, in The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1992). Milton’s gendered treatment of this element speaks retrospectively to Antony’s decision to fight at sea, which it is clear from earlier in the play is contrary to his military judgement, and a disaster only further illustrated rather than caused by his high-tailing it after Cleopatra’s fleeing ship in the battle itself. 66

Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 117–118.

67

The Alciato emblem of Mark Antony, instigator of the

murder of Cicero, whipping on the lions of Hercules, his famed ancestor, which pull his chariot, above the maxim that ‘thus the fiercest are tamed’, might serve as an illustration of Cicero’s central place, as dismembered

republican orator, within Milton’s preoccupation with the sparagmos of the orator-poet. As an exact counterpart of the Alciato emblem of Hercules Gallicus, which declares that brute force or physical strength are trumped by eloquence (Eloquentia fortitudine praestantior), the inferences of this second emblem support the relevance of the allusive Mark Antony-Hercules interplay to the political argument being made here. The illustration is again

reproduced

with

kind

permission

of

Universitätsbibliothek, Mannheim. 68

‘Fulvia, the widow of Clodius the demagogue, a woman

not born for spinning or housewifery, nor one that could be content with ruling a private husband, but prepared to govern a first magistrate, or give orders to a commanderin-chief. So that Cleopatra had great obligations to her for having taught Antony to be so good a servant, he coming to her hands tame and broken into entire obedience to the commands of a mistress.’ Plutarch’s Lives, trans. North, Vol. 9, 14–15. Arguably, rather like Aspasia as putative rhetorical teacher of Pericles and Socrates, Fulvia ‘teaches’ Antony by example the most effective possible funeral oration, when she displays to the people in the streets the body of her murdered first husband, Clodius, causing popular outrage and the trial of his murderer, Milo, at which she testifies. In Antony’s absence, she defends his reputation against the attacks of Cicero, and

participates in the wars against Caesar in his interest, a fact which Plutarch notes allows Antony and Octavian to conveniently blame her for these, as the occasion for a reconciliation between the two men (Octavian divorces Fulvia’s daughter Clodia, and Antony, now widowed, is free to marry Octavian’s sister, Octavia), Plutarch, Vol. 9, 5, 17–20. 69

For the long (classical and early modern) tradition of

tongues and swords as interchangeably representing masculine potency, and needles as the female equivalent, see Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Makng of the Feminine (London, 1996) and Lynch, MPPS chap. 3; for the claim that ‘the semiotic activity peculiar to women throughout Greek tradition is not linguistic. Greek women do not speak, they weave. Semiotic woman is a weaver’, and reflections thereon, see Bergren, ‘Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought’, II, ‘The Signs of the Female: Weaving’. 70

JC, IV. i.1–6 does not name Cicero, whose inclusion is

only reported by its results at IV. iii.175–77. Why does Shakespeare make this choice? Is it part of his general diminution of Cicero’s role in the story, and does he assume wide knowledge on the part of his audience as to the gruesome means of Cicero’s death? Is the omission of the symbolic features of Cicero’s dismemberment

detailed by Plutarch and Cassius Dio precisely because Shakespeare does not want to detract from the two-way oratorical struggle between Brutus and Antony which is so central to his drama? 71

Yasunari

Takada,

‘Shakespeare’s

Cicero’,

in

Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. Mary Ann McGrail, Poetica 48 (1997), section II. 72

Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence

(Ithaca, 1994), chap.1. 73

Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, chap.5; for

Milton’s self-definition in his polemics, and the role of militant chastity/virginity as prerequisite for poetic inspiration or production, and sexual assault on virgin or ‘matron’ as underlying polemic eloquence, republicfounding and revolutionary change, see Lieb, 102–103, 135–158; and for associations of sparagmos, androgyny, blindness and voice, Catherine Maxwell, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester, 2009), chap. 2; Lynch, MPPS, 31–35, 221, 234–236, and (forthcoming) ‘Once Twice Three Times A Lady: Milton as Female Orpheus’. Classical narratives abound with dismembered, beautiful youths, such as Osiris, Hyppolytus, Adonis and Orpheus himself, as well as assailed virtuous women like Lucretia and Lavinia, which, ever since his youthful Prolusions (apparently his only attempt at oral rather than written oratory), Milton

regularly draws upon in his depictions of oratorical effectiveness and its perils. Nonetheless, it is above all the gender-fluidity of Orpheus, whose words, according to Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, soothed beasts, rocks and trees, and forms the model of the divinely prompted orator who engendered civilisation (the end of bestial roaming), peace, marriage and the urban living that made politics possible (Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) (London, 1584), ‘Preface’, Avii) that Milton takes to heart: destroyed by women and yet seeker after, retriever of (see note 82) and absorber of the feminine. For digestive consumption as means of subsuming female linguistic attributes, grounded in the ability to know good and evil and therefore to replace one with the other or disguise one as the other, and the myth of the marriage of Mêtis and Zeus as ‘aetiological myth’ of the ‘semiotic power assigned to the female and its (re-)appropriation by the male’, see Bergren, ‘Weaving Truth’, II. 74

Hollindale, ‘Music under the Earth: The Suicide

Marriage inAntonyandCleopatra’, 30–31. 75

From the address to the significantly named Eros to the

urgent desire to meet death as a ‘bridegroom’, to ‘run into’t/As to a lover’s bed’ (AC, IV. xiv.99–101), the closing scenes of the play generate a narrative of rejuvenation and even recovered virginity which resonates with that of Samson. For the battle of white and brown hairs as

reflecting Antony’s self-division following the disgrace of fleeing Caesar’s ships (AC,III.ii.13–15), to acceptance of the mingling of grey and brown hair on the heads of both lovers, with a corresponding claim to ‘compete with youth on equal terms’, see Hollindale, ‘Music under the Earth’, 30–31. It is ‘curlèd Antony’ that Cleopatra seeks jealously to meet in the world beyond the dissolving one she is leaving behind (AC, V.ii.300). See also Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 77–79, on melting as a female property in the Roman plays, and Hollindale, 36–37. 76

Thus in turn also, in his reversal/redemption, to his

previous enslavement to ‘foul effeminacy’, which, though it predates the drama, is analeptically related at its start. For Milton this is necessary: in his Christ-like aspect, Samson’s experience must mirror the Fall and overcome the female temptation which occasioned it, just as Jesus apparently has to do in Satan and Belial’s imaginary temptation of him by the ‘Queen’/goddess disguised as virgin in Book II of Paradise Regained. In a poem where there are no ‘actual’ women, this may seem like an example of carefully rationalised misogyny, but in fact contributes to the theme of the second time, second chance Jesus, son of virginal Mary, to whose house he returns at the end: Jesus must confront Eve and all false women/goddesses in a peculiarly linguistically inflected temptation, even if it exists only in the warped minds of

Belial and Satan (and of the reader, since it is depicted in full in the poem). Like Samson’s, Jesus’s dialogic encounter is anchored not only in the work’s centre but through that in the beginning and the ‘back story’, as well as the future (of the passion and second coming). For the false etymology of Samson’s name as meaning not only ‘sun’ but also ‘there the second time’, widely accepted in Milton’s time, see Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Towards Samson Agonistes: the Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, 1978), 99: alluded to by the Chorus and reinforced by references to the messenger who comes ‘a second time with great threat’nings to fetch him’. Satan and Belial’s ‘fantasy’ draws upon the incident in which Aphrodite impersonates a virgin to seduce Anchises, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 108–142, and Hera’s similar ruse with regard to Zeus (Iliad, XIV. 301–311, 330–340) which also has the function of indicating women’s

dissembling

use

of

language:

see

Bergren,‘Weaving Truth’, I, ‘The Speech of the Muses’. Aphrodite’s girdle, on which is embroidered ‘speech that turns aside, persuasion, deceit’ (Iliad, XIV, 214–217) also has a bearing on the dress and use of weaving, nets and snares in this very linguistically couched sexual seduction in Paradise Regained, II, 147–243, discussed also in Lynch, MPPS, 147–153.

77

Samson, like Jesus, not only ‘stands’ but ‘stands’ in for,

embodying the ‘stasis’ of a divine rhetoric channelled through the immobile body. It may be relevant, therefore, that in classical rhetoric, stasis is the process of accurately identifying the central questions in a dispute and the arguments required to address them: the last stage of Hermagoras of Temnos’ four divisions of stasis includes objection to the ongoing legal process and translatio, namely transference to the jurisdiction of another tribunal or authority. In Paradise Regained, this moment of stasis marks the revelation of Jesus’s divinity on the pinnacle. Phillip J. Donnelly contends that both poems offer instruction in scripturally constituted ‘right reason’ which draws the human individual into cooperative alignment with God, thus making possible their respective denouements: Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge, 2009), 223. 78

Sonnet XVI, Poems etc. on several occasions by Mr

John Milton, both English and Latin, composed at several times (London, 1673); Stella P. Revard (ed), John Milton Collected Shorter Poems (Chichester, 2009). 79

The (divine?) breaking of waters signified by the

gushing of water and blood is not accidental, and the birthing elements of this cataclysmic ‘rebirth’ have not gone unremarked by critics: Amy Boesky, ‘Samson and

Surrogacy’, in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: 2004); Jackie Di Salvo, ‘Intestine Thorn: Samson’s Struggle with the Woman Within’, in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana, 1988). 80

SA, 726–27. Not only does the eyes-head-persuasive

speech

paradigm

invoked

in

the

intertextual

Dalila/Dido/Acrasia interplay clearly prefigure Samson’s final moment of pre-oratorical (possible) prayer, but underlines how this later moment itself marks the final point in a crucial postural trajectory: from lying ‘with languished

head

unpropped/As

one

past

hope

abandoned/And by himself given over’ (SA, 119–21) – the result of laying his ‘head and hallowed pledge’ of all his strength (535) in Dalila’s ‘harlot lap’ – at last ‘with head a while enclined/And eyes fast fixed he stood, as one who prayed/Or some great matter in his mind revolved/At last with head erect thus cried aloud’ (1636–39). While Dalila’s ‘words addressed’ dissolve into tears and dew, wetting her Acrasian silken veil, Samson’s oratorical performance unleashes the divine force of winds and waters. 81

Virgil’s Aeneid, trans. John Dryden 1697 (New York,

1909). Kilgour highlights the parallels between the three central tempter figures in Milton’s poem, each one a double of some feature of Samson’s former self, and

Aeneas’s relations with Anchises, Dido and the raging Turnus (‘Heroic Contradictions: Samson and the Death of Turnus’): Charles II was often cast as Aeneas in the royalist triumphalism of Restoration rhetoric, yet Samson grows through rejecting unsuitable forms of heroism, and Milton’s poem suggests the contradictory nature of heroic action. Samson Agonistes may draw upon the imagery of shipwreck of Aeneid (Bk. I), and Samson, like Aeneas, must cope with the loss of a heroic past, both men ultimately ending as heroes who both win and lose. For some ideological implications of the Virgilian elements in Paradise Regained and Paradise Lost, and ideological connections

within

opposing

traditions

of

conquest/empire as against defeated republican liberty between the figures of Dido and Cleopatra, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1992). 82

PL, IV, 299. While Milton opposes ‘lying carelessly

diffused’ to the standing, hard, upright, waiting servant of divine will, he also posits the supine poet awaiting the visitations of the Heavenly Muse as both godly, chivalric, supplicant lover, and expectant wife waiting to receive the divine Word. In substituting himself for the ‘fallacious bride’, Samson partakes of an ongoing narrative of reunion and retrieval (not least the Christian soul’s recovery of the union with God lost at the Fall): Sychaeus

recovers Dido, Cleopatra and Samson earn the title of true wife, and even the type of the dismembered poet-orator, Orpheus, according to some classical accounts, recovers his bride: Syrithe Pugh, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice in the Middle Books of The Faerie Queene’, in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual (2017/2018) vol. 31–32, 1– 41. As Pugh makes clear in her lucid discussion of the implications of Spenser’s choice of the tradition of the reunited lovers in his Faerie Queene, this decision can be taken for political reasons and on basis of the way the poet wishes to depict married love. In doing so, Spenser privileges Amor over Roma, unlike Virgil, the imperial poet of the later incarnation of the ‘ass unpolicied’, the self-deified Augustus, a more dangerous tyrant even than Cicero foresaw in Antony. Orpheus, who was frequently taken as an illustration of frenzied inspiration without self-control, needs his feminine component; a poet who is only male cannot be truly effective. For related questions of the perceived female nature of language and the imagination in the Renaissance and seventeenth-century classical reception, as well as the necessity of the pleasingness of language in addressing human reason, and the ‘feminine’ appeal of poetic language, see Lynch, MPPS, chap. 3. 83

Charles Moseley, ‘Speaking Pictures: Visual Symbol in

Antony and Cleopatra’, in Linda Cookson and Bryan

Loughrey (eds), Critical Essays on Antony and Cleopatra (Harland, 1990), 84–91. 84

Alison Passe, The figure of Cleopatra in early modern

English and French drama (1553–1635), unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen 2018, 3. Fulke Greville’s play of the same name (1601) was apparently burned by the author out of fear of repercussions if the titular characters were seen to bear too much resemblance to Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex. 85

Lynch, MPPS, 222–223.

86

Stella P. Revard, ‘Dalila as Euripidean Heroine’, 291–

302. 87

John Guillory, ‘Dalila’s House: Samson Agonistes and

the Sexual Division of Labour’, in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986) 112–115. 88

Martin

Kuester,

Milton’s

Prudent

Ambiguities

(Lanham, 2009). While God’s language in Paradise Lost may be noted for its freedom from image-making and metaphor, the interactions with Adam, as conveyed by Raphael in Eden, deploy divine ‘prudent ambiguities’ in an instructive way, an ‘intangling’ reminiscent of the Socratic method, seen again in the debate of Paradise Regained and recommended by Milton in a pedagogic

and theological context in his prose. Though endorsing Jesus’s provocative use of language (‘not so much a teaching as an intangling’) in dealing with the Pharisees (CPW, II.642), a justification also for Samson’s God-given capacity to speak in riddles to the Philistines, Milton follows Augustine in averring that, since the Fall, though the ‘essence of Truth is plainnesse, and brightnes; the darknes and crookednesse is our own’ (CPW, I.566). Vladimir Brljak, ‘The Satanic “Or”: Milton and Protestant Anti-Allegorism’, Review of English Studies 66 (2015): 403–422, argues convincingly for Satan as the first allegorist, and in Samson Agonistes, if it is divine utterance that Samson pours forth at the end, God certainly seems to specialise in transmogrification (both of language and of its human mouthpiece/his champion), rather than metaphor (one thing stands for another) or simile (resembles another). What are the implications of Milton’s representation of what Kuester calls ‘God-speak’ for our understanding of the drama’s attitude to allegory as against typology, to synaesthesia, metaphor and simile as

charted

in

this

essay:

one

thing/person/event/narrative stands in for/represents/is superimposed upon/transforms into another in and through language, and yet at the same time purportedly consists of the same, unified entity as part of a parallel,

unfallen ‘reality’? These questions lie beyond the scope of this argument yet are evidently invited by it. 89

KJV, Judges 16:30.

90

Sonnet VII, ‘On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-

Three’, (1631), John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Carey, 153. 91

For fuller discussion of Milton’s deployment of the

categories of ‘soft’ (easy, pleasing, smooth etc.) and ‘hard’ (rough, muscular, difficult) to denote both positive and negative moral attributes, human experiences and divine qualities, as well as the relation of these terms to gender, rationality and language, see Lynch, MPPS, chap.3. 92

Machiavelli, The Discourses, 169; Arendt, HC, 190–191;

PP, 127–128. 93

On Seneca, see Burrow, Shakespeare & Classical

Antiquity, 163, 166–167. Arendt sees Plato’s entire emphasis (from the withdrawal of the philosopher from the world to his rulership of the state envisaged in his Republic) as essentially a response to the catastrophic ‘failure of persuasion’ on the part of Socrates at his trial (and in the occasions for it), as well as of his friends in taking his own life. ‘Socrates had wanted not to play a political role but to make philosophy relevant for the polis’ (PP, 26). This set him at odds with an Athens which Arendt views as by this juncture in political decline. She claims that Plato’s immortalisation of Socrates, and

instigation of a divide between politics and philosophy which has pertained ever since, is a distortion of Socrates’ own purposes and his actual practice insofar as we can deduce it. 94 95

Burrow, Shakespeare & Classical Antiquity, 202–239. JC, II.i.14–16. Brutus’s cogitations on political

justifications for the assassination of Caesar invoke both the ‘adder’ and its ‘sting’, and there may also be allusions to the ritual practices of Catholicism, that ‘other’ Rome present in the consciousness of Shakespeare’s audience: Thomas Rist, ‘Those Organnons by which it Mooves: Shakespearean Theatre and the Romish Cult of the Dead’, in Shakespeare Survey, vol. 69 (2016). 96

From Wittreich, who erroneously takes ‘secular’ as the

opposite of ‘sacred’ (Shifting Contexts: Reinterpreting Samson Agonistes, 261–268, 278–282) and thus concludes that the phoenix image is there ‘not to mark the recovery of paradise but yet another loss of it; not to elide Samson and Christ but, instead, to sort the slayer of men and their savior into two very different traditions’, to Sanford Budick, ‘Milton’s Joban Phoenix in Samson Agonistes’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 11 (2005), 5.1–15: ‘by missing Milton’s Joban reference in the phoenix simile, and by assuming that his intended resonance here is largely pagan and/or secular, we have left the door open to considerable distortion of some of

the play’s largest meanings’. Budick is building on Lewalski’s account with regard to Paradise Regained, in which Samson and Job are both types of Christ as the man of faith; see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: the Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, 1966), 10–36. Though the question of whether Antony is ‘like’ his

97

supposed ancestor Hercules or is deserted by him remains; if he is like him which traits has he inherited: those of the Gallican orator, the strength of the demi-god with the life-heroic, the tendency to be led astray by women, the gender-bending and cross-dressing, the death/betrayal at the hands of his treacherous wife? This question haunts the play and its characters– both Brutus and Antony suffer from a sense of ancestor-haunted insufficiency, another feature they have in common. 98

Hollindale, ‘Music under the Earth’, 38–39.

99

SA, 1647–52.

100

Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford,

2014), 109–117. Skinner sees Shakespeare as drawing on Cicero’s De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium often attributed to him, as well as on Quintillian and Thomas Wilson for his depiction of oratory in action in these exchanges. 101

Arendt, HC, 26–27, 28–37.

102

Indeed the role of Fulvia in such accounts as that of

Plutarch and Cassius Dio allows it to be specifically Antony’s tendency to be overmastered by women that causes the death of oratory and republican virtue, ensuring that the figure of the dismembered orator haunts Miltonic texts and his poetic self-fashioning from Orpheus to the Matron of Gibeah. 103

JC, V.iv.13–14. Some editions add the direction

[Offering money] as a way of enacting the line ‘There is so much that thou wilt kill me straight’, or even of replacing that line altogether. The Arden edition considers this ‘forced’ since the honour to be gained from being Brutus’ killer is sufficient incentive for the soldier to despatch him quickly: Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (2004), 129. 104

Some editions follow the Folio, which has a line

indentation but no new speaker, and hence give these words as Brutus replying to Cato’s self-identification; others, however, consider this a mistake in transcription, and, noting that the soldiers have already entered and have started fighting, ascribe these lines to Lucilius and the beginning of his impersonation of Brutus to divert the soldiers; see for instance Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (2004), 129. 105

Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, 167–183.

106

Burrow, Shakespeare & Classical Antiquity, 217–226.

107

Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, chap.6.

108

Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’

in Milton and Republicanism, eds David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1995), 3–24, and Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Limits of Ciceronian Rhetoric’, in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, 1997), 203–226. 109

AC, V. ii. 315, 306–7.

110

It is noticeable that Antony’s death, for all the verbal

echoes of Brutus’ it contains, and despite all Antony’s own assertions of manliness at this juncture, notably omits any repetition of the verdict Antony himself pronounced on his fellow-Roman orator: ‘this was a man’. 111

George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical

Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994), 110. For rhetoric as ‘one of the martial arts’, see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), 14; for Milton’s Pauline modifications of the ideal classical orator model, see Wittreich, ‘“The Crown of Eloquence”: The Figure of the Orator in Milton’s Prose Works’, in Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst, 1974), 7–11. 112

A kind of inversion of Samson, Brutus fails as husband

to the honourable Roman orator’s daughter by not telling

his secret (weakness) to his wife. Milton was perhaps not tongue in cheek when citing Hercules and Deianira as instructive for marital relations, recommending the reading of Sophocles’ ‘Trachiniae’ ‘not for its mythical grandeur but for its insight into “household matters”’, Richard Rowland, Killing Hercules: Deianira and the Politics of Domestic Violence, from Sophocles to the War on Terror (London, 2017), 5, and for further analysis chap. 5. See also footnote 52 in this chapter. 113

For female dressing as comparable to male arming, and

the use of related female-inflected imagery in the characterisation of rhetoric/poetry, see Lynch, MPPS, chap.3. The emphasis on the process of dressing in Cleopatra’s preparations for death invokes the recurrent classical and Renaissance equation of women donning gorgeous apparel and cosmetics with men putting on armour and weapons, with both activities used from Socrates/Plato onwards as metaphor for rhetoric itself: Cleopatra is evidently staging her demise as theatre (an alternative performance to the one she earlier foresaw as her lot) and the scene she intends Octavian to find will also operate as a powerful piece of posthumous rhetoric. Milton’s depiction of the way poetic language works as a courtly scene of two handmaids dressing Truth in an antechamber or tiring house, in hopes of making her pleasing to the Affections before she is led to Queen

Reason, partakes of this tradition. Yet Cleopatra is a queen, and dressing herself in the raiment of power. In the means and location of her death, she insists on her femininity and exotic otherness, her rulership and Egyptian-ness, and by doing this to the utmost is able to become simultaneously Roman and ‘male’, or at least to absorb these qualities within herself. 114

Hollindale, ‘Music under the Earth’, 38–39.

115

Moseley, ‘Speaking Pictures’, 84–86, 89.

116

Moseley, ‘Speaking Pictures’, 91.

117

In rejecting all lunar influence – ‘now the fleeting

moon/No planet is of mine (V.ii.240–41) – she denies her status as a false and changeable woman, or indeed being a woman altogether (since women are supposedly constitutionally governed by the moon and therefore inherently inconstant etc., an assumption which enables the ambiguity of Samson’s ‘all women false like thee’). 118

‘Rome for Shakespeare’s Romans is not just where they

live. It is a historical idea they have to live up to’, while ‘the Rome of Julius Caesar is a continual unsteady conjunction of high principle and bloody terror.’ Burrow, Shakespeare & Classical Antiquity, 217, 223. 119

The meaning of ‘secular’ may well be relevant here,

encompassing siècle, circle, cycle. Milton often depicts circularity as feminine and demonic (the coiled circular motion of the serpent, raising himself aloft like the false

tower of Babel, as against the virtuous tower of him who ‘stands’, like Samson, conducting God’s lightning and channelling God’s Word). Circe, who gave the shape its name, encircling rhetoric, a feminine language of coils, snares etc. is opposed to the ‘good’ circle – that of rebirth and Jesus’s second coming. 120

Arendt, PP, 6, 15–16, 26–28, 128.

121

While it is frequently noted that Samson is likened to

the phoenix, in fact the grammar of the sentence dictates that it is primarily his ‘virtue’ which rises from the ‘ashy womb’, a ‘virtue’ which encompasses both the political and theological senses of the term. It is this ‘virtue’ which has turned out not to be ‘Depressed and overthrown, as seemed’

(1697–98),

but

instead

‘teemed,/Revives,

reflourishes, then vigorous most/When most unactive deemed’ (1703–05). It is not easy to separate this ‘virtue’ from its vessel, Samson, the man, from that belonging to a man, and this is indeed part of the point: Samson is both reborn and gives birth to his own virtue, even as it gives birth to itself in him. 122

Their own or those of their poetic posterity: as Pericles

claims, Athens and its politics of public speech constitutes the immortality of the dead warriors just as much as the replacement sons to be bred by the grieving parents: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, 1961), II.iv.119–122.

123

Milton, ‘On Shakespear’, Collected Shorter Poems, ed.

Revard. 124

Arendt, PP, 14–16, 18–19.

125

Burrow, Shakespeare & Classical Antiquity, 30.

126

For the status of sonnets in the period and

Shakespeare’s reputation as poet and dramatist in the mid-seventeenth century, see Cathy Shrank, ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: John Benson and the 1640 Poems’, Shakespeare (September, 2009) 5:3, 271–291. 127

The invocation of the Delphic oracle brings us to the

last of the inspired, (raped) virgin, female orators in Milton’s binary canon, namely Pythia. Conveyor of truth from the world of the divine, poetic performer and metrical innovator, Pythia, stands in opposition to those ‘women false like’ Calypso and Circe, ‘dread goddess endowed with speech’ who ‘weaves, sings, seduces and prophesies’ (Homer, Odyssey, i. 55–57, v. 61–82, x. 220– 222, in Bergren, ‘Weaving Truth’, I). These are themselves figures of double-ness, who delay and distract the hero and his ship from his mission of homeward return to his faithful wife-bride, Penelope, but also provide both true and false information/navigational knowledge (Odyssey, V.275–77). The priestess, Pythia, however, is renowned for her virginity, with chaste purity stressed as prerequisite for her suitability for union with the god – until, as Diodorus of Sicily (16. 26. 6) relates, Echecrates

the Thessalian abducted and raped the incumbent Pythia, so that ever after a woman of fifty, significantly dressed as a virgin, performed the office. In Milton’s geographical anatomy of orifices and vessels, the womb/mouth of Delphi’s crevice in the ground beneath the omphalos of the world, site of Zeus’s son Apollo’s defeat of the enormous serpent, Python, and at the same time, Hesiod tells us, of the stone Rhea gave Cronos to devour in place of the infant Zeus, makes perfect sense. Rhea’s act of substitution enables the survival of Zeus, who goes on to outdo his father in appropriation of female power to utter both ‘true things’ or ‘false things like to real things’ – namely mêtis, the shape-shifting ability to ‘weave a web full of artifice’ (Hesiod, Works and Days, 64) – by swallowing not just his offspring but the goddess/mother, Mêtis, herself: as Bergren notes, the (re-)production of social legitimacy and true meaning are in the hands of the female, but so thereby is the is the power of mêtis, the power of substitution and transformation, the power, therefore, of ‘the tropos or “turning” that will later become the foundation of rhetoric’. For Hesiod’s Pandora (whose pythis of human troubles for centuries to readers suggested an etymological link) as Pythia’s female counterpart – the ‘order, ornament’ and ‘sculpted female’ (Theogony, 587, 513), who comes in ‘likeness of a reverend virgin’ (Theogony, 572), a ‘beautiful evil in place

of good’ (Theogony, 570, 585, 602), in short, as Bergren phrases it, ‘a cosmetic composite of all the qualities […] associated with the language of the female’, originator both of the maternal truth of subsequent generations, like Eve, and first weaver of that ‘web full of artifice’; Bergren ‘Weaving Truth’, II, and Michael Scott, Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World (Princeton, 2014). 128

Milton, CPW, I. 805.

6 Adonis

and

literary

immortality in pastoral elegy Syrithe Pugh

The two English poems discussed in this chapter belong to a distinct poetic tradition, as laments for the death of a fellow poet – Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’ for Philip Sidney, who had died at the Battle of Zutphen nine years earlier in 1586, and Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ for John Keats, who died of consumption in Rome in 1821. Both of them, as indeed similarly the Greek Επιταφιος Βιωνος (Lament for Bion) which stands at the beginning of the tradition, have been criticized for an alleged lack of originality, by critics who, failing to grasp the subtle artistry and meaningfulness of their prominent use of allusion and imitation, dismiss these methods as inert ‘borrowings’ or mechanical

adherence to ‘convention’. Such disparaging comments 1

are based on a tacit assumption that creative originality involves a sharp break from the past rather than revisionary engagement or dialogue with it, and that poetry’s aim is to move the reader with an autonomous and authentic expression of individual emotion, whose sincerity must be in inverse proportion to its artistic ingenuity. These widespread aesthetic prejudices acquire a tinge of moral indignation in the context of elegy (in the modern sense of mourning poems), because it is taken as an insult to the dead that a poet did not bother to create something fresh and new, or that they were not sufficiently filled with personal grief to express in such original utterance. The bucolic or pastoral genre to which these poems affiliate themselves exacerbates the situation: pastoral poems generally are much concerned with their relation to earlier poetry, a dialogue of present and past mirrored in the picture they present of contemporaneous communities of singers exchanging and responding to each other’s songs, and so the genre as a whole has suffered from the same critical prejudices, with their distrust of ‘convention’ and preference for autonomous individual utterance. This is a grand

misapprehension which seriously gets in the way of understanding these poems, for allusion and imitation are their very life-breath. The poems in this tradition are about imitating and being imitated. They are at home in lament-poetry because, no less than Horace’s famous boast exegi monumentum aere perennius (‘I have made a monument more enduring than brass’, Odes 3.30), they confront death with an assertion of the immortality of art; and they are at home particularly in bucolic or pastoral (though never wholly cut off from other genres) because the idea they evoke of poetic tradition as an ongoing friendly exchange of song across the ages so strongly recalls the picture of communities of herdsmen singing to each other which is the basic given of bucolic from its beginning in Theocritus’ Idylls. The figure of Adonis, mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite in myth, and in cult a vegetation deity representing the cycle of the seasons in his annual, Persephone-like death and rebirth, forms the focus of the tradition, for though Adonis was never a singer, he furnishes a symbol both of the way in which poetic imitation confers immortality on the individual poet, and more impersonally of the capacity of poetry, as a collective and supra-temporal endeavour, to

resist the depradations of death, oppression and adversity. Spenser and Shelley understood this as well as their Greek and Roman predecessors did. Focussing on how they respond to and use the distinctive language of the tradition can help us not only to appreciate their poems properly, but also to gain a new perspective on what literary imitation means, and what is at stake in its practice. The Lament for Bion was written in the late second or early first century

BCE,

and has traditionally been

ascribed to Moschus, though this ascription is now discredited. (I shall refer to the poet as ‘pseudo-Moschus’ here.) The author identifies himself as a student of the bucolic poet Bion, and as working in Ausonia (Southern Italy); he writes in Doric Greek, the dialect associated with bucolic and used by Bion and by Theocritus before him. He calls on all of nature to lament the death of Bion, and that of music and Dorian poetry, which have died with Bion. He describes the mourning of birds and cattle, of various gods, of the landscape itself and of the cities of men, before reflecting bitterly on human mortality in general and the injustice of Bion’s death by poison, and ending with the wistful fancy that Persephone, goddess

of the Underworld, may be so charmed by Bion’s music that she will give him back, as once she gave Eurydice back to Orpheus. (She is a Sicilian, pseudo-Moschus 2

points out, so the Doric poetry of Theocritus’ native Sicily will appeal to her.) True to the character of Hellenistic poetry, the lament is highly allusive throughout, with some passages reading almost like a patchwork of quotations from earlier poems (and if more postTheocritean bucolic poetry – particularly more of Bion’s – had survived, we would doubtless recognize even more allusions). Most strongly, it evokes Bion’s own Lament for Adonis, which describes Aphrodite’s mourning for her mortal lover Adonis, killed by a wild boar while hunting.

3

Pseudo-Moschus’ opening call to nature to cry αἰαῖ …καλὸς τέθνακε μελικτάς [‘Alas! The beautiful singer is dead’, 6–7]

4

and to the nightingales to tell the Sicilian spring Arethusa that Bion is dead, and with him ὤλετο Δωρὶς ἀοιδά (‘gone is Dorian song’, 12) echoes the opening lines of Bion’s poem,

Αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν: ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις:’ ‘ὤλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις’ ἐπαιάζουσιν Ἔρωτες [‘I cry woe for Adonis and say The beauteous Adonis is dead; and the Loves cry me woe again and The beauteous Adonis is dead’, Lament for Adonis, 1–2]

together with the later lines: ‘αἰαῖ τὰν Κυθέρειαν’ ἐπαιάζουσιν Ἔρωτες.

ὤλεσε τὸν καλὸν ἄνδρα, συνώλεσεν ἱερὸν εἶδος. [‘The Loves cry woe again saying “Woe for Cytherea”. Lost is her lovely lord, and with him lost her hallowed beauty’, Lament for Adonis, 28–9]

The constitutive half-lines of the first passage quoted, and the first half of line 28, recur in varied combination, like a subtly modulated, irregular refrain, throughout Bion’s poem. In pseudo-Moschus’ poem, Bion is implicitly compared to the dead Adonis; music dies with him just as Aphrodite’s beauty dies with her lover. The refrain-like repeated phrases in Bion are already about a responsive call and return of lamentation (Αἰάζω, ἐπαιάζουσιν – ‘I cry “Aiai!”’; ‘they cry back “Aiai!”’). When pseudo-Moschus echoes Bion’s lines, it is as though he is joining in the shared lament.

The Lament for Bion also has its own, more regular refrain: ἄρχετε Σικελικαὶ τῶ πένθεος ἄρχετε Μοῖσαι [‘Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin the song of woe’, 8]

and this looks back to the chief model for Bion’s lament, in what is effectively the founding poem of bucolic poetry. The lament of the goatherd Thyrsis for the legendary singer Daphnis in Theocritus’ first idyll is structured around the refrain, ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι φίλαι ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς. [‘Begin, dear Muses, begin the bucolic song’, Idyll 1.64]

5

As Daphnis lies dying in Theocritus’ idyll, we hear how the beasts lament him, and then how he is visited by a succession of gods – first Hermes, then (after a group of herdsmen) Priapus, and finally Aphrodite. Daphnis has defied her and love; this seems to be the cause of his death, and she has come to gloat, yet, although he continues to defy her, her anger is mixed with pity, and we are told finally that she would have raised him up again, but was prevented by the Fates (Idyll 1.138–40). Thyrsis’ song sets the precedent for bucolic lament, and

both Bion and Moschus are indebted to it. They develop the trope of nature itself mourning, adding to the beasts of Idyll 1 the mountain and riverbank trees which grieve for Daphnis in the similar lament Theocritus describes briefly in Idyll 7 (74–75), with Bion also contributing grieving flowers and pseudo-Moschus flowers and birds (Bion, Lament for Adonis 31–37, Lament for Bion 1–7). Pseudo-Moschus embellishes the trope with a further deft allusion to Bion, in his address specifically to the roses and anemones: νῦν ῥόδα φοινίσσεσθε τὰ πένθιμα, νῦν ἀνεμῶναι (‘Pray roses, now be your redness sorrow, and yours sorrow, windflowers’, 5). Bion says that ἄνθεα δ̓ ἐξ ὀδύνας ἐρυθαίνεται (‘flowers [in general] blushed red for grief’, 35) at Adonis’ death, but later in his poem he tells how roses sprang from Adonis’ blood, and anemones from Aphrodite’s tears (66); pseudo-Moschus’ φοινίσσεσθε (Phoenician purple) is the colour of Adonis’ blood in the three lines Bion lavishes on it at 25–27 (φοινίσσετο, 26). Theocritus’ procession of visiting deities, meanwhile, shrinks in Bion to Aphrodite, accompanied later by the Loves, with only swift mention at the end of Hymen, the Charites and finally the Fates, who here (in a twist on the ending of the lament for

Daphnis) themselves try to call Adonis back, but are prevented by Persephone. Pseudo-Moschus reamplifies and indeed overgoes the Theocritean subtext, with a catalogue of gods including Apollo, the satyrs, Priapus, Pan and the nymphs (who were conspicuously absent from Daphnis’ death-scene at Idyll 1. 66–9) all grieving for Bion (26–9). Thyrsis’ song anticipates Bion’s in a more explicit way, too, for Daphnis taunts Aphrodite by foretelling her own future misfortunes, mentioning Adonis, who ‘hunts all manner of beasts’ (θηρία πάντα διώκει, 110): among them is the boar which will kill him (and which Bion’s Aphrodite calls θηρὶ at line 61). But another Theocritean idyll is also an important subtext of both Bion’s and pseudo-Moschus’ laments – one which is neither bucolic nor a lament. Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll is an urban mime which tells, in a realistic and comic way, of two housewives – like Theocritus, natives of Sicily now living in Alexandria – making their way from their homes in the suburbs through the bustling city, to attend a gorgeous, state-sponsored celebration of the Adonia. The Adonia was an annual religious festival, extending over two days, with the wedding of Aphrodite and Adonis celebrated on

the first day, and his death lamented on the second. In this cult, Adonis has become a vegetation deity, whose annual death and return mark the cycle of the seasons (in a way which resembles the myth of Persephone’s own seasonal shuttling between earth and the Underworld). The idyll ends with the performance of a formal song, which hymns the divine pair, describes the ceremonial bed in which their effigies embrace under soft purple coverlets, surrounded by the city’s offerings, anticipates the second day of the festival, on which the effigy of Adonis will be committed to the sea with lamentation, and finally looks forward happily to Adonis’ return next year (ἐς νέωτ᾽, 143). Bion’s poem is partly a pathos-laden, epyllion-like narrative of the singular event of Adonis’ death and Aphrodite’s immediate grief, but it also partly presents itself as the kind of song which might be ritually performed at the Adonia on the second day, the day of mourning. The singer in Theocritus anticipates such a song when she describes how, the following dawn, she and the other women will bear Adonis out to the waves with their hair ungirt (like Aphrodite’s in the Lament for Adonis, 20) and breasts bared in a ritual expression of

grief, and λιγυρᾶς ἀρξώμεθ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς (‘we shall begin our shrill lament’, Idyll 15.135). Bion’s poem is thus a reply to Theocritus’ wedding song. The signals that this is so begin in line 3, when Bion tells Aphrodite to sleep no more beneath her purple coverlets (πορφυρέοις ἐνὶ φάρεσι). These are the soft purple coverlets (πορφύρεοι τάπητες μαλακώτεροι, Idyll 15.125) on which Theocritus dwells for three lines in his description of Adonis’ couch, at 15.125–7. In the second half of the poem, after Aphrodite’s first-person lament, the tone becomes altogether more ritualistic, as we move indoors, to a place which could almost be the setting of the song of Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, in Ptolemy’s palace. Aphrodite has been mourning Adonis where he fell, but now she is bidden to leave the woods and lay him on her couch, to which several lines are devoted. We are told it is made of solid gold (74), recalling the gold ornamentation of the couch in Idyll 15 (123); again we hear of those coverlets, now described as μαλακοῖς (‘soft’, 72), still echoing the same line of Theocritus (125). Cypris is told to pour Syrian perfume on him (ῥαῖνε δέ νιν Συρίοισιν ἀλείφασι, ῥαῖνε μύροισιν, 77), recalling the flasks of Syrian perfume (Συρίω μύρω, 15.114) among the offerings surrounding

the couch in Theocritus. The purple coverings return again at line 79, and then we hear of the mourning Loves. Among the offerings they cast on his body is a feather (πτερόν, 82), and one fans Adonis with his wings (πτερύγεσσιν, 85): the Loves are traditionally winged, of course, but in this context the details particularly recall the happier crowd of Loves depicted or carved above the ceremonial couch of Idyll 15, and the simile that described them: οἷοι ἀηδονιδῆες ἀεξομενᾶν ἐπὶ δένδρων πωτῶνται πτερύγων πειρώμενοι ὄζον ἀπ᾽ ὄζω. [‘like young nightingales that flit upon the tree from spray to spray making trial of their fledgeling wings’, 121–2]

After the Loves, we hear of Hymen, and are told that he has changed his song to join in Bion’s refrain: οὐκέτι δ̓ Ὑμήν, Ὑμὴν οὐκέτ̓ἀείδει ἑὸν μέλος, ἀλλ̓ ἐπαείδει ‘αἰαῖ’ καὶ ‘τὸν Ἄδωνιν’ ἔτι πλέον ἢ Ὑμέναιον. [‘the burden of his song is no more “Ho for the Wedding”; there’s more of “Woe” and “Adonis” to it than ever there was of the wedding-cry’, 88–90]

The Charites’ cry of grief is also compared to their former song of thanksgiving (93). Through all this there are continual mentions of the past: Adonis must lie in the coverlets ‘wherein he used to slumber’, Hymen’s song ‘is no more “Ho for the Wedding!”’ On one level these references are to the narrative past, before Adonis was killed by the boar, but on another they are to the literaryhistorical past, to things as they were in Theocritus’ jubilant wedding hymn. Once recognized, these echoes tinge Bion’s mournful poem with ironic optimism. The effect is sharpest in the middle of Aphrodite’s great central lament, where she cries: φεύγεις μακρὸν Ἄδωνι, καὶ ἔρχεαι εἰς Ἀχέροντα [‘You flee afar, Adonis, you go into Acheron’, 51]

Unwittingly, she echoes lines which frame the wedding song of Idyll 15, where the singer begins by telling Aphrodite that, after a twelvemonth of waiting, the Hours have brought Adonis back from Acheron (102), and towards the end congratulates Adonis: ῞Ερπεις ὦ φίλ᾽ ῎Αδωνι καὶ ἐνθάδε κεἰς ᾿Αχέροντα ἡμιθέων, ὡς φαντί, μονώτατος.

[‘Thou, dear Adonis, alone of demigods, as they tell, dost visit both earth and Acheron’, 136–7]

Ἄδωνι and Ἀχέροντα fill the same metrical positions in all three lines. That Bion was thinking of 15.136 is 6

confirmed by his witty play on the theme: Theocritus’ singer goes on to list other heroes and demi-gods who, unlike Adonis, have not been allowed to visit both earth and Hades; Bion’s Aphrodite goes on immediately to lament that, since she is a goddess, she is unable to go to Hades at all (and so cannot follow her lover). The allusion emphasizes that Adonis’ death is not final, and that Aphrodite is therefore wrong to think she must bear ἀκόρεστον ἀνίαν (‘unceasing grief’, 56). Though we are told at line 96 that Persephone will not let Adonis go, we know from Theocritus that she will do so next year, and every year after. Bion ends by acknowledging this cyclicity: λῆγε γόων Κυθέρεια τὸ σάμερον, ἴσχεο κομμῶν: δεῖ σε πάλιν κλαῦσαι, πάλινεἰς ἔτος ἄλλο δακρῦσαι. [‘Give over thy wailing for today, Cytherea, and beat not now thy breast any more; thou needs wilt wail again and weep again, come another year’, 97–8]

There are subtle echoes here of the variations on the refrain of Thyrsis’ lament for Daphnis in Idyll 1 – ἄρχετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι πάλιν ἄρχετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς (‘begin again the bucolic song’), which takes over at line 94, and λήγετε βουκολικᾶς Μοῖσαι ἴτε λήγετ᾽ ἀοιδᾶς (‘cease the bucolic song’) which enters at 127 – and this has the effect of suggesting lament as formal or ritual performance. And though Bion’s emphasis is on lament, the anticipation of εἰς ἔτος ἄλλο (‘next year’) reminds us of the joyful anticipation of Adonis’ return ἐς νέωτ᾽ (‘next year’, 15.143) which ends the song of Idyll 15. Pseudo-Moschus

recognizes

the

promise

of

immortality lurking in Bion’s allusions to Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, and weaves in his own allusions to the same poem in order to extend that promise to Bion. The more subtle and indirect of the ways he does this is through the repeated appearances of nightingales. They are mentioned no less than three times in the Lament for Bion, and in such a way as to recall at once Bion’s Loves and the simile in Theocritus’ song about the Loves flitting like nightingales amid the green bowers above Adonis’ couch. Just as Bion’s Loves participate insistently in his refrain (at lines 2, 6, 15, 28, 62 and 86), so here do

pseudo-Moschus’ nightingales in his. We have already seen how their message to Arethusa at 11–12 takes part in pseudo-Moschus’ echoing of Bion’s refrain. Later in the poem, the nightingales and swallows lament back and forth, like Bion and the Loves in the Lament for Adonis: καθεζόμεναι ποτὶ πρέμνοις ἀντίον ἀλλάλαισιν ἐκώκυον: αἳ δ̓ ὑπεφώνευν ‘ὄρνιθες λυπεῖσθ̓ αἱ πενθάδες: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡμεῖς.’ [‘[They] sat upon the branches and cried aloud in antiphons, and they that answered said “Lament, ye mourners, and so will we”’, 47–9]

This is followed immediately by pseudo-Moschus’ refrain, with πένθεος at its centre echoing the birds’ πενθάδες in the middle of 49. Bion is said to have taught these birds to speak (ἃς λαλέειν ἐδίδασκε, 47): this makes them fellow-pupils of Love himself, for in Fragment 10 (‘Great Cypris appeared to me’), Bion recounts how Aphrodite committed Love to his care, to be taught how to sing. (It does not go well, for Love pays no attention to his lessons in bucolic song, and instead teaches Bion love-songs and all ‘his mother’s doings’ – including perhaps her love and lament for Adonis.) The Lament for Bion refers to this episode at 83–4. Pseudo-Moschus is

recognizing the relation between Bion’s Loves and the Loves of Theocritus’ wedding-song, and marking this by turning them into the nightingales to which Theocritus compared them. There is also a hint of word-play in all this.Ἀηδών, the usual Greek word for nightingale, appears at line 38, but at line 9 pseudo-Moschus (uniquely in surviving Greek texts) uses the alternate form ἀδόνες (omitting the eta of the opening diphthong), and at line 46 applies a feminine ending to the same Doric version of the word to give ἀδονις (used here in the plural ἀδονίδες). For a reader conscious of the insistent presence of of Bion’s Lament for Adonis as the poem’s chief intertext, the effect is to suggest that Ἀδώνις and ἀδονις, Adonis and the nightingale, are nearly interchangeable. Ἀηδών is derived from the root ἀείδω, ‘I sing’, and is frequently used in Greek to mean ‘poet’ as well as ‘nightingale’, so the suggestion serves pseudo-Moschus’ underlying comparison of Bion the singer – the αἠδών – to his own Adonis very well. The most explicit moment of this comparison between Bion and Adonis (and the only time Adonis is mentioned in the poem) comes at lines 68–9, where we are told that

χἀ Κύπρις ποθέει σε πολὺ πλέον ἢ τὸ φίλημα, τὸ πρώαν τὸν Ἄδωνιν ἀποθνᾴσκοντα φίλησεν. [‘And Cypris, she’s fainer far of you than the kiss she gave Adonis when he died the other day.’]

This is the same confusion of narrative and literaryhistorical time we saw used by Bion to refer to Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, here exploited by pseudo-Moschus to point to Bion’s own poem: Aphrodite kissed Adonis πρώαν, ‘the other day’, not so much because this actually happened at some point in the past, but because it happened in the earlier poem. The Lament for Adonis describes this kiss at great length, at 11–14 (where it dies on his lips – θνᾴσκει) and again at 44–50, the exact centre and emotional climax of Bion’s poem. We shall come back to this kiss. But again it is at the lowest, most grief-laden point of the lament that a reminder of Theocritus’ wedding hymn insinuates optimism into the poem. αἰαῖ ταὶ μαλάχαι μέν, ἐπὰν κατὰ κᾶπον ὄλωνται, ἠδὲ τὰ χλωρὰ σέλινα τό τ̓εὐθαλὲς οὖλον ἄνηθον, ὕστερον αὖ ζώοντι καὶ εἰς ἔτος ἄλλο φύοντι: ἄμμες δ̓ οἱ μεγάλοι καὶ καρτεροί, οἱ σοφοὶ ἄνδρες, ὁππότε πρᾶτα θάνωμες, ἀνάκοοι ἐν χθονὶ κοίλᾳ

εὕδομες εὖ μάλα μακρὸν ἀτέρμονα νήγρετον ὕπνον. καὶ σὺ μὲν ὦν σιγᾷ πεπυκασμένος ἔσσεαι ἐν γᾷ, [‘Ay me! When the mallows and the fresh green celery and the springing crumbled dill perish in the garden, they live yet again and grow another year; but we men that are so tall and strong and wise, soon as ever we be dead, unhearing there in a hole of the earth sleep we both sound and long a sleep that is without end or waking. And so it shall be that thou wilt lie in the earth beneath a covering of silence…’ 99–105]

The dill – ἄνηθον – of line 100 is the same plant of which green canopies have been made over Adonis’ couch in Theocritus (χλωραὶ δὲ σκιάδες μαλακῷ βρίθοντι

ἀνήθῳ, Idylls 15.119); their greenness is here reassigned to the celery (χλωρὰ σέλινα), its tenderness (μαλακῷ) recalled in the name of pseudo-Moschus’ mallows (μαλάχαι). The garden (κᾶπον) in which these tender greens perish is, we are to understand, a ‘Garden of Adonis’ – one of those ‘delicate gardens [κᾶποι] in silver baskets’ guarded by Adonis among the offerings at Idyll 15.113–14. Part of the ritual of celebrating the Adonia was to plant such little pots of quick-springing and shortlived salad, and to watch them die, as a symbol of the

cycle of life, death and rebirth in nature marked by the festival. Their dying reflects Adonis’ death, but the knowledge that they will ‘live again and grow another year’ anticipates his return – and pseudo-Moschus’ phrase here, εἰς ἔτος ἄλλο, is lifted directly from the final line of Bion’s lament, with its memory of the joyous end of Theocritus’ song. So, although the point of the passage is ostensibly to contrast this rebirth of nature with the finality of human death, and Bion is imagined as sleeping forever ‘beneath a covering of silence’, already the allusion anticipates the poem’s closing hope that Bion may, like Adonis, return from the Underworld. The idea that Bion’s death is ἀτέρμονα (‘without end’, 104) is undermined exactly as Bion undermined Aphrodite’s assertion that her grief would be ἀκόρεστον (‘ceaseless’, Lament for Adonis 56). It is the ‘silence’ we should distrust. There have been several claims in the poem that music is dead and gone with Bion. For instance, at 30–31 Echo is said to have fallen silent now that she can no longer imitate Bion’s lips, as we heard her doing in the Lament for Adonis, where she echoes Bion’s refrain: ‘ἀπώλετο καλὸς Ἄδωνις.’ (38) But of course, this is the very refrain we have seen

pseudo-Moschus echo repeatedly in this poem: in effect she is not silent, because pseudo-Moschus has taken over her role. The lines about Bion’s syrinx – the pipes traditionally symbolizing bucolic poetry – are important in thinking about this effect: τίς ποτε σᾷ σύριγγι μελίξεται ὦ τριπόθητε; τίς δ̓ ἐπὶ σοῖς καλάμοις θήσει στόμα; τίς θρασὺς οὕτως; εἰσέτι γὰρ πνείει τὰ σὰ χείλεα καὶ τὸ σὸν ἆσθμα, ἀχὰ δ̓ ἐν δονάκεσσι τεᾶς ἔτι βόσκετ̓ἀοιδᾶς. Πανὶ φέρω τὸ μέλισμα; τάχ̓ἂν καὶ κεῖνος ἐρεῖσαι τὸ στόμα δειμαίνοι, μὴ δεύτερα σεῖο φέρηται. [‘O thrice belovèd man! who will make music upon thy pipe? Who so bold as to set lip to thy reeds? For thy lips and thy breath live yet, and in those straws the sound of thy song is quick. Shall I take and give the pipe to Pan? Nay, mayhap even he will fear to put lip to it lest he come off second to thee’, 51–6]

Literally, the lines declare Bion so great as to be inimitable, articulating openly a crippling form of what Harold Bloom will later call the ‘anxiety of influence’. No future poet – including, we assume pseudo-Moschus himself, or even so great a musician as the god Pan – will dare to attempt bucolic, because he will fear to prove

himself inferior to Bion, as though taking part in a kind of amoebaean song contest across time. The enduring life of Bion’s music – its excellence? its fame? – is paradoxically fatal to music, daunting future poets to silence. But what is going on at the intertextual level of the passage, through imitation and allusion, is more complex. Most obviously, it responds to the passage in Theocritus’ first idyll, where Daphnis bequeaths his syrinx to Pan: ἔνθ᾽ ὦναξ καὶ τάνδε φέρευ πακτοῖο μελίπνουν ἐκ κηρῶ σύριγγα καλάν, περὶ χεῖλος ἑλικτάν. [‘Come, my Lord, and take this pipe, fragrant of honey from its compacted wax, with binding about its handsome lip’, 1.128–9]

The effect of this is to assert that Bion is even greater than the legendary Daphnis (often presented as the semidivine son of a nymph, and the inventor of bucolic song).

7

But pseudo-Moschus weaves in with this a recollection of that kiss which formed the centre and climax of Bion’s Lament for Adonis: ‘μεῖνον Ἄδωνι… ὥς σε περιπτύξω καὶ χείλεα χείλεσι μίξω.

ἔγρεο τυτθὸν Ἄδωνι, τὸ δ̓ αὖ πύματόν με φίλησον, τοσσοῦτόν με φίλησον, ὅσον ζώῃ τὸ φίλημα, ἄχρις ἀποψύχῃς ἐς ἐμὸν στόμα κεἰς ἐμὸν ἧπαρ πνεῦμα τεὸν ῥεύσῃ, τὸ δέ σευ γλυκὺ φίλτρον ἀμέλξω, ἐκ δὲ πίω τὸν ἔρωτα, φίλημα δὲ τοῦτο φυλάξω ὡς αὐτὸν τὸν Ἄδωνιν… [‘Stay, Adonis … till I clip thee about and mingle lip with lip. Awake Adonis, awake for a little while, and give me one latest kiss; kiss me all so long as ever the kiss be alive, till thou give up thy breath into my mouth and thy spirit pass into my heart, till I have drawn up all thy love; and that kiss of Adonis I will keep as it were he that gave it…’ 44–50]

Bion here draws on the traditional Greek notion that the soul (ψύχῃ, 47) leaves the body with the last breath (πνεῦμα, 48); Aphrodite imagines that if she presses her lip to his (χείλεα χείλεσι) she will absorb his very life through her mouth (στόμα, 47) into her heart, where she can guard and preserve it (φυλάξω). The memory of this passage in pseudo-Moschus makes for a subtext altogether less combative than the imagined songcontest. Bion’s syrinx becomes an intermediary like the lips of the dying Adonis; in them are the still living lips

(χείλεα) and breath (ἆσθμα, 53) of Bion; he who presses his mouth (στόμα, 52) to them may like Aphrodite absorb Bion’s sweetness, and in breathing through them will breathe out Bion’s songs (ἀοιδᾶς, 54). Like the rest of the poem, the lines enact what they describe, as pseudoMoschus makes new poetry with Bion’s words. PseudoMoschus is not daunted by Bion’s greatness, but inherits his song. He will state this more explicitly later. The river Meles, we are told, grieves for Bion just as she once did for Homer, for both were allegedly born by her banks, and both are presented as equally worthy poets, sweet mouthpieces of the Muse Calliope (72), though one sang of war in heroic epic and the other of love in bucolic.

8

Pseudo-Moschus lists cities which mourn for Bion more than they ever did for their own celebrated poets (Hesiod, Pindar, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Archilochus, Sappho); Syracuse mourns Bion as if he were ‘a Theocritus’ (93), and Ausonia’s mourning is this song pseudo-Moschus sings now, which is ‘inheritor of that Dorian minstrelsy which came of thy teaching’ (ἀλλ̓ ἅντε διδάξαο σεῖο μαθητὰς/κλαρονόμος Μοίσας τᾶς Δωρίδος, 95–6). Like the nightingales, pseudo-Moschus has been taught to

sing by Bion, and his song is the ongoing life of Bion’s music. The fancy at the end of the poem that Bion may, as a reward for his song, be allowed to return from the Underworld, no longer seems so far-fetched: in a metaphorical sense, it has already happened here. And thus the modesty of the closing lines begins to seem disingenuous: εἰ δέ τι κἠγὼν συρίσδων δυνάμαν, παρὰ Πλουτέϊ κ̓ αὐτὸς ἄειδον. [‘and had but this my pipe the power of that his [Orpheus’] harp, I had played for this in the house of Pluteus myself’, 125–6]

For in a sense the Lament for Bion has performed the same feat as Orpheus’ lyre, and brought the beloved back to life. Bion was named as ‘the Dorian Orpheus’ in one of pseudo-Moschus’ variations on Bion’s refrain earlier in poem (ἀπώλετο Δώριος Ὀρφεύς, ‘the Dorian Orpheus is gone’, 18), but both poets are Orpheus here at its end. The extent of the Lament for Bion’s influence on later literature has been underestimated. Specifically, we can list several of its features which immediately become conventional in laments for dead poets: praising the dead poet and asserting literary immortality; depicting them

under the persona they adopted and among the characters described in their work; echoing and alluding to their poetry; and announcing the present author as heir to the dead poet’s skill, and therefore as deserving praise and immortal fame themself. And by way of acknowledging how the Lament for Bion establishes this set of conventions, poets working in this tradition over the next two millennia frequently compare their subject, as pseudo-Moschus does, either to Orpheus or to Adonis or to both. Among the Roman poems which follow the Lament for Bion in several or all of these respects, some which were undoubtedly important to later English poets are Virgil’s tenth eclogue on the amatory elegist Gallus (metaphorically ‘dying’ of love), Ovid’s Amores III.ix on Tibullus (which follows pseudo-Moschus’ techniques perhaps most fully, though not a bucolic poem), and Statius’ Silvae II.7, a boldly paradoxical birthday poem for the dead Lucan (which is not bucolic either, and eschews Adonis, but amplifies pseudo-Moschus’ other analogy with Orpheus). I shall discuss Statius’ poem 9

briefly when we come to Shelley, but for now we must be content with this mere mention, and pass on to the English poems.

Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’ represents Sidney under the name he adopted for his semi-fictional persona in his amatory sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (the mistress’ name ‘Stella’ is Latin for ‘star’, and ‘Astrophil’ is from the Greek ‘asther’, star, and ‘philo’, I love); but here he is a shepherd, thus recalling Sidney’s persona in his pastoral

prose

romance,

Arcadia

(whose

name,

‘Philisides’, also means ‘star-lover’, from the alternative Latin word for ‘star’, sidus). Like the historical Sidney, himself a bright young star of the court who contributed to masques and entertainments for Elizabeth, he is a skilful poet, on whom his community relies for entertainment, ‘Merily masking both in bowre and hall’, (28) the courtly overtones here almost breaking through the pastoral fiction. But he is also an Adonis, an analogy already drawn fleetingly in several of the poems in the elegiac outpouring that followed Sidney’s death, but here underpinning Spenser’s whole poem.

10

The poem is

introduced as the speaker’s ‘dolefull plaint’ in three sixline stanzas, typographically marked off with italic font from the body of the poem, and concludes with a lament spoken by a character in the poem, Astrophil’s sister Clorinda (representing Philip Sidney’s sister Mary). But

unusually for a pastoral elegy, the main body of the poem takes the form of an epyllion (a narrative poem much shorter than epic), which relates the story of Sidney’s death, transmuting the battle where he received his death-wound into a hunting expedition. When Astrophel is killed by a boar and his mistress Stella grieves over his body, the poem modulates into a clear imitation of Bion’s Lament for Adonis. As the rose departs from the lips of 11

Bion’s dying Adonis (τὸ ῥόδον φεύγει τῶ χείλεος, 11), Astrophel’s lips are ‘like faded leaves of rose’ (138); at the sight of her lover with ‘filthie gore deformed’ (152), Stella tears her hair and loses her beauty (155–62) as does Bion’s Aphrodite (Lament for Adonis, 29–31); like Bion’s Aphrodite, Stella ‘with sweet kisses suckt the wasting breath,/Out of his lips’ (165–6). Spenser does not relay Stella’s lament, however, saving this for Clorinda at the end of the poem, and excusing himself here by saying that ‘No toong can tell, nor any forth can set’ her ‘piteous mone’ (170–71). And unlike Bion’s Aphrodite Stella is mortal, so Spenser can depict Stella as swiftly dying and going to join her mate, To proue that death their hearts cannot diuide, Which liuing were in loue so firmly tide.(179–80)

This is of course what Aphrodite lamented she could not do. To symbolize this reunion, the couple are finally transformed into a single flower, whose complex appearance and multiple names, described over three stanzas, reflects Spenser’s sense of the accumulated tradition he is joining. Spenser’s new flower is said to fade from red to blue, the duality of colour evoking the two flowers which have their genesis in Bion’s Lament, the rose which springs from Adonis’ blood and the anemone springing from Aphrodite’s tears, recalling at the same time Bion’s earlier image of fading colour as the rose departs from Adonis’ lips (11). The flower is further complicated by a white star at its centre, representing Stella, and the dew that gathers in its cup is said to be her tears (recalling the anemone growing from the tears of Bion’s goddess). The idea that the lovers are actually metamorphosed into the flower comes not from Bion but from Ovid, whose account

of

Adonis’

Metamorphoses

ends

death

in

(following

Book a

10

lesser

of

the

known

Hellenistic tradition) with his transformation into the anemone; Ovid’s version brings the myth closer to that of Apollo’s beloved Hyacinthus, transformed into the

hyacinth after death (and Spenser’s comparison of the dying Astrophel to a lily at 166 recalls Ovid’s comparison of the newly formed hyacinth to a lily, differing only in their colours, in his account of Hyacinthus’ death at Met. X. 212–13). It also recalls Thomas Watson’s Latin hexameter poem Amyntas, published in 1585, and its English translation by Abraham Fraunce, published in 1587, both widely read and much admired at the time. Amyntas is a collection of eleven ‘lamentations’ in which the shepherd Amyntas mourns his beloved Phyllis (with pointed allusion to Orpheus’ mourning for Eurydice, especially at 2.73–6 and 6.9–14 of Fraunce’s version, and frequent reminiscences of both Bion’s and pseudoMoschus’ laments); in the end Amyntas commits suicide in order to be reunited with her in Elysium, and the pitying gods transform him into the amaranthus flower, in an elaborate passage indebted both to Bion and to several of Ovid’s etiological plant metamorphoses. Spenser’s innovation in combining his two lovers into a single flower carries over into the metamorphosis Amyntas’ insistent emphasis on the lover’s desire for reunion in death – that particular form of reunion which is denied to Bion’s immortal Aphrodite – and indeed,

though critics normally speak of Spenser’s Stella as dying of grief, there is nothing to specify that she does not kill herself as Amyntas did. Spenser names his flower 12

‘Astrophel’,

with

perhaps

a

suggestion

that

his

character’s name accommodates Sidney’s persona Astrophil to the asphodel, imagined as filling the meadows of the afterlife from Homer onwards, but he also offers two alternative names. The first, ‘Starlight’, evokes Stella and her influence on Sidney’s poetry as a quasi-celestial source of inspiration. The second, Penthia (Greek for ‘sorrow’), evokes pseudo-Moschus’ reworking of Bion’s rose and anemone, νῦν ῥόδα φοινίσσεσθε τὰ πένθιμα, νῦν ἀνεμῶναι, (‘Pray roses, now be your redness sorrow, and yours sorrow, windflowers’, 5) which heralds his refrain, with its repeated naming of the Lament as τῶ πένθεος (‘the sorrows’, 8 etc.). It is not only the lovers who are united and perpetuated in Spenser’s richly symbolic flower, but the earliest poems of the tradition in which he is working. Spenser’s poem concludes with the ‘dolefull lay’ of Astrophel’s sister Clorinda. Clorinda’s version of the 13

grieving landscape (by now a convention of funerary elegy, but taking its origins from Theocritus’ lament for

Daphnis and the fuller treatments in Bion’s Lament for Adonis and the Lament for Bion) focusses in on the flower as a metaphor for Astrophel, ‘The fairest flowre in field that euer grew’ (‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’, 29). The 14

fields ‘waile their widow state,/Sith death their fairest flowre did late deface’, (27–8), and the shepherdesses are told to break their garlands, now that ‘the flowre, which them adornd, is gone to ashes’ (39). The trope combines a memory of pseudo-Moschus’τὰ δ̓ ἄνθεα πάντ̓ ἐμαράνθη (‘all the flowers are withered away’, 32) with his claim that the bees no longer give honey now that the honey of Bion’s song is gone, and Bion’s exhortation ὀλλύσθω μύρα πάντα: τὸ σὸν μύρον ὤλετ̓ Ἄδωνις (‘perish now all perfumes, for he that was thy perfume is perished and gone’, 78). The ‘ashes’ into which this ‘fairest flowre’ is turned may play on the similarity of the Greek ἀσφοδελὸν (‘asphodel’) and σποδελόν (‘ashy’, from σποδός, ‘ashes’); some of the scholiasts on the Odyssey preserve ‘the ashy meadows’ as a textual variant on Homer’s ‘asphodel meadows’ at Odyssey 11.539. But 15

Clorinda is acutely aware of the inadequacy of the image, and

refuses

to

take

the

consoling

fiction

of

metamorphosis as more than a metaphor, asking (her

question recalling Aphrodite’s painful uncertainty at Lament for Adonis 57) What is become of him whose flowre here left Is but the shadow of his likenesse gone. Scarce like the shadow of that which he was, Nought like, but that he like a shade did pas. (57–60)

The paradox is easier to understand than to paraphrase, but effectively dissolves connection into disjunction – the tenuous, fugitive, unreliable nature of any claim that the flower resembles Astrophel is itself the flower’s only similarity to Astrophel, in his tenuous and fugitive hold on life. It is an almost nihilistic development of the vexed comparison between plant and man which provides the substance for pseudo-Moschus’ outcry against mortality. It is also informed with a Platonic scepticism about both mimetic representation and the transient world of the flesh, reminiscent of recurring Platonic gestures in Sidney’s work (for instance in Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 25 and 52.6–8, ‘Stella is/That virtuous soul, sure heir of heavenly bliss,/Not this fair outside, which our hearts doth move’), and Clorinda passes on to an alternative vision of Astrophel’s immortality in a Christian heaven with strong neo-platonic overtones.

16

This ‘Paradise’ is described over four stanzas, as an elaborate locus amoenus, replete with the flowers and birds which are conventional features of such literary ‘pleasant places’: Ah no: it is not dead, ne can it die, But liues for aie, in blisfull Paradise: Where like a new-borne babe it soft doth lie, In beds of lillies wrapt in tender wise. And compast all about with roses sweet, And daintie violets from head to feet. There thousand birds all of celestiall brood, To him do sweetly caroll day and night: And with straunge notes, of him well vnderstood, Lull him a sleep in Angelick delight; Whilest in sweet dreame to him presented bee Immortall beauties, which no eye may see. But he them sees and takes exceeding pleasure Of their diuine aspects, appearing plaine, And kindling loue in him aboue all measure, Sweet loue still ioyous, neuer feeling paine. For what so goodly forme he there doth see, He may enioy from iealous rancor free. There liueth he in euerlasting blis,

Sweet spirit neuer fearing more to die: Ne dreading harme from any foes of his, Ne fearing saluage beasts more crueltie.(67–88)

Such loci amoeni in secular poetry are traditionally places dedicated to love-making (amoenus is cognate with amor, love), and this is no exception, but this is the divine love described in the Phaedrus, to which Sidney compares his love for Stella in sonnet 25 of his sequence: The wisest scholar of the wight most wise, By Phoebus’ doom, with sugared sentence says, That virtue, if it once met with our eyes, Strange flames of love it in our souls would raise …

On the surface, it seems we have gone beyond Bion and pseudo-Moschus, and that Astrophel is no longer an Adonis-figure: the classical treatments of Adonis never suggest that he is lapped in a pleasurable Elysium during his sojourn in the Underworld, and conversely there is no anticipated return from Clorinda’s Christian heaven. Platonic transcendence and the Christian heaven seem to have replaced any allusion we might have expected to the cyclical rebirth celebrated in the Adonia, which forms so crucial a subtext in the Greek poems. But in fact this is

not the case, for Clorinda’s vision is designed to remind us forcefully of a passage in Spenser’s epic poem published five years earlier, which is precisely on the theme of the Adonia. The Garden of Adonis, in canto vi of the third book of The Faerie Queene, takes the symbolic salad pot of the Adonia ritual and transforms it into a newly fabricated, quasi-mythical locus amoenus, an imaginary space allegorizing the perpetual regeneration of nature through procreation. At its heart, within an arbour of naturally 17

interwoven branches recalling the canopy over their couch in Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, we find Venus and Adonis engaged in perpetual love-making: There wont faire Venus often to enioy Her deare Adonis ioyous company, And reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy; There yet, some say, in secret he does ly, Lapped in flowres and pretious spycery, By her hid from the world, and from the skill Of Stygian Gods, which doe her loue enuy; But she her selfe, when euer that she will, Possesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill. And sooth it seemes they say: for he may not

For euer die, and euer buried bee In balefull night, where all things are forgot; All be he subiect to mortalitie, Yet is eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall, Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie; For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing giues to all. There now he liueth in eternall blis, Ioying his goddesse, and of her enioyd: Ne feareth he henceforth that foe of his, Which with his cruell tuske him deadly cloyd: For that wilde Bore, the which him once annoyd, She firmely hath emprisoned for ay, That her sweet loue his malice mote auoyd, In a strong rocky Caue, which is they say, Hewen vnderneath that Mount, that none him losen may. (III.vi.46–48)

The points of connection with Clorinda’s vision are obvious: compare in particular ‘There now he liueth in eternall bliss …/Ne feareth he henceforth that foe of his’ (481–3) with Clorinda’s ‘There liueth he in euerlasting blis …/Ne dreading harme from any foes of his,/Ne fearing saluage beasts more crueltie’ (‘Dolefull Lay’, 85–

88). But this is a scene not of Platonic but of procreative sexual union. Around the bower are flower beds where ‘a thousand thousand naked babes’ (32.3) are planted for a thousand years, before issuing into the world through the gate of birth, returning in due course through the other gate to be planted in the garden for another thousand years, in an endless cycle; they include ‘Infinite shapes of creatures’, all the species which make up ‘natures fruitfull progenyes’ (35.1, 36.9). Clorinda’s comparison of Astrophel’s soul to a ‘babe’ lying in a bed of flowers recalls this image. Spenser’s garden is a novel visualization of nature’s cycle of death and birth, in the generations of creatures and in the succession of the seasons, with an emphasis on the positive side of the equation. Rather than temporal alternation, we are shown spatial containment, with death (or the boar) safely imprisoned – not absent or denied, but unable to do lasting harm, just as, from the perspective of the Adonia, Adonis’ death and the winter season do no harm in the long run. When 18

Venus ‘reape[s] sweet pleasure’ of Adonis, ‘and of his sweetnesse takes her fill’, Spenser remembers the kiss in which Bion’s Aphrodite promises τὸ δέ σευ γλυκὺ φίλτρον ἀμέλξω (‘I will milk the sweet philtre’, 48), but

what is there imagined as a desperate attempt to absorb the departing soul, once and for all, is here refigured as an endlessly repeated act of insemination, in which Venus and Adonis become mother and father of all life on earth. (This idea of Venus flows in part from the opening of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a work which underlies much of the description of the Garden.) The pathos of 19

the narrative moment in Bion’s epyllion is transmuted into another symbol of the cyclical continuity celebrated in the annual ritual. While Spenser’s garden represents and guarantees the continuity of life on earth, it also stands outside it, not only because it is presented as a space occupied by the creatures in intervals between death and rebirth, but also because its figurative character and allegorical warping of space and time make it so difficult to place in the world of reality. For this reason, Spenser is able to assimilate it to the meadow where the spirit of Er, in Plato’s fable at the end of the Republic, has revealed to him the cycle of reincarnation, a space between life and death where he witnesses the souls meeting on their journeys between the world and the afterlife, and choosing their destinies. The twin gates of birth and death and the thousand year sojourn

between lives are common to Spenser’s and Plato’s myths. But any hint of Plato’s moralizing or of a dualism of soul and body is greatly subdued in Spenser, so that his vision also resembles Lucretius’ resolutely materialist account of the universe, in which the very non-existence of an immaterial soul, and the continuity of matter, endlessly assuming new forms, provide a quite different argument against the fear of death, underpinned in Lucretius by a recurring celebration of the fecundity of nature. So although Clorinda’s lay makes no explicit allusion to the rebirth of Adonis and of nature in the Adonia, it nevertheless points the reader towards such ideas by being conspicuously modelled on the garden of Faerie Queene III.vi, prompting the reader to consider at the same time that it is the shaping influence and imitation of poetry – here, Spenser’s own – that imparts these intimations of immortality. Considered in isolation, Spenser’s Garden of Adonis does not seem to have much to do with the immortality of poetry, specifically. But one stanza places poetic immortalization close to its heart. Within the arbour where Venus enjoys her Adonis, we are told,

grew euery sort of flowre, To which sad louers were transformd of yore; Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramoure, And dearest loue, Foolish Narcisse, that likes the watry shore, Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late, Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate, To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date.(III.vi.45)

These

flower

metamorphoses,

once-and-for-all,

dehumanizing transformations which mark the end of tragic tales, sit oddly amid the very different vegetation imagery of the garden, tied so closely to the Adonia’s assertion of rebirth and renewal. They belong to the world of tragic pathos which Bion’s Aphrodite, in the first flush of her grief, believes she is doomed to inhabit forever, as yet unaware of the ritual recurrence which will subsume this narrative moment. Indeed, the gap created by Spenser’s Virgilian half-line at line 4 may suggest that the catalogue of Ovidian youths transformed into flowers is incomplete, missing as it is Ovid’s Adonis, transformed into an anemone, the obvious companion for his Narcissus and Hyacinthus. Adonis is necessarily absent 20

here, of course, because Spenser has reserved for him a different fate, in the ‘eternall blis’ he is about to describe. The same trope which was unsatisfactory for other reasons to the Platonizing Clorinda is felt to be deficient here in its sterility, when set beside the fertility of the Adonia cult symbolized in the perpetual love-making of Spenser’s Adonis. But Spenser brings it as close as possible to the continuity he celebrates. The last metamorphosis in the catalogue, to which Spenser gives four lines, is not from Ovid, but from Watson’s neo-Latin Amyntas and Fraunce’s English translation. Spenser emphasizes this by noting that the metamorphosis happened only recently (‘but late’) – that is, in a recent poem, to which he then pays explicit tribute in the last line, praising both poets (Watson and Fraunce) for immortalizing Amyntas in their immortal verse. Being turned into a flower as a memorial of one’s tragic death may not be very like becoming ‘eterne in mutabilitie’ with Spenser’s Adonis, but enjoying ‘endlesse date’ as the subject of an immortal poem is more so. These lines may even be intended to convey to Mary Sidney, the Clorinda of Astrophel, a delicate reference to her brother’s death. Watson’s poem appeared before

Sidney’s death, and its characters seem to be purely fictional. But Fraunce’s translation was published in 1587, the year following Sidney’s death, and was dedicated to his grieving sister. In his dedicatory epistle Fraunce introduces the set of lamentations for Amyntas as the product of his own mourning over the past year: Mine afflicted mind and crased bodie, together with other externall calamities haue wrought such sorowfull and lamentable effects in me, that for this whole yeare I haue wholy giuen ouer my selfe to mournfull meditations. Among others, Amintas is one…

Both the dedicatee Mary Sidney and the wider readership are clearly instructed to place the lamentations in the context of the general mourning for Philip Sidney since his death the year before. Fraunce was a member of Mary’s circle of patronage after Philip’s death, and later dedicates to her a work in three parts, comprising poetry and prose, which he titles The Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch. It contains a reworking of his Lamentations of Amyntas, and depicts Mary Sidney, under the fictional persona of Pembrokiana, instituting and presiding over an annual ‘Amyntas Day’ at her house, ‘Yvychurch’, where nymphs and shepherds perform songs about

mythological metamorphoses, to commemorate his death. The idea of the festival is clearly reminiscent of the Adonia. It is possible that it also reflects some actual annual gathering held by Mary Sidney in memory of her brother. Quitslund suggests that Spenser may have 21

presented a version of canto vi to Mary Sidney as his own offering at such a gathering, between Philip’s death in 1586 and its publication in 1590. Seen in this light, the 22

great celebration of nature’s procreative continuity in the canto as a whole affords consolation for Mary’s personal grief, subsuming the image of Sidney as Amyntas, immortalized through endless lamentation, into the more vibrant and energetic immortality of the Adonia. The gesture is essentially private, and it is impossible to be certain whether it is really intended or not. But if it is there, then the connection in Spenser’s work between memorializing Sidney and remembering the significance of the Adonia ritual begins much earlier than the rather tardy public tribute of ‘Astrophel’.

23

The complicating note in all this is that the ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’ activates these resonances not through imitation of the dead poet’s works, as pseudo-Moschus does in the Lament for Bion, but through imitation of

Spenser’s own earlier poetry: it would seem to present Spenser, not Sidney, as the immortal progenitor of future song. Indeed, Clorinda explicitly silences Astrophel’s songs, telling the ‘Shepheards lasses’, Ne euer sing the loue-layes which he made… Ne euer read the riddles, which he sayd Vnto your selues, to make you mery glee.(43–6)

Underlying this turn is an implicit charge that Sidney wasted his exceptional poetic talent by seeing poetry as purely recreational, and preferring the military vita activa

which

led

to

his

death.

24

The

courtly

entertainments and playful love poetry which he wrote, Spenser implies, afford only a display of wit and skill, and no vision or lesson of enduring truth and value worthy of remembrance and capable of offering guidance or consolation to the community which survives him. As Helgerson has shown, Sidney belonged to a generation of ‘prodigal poets’ who accepted the view of contemporary humanists that poetry was essentially no more than a pastime for idle hours, which should ultimately be put aside in favour of useful service to the state. Even in the Apologie for Poetrie, where Sidney mounts a vigorous defence of poetry’s capacity to teach and move the reader

to virtuous action, he presents his authorship not only of poetry but of the Apologie itself as merely a way of amusing himself while waiting to be given office and a field for real action. Poetry is either a respite from or an abdication of duty. The romance Arcadia is concerned with the private and public confusions which arise when the king Basilius abdicates his duty by rusticating himself and his entire court into the world of pastoral, plunging his realm into disorder which can be cured only by the end of the pastoral retreat. In Spenser’s elegy, Astrophel embarks on his hunt to impress his mistress because he sees valiant deeds as more worthy than ‘verses vaine’, at which the narrator indignantly interjects ‘yet verses are not vaine’ (68). With greater faith than Sidney and the rest of his generation in the value of poetry, Spenser, by contrast with his Astrophel, has provided enduring moral and philosophical sustenance to his community by writing The Faerie Queene, and particularly in his revaluation of sexual love, celebrated in the Garden of Adonis episode, and also in his other publications of 1595 – the sonnet sequence on his own marriage, Amoretti and Epithalamion, and the pastoral ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’ printed in the same volume as ‘Astrophel’,

in which he appears under his pastoral persona Colin Clout as the ‘Priest’ of Love, guiding and teaching the ‘shepheards nation’. Less generous, perhaps, than pseudo-Moschus, Spenser in ‘Astrophel’ adapts his methods to show not so much the immortality which his subject’s poetry has attained, but rather the kind of immortality which poetry can attain, when practised seriously and as he himself has practised it. Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ shows none of this reserve as it deploys the methods of the Lament for Bion in the service of its tribute to Keats. Much has already been written about the poem’s rich tapestry of allusions, including those to the Lament for Bion and (especially) to Bion’s Lament for Adonis: Shelley was sufficiently vocal about his knowledge and love of Greek for critics to notice these things (where Spenser’s response to Greek poetry has been relatively neglected); indeed, we have Shelley’s partial translations of the Bion and pseudoMoschus laments, and at the time of Keats’ death Shelley was looking forward to teaching him Greek. All I intend 25

to do here is to make a few points bringing out how pervasively the poem is shaped by the tradition

stemming from pseudo-Moschus’ lament, and the centrality of the Adonia to its thought. The extravagantly allusive poem is filled with references to Keats’ own poetry, but most especially to a handful of poems which resonate with this theme. Keats’ 26

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is important partly because Shelley recognizes and responds to the intertextual significance of nightingales in Theocritus and pseudo-Moschus, and ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ because its macabre story, in which the grieving Isabella hides her murdered lover’s head in a pot of basil, which she waters with her tears, is so reminiscent of the symbolic salad-pots of the Adonia. Keats’ Endymion is particularly significant, not only because of its over-arching narrative of a youth attaining union with his divine beloved, an erotic rapture which Keats assimilates to the rapture of poetic inspiration, but also and especially because, in Book 2, Endymion passes alive through the Underworld, where he comes across Adonis on the couch where he passes ‘his winter-sleep’ in ‘quiet luxury’, watched over by a crowd of ‘serene Cupids’ (Endymion 2.480. 486, 419). Though Keats could only have known the Greek poems in translation, his Cupids’ ministrations are reminiscent of Bion’s mourning

Aphrodite and Loves, and behind them the Erotes of Theocritus’ canopy: another took A willow bough, distilling odorous dew, And shook it on his hair; another flew In through the woven roof, and fluttering-wise Rain’d violets upon his sleeping eyes.(Endymion 2.423– 7)

Keats’ Endymion is just in time to witness Adonis’ annual reawakening, with the arrival of Venus in her dovedrawn chariot, ‘to pant through/The first long kiss, warm firstling’, (2.490–91) in ‘embracements warm’ (533) which anticipate the climax of Book 2, where Endymion and Cynthia consummate their love. When Shelley mourns Keats as ‘Adonais’, a variation on ‘Adonis’, he is therefore identifying the poet with one of his own characters, as pseudo-Moschus did.

27

These allusions to Keats are mixed in with allusions to an array of classical and modern canonical poets, dignifying Keats by conspicuously granting him equal status as a poet worthy of such imitation and allusion, and simultaneously claiming the status of a learnedly classicizing work for ‘Adonais’ itself. There is a polemical

edge to all this, for Shelley saw Keats’ final fatal illness as having been brought on by hostile reviews from conservative critics, in a contemporary cultural context which was politically charged. Keats was from a lower middle-class

background

and

had

not

attended

university (though he went to medical school and was a qualified apothecary); his poems had been attacked in the conservative press, with barely disguised social snobbery, for a perceived lack of classical learning and decorum.

28

Shelley connected these attacks with the

ongoing critical hostility, in the same conservative quarters, to the radical ideas in his own work and in that of other poets associated with Leigh Hunt. A cancelled 29

passage for the preface to ‘Adonais’ emphasizes that ‘Mr Keats was the known intimate of Leigh Hunt and Mr Hazl[itt] and other enemies of despotism & superstition’, making it clear that he sees the critical attacks on Keats as, like those on himself, politically motivated. The highly allusive manner of ‘Adonais’ undermines the notion that political reactionaries have a monopoly on classical learning, and the prominent presence of Milton and Lucan among the shades of dead poets who appear in the poem, with an emphasis on their radical and republican

credentials, similarly works to free the classical tradition of any implication of intrinsic political conservatism. The lofty and ambitious form and tone of Shelley’s poem is also to be understood as defiant in this sense, outspokenly aligning both Shelley and Keats with the heights of poetic inspiration and vision which Milton claimed for his religious epic, and using the distinctive stanza of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as well as a host of personifications reminiscent of Spenser’s allegorical epic. Yet the classical texts most insistently evoked and imitated are the (relatively lowly, in generic terms) Lament for Adonis and Lament for Bion. Bion’s Lament for Adonis is the most obvious intertext, as the mourning over Adonais is modelled conspicuously, both in the broad movement of the poem through its first twenty-nine stanzas and in many details, on Aphrodite’s in Bion’s poem. The opening ‘I weep for Adonais—he is dead!/O, weep for Adonais!’ which recurs with variations in later stanzas (III, IV, V, VI and XI), recalls Bion’s similar quasi-refrain; the call to Urania to ‘wake and weep!’ in stanza III, repeated in stanza XXII, recalls Bion’s opening address to Aphrodite; the Dreams who tend on Adonais’ corpse recall Bion’s mourning

Loves, especially in stanzas IX to XI, where they fan him with their wings, wash his limbs and cast on him offerings of clipped hair and their bows and arrows; Urania hurrying barefoot to his side ‘Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel’, ‘And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than they’, which rend her ‘soft Form’, clearly imitates and moralizes Bion’s Aphrodite rushing barefoot through thorny briars to reach her dying lover, and her speech to him Aphrodite’s in Bion (stanza XXVI is virtually a direct translation of Bion 42– 53). The Lament for Bion, meanwhile, is foregrounded before the poem even begins, with the lines on the poisoning of Bion (109–12) appearing as an epigraph at the head of the preface: the trope is that Keats has been effectively murdered by the poison of the hostile reviewer, and the theme returns at stanza XXXVI, which imitates the same lines from pseudo-Moschus. The other highly conspicuous allusion to the Lament for Bion is in the meditation on the contrast between the cyclical rebirth of vegetation and nature and the supposedly permanent mortality of Adonais at XVIII to XXI, which expands pseudo-Moschus 99–107. All these allusions have been noted by commentators. But the debt to both

poems, and especially to pseudo-Moschus, is more pervasive than these specific examples show: it is fundamentally a debt to their intertextual method, and to the idea, embodied in the Lament for Bion, that poetic imitation

both

testifies

to

and

ensures

poetic

immortality. This idea, which develops gradually through Shelley’s poem, is also touched in at the very beginning, when his opening stanza admonishes the sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: with me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

On the literal level, the lines obviously anticipate the eternity of fame which will be promised to Keats at the end of the poem, but there is also something subtler going on here. Even as, on the surface, Shelley’s ‘sad Hour’ points to the unique moment of Keats’ death, to be remembered for eternity through endless mourning, the personification trope evokes the Greek Horai, whose departure and return mark the cyclical renewal of the

seasons. In this Adonian context, it evokes specifically the opening of the song in Theocritus’ fifteenth idyll, οἷόν τοι τὸν ῎Αδωνιν ἀπ᾽ ἀενάω ᾿Αχέροντος μηνὶ δυωδεκάτῳ μαλακαὶ πόδας ἄγαγον ραι. βάρδισται μακάρων ραι φίλαι, ἀλλὰ ποθειναὶ ἔρχονται πάντεσσι βροτοῖς αἰεί τι φορεῦσαι. [‘see how after a twelvemonth the Hours have brought thee back Adonis from Acheron’s ever-flowing stream, the dear soft-footed Hours, tardiest of the Blessed Ones; yet ever longed for is their coming, and ever for all men do they bring some gift’, Idyll 15.102–5]

The very beginning of Shelley’s poem, then, directs us to the knowledge that death may not be as permanent as it seems, and to the very intertext which infuses Bion’s and pseudo-Moschus’

laments

with

their

underlying

optimism. The Dreams which gather around Adonais in stanzas IX to XIII conspicuously imitate Bion’s grieving Loves, as we have said, but they do so in such a way as to evoke more specifically their development in pseudo-Moschus’ nightingales. To recap what we argued above, Theocritus’

fifteenth idyll has Loves like nightingales; Bion has Loves participate antiphonically in his chorus; pseudoMoschus has nightingales, taught to speak by Bion, echoing Bion’s poem and his own chorus in their antiphonic singing. Shelley goes one step further, and replaces the Loves and nightingales with personifications of Keats’ poems: The quick Dreams, The passion-winged Ministers of thought, Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught The love which was its music, wander not,— Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, But droop there, whence they sprung; and mourn their lot Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, They ne’er will gather strength, or find a home again.(stanza IX)

The notion of poems as dreams and the internalized pastoral landscape are both aptly Keatsian (compare for instance Keats’ ‘Ode to Psyche’), but the personifications are

clearly

also

a

version

of

pseudo-Moschus’

nightingales, Bion’s pupils. We are prepared for this

subtextual presence of nightingales in the preceding stanzas, where Urania is addressed repeatedly (in stanzas IV, V and VI) as ‘Most musical of mourners’, and in stanza III as ‘melancholy Mother’, epithets recalling Milton’s description of the nightingale in ‘Il Penseroso’ as ‘Most musical, most melancholy’ (62). This is no trivial or random snippet of Milton, but an early example of a strain of imagery deeply significant to Milton’s selfpresentation, and to Shelley’s theme. The figure of Melancholy invoked in ‘Il Penseroso’ is a veiled version of Urania, the heavenly muse who would inspire Paradise Lost, and, in a strain of imagery which unfolds 30

through the Proems to Books 3, 7 and 9 of the epic, Milton compares his nocturnal composition, inspired by this celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse(9.21–4)

to the singing of ‘the wakeful bird’, the nightingale, who ‘Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid/Tunes her nocturnal note’ (3.38–40).

31

The stanza which first

introduces Shelley’s epithet ‘Most musical of mourners’,

stanza IV, is explicitly about the political persecution, death, and immortal influence of Milton, whose ‘clear Sprite/Yet reigns o’er earth’, for Shelley’s Urania suffers Keats’ death as a second bereavement, which recalls her earlier mourning for Milton: ‘But now, thy youngest, dearest

one,

has

perished,/The

nursling

of

thy

widowhood’ (VI). When in stanza XVII Keats’ ‘sister spirit, the lorn Nightingale’ appears in the flesh to join in nature’s mourning (with a respectful nod to her special relationship with Keats as the author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’), it has the effect of merely unveiling the nightingales who have been present as a subtext all along. Shelley is everywhere concerned to embellish and enrich the tropes and images he takes over from his sources, and stanza X furnishes a beautiful example. The first of the Dreams sees one of her own tears on Adonais’ eyelash, and mistaking it for his – ‘A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain’ – takes it as a sign he still lives. But even as she utters the vain hope, she vanishes, ‘as with no stain/She faded, like a cloud which has outwept its rain’. Underlying the deft encapsulation of transience (recalling Marvell’s evaporating drop of dew, as an image for the soul’s passage from the world) is the

irony that both she, the Dream, and the tear into which she has wept herself, are truly loosened from Adonais’ brain, so that this tremulous moment in which she survives to speak really does represent his intermediary state between life and death. That it is so brief suggests that she is one of the poems Keats did not survive to write down. Stanza XII describes another evanescent poem, conceived too late to be given lasting form, but it does so in a way which begins to engage with pseudo-Moschus’ treatment of immortal song: Another Splendour on his mouth alit, That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit, And pass into the panting heart beneath With lightning and with music: the damp death Quenched its caress upon his icy lips; And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips, It flushed through his pale limbs, and passed to its eclipse.

With its focus on Adonais’ ‘mouth’, the idea of drawing breath from another’s lips and the image of passing into the heart, this is clearly reminiscent of the kiss Bion’s

Aphrodite begs of the dying Adonis. But because this ‘Splendour’ is one of Keats’ poems, the ‘passion-winged Ministers of thought’, it simultaneously evokes pseudoMoschus’ reworking of Bion’s kiss in his description of Bion’s syrinx, in which Bion’s lips and breath still live (Lament for Bion, 53–4), recognizing pseudo-Moschus’ engagement with Bion’s passage, and unfolds the implication that the breath of music which passes from the poet into the syrinx or splendid poem retains the power to enter the hearts of new hearers, just as Adonis’ spirit, at least in Aphrodite’s wistful desire, enters and continues to live in her, and as poems wander ‘from kindling brain to brain’ (IX). Both here and in the later and closer imitation of Bion’s kiss in stanza XXVI the attempt to absorb the life and spirit is frustrated: we are dealing here with poems which were never given lasting form, and so will not survive, and Shelley is still at this point concerned with grief and lamentation, and has not yet reached the optimistic vision which will take over in the concluding part of the poem. As I have mentioned, Urania’s speech at XXV– XXIX is modelled on the despairing lament of Bion’s Aphrodite. But after that point, a recovery begins, leading

ultimately

to

the

triumphant

closing

vision

of

immortality. Critics have tended to see the influence of the Greek poems as localized in the lament phase of the poem, and to read the optimistic conclusion as turning away from this poetic tradition to Platonism. It is true 32

that the most obvious allusions to specific passages of Bion and pseudo-Moschus occur before the final optimistic turn, treating Adonais’ apotheosis, and that the imagery of transcendence in the closing stanzas is often Platonic in colouring. But we know by now that the assurance of immortality is fundamental in the Greek poems too, and that Shelley’s conspicuous allusions to them in the lament phase of his poem already register that underlying optimism, while as yet tempering it. As we shall see, the supposedly ‘Platonic’ turn when it comes actually follows very closely the amplification of pseudoMoschus’ optimistic subtext in a later classical poem, Statius’ Silvae 2.7. Shelley’s Urania is a good way into this intertextual relationship. Critics keen to emphasize Shelley’s Platonism have introduced the confusing notion that she represents the Aphrodite Ourania (Gk. ‘celestial’) of intellectual love between men, which Plato in the

Symposium opposes to Aphrodite Pandemos (Gk. ‘of all the people’), who embodies (hetero)sexual love. They 33

sometimes go so far as to say that Shelley calls her Urania to distinguish her from ‘the lower Cyprian Aphrodite of the source-myth in Bion’s handling, where the goddess is distinctly earthy and sexual’. The idea introduces an 34

anti-eroticism wholly at odds with both Keats’ and Shelley’s professed attitudes to sexual love in their poetry. At the same time, critics often note that she is never mentioned again after stanza XXXIV, where she looks without recognition at the figure representing Shelley himself among the mourning shepherd-poets, and read this as a symptom of how the ‘Platonic’ conclusion altogether turns its back on the mythological epyllion of the first two-thirds of the poem, which was so indebted to Bion and pseudo-Moschus. This is all confusing and unnecessary. Shelley’s Urania is the heavenly muse of Milton, the classical muse of astronomy and religious poetry (a figure quite unrelated to Plato’s Aphrodite Ourania), and the replacement of Bion’s 35

goddess with a muse is not an innovation, but has happened already in Statius’ Silvae, where Urania’s sister-muse Calliope laments the death of Lucan. It will

be worth digressing from Shelley for a while to examine this poem, since it anticipates ‘Adonais’ in several ways, and particularly reveals the transcendental turn of its conclusion as already present in the poetic tradition stemming from pseudo-Moschus. Silvae 2.7 is an ode celebrating the birthday of the dead Lucan, written for his widow Polla, an unusual conflation of genres producing a boldly paradoxical poem, a meditation on the immortality of poetry which treats death as birth into a new life. It looks to the Lament for Adonis and the Lament for Bion as rich interconnected sources for this theme. The poem is a lament framed by festive passages at beginning and end, in which the optimistic subtext provided in Bion and pseudo-Moschus by allusions to the Adonia is writ large. Like Bion’s poem, with its central first-person lament of Aphrodite, Statius’ poem centres on the long speech of Calliope, which begins as her prophecy of Lucan’s life and career as she takes him on her lap in his infancy, and ends with her mourning his death as once she mourned her son Orpheus. Calliope compares herself to Venus at l.84, because among the favours she bestows on Lucan is the gift of a worthy wife; the poem also names Aphrodite (as

Dione) in its second line. With these lightly touched-in references, Statius encourages the reader to bear Bion’s Aphrodite in mind. But this is a poem about poetry, and the goddess is mentioned at its outset only by way of a connection between a hill sacred to her and the inspirational waters of the Pirene, as Statius calls on inspired poets and the gods of poetry (Bacchus, Apollo and the Muses) to attend the festivities honouring Lucan’s birthday. Like pseudo-Moschus, Statius fills his poem with echoes of and allusions to the dead poet’s works (doubtless to Lucan’s lost poems as well as to the surviving Bellum Civile, which we can recognize), not only where Calliope lists and praises his works, but also in his own phrasing throughout. The figure of Calliope 36

combines Bion’s Aphrodite with pseudo-Moschus’ grieving Meles: τοῦτό τοι ὦ ποταμῶν λιγυρώτατε δεύτερον ἄλγος, τοῦτο, Μέλη, νέον ἄλγος. ἀπώλετο πρᾶν τοι Ὅμηρος, τῆνο τὸ Καλλιόπας γλυκερὸν στόμα, καί σε λέγοντι μύρασθαι καλὸν υἷα πολυκλαύτοισι ῥεέθροις, πᾶσαν δ̓ ἔπλησας φωνᾶς ἅλα: νῦν πάλιν ἄλλον υἱέα δακρύεις, καινῷ δ̓ ἐπὶ πένθεϊ τάκῃ.

[‘O most sweet-voiced of rivers, this makes thee a second grief; this, good Meles, comes to thee a new woe. One melodious mouthpiece of Calliope is long dead, and that is Homer; that lovely son of thine was mourned, ’tis said, of thy tearful flood, and all the sea was filled with the voice of thy lamentation: and lo! now thou weepest for another son, and a new sorrow melteth thee away’, 70– 75]

Just as Bion’s death is a second bereavement for the Meles, replaying the river’s former grief at the death of that ‘sweet mouthpiece of Calliope’, Homer (for both poets were said to have been born beside the Meles, and indeed classical Lives of Homer sometimes say he was a son of the river-god), so Lucan is treated as an adoptive second son to Calliope after the death of her son Orpheus. As she takes the infant Lucan on her lap, Tum prima posito remissa luctu longos Orpheos exuit dolores …. [‘Then relieved at last of grieving, she put aside her long sorrow for Orpheus …’ 39–40]

37

Her speech opens with her comparing Lucan’s power to move Roman audiences with Orpheus’ power to move

trees, and ends by comparing her grief at Lucan’s death to her mourning for Orpheus: sic ripis ego murmurantis Hebri non mutum caput Orpheos sequebar. sic et tu (rabidi nefas tyranni!) iussus praecipitem subire Lethen, […] tacebis. [‘So I once followed Orpheus’ not speechless head along the banks of the murmuring Hebrus. So you too (O crime of the mad tyrant!), ordered to plunge into precipitous Lethe, […] will be silent’, 98–104]

That Statius is thinking of pseudo-Moschus’ passage on the Meles is confirmed by the earlier lines, in which he employs metonymy to assert Lucan’s superiority to Homer and Virgil: the Baetis (a river of Lucan’s native Spain) is Graio nobilior Melete (‘more noble than the Greek Meles’) and superior also to Mantua. Just as Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace, refers metonymically to Virgil, so the Meles refers to Homer (his birthplace, as in pseudo-Moschus). Statius is the only Latin poet to mention the Meles; his decision to do so in this context can be taken as an invitation to compare his poem to the Lament for Bion.

The replacement of the Meles with Calliope enables the poem’s most insistent trope, the idea that Lucan is a second Orpheus. This, too, builds on pseudo-Moschus’ repeated identification of Bion as ‘the Dorian Orpheus’ (Δώριος Ὀρφεύς, 18). Statius ignores the symbolism of Adonis’ return from the Underworld, but Orpheus’ power to influence the infernal deities, which pseudo-Moschus invokes in the optimistic ending of the Lament for Bion, is fundamental to his treatment of Lucan. In her catalogue of Lucan’s works, Calliope mentions his ‘Orpheus’, recited to crowded theatres, and immediately before it alludes more obliquely to another lost work, the Catachthonion (or ‘Descent Beneath the Earth’): sedes reserabis inferorum (‘you will open up the habitation of the dead’, 57), rhetorically attributing to Lucan the action his lost poem presumably described (a device also employed by pseudo-Moschus at 81–2). The reference means that, when Calliope ends with her description of Lucan dragged down into the Underworld, her gloom is undercut by the example of Orpheus, and our awareness that poets are not always to be confined in those infernal regions, but can sometimes sing their way out. At the same time, we may well hear in et tu (rabidi nefas

tyranni!)/iussus praecipitem subire Lethen an echo of Bion’s Aphrodite, ἔρχεαι εἰς Ἀχέροντα/πὰρ στυγνὸν βασιλῆα καὶ ἄγριον (‘you go into Acheron and to its cruel and sullen king’, 51–2), lines in which the goddess’ gloom is similarly undercut by the echo of Theocritus, reminding the reader of Adonis’ similar ability to bounce back. Like pseudo-Moschus’ passage contrasting the cyclical rebirth of plants with human mortality, Calliope’s lament ends poignantly with tacebis (‘you will fall silent’), but as in pseudo-Moschus, we are not to trust this silence. For Statius goes on to picture Lucan’s soul still singing in the afterlife. He offers two alternative visions. The first, which describes Lucan as ascending to the heavens by the way great souls take, and from there looking down on earth and laughing at tombs, is vaguely reminiscent of Plato (for instance Phaedo 80–81 on the soul of the philosopher dwelling for eternity with the gods, and Timaeus 41d, where each soul is assigned a star, though here the topic is not the afterlife but the creation of man), and more strongly of the dream of Scipio in Cicero’s De Republica (especially 6.13 and 6.16), but is modelled

chiefly on Lucan’s Stoic vision describing the ascent of Pompey’s soul in the Bellum Civile: Qua niger astriferis conectitur axibus aer… semidei manes habitant, quos ignea virtus innocuos vita patientes aetheris imi fecit, et aeternos animam collegit in orbes … illic postquam se lumine vero inplevit, stellasque vagas miratus et astra fixa polis, vidit quanta sub nocte iaceret nostra dies, risitque sui ludibria trunci. [‘Where our dark air joins the starry regions … there dwell spirits of those, innocent in life, whose fiery quality enables them to endure the lowest part of the ether … After he had filled himself with the true light and wondered at the planets and the fixed stars of heaven, he saw under how much darkness lies our day, and laughed at the mockeries done to his headless corpse’, 9.5–14]

Statius’ second alternative imagines Lucan singing in Elysium, in the company of ‘Pompeys and Catos’, the republican heroes of his epic, and witnessing from afar the punishment in Tartarus of Nero, the rabidus tyrannus responsible for his death. This too draws on the Bellum Civile, where in the prophecy of Book 6 Lucan describes a place in Elysium reserved for the dead of

Pompey’s side, while the Caesarean forces are doomed to Tartarus (6.799–809). Finally, Statius urges Lucan to beg a day of the ‘gods of the silent’ (that silence again ironically tendentious in context), so that they will allow him to visit his wife (whose enduring love is described with allusion to that of Pompey’s widow at Bellum Civile 9.70–72). Though Statius varies the theme by comparing the imagined visitation with another myth (Protesilaus’ return to his widow Laodamia), the similarity to pseudo-Moschus’ closing allusion to Orpheus’ recovery of Eurydice is clear: Lucan is after all a second Orpheus, and has ‘laid open the habitations of the dead’ before (57). The poem ends in a boldly paradoxical and triumphant tone: procul hinc abite, Mortes: haec vitae genitalis est origo. cedat luctus atrox genisque manent iam dulces lacrimae, dolorque festus, quicquid fleverat ante, nunc adoret. [‘Be far from here, Deaths! This is the beginning of life. Let dreadful lamentation give way, let tears now sweet flow from our eyes, and let festive grief adore now that which it mourned before’, 131–5]

The pluralization of the usual singular personification of Death, even as he dismisses them, reduces the awful spectre of mortality to the relatively ineffectual, even ornamental, status of a Hellenistic flock of little Loves, while the next line harnesses the generic peculiarity of the occasion to redefine Lucan’s death defiantly as a birthday itself, an entry into another and immortal life. The closing call for ‘festive grief’ to ‘adore’ now what it formerly lamented comes close to suggesting worship of Lucan as a divinity (an effect underpinned by the hymnic style of 107–112, addressing Lucan). Taken with all the other reminiscences of Bion’s and pseudo-Moschus’ laments, the combination of religious festivity with joy and mourning also recalls the Adonia. And as in pseudoMoschus, Statius has accomplished the immortality of continuing song his poem promises to Lucan, by echoing Lucan’s poetry, ensuring that it will not fall silent as Calliope feared. The relation of Statius’ poem to the Lament for Bion has not, as far as I can find, received comment. The general neglect of pseudo-Moschus’ poem and its influence on Roman poets may be one reason for this. Another must be the distance between them in terms of genre – one a bucolic lament in hexameters, the

other a strange hybrid of genethliacon (a birthday poem) and consolatio (a poem comforting the bereaved) in hendecasyllables. What are superficially the most obvious characteristics of pseudo-Moschus’ poem are absent from Statius: Lucan was not known as a love-poet, so there is little mention of love here (let alone personified weeping Loves), and we have lost the bucolic focus on nature, with its sympathetically grieving landscape and nightingales, which would sit uneasily with Statius’ evocations of Lucan’s ‘thundering’ epic style. But perhaps the most significant difference between the two poems is simply that Statius spells out and amplifies the subtle hints of optimism in the Greek poem, explicitly turning grief into rejoicing, and linking that optimism to grander philosophical and cosmological notions about the afterlife. Like Statius’ Calliope, Shelley’s Urania is a Muse, the Muse

of

heavenly

knowledge,

astronomy,

and

cosmological and religious poetry. Where pseudoMoschus’ Meles mourns Bion as formerly Homer, and Statius’ Calliope Lucan as formerly Orpheus, Shelley’s Urania mourns Keats as once her Milton. And as the mourning of Meles gives way to the hope of Bion’s return

at the end of pseudo-Moschus’ lament, and as, more emphatically, Calliope’s despair gives way to Statius’ closing vision of immortality, so after Urania’s lament has ended Shelley’s poem mounts gradually to a triumphantly optimistic close. The way has been pointed by Statius, but there is a further felicitous twist, for Urania is precisely the Muse who presides over this kind of visionary philosophical poetry. Though she disappears as a figure within the narrative, she must be taken as inspiring the rest, and the moment in stanza XXXIV when she looks at Shelley and murmurs ‘‘‘Who art thou?”’, her last words in the poem, is in fact the point at which Shelley begins to write under her inspiration. Some of the language in this final section is reminiscent of Plato, whom Shelley regarded as ‘essentially a poet’, but there is little sense of the strict 38

dualism of soul and body which dominates Plato’s treatment of the afterlife, and no trace of the insistence on the dietary and sexual abstinence which enable the philosopher’s soul to escape its ‘prison-house’ in Socrates’ meditation on immortality at the end of the Phaedo, or which is necessary in his attaining the vision of the ideal realm in the Phaedrus. Shelley combines a

vision of Adonais ascending to the stars with the (rather contradictory) idea of Adonais remaining in and pervading this earthly nature: caverns and forests, flowers and fountains are bidden to cease their mourning, ‘for from thee/The spirit thou lamentest has not gone’ (XLI). The imagery of this passage, stanzas XLI to XLIII, draws on Spenser’s procreative and material Garden of Adonis: He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. He is a portion of that loveliness Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there, All new successions to the forms they wear …(XLII– XLIII)

Shelley’s editor Kelvin Everest suggests that the Power of which Adonais is now part ‘sustains’ nature ‘from beneath by gravity’, but there are less mechanical forces at work here too. Rather, Shelley is assimilating Adonais 39

to both the creative principles in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis. On one hand, he recalls Adonis himself, who is 40

eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall, Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie: For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing giues to all. (Faerie Queene III.vi.47)

On the other, he recalls the ‘huge eternal Chaos’ which lies ‘in the wide wide wombe of the world’ beneath the Garden, ‘which supplyes/The substaunces of natures fruitfull progenyes’ (III.vi.36), the ‘matter, whereof they are made’. It becomes a body ‘when as forme and feature it does ketch’, but ‘when the life decayes, and forme does fade’ (37), this eternal matter is not chaunged, nor altered, But th’only forme and outward fashion, For euery substance is conditioned

To change her hew, and sundry formes to don…(Faerie Queene III.vi.38)

Together, the two principles perpetuate the original act of creation in an ongoing procreative cycle, for of their own accord All things, as they created were, doe grow, And yet remember well the mightie word, Which first was spoken by th’Almightie lord … (III.vi.34)

Earlier in his poem, Shelley echoes the same passages to describe the ‘Dreams’ given form in Keats’ poetry, All he had loved, and moulded into thought, From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound, (Adonais XIV)

and then at stanzas XVIII to XIX to describe the springtime reawakening of nature, as part of his amplification of pseudo-Moschus’ despairing contrast between nature’s seasonal revival and human mortality: A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has burst As it has ever done, with change and motion, From the great morning of the world when first God dawned on Chaos… (XIX)

Now, Keats’ formative powers extend beyond his poetic ‘Dreams’, as he enters into and shapes nature itself, partly because (as echoes particularly of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in stanza LII suggest) our perception of nature will be forever changed by reading his poems. We are also given a vision of Adonais ascending to the stars, where Chatterton, Sidney and Lucan – all poets who, like Keats, died young, after suffering some form of calumny or oppression – ‘Rose from their thrones … 41

robed in dazzling immortality,’ to greet him: ‘Thou art become as one of us,’ they cry, ‘It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long Swung blind in unascended majesty, Silent alone amid an Heaven of song. Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng!’(XLVI)

With its astral ascent and companionship of heroic spirits (here specifically poets), the passage recalls Statius 2.7.107–13 and behind it the Stoic vision of Lucan’s Bellum Civile 9.6–14, but Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (with its famous description of the harmony of the spheres) is here evoked perhaps most strongly of all.

42

(The same text also informs the earlier passage,

the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came. A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through

time

and

change,

unquenchably

the

same,(XXXVIII)

recalling Cicero, where Scipio is told that the souls of men are derived from those sempiternal fires, which we call stars.) Commentators sometimes try to rationalize the 43

perceived paradox of an Adonais at once ‘made one’ with an earthly ‘Nature’ and at the same time ascending to this starry heaven by taking Shelley to mean that Keats’ body becomes part of the material continuity of nature symbolized in the Adonia and in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis, while his soul ascends to the stars. This is 44

reading through the lens of Platonic dualism, but Shelley does not actually make such a distinction. He is not engaging antagonistically with Plato, and indeed smooths over any tension by echoing, in ‘thou Vesper of our throng!’, the epigram from the Greek Anthology which he prints and ascribes to Plato on the title page of Adonais, and elsewhere translates: Thou wert the morning-star among the living Ere thy fair light had fled—

Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendour to the dead. (‘To Stella’)

But the idea of a strict separation of soul and body, and a soul which transcends and leaves the earth, is not found in Shelley’s poem. Perhaps the best way to approach the apparent paradox is rather to notice that the music of Shelley’s spheres, unlike that of Cicero, is audible on earth. The stanza before the introduction of Chatterton, Sidney and Lucan begins with a general statement that such ‘splendours of the firmament of time’ as the soul of Adonais (and we recall that his poems were earlier called ‘Splendours’ as well as ‘Dreams’) do not die but climb to the stars, ‘And death is a low mist which cannot blot/The brightness it may veil’ (XLIV). This is still reminiscent of Lucan on the soul of Pompey, looking down from the ether on the night which veils our day, but the direction of the gaze has shifted, and where Lucan’s emphasis was on how much night (quanta nocte) obscures the true light for those on earth, Shelley is concerned to emphasize how little the brightness of the stars has been obscured by the separating ‘low mist of death’. This prepares for a new turn:

When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, And love and life contend in it, for what Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.

At first it seems we are no longer talking about what happens after death at all, but rather that this ascent to the stars, and above the very condition of mortality, is something which happens to the living, whenever they engage in ‘lofty thought’. Then we realize that we are 45

considering both, as separate ascents, for when the contemplative ascent happens, ‘the dead live there’: it is as though the mind of the living, mounting in thought to the starry sphere, meets with the souls of the dead already ensconced there. Or perhaps, rather, ‘there’ refers to ‘lofty thought’, or even ‘young heart’, and the starry sphere has been internalized, to be understood now as a spatial metaphor for the minds and hearts of the living, in their successive generations, who meet the dead as they contemplate the writings they have left behind. The momentary confusion over whether we are speaking of a living, contemplative youth or of the dead also suggests that perhaps this ‘young heart’ is Shelley

himself, engaged as he is in ‘lofty thought’ about immortality and the cosmos under the inspiration of Urania, tracing the path taken by Adonais after death. When the confusion is resolved in an image of communion between the living and the dead, and in fact of the dead enjoying their immortality precisely within the heart and thought of the living, we experience an uncanny fusion of Shelley with Keats, and indeed with the rest of ‘the dead’ into whose throng Adonais is about to be welcomed. It is this sense of communion and interfusion which sustains Shelley through the remaining stanzas, as he turns in stanza XLVII to address himself with a rebuke for mourning, in the light of his new understanding: ‘Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,/Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright’. The rest of the stanza summarizes his newly achieved perspective, which is both of the cosmos and of his own place within it, as Shelley’s vision expands from the ‘Earth,/As from a centre’ to encompass the universe, and then returns ‘Even to a point within our day and night’. The danger against which he warns himself at the end of the stanza, with ‘And keep thy heart light lest it make thee

sink/When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink’, is the mistake of seeing physical death as the only means of following Adonais in his ascent to the starry spheres, and this continues to haunt him in the imagined visit to Keats’ grave in Rome from stanza XLVIII on. The contrast between the ruins of antique Rome, an emblem of worldly transience (as for Du Bellay and Spenser in the sixteenth century), and the immortal ‘kings of thought’, to whom Adonais has been gathered, and who ‘are all that cannot pass away’, provokes Shelley to a weary contemptus mundi, to the point where in stanza LII he adjures himself ‘Die,/If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!’ We revert momentarily to a sense that 46

‘A light has passed from the revolving year’ with Keats’ death (LIII), recalling the earlier amplification at stanzas XVIII to XXI of pseudo-Moschus’ contrast between the cycle of the seasons and the finitude of human life, and the despairing mood drives him to a suicidal wish to overcome separation by dying with the beloved, as Bion’s Aphrodite wishes she could, and as Watson’s and Fraunce’s Amyntas and Spenser’s Stella do: ‘No more let Life divide what Death can join together’. (A more personal loss, though unnamed here, underpins Shelley’s

despair, for his own infant son was buried in the same cemetery.) Shelley does not yield to the temptation, and asks himself why: ‘Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?’ But the poem has already provided the answer. Physical death is not necessary, for ‘lofty thought’ is enough to lift ‘a young heart above its mortal lair’ (XLIV), to achieve a vision equalling that enjoyed by apotheosized souls. The last two stanzas show Shelley enjoying this transcendent vision through the rapture of poetic inspiration rather than death. ‘The Light whose smile kindles the Universe… now beams on’ him (LIV): this is the ‘burning fountain’ to which Adonais has returned (XXXVIII), the ‘white radiance of Eternity’ which, in the despairing mood of stanza LII he believed, Platonically, to be merely obscured and distorted by earthly life and fully attainable only through death; but it is also the ‘transmitted effluence’ (XLVI) of the dead poets who move ‘like winds of light’ (XLIV) in the heart of the young reader, and it is a light available in life. In the mixed metaphors of stanza LIV, the Platonic sense that the things of nature are merely ‘mirrors of/The fire for which all thirst’, inauthentic replicas of eternal Ideas, is

subordinate to a stronger sense of Light, Beauty and ‘sustaining Love’ positively infusing ‘man and beast and earth and air and sea’. Shelley is writing here of the poetic inspiration which Plato describes in the Phaedrus (245a) as a θεία μανία (‘divine madness’) sent by the Muses, but he eschews Platonic contempt for created nature in favour of a vision in which the eternal Light and Love ‘sustaining’ earth’s ‘web of being’ is thoroughly assimilable to the Adonis of cult, a procreative principle guaranteeing the continuity of nature. In the final stanza, Shelley’s divine madness takes form in the image of breath which is the root of the word ‘inspiration’ (from Latin spiro, ‘I breathe’): ‘The breath whose might I have invoked in song/Descends on me …’ (LV) This breath is the ‘one Spirit’ whose ‘plastic stress/Sweeps through’ the universe in stanza XLIII, but it is also specifically poetic. It is the breath which Keats’ poems were ‘wont to draw’ from his mouth, giving them ‘strength to pierce the guarded wit/And pass into the panting heart’ of readers (XII), carrying ‘from kindling brain to brain’ the love they have drawn from ‘the living streams/Of his young spirit’ (IX). Behind this it is also the breath of the dying Adonis which Bion’s Aphrodite

longs to suck up in a last kiss, and the breath still living in Bion’s pipe, ready to breathe forth in new music (as it does in pseudo-Moschus’ and here in Shelley’s imitative poems). It is the breath of all the dead poets who ‘move like winds of light’ through the ‘young heart’ (XLIV), the ‘clear Sprite’ of Milton which ‘Yet reigns o’er earth’ (IV), the inspiration personified in the Muse Urania but now understood as transmitted through books. The selfreference ‘whose might I have invoked in song’, meanwhile, alludes not only to these elements of ‘Adonais’, but also to Shelley’s earlier ‘Ode to the West Wind’, in which Shelley has hymned the spirit of poetic inspiration in terms which anticipate his elegy. Like ‘Adonais’, the ode explores the relation of spirit and matter, focussing on the materiality of the written word itself and investing it with the power of seasonal revival celebrated in the Adonia, to produce a version of Platonic θεία μανία which transcends Platonic dualism: Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth … Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (61–70)

The paper pages which resemble the dead leaves of autumn carry with them a power to inspire readers and thus transform the world. Thus they are like the ‘winged seeds’ which, in the first strophe, are carried to their ‘dark wintry bed … where they lie cold and low,/Each like a corpse within its grave’ only until spring awakes them to fill ‘With living hues and odours plain and hill’ (6–7, 12). Writing, and even print publication, is part of this wind which breathes a quickening power through the world to awaken distant audiences. And though the presence of death in the ode is as yet only metaphorical, the same wind also drives the pages of poets long dead, so that they may ‘move like winds of light’ in the hearts of new readers, which is the story of ‘Adonais’. When Spenser and Shelley draw inspiration from Theocritus, Bion and pseudo-Moschus to revive the Adonia’s celebration of nature’s continuity as a symbol of the power and endurance of poetry, they are consciously at odds with a more powerful tradition. Though Theocritus’ description of a lavish, state-sponsored ceremony within the palace precincts at Alexandria is the

fullest surviving account of the Adonia rituals, it appears to be anomalous. All the other evidence suggests that the Adonis cult, wherever it took hold, was unofficial, celebrated only by women, and habitually scorned and ridiculed by men, the wielders of political power. It has been argued that it was positively counter-cultural, and even proto-feminist, especially in the context of Athens, with its rigid patriarchy. The contempt evident in most 47

classical references continues to be prevalent in the Renaissance, where ‘gardens of Adonis’, the salad-pots of the Adonia ritual, are no longer symbols of seasonal revival, but become bywords for transience, vanity and folly. When Spenser in The Faerie Queene transforms 48

the scorned salad-pot into a mythological locus amoenus allegorizing earth’s perpetual fertility, and when Shelley (building on Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’) puts this grand vision at the service of a hymnic celebration of the immortality of poetry, they are deliberately recuperating the Adonia against such aspersions. This also has a bearing on both poets’ attitude to Plato, for Socrates sides with the detractors of the Adonia in the Phaedrus when he uses the ‘garden of Adonis’ as an emblem of futility, something which gives an impressive

display quickly and easily, but has no lasting value. The dialogue has concerned itself chiefly with love as one of the divinely inspired forms of madness, touching on poetic inspiration among the others, and has been built largely on the familiar distinction between mortal body and immortal soul, and the idea of sexual abstinence and control of the bodily appetites as a requisite in the ideal love which guides the soul of the philosopher to apprehend truth. (Socrates uses the famous image of the soul as charioteer managing his unruly horses, as he strives to mount to the ether to view the realm of the fixed stars.) But the topic here, towards the end of the dialogue, is the superiority of oral dialectic, ‘the living word of knowledge which has a soul’, to ‘the written word’, which ‘is properly no more than an image’ of it.

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Socrates compares written texts to paintings, as they ‘have the attitude of life’ but cannot respond to questions, always giving ‘one unvarying answer’, and to illegitimate children, who ‘have no parent to protect them if they are maltreated or abused’ or wrongly understood, and then asks: Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to bear fruit,

and in sober seriousness plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight days appearing in beauty? At least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting soil, and practises husbandry, and is satisifed if in eight months the seeds which he has sown arrive at perfection. (276B)

Likewise, Socrates goes on, the wise man ‘will not seriously incline to “write” his thoughts “in water” with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others’ (276C). He may ‘sow and plant in the garden of letters, but only for recreation and amusement’, while his serious pursuit will be that of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness. (276D–277A)

Only such ‘principles orally communicated’ by the philosopher, and their ‘brethren and descendants […] duly implanted by him in the souls of others’, are his ‘legitimate offspring’ (278A–B). There are two great ironies here. The first is that Socrates’ words survive only because Plato wrote them down (with the implication, if we take Socrates’ argument seriously, that we cannot hope to grasp their true meaning – and indeed, the ambiguities and ironies which attend Socrates’ speeches in Plato, with their frequent word-play, tropes, literary allusions and interpolated myths, are what make Shelley, as Sidney before him, assert that Plato was ‘essentially a poet’). The second irony is that the imagery of the germinating seed rendered ‘immortal’ in successive generations, which Socrates uses to praise oral dialectic, epitomizes what the Adonia celebrates and what its salad-pots really symbolize. We can see Shelley as pouncing with delight on these ironies, as he conflates Plato’s idea of poetic inspiration as ‘divine madness’ with the power of print, in the figure of the West Wind which will ‘scatter’ his words among mankind like ‘winged seeds’ ‘to quicken a new birth’, and again in ‘Adonais’, as he reflects on the Adonis-like

vitality with which the writings of the dead animate and inspire successive generations of readers and poets. At the same time as recuperating the Adonia from the aspersions Socrates and others have thrown on it, he uses Socrates’ own, covertly Adonian imagery to counter his argument, and sing the praises of writing. Implicitly, it is also a ‘defence of poetry’ against Plato’s famous denigration of poetry, as a mere imitation of the delusory world of the senses, in favour of philosophy, which seeks true knowledge of ideas (compare Socrates’ analogy between writing and painting above). When thinking of this passage of the Phaedrus in the context of Keats’ death and Shelley’s memorialization, it is impossible not to mention the resonance of another image Socrates uses in passing, where he embellishes his assertion of the futility of writing by invoking the obvious, and already proverbial, futility of writing ‘in water’:ἄρα σπουδῇ αὐτὰ ἐν ὕδατι γράψει μέλανι σπείρων διὰ καλάμου… (‘Will he in all seriousness write his thoughts in dark water, sowing them with a reed …?’) ὕδατι μέλανι (‘dark water’) is a paraphrasis for ‘ink’, but by putting the qualifying adjective last, Plato is (as the nineteenth-century commentator

Thompson

observes)

‘sliding

in

a

proverbial phrase by way of additional illustration’, for what we read before we get to this qualification is ἐν ὕδατι γράψει, ‘Will he write in water?’

50

(And he

immediately proceeds to weave in the other metaphor of sowing seeds as in a garden of Adonis, with σπείρων, ‘sowing’, and καλάμου, which could be either a reed-pen or a reed used for sprinkling seeds.) It is unlikely that Keats had this passage specifically in mind when, on his deathbed, he gave Joseph Severn the instructions he would later carry out, that Keats’ tombstone should bear, instead of his name, the inscription ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. The phrase is a common image for transience or futility in Greek, Latin and English (and as we have seen is probably being invoked as proverbial already by Plato), and Keats would have known it from many sources and contexts. Indeed, it seems so much in keeping with the gestures of self-effacement and yearning for dissolution which are familiar in Keats’ poetry, that the inscription on the actual tombstone may be mistaken in putting Keats’ request down to ‘the bitterness of his heart’, and perhaps we do not have to read into it the bitter complaint against transience which the phrase normally implies elsewhere. But it is tempting

to think that it reminded Shelley (who understood bitterness better than self-effacement) of this particular context. Though the stone was not erected until after Shelley’s death, less than a year later, Shelley knew about the instruction Keats had left. He planned a stanza on it for ‘Adonais’, which begins by quoting the inscription (in slightly altered form), ‘Here lieth One whose name was writ on water’. But before any breeze can erase the name from the water’s surface, ‘Death, the immortalizing winter’, repenting Keats’ death, freezes the stream, so that ‘time’s printless torrent grew/A scroll of crystal, blazoning the name/Of Adonais!’ The fragment was excluded from the poem, to be published only in Mary Shelley’s posthumous edition of Shelley’s works: Shelley must have decided that the icy monumentality of the image distracted from the vitality and dynamism of the strains of imagery he ultimately uses to depict Keats’ immortality, those of Adonic fertility and poetic inspiration. But it represents an additional side-swipe, perhaps, at Plato’s denigration of writing in the Phaedrus. It is peculiarly fitting that ‘Adonais’ should push back against Plato’s attack on writing, because of the poem’s

deep investment in strategies of literary imitation. While it is not strictly necessary for poetry to be written down in order that poems may allude to and imitate each other, it undoubtedly helps. There is a limit to the amount of verse a poet could memorize, or expect an audience to recognize, without refreshing their memory at the fountain of the text, and it is therefore not surprising that the highly allusive poetics of the Hellenistic age should be so closely associated with the great library at Alexandria, where Theocritus worked. The Lament for Bion is one example of the sophisticated and purposeful intertextual methods of that period, and its far-reaching influence has made the figure of Adonis a symbol not only of the immortal fame desired for a dead poet, but of how poetic imitation confers that immortality, and of the capacity of poetry as a communal endeavour across the ages to transcend death and a host of other worldly misfortunes, from oppression by a Nero to hostile reviews in the conservative press. Late in the current of that influence, Shelley was fully alive to the wealth of meaning concealed within its slight form, awaiting rediscovery by successive ages of readers and poets. So much is evident when he turns in the ‘Defence of Poetry’

to address Hellenistic poets (such as Theocritus, Bion and Moschus), as ‘sacred links’ in an endless ‘chain’ of poetry, ‘which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all’. He continues, And let us not circumscribe the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more finely organized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.

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Shelley’s own masterpiece ‘Adonais’ is itself often misunderstood because of a failure to take its imitative method, and the bucolic poems it imitates, seriously enough, to recognize that Plato is only one of the ‘winds of light’ which move through the poem and to grasp the full significance and purpose invested in the very practice of imitation and allusion, both in Shelley and in the

earlier poems which participate in this tradition. The tradition may be a minor one, in the sense that the works within it are relatively few and relatively short. But when these poems are understood, as they are meant to be, in relation to each other, they give us an extraordinary glimpse of how poets across two thousand years have thought about their powers and their craft.

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1

For instance, Robert Shafer complains of Spenser’s

‘borrowings’ and ‘forced, conventional tone’ (‘Spenser’s “Astrophel”’, MLN 28 (1913), 226); John Bernard finds ‘Astrophel’ ‘conventional to the point of tedium’ (Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund

Spenser

(Cambridge,

1989),

122);

Earl

Wassermann sees Shelley as ‘reproducing the mechanics of the traditional elegy’ (‘Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode’, ELH 21 (1954), 311). 2

Though modern audiences are more familiar with the

tragic version of this story, in which Orpheus ultimately fails to recover Eurydice from Hades, the earliest known reference to that ending occurs only in Virgil’s Georgics, written at least half a century after the Lament for Bion. All previous references to the episode seem to assume Orpheus’ success. 3

See Flora P. Manakidou, ‘ΕΠΙΤΑΦΙΟΣ ΑΔΩΝΙΔΟΣ and

ΕΠΙΤΑΦΙΟΣ ΒΙΩΝΟΣ: Remarks on Their Generic Form

and Content’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 37 (1996), 27–58. 4

English translations of Bion and pseudo-Moschus are

taken throughout (though sometimes slightly modified) from J. M. Edmonds (ed. and tr.), The Greek Bucolic Poets (London, 1912). 5

English translations of Theocritus are taken throughout

from A.S.F. Gow (ed. and tr.), Theocritus, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1952). 6

Though the grammatical case of the two proper nouns is

necessarily different in 15.102. 7

On these aspects of the Daphnis legend, see Gow,

Theocritus, Vol. II, 1. The idea of Pan fearing to come second also wittily engages with this idyll, where it is with a tone of fulsome compliment that Thyrsis tells the goatherd in line 3 that he deserves the second prize after Pan. 8

On the erotic overtones of this phrase, τὸ Καλλιόπας

γλυκερὸν στόμα (‘sweet mouthpiece of Calliope’), which also echoes Aphrodite’s kiss in Bion, see Michael Paschalis, ‘γλυκερὸν στόμα: Erotic Homer in the Lament for Bion’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 34 (1995), 179–185. 9

On Virgil’s allusions to pseudo-Moschus’ lament in the

tenth eclogue, see Raymond Kania, ‘Orpheus and the Reinvention of Bucolic Poetry’, American Journal of

Philology 133 (2012), 657–685, and on Ovid’s in Amores III.ix, see Joseph D. Reed, ‘Ovid’s Elegy on Tibullus and Its Models’, Classical Philology 92 (1997), 260–269. 10

For example, in Bryskett, ‘The mourning muse of

Thestylis’, first published in 1587 and reprinted here in Spenser’s volume; the Greek poem by John Lloyd which opens the commemmorative volume Peplus (1587); the contributions of William Gager, William Whitlock and Henry Price to the Oxford volume of Exequiae (1587); and the poem by ‘R.S.’ in the Cambridge collection, Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae (1587). See John Buxton, ‘Peplus: New College Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney’, in The Warden’s Meeting: A Tribute to John Sparrow, ed. Anthony Davis (Oxford, 1977), 23–26. 11

Discussed by Merritt Y. Hughes, ‘Spenser and the Greek

Pastoral Triad’, Studies in Philology 20.2 (1923), 184– 215; T. P. Harrison, Jr., ‘Spenser, Ronsard, and Bion’, MLN 49 (1934), 139–145; and Michael O’Connell, ‘Astrophel: Spenser’s Double Elegy’, SEL 11 (1971), 27–35, of whom only O’Connell seriously considers the possibility that Spenser may have known the poems in Greek. Spenser would have studied Greek both at the Merchant Taylor’s School and at university in Cambridge, however. On knowledge of Greek in England at the time, see Micha Lazarus, ‘Greek Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England’, Renaissance Studies 29 (2014), 433–458.

12

This part of Spenser’s narrative is quite detached from

reality: Sidney’s widow, clearly represented by Spenser’s Stella, had married again, while the woman signified by ‘Stella’ in Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Penelope Rich, née Devereux, was already married when Sidney was writing, and survived him by many years. 13

The authorship of this lay has been open to question,

with some arguing that it was written by Mary Sidney (see G. F. Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu, Salzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg Austria, 1979); Margaret Hannay et al. (eds), The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford, 1998)). On the other side, arguing for Spenser’s authorship, see for example W. Oram et al. (eds), The Shorter Poems (New Haven, 1989); Richard McCabe (ed.), Spenser: The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999); G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985); and Pamela Coren, ‘Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney, and the Doleful Lay’, SEL 42 (2002), 25–41. 14

On Spenser’s engagement in ‘Astrophel’ with Virgil’s

handling of the trope in the Eclogues (especially Eclogue 10), see Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems (Manchester, 2016), ch. 4.

15

See Steve Reece, ‘Homer’s Asphodel Meadow’, Greek,

Roman, and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), 389–400, especially 393. 16

We should note, however, that Sidney ironically

undercuts such Platonic gestures as these in Astrophil and Stella, as a recalcitrantly lustful Astrophil continually rebuffs Stella’s offer of chaste Platonic love. See T. P. Roche, Jr, ‘Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading’, Spenser Studies 3 (1982), 139–191, repr. in Dennis Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford, 1987), 185–226. 17

In the present context it is worth mentioning that it is

introduced by Spenser’s conspicuous imitation, in the first part of the canto, of another epyllion by Moschus, ‘Fugitive Love’. 18

The boar in the tale of Adonis was commonly

interpreted as allegorizing winter in the Renaissance: see for instance Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (Venice, 1581), 5.16. 19

See Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser and Lucretius’, Studies

in Philology 17 (1920), 439–464; Jonathan Goldberg, Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (Bronx, NY, 2009), 105– 116. 20

The half-line appears only in the posthumous 1609

edition, with stanza 45 appearing as a short, eight-line

stanza in the two editions printed in Spenser’s lifetime. But modern editors agree that it represents Spenser’s own addition, left in the manuscripts which the 1609 printer Matthew Lownes inherited after the death of Spenser’s former publisher William Ponsonby in 1604. 21

On this possibility, see Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Countess

of Pembroke’s Patronage’, p. 135 and Margaret Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford, 1990), 112. 22

Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic

Natural Philosophy and The Faerie Queene (Toronto, 2001), 223. 23

Spenser had also memorialized Sidney in the 1591

Complaints volume, in the end of ‘The Ruines of Time’, in passages indebted to Virgil’s sixth eclogue (see Philip Hardie in this volume), and drawing the parallel between the dead poet and Orpheus which Statius uses in his poem on Lucan and which Shelley will use in ‘Adonais’. (See ‘Ruines of Time’, 330–336 and 603–616.) 24

Raphael Falco argues persuasively for this reading of

the poem in ‘Spenser’s “Astrophel” and the Formation of Elizabethan Literary Genealogy’, Modern Philology 91 (1993), 1–25. 25

On imitation of the Greek poems in ‘Adonais’, see

especially E. B. Silverman, Poetic Synthesis in Shelley’s Adonais (The Hague, 1972) and Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley’s

‘Adonais’ and John Keats’, Essays in Criticism 57 (2007), 237–264. For Shelley’s intention to teach Keats Greek, see his letter of 29 October 1820 to Marianne Hunt, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford, 1964), II.240. 26

On allusions to Keats’ poems in ‘Adonais’, see especially

Stuart Curran, ‘Adonais in Context’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference (Totowa, NJ, 1983), 165–182, and Everest, ‘Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ and John Keats’. 27

The explanation for Shelley’s variation on the name

‘Adonis’ most widely accepted today (one first suggested by Shelley’s editor Rossetti, carefully discussed by John W. Hales in ‘Shelley’s “Adonais”’, MLQ 5 (1902), 61–65, and given prominence by Earl Wasserman in his strongly Platonizing and incidentally Christianizing ‘Adonais: Progressive Revelation’) is that it combines the classical name with the Hebrew ‘Adonai’, Lord. (Wasserman pays only superficial attention to the Hellenistic intertexts, regarding Shelley as merely ‘reproducing the mechanics of the traditional elegy’ (311), ‘elegiac conventions’ (326) which are only ‘binding restraints’ and ‘merely formal duties’ (279), having nothing to do with the poem’s ‘internal activities’ (278), and which lead to a rejection of their ‘false perspectives’ in favour of Platonic ‘sharp dualism’. He seems reluctant to consider ‘resurrection’ as

a distinctive – not to say the essential – feature of the Greek Adonis, and opposes ‘the season-god’ of the early part of the poem to the Christ-like ‘Resurrection god’ celebrated at the end (296).) Other suggestions have included the idea that the name puns on the Greek αἠδών, ‘nightingale’ (an idea, first suggested by Silverman, Poetic Synthesis, p. 102, which does nothing to account for the ‘–ais’ ending, the fact calling for explanation – though as we have seen this pun is already at work in pseudoMoschus), and the idea that Shelley is inserting the ‘ai!’ of lament, from Bion’s refrain, into Adonis’ name (H. J. Jackson, ‘The “ai” in ‘‘Adonais’’, RES 62 (2011), 777–784). Though the latter still does not explain what might seem a rather arbitrary splicing of the words, it is nevertheless attractive as suggesting Shelley’s response to the wordmusic of Bion’s opening lines, with their rich play of assonance and consonance: Αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν… Ἄδωνις’ ἐπαιάζουσιν. 28

Shelley is thinking primarily of the review of Endymion

in the Quarterly Review xix (April 1818), 204–208, but see also those in The British Critic ix (June 1818), 649– 654 and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine iii (August 1818), 519–524. 29

For instance the review of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam in

the Quarterly Review xxi (April 1819), and the attack on Shelley in the review of Hunt’s Foliage in the Quarterly

Review xviii (January 1818), 324–335. On the radical politics of Keats’ own poetry, largely neglected by modern criticism until the 1980s, see Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford, 1998). 30

See Stella P. Revard, ‘“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”:

Classical Tradition and Renaissance Mythography’, PMLA 101 (1986), 338–350. 31

Milton’s nightingale here leaves a distinctive trace in

Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in an echo of the relatively uncommon word ‘darkling’: ‘Darkling I listen; and, for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death…’ (ll. 51–2) We might trace the combination of this word ‘darkling’, nightingale imagery and the death or immortality of song through James Russell Lowell’s ‘To Holmes: On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday’ and Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’, both poems which engage consciously with the tradition we are considering. 32

For the alleged turn away from the Hellenistic tradition,

see for instance Eric Smith, who thinks Shelley ‘finally…abandons pastoral and the Adonis story’ because he is ‘unable’ ‘to find consolation within it’ (By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich, 1977), 77), and Newman Ivey White, who writes ‘Though Shelley […] produced some beautiful stanzas based partly upon borrowed materials, the poem does not attain its full power until it becomes more fully Shelleyan’ (Shelley, 2

vols, London, 1947, 2.296). Peter Sacks sees the poem as overcoming doubts about the genre and pushing beyond it (The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, 1985); Wasserman as ‘testing the thesis of Bion’s lament’ (284) before finding it ‘false’ (286) and improving on it in a Platonic conclusion (‘Adonais: Progressive Revelation’, 284, 296). For other strongly Platonic readings of the poem, see James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (Durham, NC, 1949), and Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry (Oxford, 1967). 33

See for instance Silverman, Poetic Synthesis, 32;

Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, 293. 34 35

Everest, ‘Shelley’s Adonais and John Keats’, 241. Milton’s Urania is probably influenced in turn by

Spenser’s ‘Teares of the Muses’, in the same volume of Complaints which contains Spenser’s earlier tribute to Sidney in ‘The Ruines of Time’, and Shelley may well have been remembering this too. As Richard Danson Brown has suggested in a private communication, lines 523–24 of ‘Teares of the Muses’, where Urania declares ‘How euer yet they mee despise and spight,/I feede on sweet contentment of my thought’, sound ‘oddly Shelleyan’ when read with the hostile reviews which supposedly killed Keats in mind.

36

See the commentary of Harm-Jan Van Dam (ed.), P.

Papinius Statius Silvae Book II (Leiden, 1984), which also provides the Latin text I use here; Martha Malamud, ‘Happy Birthday, Dead Lucan: (P)raising the Dead in Silvae 2.7’, Ramus 24 (1995), 1–30. 37 38

Translations from Latin texts are my own. Shelley, ‘Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and

Prose, 2nd edn, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York, 2002), 514. 39

In The Poems of Shelley, ed. Michael Rossington, Jack

Donovan and Kelvin Everest, Vol. 4 (London, 2014), ‘Adonais’. 40

On the importance of Spenser’s influence on Shelley,

see Stuart Curran, ‘“Adonais” in Context’, Silverman, Poetic Synthesis and Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (Philadelphia, 1991), whose reading of ‘Adonais’ focusses on the two poets’ shared ‘preoccupation with poetic influence and continuity’ (340). 41

The precociously brilliant Chatterton was both attacked

and celebrated for his forged pseudo-mediaeval poems; Shelley thought that the career of Sidney (his distant relation) had suffered because of his critical views on absolute monarchy; Lucan was forced to commit suicide (the rabidi nefas tyranni deplored by Statius) for his part in a failed plot to assassinate Nero.

42

Cicero, De Republica 6.18–19.

43

Cicero, De Republica 6.15.

44

For example, Wasserman, for whom the poem’s

ultimate ‘revelation’ ‘is that dust and soul return to their separate origins’ (‘Adonais: Progressive Revelation’, 313) and Everest, who speaks of an Adonais ‘whose body is reabsorbed into the vitality of Nature and whose spirit lives on with the “enduring dead”’ (‘Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ and John Keats’, 239). 45

I do not agree with Everest, incidentally, that the

contention of love and life need suggest ‘the idea of enmity between love and life’, as if Shelley were expressing a Platonic hostility to sexuality and the body. Love and life do not have to be contending against each other, but can both be understood as positive forces inspiring the young heart as it chooses its destiny. 46

Wasserman takes the imagery of this stanza, in which

‘Life is a dome of manycoloured glass’ which ‘Stains the white radiance of Eternity,/Until Death tramples it to fragments’ as a wholly positive endorsement of Platonic idealism, but this would make ‘Adonais’ a profoundly anti-Keatsian poem, putting Shelley on the same side as the spiteful philosopher of Keats’ ‘Lamia’, destroyer of dreams and rainbows. 47

Aristophanes mentions the Adonia in the context of the

women’s rebellion in Lysistrata; on the topic generally

see Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (Berkeley, 1993). 48

For instance in Erasmus, Adages. On Spenser’s Garden

of Adonis in relation to these competing traditions, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1976). 49

Phaedrus 276A, in The Dialogues of Plato, tr. Benjamin

Jowett, 4 vols (4th edn, revised; Oxford, 1953), Vol.3. 50

The Phaedrus of Plato, ed. G. Long and A. J. MacLean,

with notes by W. H. Thompson (London, 1868), 276C. 51

Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 522. I am indebted to David

Duff for drawing my attention to this passage; see his discussion in Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford, 2009), Ch. 5. 52

I am grateful to David Duff, Richard Danson Brown and

Andrew Laird for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter, which saved me from many infelicities. (Those that remain are entirely my own fault.)

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Index Achilleos, Stella 4n3 Achilles 47, 162, 167 Acrasia (in Spenser’s Faerie Queene) 124, 139–40, 153 Adonia festival 183–4, 186, 188, 197–202, 204, 207, 212, 216, 224–5, 227 Adonis 30, 180–90, 192–4, 197–201, 204–5, 208, 210, 211n32, 214–15, 218, 224–5, 227–8 gardens of 188, 198, 204, 225–7 Aeneas 47, 49, 51, 81–2, 139, 142, 153–4 Aeschines Socraticus 124n10 aesthetics 29, 76, 86, 93 Aetna 19–21, 24, 27, 52 Aetna 39n9 afterlife 4, 14, 31–2, 38–9, 40, 44, 46, 117, 217 see also Elysium; ghosts; heaven; Hell; immortality; Underworld, the Aggeler, Geoffrey 112n51 Alcaeus 191 Alexander, Gavin 40, 42n14, 45n19 Allecto 82

allusion 1, 9, 10n16, 15n22, 16n25, 20n33, 24, 28–9, 32–4, 40– 1, 44–5, 48, 53, 59–60, 80–2, 85–9, 96–8, 136, 153–4, 158, 163, 179–95, 197–202, 204–11, 213–16, 228–9 in visual art 34–8 Amata 82 ambition 20–1, 24–5, 28, 32–4, 47, 52–3, 65, 97, 104, 105, 107–8 as hubris 24–5, 32, 33, 38, 52, 54, 174 see also Phaethon; Icarus Amor see Eros anabasis see ascent Anacreon 3–7, 191 Anacreontea 3–4, 6 translations from 6 Antisthenes 124n10 Antony, Mark 106, 124, 141–2, 144, 147–8, 162–4, 170–2 see also Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Apelles 35, 38 Aphrodite 30, 68, 69, 151n76, 180–91, 193–4, 196, 198–201, 204–7, 210–13, 215, 223–4 Apollo 34, 42, 68, 117n63, 118, 183, 213 apotheosis 34–8, 40, 44–5, 116–17, 142n52, 211, 216, 223 appearance, false 122–3, 158, 164–5 see also fame as unreliable opinion Appian 102, 107n42, 109, 111n49 Aquinas 144n60

Archelaus of Priene, Apotheosis of Homer 36 Archilochus 191 Arendt, Hannah 126, 134, 154, 155 On Violence 144n59 The Human Condition 126–8, 131, 136–8, 162–3, 167, 169 The Promise of Politics 131n20, 138n41, 161n93, 173–4, 175n124 Arethusa 181, 186 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 45–9, 51 Aristophanes Lysistrata 225n47 The Acharnians 124n10 Aristotle 154 Nicomachean Ethics 128n17 Politics 128n17, 131n20, 139n46, 145n63, 160 Rhetoric 7n11, 129, 137 ascent 14, 16, 19–27, 62, 219–22 see also apotheosis; astral realm; climbing; flight; heaven; soul, progress towards virtue; transcendence Ascoli, A. R. 46n20 Asher, Lyell 25n44 Aspasia 124n10, 148n68 astral realm 21, 28, 31–4, 38–41, 44–5, 62, 97, 215, 217, 219–22 see also flight Atwood, Margaret 121 Augustine 25, 27, 123n8, 123n9, 170 Confessions 16–17, 22, 23, 25–6

Augustus Caesar 22, 34, 47, 58, 60, 67n38, 155n82, 171 Babel 51–2, 129n18 Bacchus 50n28, 213 Backhaus, Birger 115n57 Bain, C. E. 74n50 Bakhtinian chronotopes 67 Baldwin, T. W. 95n10 Baxter, Nathaniel 40 Bažil, Martin 59n10 Bembo, Pietro 24n39 Ben-Amos, Ilana 107n43 Bergren, Ann 125n10, 142n52, 148n69, 150n73, 151n76, 177n27 Bergvall, Åke 17n27 Bernard, John 179n1 Bernstein, Neil 99n25 Bible 31, 50, 51, 53, 65, 123n6, 141n51, 144n60, 153, 159, 169, 175 Billanovich, Giuseppe 16n26 Bion 180–1, 187, 191 Fragment 10 187 Lament for Adonis 181–91, 193–7, 199, 200–1, 204, 205n27, 206–8, 210–13, 215–16, 223–5 see also Lament for Bion birth 57, 90n91, 152, 174n121, 173, 175–6, 199, 200, 212, 216, 227 see also rebirth blindness 34, 54, 134, 150n73

Blissett, William 93n5 blood 14, 29, 92–4, 96–104, 107–12, 152n79, 172, 183, 193–4 and bloodthirst as distinctively Marlovian image 96–101, 114n56, 115, 119 drinking or transfusion as metapoetic figure 93, 98, 101, 114, 117–18 sacrifice 96, 106, 116–20 thirst for 96–9, 108–9, 112, 113, 115 Bloom, Harold 121, 122, 175, 189 Boas, F. S. 102n35, 112n50 Boccaccio, Giovanni 26 Boesky, Amy 152n79 Bold, Michael 79–82 Bradbrook, M. C. 106n40 Braund, Susanna 55n1, 92n3 Brljak, Vladimir 159n88 Brome, Alexander 6 Brown, Ricard Danson 212n35, 229n52 Bruère, R. T. 114n54 Brutus, L. Junius 165 Brutus, M. Junius 103, 106–12, 116, 124, 149, 156–7, 170 Bryskett, Lodowick 107n43, 192n10 Buchanan, George 133 Buckley, Emma 29, 92n3 bucolic see pastoral Budick, Sanford 161n96

Bullough, Geoffrey 103n36 Burrow, Colin 161, 165, 173, 176 Buxton, John 193n10 Caesars Revenge 29, 93, 102–13, 119 Callimachus Epigram 23 52 Calliope 90n91n, 117–19, 191, 212–17 Calypso 177n27 Camões, Luís Vas de, Lusiads 84 Campbell, David 4n3 Campbell, Gordon 134n28 canon, canonisation 32, 34, 36, 38, 86, 88, 205 Capaneus 54 Capitol (hill in Rome) 33 Cassius Dio 102, 125n11, 149n70, 164n102 Cato, M. Porcius (‘the Censor’, d. 159 BCE) 13 Cato, M. Porcius (d. 42 BCE) 111, 115 Cato, M. Porcius Uticensis (‘the Younger’, d. 46 BCE) 100, 111, 115, 163, 215 Cato, M. Porcius (son of Cato Uticensis, d. 42 BCE) 163 ‘Cavaliers’ (royalist) 135n34 cento 8–9, 59, 82n69 Chaos 48–9, 80, 113, 218 see also dissolution of world or cosmos Chapman, George 102

charisma 93, 95n11, 100 Charles I of England 57, 60, 129, 134 Charles II of England 5, 153n81 Chatterton, Thomas 219–21 Chaucer, Geoffrey 42, 176 House of Fame 31 Cheney, Patrick 42, 95n9, 95n12, 96n17, 97–8, 102n31, 114n55 chivalric romance 135, 138–40, 143–4, 155n82 choral and antiphonal singing 50, 181–2, 185, 186–7, 208 see also merging voices Christ 48, 50, 53, 63, 151n76, 151n77, 152, 153, 161, 173, 205n27 Christianity 17–18, 22, 25, 27, 42, 49, 63n25, 73, 80, 172, 174, 205n27 Cicero 8, 9, 10, 11, 12n20, 15, 125, 147–50, 164–6 De inventione 124n10, 163n100 De republica 215, 220 Epistulae ad familiares 8, 10–11 Phillipics 166 Rhetorica ad Herennium 163n100 Tusculan Disputations I 52n33 Tusc. Disp. V 16n25 Circe 140, 153, 177n27 citizenship 123, 126, 128, 133, 163–4, 172, 174 see also non-citizens; public speech civic society 29, 66–7 retreat from 11, 15, 66–7

see also politics Civil Wars, English 5, 61, 129, 134 Civil Wars, Roman 58, 60–1, 91–120, 147, 149, 156–7, 164–8 Clark, Peter 5n5 Clarke, Adam 123n6 Claudian 31 On the sixth consulship of Honorius 50n27 Cleombrotus of Ambracia 52 Cleopatra 105, 115, 124–5, 139, 141–3, 144, 148, 153, 157, 160, 167, 170–2, 174 see also Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra climbing (hill or mountain) 16, 18, 19, 20–1, 23–6, 33, 52, 53n35 Colclough, David 134n30 Comes, Natalis 199n18 Commonwealth, English 134, 166 community, literary 5–7, 12–16, 22, 86, 88, 180, 220, 222, 228– 9 see also contemporaneity effect; conversation competition see emulation consolation 15n22, 44, 202, 203, 211n32, 216 contemporaneity effect 3, 4, 8–10, 86, 180, 222 see also conversation continuity of matter 200, 218–19 convention and conventionality 63, 111, 179–80, 192, 195, 205n27 see also topoi

conversation allusion, imitation and translation as 1–4, 8–16, 24–9, 56, 81, 93, 121, 163, 175–6 Coren, Pamela 195n13 Cornelius Severus 19 Corns, Thomas N. 76n55 Cotton, Charles (the younger) 6 Cupid see Eros Curran, Stuart 204n26, 218n40 cyclicity of reincarnation 38 of violence 110–11, 113, 119–20 seasonal 180, 183, 186, 199, 207, 215, 219, 223, 224, 225 see also continuity of matter Cycnus 45, 48 Daedalus 39, 53 Dalila 123, 124–5, 139–40, 142, 144, 152, 153, 158, 169, 173 Dante 31, 36, 38, 46–8, 49, 53 Inferno 4 52n31 Inferno 13 47 Inferno 28 47 Paradiso 2–5 46 Paradiso 9 31n1 Daphne 68, 77 Daphnis 182–3, 190 Dares Phrygius 31 Davies, Mark 12, 24n38

Deianira 124n10, 141–2, 170n112 Dekker, Thomas 42 Deleuze, Gilles 123n8 Demerson, Geneviève 87, 89, 90n91 Demosthenes 144n60, 152, 166 Derrida, Jacques 136n35 Dictis Cretensis 31 Dido 47–8, 81–2, 124, 139, 142, 153–4, 155n82 Dilke, O. A. W. 107n41 Diodorus Siculus 7, 9, 79, 177n127 Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro 16, 17, 25–7 diptychs, poetic 28, 56, 61–76, 86–90 ‘virtual diptych’ 76–85 Dis 77 see also Pluto DiSalvo, Jackie 152n79 dissolution 228 evaporation 62, 210 liquefaction 140, 150, 153n80 moral 140 of world or cosmos 103, 111–13, 150, 156 of marriage 151 of soul from body 154 Donne, John 64n28 Donnelly, Philip J. 123n9, 152n77 Dorat, Jean 83–6

Dryden, John 81n66, 153 Du Bellay, Joachim 56, 86 Antiquités de Rome 222 ‘À Pierre de Ronsard’ 87–90 Elegiae 1 88n88 Elegiae 6: Ad P. Ronsardum 87–90 La Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise 86 Regrets 87n82 Dudley, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester 40 Duff, David 229n51, 229n52 Duncan-Jones, E. 64n29, 71n45 Durling, Robert 27n47 Dzelzainis, Martin 137n37, 166n108 Echo 189 Eden, Garden of 73–4, 75n52, 76–9 Eden, Kathy 11n19 elegy (poetry in elegiacs) 70 elegy (death lament) 30, 179–80, 184 for fellow poet 40–45, 134, 179–229 Elijah 46, 51 Elizabeth I of England 135, 156n84, 192 Elysium 4, 30, 40, 41, 42, 52, 99, 112–13, 194, 197, 215 emblems 43–4, 143–4, 147–8, 155, 171 Empedocles 52

emulation 6, 20–1, 24n39, 34, 97, 105–6, 136n34, 189–90 see also hyperbole, Lucanian and Marlovian Enoch 46 Ennius 32, 34 Enterline, Lynn 132n24 Epicurus 32, 39, 53 epyllion 184, 193 Erasmus, Adages 225n48 Erictho 98–9, 119 Eros or Erotes 69–70, 73n49, 181, 184–7, 204–5, 206–8, 216 see also mourning Loves; sexuality and eroticism Erskine-Hill, Howard 114n54 eschatology 44–5, 112, 113 Eurydice 155n82, 181, 194, 216 evaporation see dissolution Eve 135, 151n76, 177n127 Everest, Kelvin 204n25, 211n34, 218, 220n44, 222n45 exploration and trade in the Renaissance 75, 76, 79 Falco, Raphael 203n24 Falconer, Rachel 125n11 fame 20, 24–5, 32–4, 37, 40, 42–3, 46–7, 116, 122, 138, 154, 159, 162, 168, 174, 207, 228 as unreliable opinion 20, 24–5, 38, 47–8, 51 Faria, Thomas de 84 Fates, the 46, 47, 92, 118, 182, 183

Feeney, Denis 55 flight 12, 14, 21–2, 28, 31–54 passim, 72, 73n49, 108 see also ascent flowers 183, 193–6 Ford, Philip 85 Fortune 7, 11, 14–15, 20, 26, 91–2, 97, 111, 116, 228 Fowler, Alastair 77n57, 79n60 Fraunce, Abraham Amyntas 194, 201–2, 223 The Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch 202 freedom 12–15, 93, 110, 126–9, 139, 152, 159, 165, 172, 154, 176 Fulvia (daughter of M. Fulvius Bambalio, d. 40

BCE)

164n102 Gager, William 192n10 Gallus 20, 41, 192 Garber, Marjorie 98n21 Geoffrey of Monmouth 31 gender 29, 128–31, 139–56, 166, 168–72, 174, 225 see also non-citizens ghosts 40, 99n25, 106–7, 112, 114n56, 119 Giants 51, 54 Gill, Roma 92n3, 95n10 Goldberg, Jonathan 199n19 Golden Age, the 74 Gorey, Matthew 84n73 Gorges, Arthur 95n10, 96n14

125, 148,

Gorgias 125n10 Gow, A. S. F. 190n7 Gray, Thomas 53–4 Greek, knowledge of 2, 10, 193n11, 204 Greek composition in the Renaissance 57, 61 Greenblatt, Stephen 98n21 Greene, Thomas 3, 17–18, 25 Greenlaw, Edwin 199n19 Gregory, Tobias 82 Greville, Fulke 156n84 Guibbory, Achsah 130n19 Guido de Columpnis 31 Guillory, John 158n87 Haan, Estelle 56, 57n3, 57n4, 58n7, 59n11, 60n17, 61, 62, 63n24, 66n35, 71n45, 73n49, 75, 76n55, 79n61 Habermas, Jürgen 126 Hades see Underworld, the Hadfield, Andrew 132n21, 133, 134n30, 161, 163, 165 Hale, John K. 76n55, 79n61 Hales, John W. 205n27 Hall, John 6 Hammill, Graham 106n40 Hannay, Margaret 195n13, 202n21 Hannibal 18, 23 Harapha 123, 135, 138, 145

Hardie, Philip 3n2, 25n42, 27–8, 32n2, 32n3, 38n7, 43n16, 50n28, 52n34, 57n4, 80n63, 92n3, 96n16 Hardy, Thomas 209n31 Harrison, Stephen 45n18, 89n88 Harrison, T. P., Jr 193n11 heaven (Christian) 18, 22, 41–2, 44, 50, 52, 196–7 Hector 47 Helen of Troy 124n10, 142n52 Helgerson, Richard 203 Helicon 15, 20, 41, 53, 80 Hell 22, 46–7, 48, 112–13 see also Underworld, the Hellenistic poetry 181, 194, 205n27, 211n32, 216, 228–9 see also Bion; Lament for Bion; Moschus; Theocritus Henrietta Maria, Queen 60 Hera 68, 124n10, 151n76 Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke 40, 45n19, 193, 195n13, 201–2 Hercules 124, 137, 140–3, 160, 162n97, 170n112 choice of 140, 156, 171 Gallicus 124, 143–4, 147, 148n67 Hermes 182 Herodotus 36n5 Herrick, Robert 3–8, 30 Hesperides 4–8 ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’ 3, 6

‘Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’ 7 ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse, calling him to Elizium’ 4 ‘To his Booke’ (multiple poems with this title) 7 ‘To his Muse’ 7n12 ‘To his peculiar friend Master Thomas Shapcott, Lawyer’ 7 ‘To his peculiar friend Sir Edward Fish, Knight Baronet’ 7 ‘To Live Merrily and Trust to Good Verses’ 4 ‘To the Queene’ 7 ‘When he would have his verses read’ 7n12 Hesiod 41, 125n10, 191 Theogony 20, 80, 177n127 Works and Days 177n127 Hinds, Stephen 9, 12n20, 15n22, 28, 78n58, 88n88 Hirtius, Aulus 115 historicism 4, 103, 114, 126–7 Hoefmans, M. 39n8 Hollindale, Peter 142n53, 150nn74–5, 162n98, 171n114 Homer 31, 34, 36, 41, 47, 85–6, 125n10, 126, 191, 213, 214, 217 Hymn to Aphrodite 151n76 Iliad 85, 151n76 Odyssey 1 85, 177n27, 195 Hooley, Dan 95n13 Hopkins, Lisa 93n5, 102 Horace 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 28, 42–3, 85 Ars poetica 52, 85–6 Epistles 1.19 31–2

Odes 1.1 33, 34, 43–4 Odes 1.2 57–61 Odes 1.3 87–8 Odes 1.25 59n14 Odes 2.16 59n14 Odes 2.20 33, 34, 38, 45 Odes 3.25 34 Odes 3.30 32–3, 34, 44, 180 Odes 4.2 33 Satires 1.8 53 Satires 2.6 53n35 Hubbard, Margaret 33n4, 59n13, 59n14, 60n17 Hughes, Merritt Y. 193n11 Humanist scholarship 2–3, 6, 17–18, 25, 67n38, 69, 85 Hunt, Leigh 206 Hyacinthus 194, 200–1 hymn 50, 183, 188, 216, 225 hyperbole, Lucanian and Marlovian 95, 96, 97n19, 98, 99n26, 101, 103, 105, 111, 112, 115 hyper-Virgilianism 81–6 Icarus 33, 39, 53 identification with character from poem or myth 183, 187, 192, 202n23, 205, 214, 216 identification with an earlier author 24–5, 89, 119, 149, 166, 191, 222

identity 122–3, 127, 147, 156–67, 172, 176 see also self, care of the imitation 3, 6, 15, 24, 28, 30, 48, 60, 180, 200, 207, 224, 228–9 immortality 7, 8, 22, 28, 30, 31–4, 38, 40, 42, 44–6, 117, 121, 126, 150, 154, 162, 171–5, 180, 192, 196, 200–204, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229 inspiration, divine 49, 122–3, 126, 135, 144n60, 155n82, 159, 169, 170, 173, 175, 206, 217, 222, 223–5, 227 interdisciplinarity 1–2, 75–6 intertextuality 1, 32–4, 59, 207, 228–9 et passim see also allusion; conversation; hyper-Virgilianism; imitation Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique Apotheosis of Homer 34–8 Apotheosis of Napoleon I 37–8 Inwood, Brad 14n21 Ippolito d’Este 47 Jablonski, Steven 83n70 Jackson, H. J. 205n27 Jacob 50 Jacobson, Miriam 76n54 Jaeckle, Daniel 63n24, 63n25, 66n34, 69n40 John, Saint 46–8, 51 Jones, Angela McShane 5n5 Jonson, Ben 4, 5, 122 Josephus 31

Julius Caesar 11, 14, 29, 60, 91–120, 133–4, 149, 163–4, 172 Junius, Hadrianus 43 Juno see Hera Jupiter 33, 34, 37, 48, 50n27, 68, 91–2, 97, 106, 108 see also Zeus Juvenal 39n9, 81n66 Kahn, Victoria 127, 137n37, 144n58, 147, 151n75 Kania, Raymond 192n9 Kaplan, Robert 64n28 katabasis 28, 31, 49, 214 see also Underworld, the Keats, John 179, 204–6, 212, 227–8 Endymion 204–5 ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’ 204 ‘Lamia’ 223n46 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 204, 209, 219 ‘Ode to Psyche’ 208 see also Shelley, ‘Adonais’ Kennedy, George A. 170n111 Kermode, Frank 77n56 Keuls, Eva C. 225n47 Kewes, Paulina 93n7, 120n65 Kilgour, Maggie 55n1, 143n54, 153n81 kisses 32, 187–8, 190–91, 193, 199, 205, 210, 224 Kocher, Paul 112n51

Kucich, Greg 218n40 Kuester, Martin 159n88 Kyd, Thomas 102–3, 112 Labriola, Albert C. 135 Lactantius, Divine Institutes 52 Laird, Andrew 229n52 Lamb, Mary Ellen 202n21 Lambin, Denys 85 Lament for Bion (attributed to Moschus) 179–83, 186–92, 194– 7, 204–8, 210–17, 219, 223–5, 228 Latin composition in the Renaissance 2, 8–12, 15–18, 22–7, 28, 55–76, 114, 117–19 see also translation Lazarus, Micha 193n11 Lee, Alexander 27 Legouis, P. 64n29, 71n45 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 134n29, 139n42, 161n96 Liapi, Lena 135n34 Lieb, Michael 125n11, 135n31, 149n72, 150n73 Lilburne, John 126, 130n19 Linus 41, 42 liquefaction see dissolution Livy 18, 131, 137 Locrine 102 locus amoenus 64, 67–70, 74, 77–9, 196–8, 225

Lodge, Thomas 102 Lollius 31 Loraux, Nicole 142n52 Lovelace, Richard 6 Lowell, James Russell 209n31 Lucan, 29, 31, 206, 212, 219–21 Bellum Civile 29, 91–120, 133, 213 B.C. 1 93–104, 110n46 B.C. 5 91–3 B.C. 6 98–9, 119, 215–16 B.C. 7 101, 103–4, 107n41, 112, 116n60 B.C. 8 116 B.C. 9 96n16, 215, 216, 220, 221 B.C. 10 115 Catachthonion 214 Orpheus 214 see also hyperbole; repetition; Statius, Silvae 2.7 Lucian 124n10 Lucretius 18, 24, 32, 39–40, 52, 53, 80, 200 De rerum natura 1 40, 199 De rerum natura 2 40n10 De rerum natura 3 39 De rerum natura 4 40n10 De rerum natura 5 40 see also continuity of matter

Lynch, Helen 29, 121n2, 126n13, 128n17, 130n19, 131n20, 132n22, 132n23, 135n31, 135n33, 136, 137n40, 139n45, 144n59, 145n62, 146n63, 150n73, 151n76, 155n82, 157n87, 170n113 McCabe, Richard 41, 44, 195n13 McConnell, Sharon 102n34 McDowell, Nicholas 5n6 McGill, Scott 59n10 McGrail, Mary Ann 127n14, 134 Machiavelli, Niccolo 131, 137, 154, 160 McLaughlin, Martin 15n23 MacLean, Gerald 92n3 MacLean, Iain 146n65 McQueen, William A. 61, 70n44, 72n48, 73n49 Maecenas 33 Maes, Yanick 114n55 Malamud, Martha 213n36 Manakidou, Flora P. 181n3 Marcus, Leah 5n5 Margoliouth, H. M. 64n29, 71n45 Marlowe, Christopher 29, 92–120 Doctor Faustus 103, 112–13 Hero and Leander 94 Lucans First Booke 29, 93–102, 114, 119 Massacre at Paris, The 108

Tamburlaine 29, 96–103, 105–6, 113–15 1 Tamb. 92–3, 96n17, 96n18, 97n19, 98n22, 104–5, 115n59 2 Tamb. 96n17, 97n19 see also blood; hyperbole Marotti, Arthur 5n4 Mars 68 Martindale, Charles 77n56 Marvell, Andrew 56–7 Ad Regum Carolum Parodia 57–61 ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ 56n2, 57 ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ 59n11 ‘Bermudas’ 75 Bludius et Corona 61n21 Dignissimo Suo Amico Doctori Witty 61n21 Epigramma in Duos Montes Amosclivium 61n21 Hortus 28, 63–75 In Eandem [Effigiem Oliveri Cromwell] Reginae Sueciae Transmissam 57 ‘On a Drop of Dew’ 61–3, 75–6, 210 Ros 61–3, 75–6 ‘The Garden’ 28, 63–75 ‘To His Worthy Friend Doctor Witty’ 61n21 ‘Upon Blood’s attempt to steal the crown’ 61n21 ‘Upon the Hill and Grove at

Bilbrough’ 61n21 Mary, Queen of Scots 133 Masters, Jamie 98n23, 101n30 Maxwell, Catherine 150n73 May, Thomas 29, 91–4 A Continuation of Lucans Historicall Poem 114–20 Cleopatra 114 Lucan’s Pharsalia … Englished 95n10, 96n14, 114–15 Supplementum Lucani 114, 117–20 Mazzotta, Guiseppe 11n19 Mercury 60, 117n63 see also Hermes merging voices 50, 191, 195 see also choral and antiphonal singing; identification with an earlier author metamorphosis 33, 38, 45, 48, 68, 193–6, 200–1 see also continuity of matter metapoetic gestures 59–60, 65n31, 73–4, 97, 185, 187–8, 194–5, 201 metempsychosis 32, 38, 98, 200 Milton, John 28, 29, 48–54, 56, 57, 206, 209, 212, 217, 224 ‘An Epitaph on Shakespeare’ 134, 175 A Readie and Easie Way 125, 149, 166 Areopagitica 143n55, 149 commonplace book 135n34

‘Comus’ 149 Epitaphium Damonis 80 ‘Il Penseroso’ 209 Paradise Lost 28, 76–83, 126, 154n81, 159n88, 206, 209, 212 Par. Lost 1 51, 79–83 Par. Lost 2 49n25, 145n63 Par. Lost 3 48–53, 209 Par. Lost 4 76–9, 154n82 Par. Lost 7 209 Par. Lost 9 135, 138n42, 209 Par. Lost 12 51 Paradise Regained 140n47, 151n76, 152n77, 154n81, 159n88 Poems … Both English and Latin 61, 76, 80, 134n28 Prolusions 149 ‘Samson Agonistes’ 29–30, 121–6, 132, 135–45, 150–4, 156– 63, 166–9, 171–5 Sonnet XVI 152 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 125, 149 Miner, Earl 83n70 Moeck, William 83n70 Mommsen, Theodore 128n16 Montiglio, Silvia 22n34 monuments (architectural) 32–4, 38, 43–4, 51–2, 156, 168–9, 171, 175, 180, 227–8 moon 46–9, 51, 135, 146, 172n117 More, Alexander 135

mortality 54, 117, 160–3, 180–81, 188–9, 196, 198–200, 207, 215–16, 219, 221 see also apotheosis; immortality; metempsychosis; suicide Moschus 229 ‘Fugitive Love’ 198n17 see also Lament for Bion Mosely, Charles 155n83, 171 Moses 80 mourning birds 180, 181, 186 cattle 180, 182 gods 180, 182, 183 landscape 180, 181, 182, 191, 195, 213, 217 Loves 181–2, 184, 186, 204, 206–8, 217 Muses 117, 206, 208–9, 211–15, 217 Mulciber see Vulcan Murray, Oswyn 4n3 Musaeus 41, 80n64 Muse, heavenly 135, 155n82 see also Urania Muses 20, 40, 42, 80, 90n91, 118, 213, 223 see also Calliope; Urania Najemy, John M. 11n19 Narcissus 200–1 necromancy 3, 98–9, 121 Nedham, Marchamont 126, 130n19

neoplatonism 63n25, 65, 72, 73n49, 196 see also Platonism Nero 117–20, 160, 215, 220n41, 228 Newton, Thomas 83n70 Nicholson, Catherine 132n24 nightingales 181, 184, 186–7, 191, 204, 205n27, 208–9 Nisbet, R. G. M. 33n4, 59n13, 59n14, 60n17 non-citizens 128–31, 133, 139 Nohrnberg, James 225n48 Norbrook, David 93n6, 95n11, 114, 117, 119, 137n37 Notopoulos, James A. 211n32, 211n33 nymphs 183, 202 see also Arethusa O’Connell, Michael 193n11 Octavian 148n68, 167 see also Augustus Odysseus 177n27 O’Hara, James 82n69 Olympus 41 Omphale 124, 140–2 Ong, Walter 169–70 Oram, W. 195n13 oratory see public speech Order of the Black Ribband, the see Stanley, Thomas Orientalism 139, 145n63

Orpheus 41, 42, 149, 150n73, 155n82, 164n102, 181, 191, 192, 194, 202n23, 212–14, 216, 217 Osiris 149 Overton, Richard 126, 130n19 Ovid 15n22, 18, 19, 22, 31, 53, 71n45, 80 Amores 2.1 69 Amores 3.9 69, 192 Ars amoris 39 Ex Ponto II.x 15n22 Ex Ponto III.iii 69 Fasti II 124n10, 141n50 Heroides IX 142n52 Metamorphoses 20n33, 26, 194 Met. I 38, 68 Met. II 39–40, 48 Met. IV 50n28 Met. VIII 39 Met. X 194 Met. XV 22, 32–4, 38, 80n63 Tristia II 20n33 Tristia V.xiii 15n22 Ovidianism 63, 67–9, 72 Paleit, E. J. 92n3, 93n6, 95n10, 95n11, 99, 100n27, 101, 114, 116n61, 117, 119, 120n67 Pan 68, 183, 189, 190n7

panegyric 34, 38, 42, 45, 47–8, 57–61 see also hymn; praise of literary predecessors Pannen, Imke 103n36 Paradise see Eden, Garden of; heaven (Christian) Paradise, Earthly (in Ariosto) 46–8 Paradise of Fools (in Milton) 48–53 Parker, Henry 126, 130n19, 146n63 Parker, Patricia 139n42 Parnassus 39 parodia 58, 70 Paschalis, Michael 191n8 Passe, Alison 156n84 pastoral 30, 70, 80, 180, 192, 208, 229 pastoral elegy (death lament) 30, 40–5, 179–97, 201–12, 217–25, 228–9 patronage 5, 28, 47, 166, 202 Paul, St 141n51, 144n60, 152, 153, 170, 175 Pearson, Jacqueline 103n36 Penelope 177n27 Pericles 124n10, 148n68, 169, 175 periodisation 2n1, 30 Persephone 77, 118, 180–81, 183, 186 Petrarch, Francesco 8–27, 30 Africa 25 Eclogues 1 25 Familiarium rerum libri 8

1.1 10, 12 4.1 (Ascent of Mont Ventoux) 16–27 4.4 25 12.8 15–16 23.19 15 24.3 9 24.5 9 24.10 8 24.12 9–10 Secretum 25 Phaethon 39–40, 48, 53 Philip II of Macedon 18, 23, 166 phoenix 122, 152, 161–2, 173–4 Picone, M. 26n46 Pigman, G. W., III 195n13 Pindar 33, 191 Plato 52, 161n93, 173–4, 212, 217, 225–7, 229 Apologia 41 epigram (misattributed to Plato), Greek Anthology vii.670 221 Menexenus 124n10 Phaedo 45n17, 215, 217 Phaedrus 10n16, 197, 217, 223, 225–8 Republic 161n93, 200 Symposium 3, 124n10, 211 Timaeus 215

Platonism 14n21, 22, 123n8, 153, 196–7, 199, 201, 205n27, 211, 220–1, 222n45, 223–4 see also neoplatonism Playfair, Thomas 45 Pléiade, the 86, 88 Plutarch 102, 106n40, 111n49, 115, 124n10, 125, 141n49, 141n51, 146n63, 146n64, 149, 164 Pluto 118 see also Dis politics 5–7, 29–30, 34, 38, 60–1, 92n3, 93–4, 100, 103, 114, 121, 123, 126, 131–6, 160, 161n93, 173–4, 176, 205–6, 209 see also public speech; public sphere; republicanism; tyranny and tyrannicide Pompeius Magnus 11, 96n17, 103–4, 116, 215–16 Pompeius, Sextus 98 Poole, William 103n36 Power, Thomas 81–2 praise of literary predecessors 13–15, 25n43, 31, 33, 40–5, 86–9, 192 see also elegy for fellow poet Priapus 53, 182, 183 Price, Henry 192n10 print publication 4–5, 40, 131–2, 225 private or domestic sphere 128–9, 138–9, 144, 166–7 procreation and propagation 199–202, 219, 224, 226–7 see also birth; rebirth

Propertius 87–8 prophecy 98–9, 103n36, 123n6, 144n60, 158 Proserpine see Persephone Protesilaus 216 Psyche 73n49 public speech 29, 121, 123, 126–9, 133, 135–6, 138, 143–9, 152, 163–70, 176 public sphere 127–9, 136–7, 139, 163–4 Pucci, Joseph 88n88 Pugh, Syrithe 7n10, 15n22, 55n1, 120n67, 155n82, 195n14 puns 21–2, 34, 35, 44, 45, 59, 62–3, 65, 66, 70n44, 71–2, 80, 227 Putney Debates, the 126, 129 Pythagoras 38 Pythagoreans 52 Pythia 177n27 Quillen, Carol 17n27, 27n47 Quint, David 46n20, 48, 53, 154n81 Quintilian 39n9, 84n76, 163n100 Quitslund, Jon A. 202 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann 151n76 Rainsborough, Thomas 130n19 Ramalho, Erick 55n1 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 34–6, 38 ‘Parnassus’ 34, 36 ‘School of Athens’ 34

reading 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12–16, 23, 25, 28, 32, 38, 86, 176, 223–5 see also reception; writing rebirth 2n1, 98, 150, 152, 161, 171, 173–4, 180, 200 see also birth; metempsychosis; phoenix reception 39, 127, 132–3 recusatio 33–4 Reece, Steve 195n15 Reed, Joseph 64n28 refrain 182, 186, 187, 206 repetition 94, 103, 110–11, 113–17, 119 see also allusion; cyclicity; Echo; refrain; ritual republicanism 29–30, 93–4, 95, 114, 116, 119, 126–7, 129, 131–4, 137, 145n61, 160, 163, 166, 168, 171, 174, 176, 206 resurrection 40, 93, 98–9, 153, 175, 205n27 see also Underworld, return from the Restoration (of English monarchy, 1660) 134, 149, 153n81, 166 Revard, Stella P. 6, 143n54, 143n56, 152n78, 158n86, 209n30 Ricks, Christopher 76n55, 77n56 Rist, Thomas 161n95 ritual 161n95, 172, 183–4, 186, 225 see also blood sacrifice Roche, Paul 96n17 Roche, T. P., Jr 196n16 Rockwell, Kiffin A. 61, 70n44 Roe, Nicholas 206n29 Rogers, Neville 211n32

Roman Catholicism 52, 138, 161n95 romance see chivalric romance Ronsard, Pierre de 56, 83–90 Franciade 83–6, 88–9 Rosenblum, R. 36n5 Rosenmeyer, Patricia 4n3 Rowland, Richard 142n52, 170n112 royalism 5–7 Rumrich, John P. 50n26 Sacks, Peter 211n32 Salmasius 135 Sappho 191 Satan 48–51, 77, 79, 81, 135, 140n47, 144, 151n76, 164 satire 28, 45–53 Sauer, Elizabeth 129n18 Schanzer, Ernest 103n36 Schiesaro, Alessandro 39, 53 Schiffman, Zachary 17n27, 24n37 Scodel, Joshua 5n5 Secundus, Johannes 6 Sedley, David 14n21 self, care of the 11–12, 15, 26–7 see also identity; soul, progress towards virtue Seneca 9, 10, 12, 29–30, 107n43, 142n52, 160–1 Ad Lucilium epistulae morales 10–11

8 13, 17, 18, 20 11 13 12 27 25 13 29 20 31 26 32 12, 26–7 33 13 38 10n16 39 24 62 15 64 13–15 65 13 67 12 77 131n20 79 19–27 84 15 88 19n32 102 25n43 104 12, 13, 23 118 11 Consolatio ad Helviam 15n22 Consolatio ad Polybium 15n22 Hercules Furens 143n55 Natural Questions 19, 23, 24n40, 39n9 servitude 131, 139

see also freedom; non-citizens Severn, Joseph 227 Sexby, Edward 130n19 sexuality and eroticism 29, 68–70, 140, 149–51, 204, 211–12, 217, 222n45, 225 Shafer, Robert 179n1 Shakespeare, William 29–30, 53, 121, 125, 132–4, 175–6 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 132, 139 Antony and Cleopatra 121, 132, 136, 140–2, 144–8, 150–1, 153–6, 161–3, 166–7, 170–2, 174–5 Coriolanus 121, 145n61 Hamlet 121, 165 Julius Caesar 103, 121, 132, 136, 145n61, 149, 156–7, 161n95, 163–8, 170, 172–3 Macbeth 121 Richard II 103n36 Richard III 121 Sonnets 176–8 Titus Andronicus 121 Shapiro, James 95n9 Sharpe, Kevin 126–7 Sharrock, Alison 39n8 Shawcross, John T. 79n62, 81n66 Shelley, Mary 228 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 30, 179–80, 192 ‘Adonais’ 30, 179, 202n23, 204–12, 217–24, 227–9

‘Defence of Poetry’ 229 ‘Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Adonis, from the Greek of Bion’ 204 ‘Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Bion, from the Greek of Moschus’ 204 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ 224–5, 227 ‘To Stella, from the Greek of Plato’ 221 Shelton, A. C. 36n6 Sherburne, Edward 6 Shore, Daniel 135n33, 139n42, 149 Shrank, Cathy 176n126 Sibyl, Cumaean 49, 98 Sidney, Algernon 126, 139n46, 145n63 Sidney, Mary see Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke Sidney, Sir Philip 40, 135, 179, 192, 194n12, 201–2, 219–21 Apologie for Poetrie 203 Arcadia 203 Astrophil and Stella 40, 192, 194, 196 Sidney-Pembroke Psalter 42 Silverman, E. B. 204n25, 205n27, 211n33, 218n40 simile 122–3, 132, 158–62, 196 see also appearance, false; identity Skinner, Quentin 132–3, 137n37, 163–4 slavery see servitude Smith, Eric 211n32

Smith, Nigel 60n17, 63n26, 72n47, 74n50, 75n52, 76n54, 129n18 Smuts, Malcolm 120n65 Socrates 10n16, 41, 124n10, 126, 148n68, 161, 173–4, 175, 177, 217, 225–7 Sol 39 Solomon 124n10 Sophocles 126, 141n50, 142n50, 170n112 soul and body 11, 14–17, 21–3, 38, 73n49, 200, 205n27, 217, 220– 1, 224–5 progress towards virtue or God 16, 17, 18, 20–7, 49, 63 departing or transmitted with last breath 32, 190–91, 193, 199, 210 writing as image or receptacle of 12, 14–15, 32, 38 see also immortality; Elysium; Underworld, the; heaven Spenser, Edmund 179–80, 204 Amoretti and Epithalamion 203 ‘Astrophel’ 179, 192–7, 199–204, 223–5 ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’ 203 ‘Teares of the Muses’ 212n35 The Faerie Queene 42, 132, 203, 206, 225 FQ II.xii 140n47, 153 FQ III.vi 197–202, 217–19, 220, 225 The Ruines of Rome 222 ‘The Ruines of Time’ 40–45, 202n23, 212n35 Spenserianism 158, 176

Squarzafico, Girolamo 11 Stanley, Thomas 5 ‘A Register of Friends’ 5–6 as editor and translator 6 and the Order of the Black Ribband 5–6 Statius 31 Silvae 2.7: Genethliacon Lucani 117, 192, 202n23, 211–17, 220 Steane, J. B. 95–6 Stesichorus 125n10 Stoicism 11, 13–14, 15n22, 20–4, 52, 160, 166, 172, 215 Suetonius 106n40 suicide 29, 52, 104, 111n48, 115, 121–2, 126, 136, 141, 142n52, 150–57, 160–7, 170–5, 223 Sulpitius 95n10, 115 swans 33, 38, 44–8, 51 Sychaeus 154, 155n82 Symonds, John Addington 101 symposia 3–4 syrinx 68 Tacitus 12, 142n52 Takada, Yasunari 149n71 Tartarus 99 Tasso, Torquato 53 theatre as political art 128, 169 Theocritus 181, 191, 228, 229

Idylls 180 Id. 1 182–3, 186, 190, 195 Id. 7 182–3 Id. 15 183–8, 198, 204, 207–8, 215, 225 Thucydides 169, 175n22 Tibullus 192 topoi 7–8, 69, 78, 79, 131n20, 133 see also locus amoenus transcendence 7, 12, 15n22, 32, 44, 48, 62, 65, 72–3, 86, 197, 211, 212, 221, 224, 228 see also ascent; flight; neoplatonism; soul and body transcendent marriage 151, 158, 162, 171, 173 translation 6, 28, 56, 58, 61–89, 204, 207 and the untranslatable 72–9 Tribe of Ben, the 5 Trinacty, Christopher 19n33 tyranny and tyrannicide 93, 98, 107, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 119, 120, 128–31, 134, 139, 143, 145n61, 147, 150, 160, 164, 166, 171, 176, 215 Underworld, the (Hades) 9, 27–8, 31, 52, 99, 113, 142, 183, 185– 6, 191, 197 return from 31, 49, 155n82, 181, 183, 186, 188–9, 191, 208, 214–17 see also Hell; katabasis Urania 207–9, 211–12, 217, 222, 224

see also Muse, heavenly Valerius Maximus 26 Van Dam, Harm-Jan 213n36 Vaucluse 15–16, 30 vengeance 60, 94, 104, 106–8, 110, 111n47, 115, 120 Ventoux, Mont 16, 18, 24, 16–27 passim Venus see Aphrodite Virgil 15, 18, 19, 25, 26, 31, 32, 36, 38, 47–8, 50, 53, 87–9, 214 Ecl. 5 40–1, 45 Ecl. 6 20, 41, 202n23 Ecl. 9 64n29 Ecl. 10 192, 195n14 Geo. 2 18n28, 24 Geo. 3 39 Geo. 4 72n47, 181n2 Aen. 28, 85, 88 Aen. 1 45n18, 72n47, 78n59, 81–5, 111n48, 154n81 Aen. 4 33, 43, 81–2 Aen. 6 41, 49, 89, 153 Aen. 7 82, 84n76 Aen. 8 50, 51 Aen. 10 45, 48 see also hyper-Virgilianism Vulcan 51, 68 Waller, G. F. 195n13

Walwyn, William 126, 130n19 Ward, Allyna E. 93n5, 100n28 Watson, Thomas, Amyntas 194, 201–2, 223 Wasserman, Earl 179n1, 205n27, 211n32, 220n44, 223n46 Webster, John 29, 103, 114 White, Newman Ivey 211n32 Whitlock, William 192n10 Whitney, Geffrey 43 Wilcox, Amanda 11n17 Williams, Gareth D. 15n24, 22n34, 23n36, 24n39, 24n40 Wilson, Thomas 150n73, 163n100 Witt, Ronald 11, 25n45 Wittreich, J. A. 143n54, 161n96, 170n111 Worden, Blair 132 writing 7, 12–15, 224–8 see also reading Zak, Gur 11n19 Zenocrate 105 zero 64 Zeus 36 see also Jupiter Zumkeller, A. 26n46 Zwicker, Stephen 126–7