Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form [1 ed.] 0268031061, 9780268031060

Citation preview

Gregory Heyworth

“Desiring Bodies answers the question that might dog comparative literature as a discipline, i.e., ‘so what?’ In a bravura display of cultural and linguistic range, Heyworth turns his own supple, Ovidian intelligence to Ovidian irruptions from within the civilizing project of romance. Heyworth writes with intense literary inwardness, adroitly turned learning, and pitch-perfect prose.” —James Simpson, Harvard University

“Gregory Heyworth’s Desiring Bodies is a highly original study. It is also very daring—breathtakingly so, at times—in its deep engagement with major canonical writers and texts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from twelfth-century Latin comedy to Milton’s Paradise Lost. His remarkable essay is achieved within a stimulating cultural and artistic exegesis of a single Ovidian line in which Heyworth finds his own large subject—the famous first line of the Metamorphoses, in which the poet announces the intention to tell ‘of forms changed into new bodies.’” — John Fleming, Princeton University “Ambitious in its aims, convincing in its arguments, and frequently surprising in its readings, Desiring Bodies asks us to reconsider how literary works both respond to and adapt the remains of the literary past. By establishing Ovid as the defining figure of formal metamorphoses across literary history, Heyworth opens new possibilities for imagining literary history as a history of literary form.” —Jennifer Summit, Stanford University

The first comparative, diachronic study of romance form in many years, Desiring Bodies is a persuasive and important cultural history that demonstrates Ovid’s pervasive influence not only on the poetics but on the politics of the medieval and early modern Western tradition. Gregory Heyworth is associate professor of English at the University of

Desiring Bodies

“Gregory Heyworth’s Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form is a wide-ranging, impressively learned, first-rate study with a provocative and weighty central argument.” —Monika Otter, Dartmouth College

Heyworth

Desiring Bodies Ovidian Romance and theCult of Form

Desiring Bodies

Ovidian Romance and the

Cult of Form

Mississippi.

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN 46556 undpress.nd.edu

Cover art: Correggio’s Jupiter and Io (GG 274). Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien. Cover design: Margaret Gloster

Heyworth.indd 1

Gregory Heyworth

5/18/09 12:13:28 PM

desiring bodies

Desiring Bodies Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form

m G r e g o ry H e y w o rt h

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heyworth, Gregory, 1967–   Desiring bodies : Ovidian romance and the cult of form / Gregory Heyworth.     p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-268-03106-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-268-03106-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism  2. Literature, Medieval—Roman influences.  3. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.— Influence.  4. Human body in literature.  5. Desire in literature. 6. Romances—History and criticism.  7. Romances, English—History and criticism.  8. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700— History and criticism.  I. Title.   PN681.5.H49   2009   809'.933561—dc22 2009017561 This book is printed on recycled paper.

Contents



Acknowledgments and Note on Translation

vii



Polemical Preface

ix



Introduction

1

Pa rt I.   The Sociology of Romance 1 Hunting for Civilization: Marie de France and the Sociology of Romance

25

2 Economies of Romance: Systems of Value in Chrétien de Troyes

59

3 States of Union: Maiestas, Marriage, and the Politics of Coercion in the Canterbury Tales

103

Pa rt II .   Romance Form and Formality 4 Missing Bodies and Changed Forms: Literal Metamorphosis in Petrarch’s Rime sparse

179

5 Playing for Time: Generic Disunities and Ludic Dimensions in Romeo and Juliet

229

vi  Contents

6 Legends of the Fall: Epic Flights and Indecorous Descents in Paradise Lost

261



List of Abbreviations

295



Notes

297



Bibliography

325



Index

349

Acknowledgments

Several people have read and commented on this book in various stages of its ontogeny. The following list gives them public exemption from my follies and gratitude for their wisdom: John Fleming, Earl Miner, Larry Danson, Robert Hanning, T. P. Roche, Ivo Kamps, and Rosette Liberman. I am grateful as well to the anonymous ­readers from the University of Notre Dame Press. On matters classical, I owe debts to Jamie Masters and Kirk Zavieh. Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared as articles in Neophilologus (vol. 84, 2000), Yearbook of English Studies (vol. 30, 2000), and Romania (vol. 120, 2002), and I wish to thank the editors and publishers for permission to reprint. For everything above and beyond the commas, I owe my wife, Sandra Knispel. This book is dedicated to the memory of Earl Miner.

Note on Translation I have attempted, as far as possible, to use standard English translations of texts, primary and secondary. For Ovid and the Latin classics, for example, I have used the Loeb. The translations from Old French are my own. On occasion, I have needed to correct translations from other languages in available editions or make my own. For that reason, I have provided the original, either in the text or the notes, for non-English sources.

vii

Polemical Preface

A preface, it seems to me, is an appropriate place to claim what a book is and does, to warn of what it isn’t and doesn’t, and to dispel misconceptions of how it does and aims to do. This book does not contribute to studies of classical influence in the traditional sense. It does not survey sources and analogues. The archeology of literary allusion falls outside its province. Stones are left unturned. While this book negotiates passages of literature at close quarters, it discovers in them issues of intellectual history and social and generic form. At its broadest, this is a history of what Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a collaborative fantasy between society and the literature of civic values that shapes and provides the material grounds of culture. For Elias, the locus of this process lay in courtesy manuals. For me it lies in romance, a genre that absorbs from Ovidian models a struggle between the desire for individual self-realization and the desire for group identity, between inclusion and exclusion, between the love of the body as a material thing and as a synecdoche of the larger body of society. The animating theory of this book turns on the odd contest in the first sentence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses between the terms corpus and forma, which function as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity. Their thematic importunity and connection to Ovid’s perpetuum carmen, however, also suggest an anxiety underlying the work, a sense that formal cohesion, societal or poetic, cannot truly exist or that if it does exist it cannot long endure. If the Metamorphoses teaches one lesson, it is that the defining moment of humanness realizes a reversion to animalism. As the bodies of Ovid’s protagonists devolve, so too do the associational bonds that limn our collective humanity, ix

  Polemical Preface

leaving the individual to expire in solitude and the collective in anomie. Desiring Bodies confronts this anxiety of flux and metamorphosis in social and generic forms as an existential condition of romance. The peril of Ovidian romance, however, is that to understand it, to be its mimic or critic, is to participate in its formal consequences. Just as the Metamorphoses was criticized for its ambiguity of genre, its indecorum and resistance to traditional civic forms and formalities, so this book absorbs into its own structure the romance fear of formal cohesion. Indeed, the very need for this prologue betrays my own anxiety that chapters covering the works of authors over six centuries cannot satisfactorily cohere under so catholic a rubric as romance. I am assuaged, however, encouraged even, that for Chaucer, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton at least, that same Ovidian fear of formal incoherence is the weak force holding their literary universes together. At its most polemical, this book attempts to redefine the grounds and assumptions of cultural history practiced on and through literature, a medium that historians, and especially Marxist historians, have chivvied into the narrow fit of antirealism. In his general introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx frames a distinction between an idealist and a materialist “history of civilization,” the former of which indulges in a “mythology” of societal origins (he cites Proudhon as an example). This mythology, he argues, drapes the facts and figures of human association in spurious teleology, substituting metaphors for material in its earliest accounts and inventing a predicate that he elegantly terms a “phantasierende locus communis.”1 The only historical spoor of the polity, for Marx, is material production; it alone records the energies of society and cultural value as measurable artifacts. Nor is Marx’s vexation with an unempirical historiography of civilization unjustified as long as we accept his premise that cultural history is the story of a social collectivity and that society, in its collective singularity, is the infissile nucleus of culture. Reasonable as such an assumption may seem—no less an authority than Aristotle, after all, defined man as a politikon zoon— ­collective forms are not civilization’s only conceivable predicates. In the Metamorphoses’ opening line, the phrase “forms changed into new bodies” is problematic enough for translators that they have, with only a few recent exceptions, reversed the position of the two main quantities to make the sentence more comprehensible. In fact, ­Ovid’s formula is deliberately problematic and momentously inverted. Here,

Polemical Preface  xi

for the first time in the history of philosophy, bodies serve as the predicates of form. What the Ovidian history of civilization cozens us to imagine is a culture constituted of individual bodies whose experiences are irreducibly idiosyncratic and resistant to collection in any solidary abstraction, social or poetic, other than one that defines itself by resistance to collection (i.e., flux) or form (i.e., metamorphosis). As agents of culture, Ovidian protagonists behave as free radicals eroding the body politic, or rather the notion that human identity is by default communal. Their individual stories of desire and suffering, grounded in the eccentric phenomenology of sensual experience, deconstruct ( pace Marx)2 the mythology of communalism. The Roman Empire at the end of the Metamorphoses, seemingly secure in the propaganda of diversity in unity, soldered together by Vergil’s epic claims of communal identity and epitomized in the cult of an emperor-god, Augustus, who had publicly traded body for numen, is instead shown to rest on a foundation of glass crazed by irony. Fragile and entropic, human civilization in the Metamorphoses returns to the ineluctable primitivism from which it only mimes its evolution: social forms are for Ovid mere formalities concealing a feral nature that reflexively resists association. Culture is a history of pretense. A shuddering crash, similar to the ones rehearsed in microcosm in each individual loss of humanity in the Metamorphoses, impends for the larger myth of Roman civilization just offstage. And if culture is myth, myths must be the facts of culture. Ovid is the Genius—in the Roman religious sense—of this study because he is perhaps the first and, along with Oscar Wilde, much the best historian of culture. And let me be clear: cultural history is an account not of how things were but of how people desired them to be. Thus Ovid may be understood as the historian of those fictions a society tells about itself in order to believe it is civilized. Like Catullus, who preceded him, and Petronius, who followed him, Ovid is a chronicler of urbanity, of self-conscious gesture, of illicit desire, of moral turpitude, of aesthetic ideals, of political dissidence. Specifically, this book tells the story of how the Ovidian cultus, a social and aesthetic ideology of urban refinement in Augustan Rome, located as much in Ovid’s idea of the body as in the body of his work, became the object of conflicted desire in a Christian Europe hungry for secular sophistication but chary of irreligion. I approach the medieval and early modern reception of Ovid’s cultus by way of intertextual readings in a series of works that can be

xii  Polemical Preface

called romances, some typical of the genre and others problematically typical: Marie de France’s Lais, Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès and Perceval, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Petrarch’s Rime sparse, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. My reasons for choosing romance as the focus of a study of cultural reception are several. First, there is its historical character. Romance is the first site of negotiation in the Middle Ages between poetic and practical language, social practice and societal ideal, locating it in a historically coherent evolution of vernacular language and mores. From the medieval Latin romanice, meaning “in the Romanic languages,” romance was literature for common consumption written not in classical Latin but in the bastard tongues of the former provinces and designed to medieval and Renaissance popular tastes. It is a forum pitched at a level of cultural discourse and social engagement somewhere between the New Yorker and Hello! As such, romance furnishes the best portrait, not of popular life, to be sure, but of contemporary vogue and middlebrow pretension. Second, there is a curricular coherence to the influences upon it. Romance is uniquely pervious to the ideology and rhetoric of one author before all others. Its other main classical or classicizing influences besides Ovid—Cicero, Vergil, Boethius, Augustine, Plato, Aristotle—serve largely to amplify or reply to Ovidian themes and topics already in play. Third, and perhaps most important for the argument of this book, because romance begs the question of form, because it shifts its narrative registers between epic and elegiac, it is the genre that best comprehends Ovid’s notions of metamorphosis and the fundamental instability literature shares with culture. This last point needs further elaboration. Histories of influence traditionally begin by identifying a characteristic set of meanings, a topos or rhetorical technique in a textual passage to which later texts and textual traditions reach back and grasp across time regardless of cultural changes at the point of reception. In other words, influence studies assume that because rhetoric exists in an extrahistorical aesthetic continuity, a text’s meanings, to the extent that they are crafted by rhetoric, remain stable. There are two problems with that conception, one theoretical, to which I shall recur briefly, and another local to the writing of Ovid alone. True enough, Ovid’s signature topoi and rhetorical techniques are easily recognizable and have been universally imitated. But because the Metamorphoses celebrates the uniqueness of

Polemical Preface  xiii

individual experience, the eccentricity of human psychology, because it operates in a liminal space among forms and genres and ever in the penumbra of irony, no stable set of meanings can be distilled from it even in its own age and cultural context. Where Vergilian epic motives reflect a politics of conviction, Ovidian romance motives, like desire itself, reflect a politics of tergiversation. Metamorphosis, for Ovid, like entelechy for Aristotle, is a process rather than a single event, a notion that permeates his work structurally, thematically, linguistically. His concept of history and social evolution is likewise meta­ morphic. Indeed, the Metamorphoses’ great argument is the historical instability of form, the fixed unfixity of the universe that human civilization struggles in vain to redress, and in struggling produces art. This socio­-artistic theory of flux, then, makes Ovid’s influence subversive of the cultures in which it is received. Every generation breaks the icons of the last, then worships the shards. But by worshiping the Ovidian cultus, later poets ended up deconstructing the cultural values whose continuity many thought they were preserving. Not all authors, however, were unaware of this problem. The purpose of this book is to trace the history of Ovid’s reception in romance through these authors’ growing awareness of mutable form as both a societal and literary problem, and to do so via a body of literature that was itself in a state of formal flux. Having mentioned the problem of form, I should also say something about the form of this book. Divided into two parts, the book covers a five-hundred-year swath of literature between 1170 and 1670. That the second part begins in the fourteenth century with Petrarch does not mean that the order of argument is chronological. Part I happens to treat medieval writers and Part II happens to treat the early moderns not because of any perceived need to designate blocks of time or authorial affinity to one or another zeitgeist. Rather, the way that romance received Ovid, its awareness of metamorphosis as a cultural and historical theme, evolved with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics and other works of literary theory in the fifteenth century. An Italian school of literary critics heralded by Petrarch and beginning in earnest with Cinzio and Tasso was able for the first time to address the question of genre and where the native European form of romance belonged in the ancient scheme. Suddenly, Ovid’s Metamorphoses ­became the fulcrum of ambiguity in a series of distinctions

xiv  Polemical Preface

among epic, tragedy, and lyric. While the medievals tended to read Ovid as a social and political historian, the Renaissance saw in him a poetic theorist as well. Thus Part I deals with social, economic, and political culture in romance, while Part II addresses poetic culture. As a whole, both parts of the project are informed by theories of antagonistic unity, objective and subjective, whose locus philosophicus is Kant. The invisible hands of the neo-Kantians Norbert Elias and Georg Simmel and critic Mikhail Bakhtin guide the dialectic of body and form across this book from sociology to poetics. Schiller’s aesthetics of form and individualism and its sociopolitical consequences, again Kantian in inspiration, and the somewhat more radical individualism of Nietzsche animate the political aspirations of this book, a politics that draws prece­dent and vehemence from Ronald Syme’s dark vision of a Roman Golden Age tarnished by Augustan totalitarianism, against which I see Ovid subtly working.3 While Marx prompts occasionally from behind the curtain, his aesthetic of communalism and collective form serves mostly as a point of refraction in my argument. I take lessons in this regard from a post-Soviet circle of culture theorists known as the “culturologists” whose aesthetic reactions to totalitarianism share something of both Syme’s and Marx’s insight. Finally, the project subscribes to an idea of diachrony in literary culture made possible by reception theory. This last critical affinity may represent for some a stumbling block, particularly the premise that cultural reception swims in the streams of both literary and social history. Louis Montrose is this notion’s most vehement opponent. In an essay subtitled “The Politics and Poetics of Culture,” Montrose argues that diachronic studies of the interrelation of literature and culture, text and context, are flawed in two ways. First, a “history of ideas” constructed from literary readings runs roughshod over the stubborn particularities of social history, which must be studied in narrower ranges of time and locale. Second, such a method submits to the “tendency to posit and privilege a unified and autonomous individual—whether an Author or a Work—to be set against a social background.”4 Both of these are serious methodological criticisms that deserve answers. Because methodology plays handmaid to ideology, however, I will attempt here not a thoroughgoing defense but a clarification of the distinction between social history and cultural reception, which may suffice as a reply for those as yet uninvested in either approach.

Polemical Preface  xv

Montrose’s first objection is one that has dogged Geistesgeschichte for at least a century and that has been addressed most intelligently by medievalists struggling with the problem of historicizing the culture of the Middle Ages. Lee Patterson frames the issue more broadly and less prejudicially than does Montrose as an antinomy between rival historiographies that he deems irreconcilable: “While wanting to do justice to the otherness of a distant past, the historian is unavoidably conditioned by his own historical situation; . . . while attentive to the particularity and detail in which the significance of the past resides, he also knows that for detail to be significant at all it must be located within a larger, totalizing context. These are oppositions that can never, in my view, come to resolution; on the contrary, they must be continually negotiated and renegotiated.”5 This is, in essence, a restatement of the structuralist distinction between diachrony and synchrony wherein literary or cultural history finds coherence in the “totalizing context” afforded by a diachronic horizon, while social history discovers “particularity and detail” in smaller, synchronic measures. Hans Robert Jauss, another medievalist, conceives of Patterson’s “opposition” rather as a bridgeable “gap between the historical and aesthetic consideration of literature.”6 He argues that literature and literary culture, which normally belong to an aesthetic or diachronic continuum, are tangent with the historical and the synchronic at the point of a work’s reception by an audience in a particular moment, or series of moments, in history. Literature is not (except as a material object) historical, but the experience of literature and the aesthetic expectations that that experience entails are. We may read a text historically, then, not only by interpreting the local social concerns that color the audience’s reception in particulars, but through a system of audience expectations (Erwartungshorizonte) encoded in the text’s generic, formal, and thematic gestures, as well as through a text’s aesthetic distance from its source of imitation. If, in his idea of the Erwartungshorizont, Jauss can be said to answer Montrose’s first objection theoretically by showing that the aesthetic consideration of literature can be legitimately historicized, practically we must still be able to describe the specific expectations a culture has of its literature at any given time. Few would argue that culture does not exist within the continuum of pragmatic history, that it is not socially contingent, yet at the same time powerfully shaped by aesthetic

xvi  Polemical Preface

predilections. Historians and historicists such as Montrose, however, have confused cultural history with social history. Consider, for example, the assumptions about culture made by the medieval cultural historian Johan Huizinga: “Contemporary culture that contents itself with mythical conceptions (as it does do every day) relapses into a childish self-deceit. When we pretend to believe in historical constructions that we know are poetic license, we are, at best, like the father in Punch playing with his son’s toy train. . . . The utterly sincere need to understand the past as well as possible without any admixture of one’s own is the only thing that can make a work of history.”7 Huizinga here fundamentally misunderstands the historicity of culture. Rather than with actualities, culture concerns itself with fictions; culture is the father playing with a toy train. The cultural achievement of romance is to posit a society’s ideals in resistance to actual, historical practice. That is not to suggest that the study of culture should be ahistorical or nonfactual but rather that it should be diachronic, such that the convictions and tastes expressed in the literature of one age, one literary context, exist in what Thomas Greene calls a “dialectical imitation” of those of another.8 Nor are the objects of dialectical imitation the social conditions of cultural production; rather, they are customs, biases, beliefs, idées fixes, mythologies that an age transmits instead of the truth, indeed often to atone for the truth. Cultural criticism can accurately locate in literature a text’s points of ideological resistance to dominant norms and measure diachronically the stages of cultural mediation in which that ideology is allowed to integrate or coexist with the dominant one. It is possible, in other words, to write a history of cultural reception in practical terms. This study makes that attempt. Social and cultural history, I have argued, are different because they study fundamentally discrepant objects: the organic versus the artificial. Yet as Montrose instances they claim a parcel of shared ground. Each garners its necessary biases and accuses the other of trespass. Objectively, the relationship of social history to cultural history is one of scale to scope. Whereas the former may obscure patterns by reducing, the latter may obscure particularities by enlarging. Without ­being mutually exclusive, the one accords greater value to a marshaling of fact, the other to a scrutiny of form. Ultimately, the paradigm that shapes culture globally and is shaped locally by social movements is literary genre. Thus by way of conciliation I offer Jean Radford’s

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contention that “for cultural historians, the study of genres may provide a mediation between literary history and social history.”9 Implicit in this answer to Montrose, and in this book’s recourse to Ovid as a cultural historian, is necessarily an incidental critique of some of historicism’s more sanctimonious claims to objectivity. Hayden White, following Hegel, has good-naturedly defrocked the abiding nineteenth-century doctrine that history is something other than a narrative, exposing it rather as a factual Rorschach that, when confronted with the aporia of pure data content, yields to imagined continuities, fictions of form. As Georg Simmel argues from a sociological perspective, “The view that the science of history should provide a mirror-image of the past ‘as it really was’ . . . commits no less an error than does realism in art which pretends to copy reality without being aware how thoroughly this act of ‘copying’ in fact stylizes the contents of reality.”10 The appeal of Ovid is that his art, like his history, is obsessively aware of its stylization of reality. Indeed, this self-conscious stylization defines his notion of cultus. Thus the Metamorphoses, as I will contend in this book, must be read not as euhemerized history or as cultural etiology but as historicized myth, culture as the resistance to the tendentiousness of form. This leads me to Montrose’s last claim regarding the history of ideas and its predilection for autonomous individuals and works. This book does indeed privilege Ovid in the history of medieval and Renaissance culture. At least as far as romance poetics and ethics are concerned, Ovid is monolithic; no other author can reasonably vie for the plinth. Still, I am loath to forfeit the goodwill of the scholar who knows that the paternity of romance is neither singular nor undisputed and that any claim to singularity of influence is but a concession of truth to convenience. So rather than claim Ovid’s cultural autonomy, this book tells a story of multifarious influence involving Homer, Vergil, Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and Augustine, inter alios, whose ideas mingle or contend with Ovidian versions. Nor does it portray a single, unified Ovid, but a corpus that is both the subject and object of metamorphosis. Finally, it resists the positivistic assumption that beneath Ovid’s façade of irony and imposture there resides another Ovid denuded of guile and entirely recuperable in motive and intent, what Nietzsche dismissed as the “impertinente Nähe” of classicism.

Introduction

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora. [My mind is bent to tell of forms changed into new bodies.] Ovid Metamorphoses 1.1

How early Europe confronted the cult of Ovid, an author

whose literary corpus is indelibly inscribed in the bedrock of European culture, is a question neither so vast nor so vague that it defies synopsis. Prospect on the answer may be found in a bit of faux Ovidiana entitled De vetula or De mutatione vitae that enjoyed wide currency in the later Middle Ages. In it, the libertine poet falls in love with a beautiful young woman. Through the intercession of a crone (vetula) friendly to both, Ovid arranges a tryst, only to fall victim to a bed-trick in which the vetula replaces his beloved, a metamorphosis he perceives by blindly tracing the lineaments of her changed form in the night. Twenty years later, Ovid encounters the lady again, now a widow, and repeats the affair. This time, however, she really has become the vetula; what was once artifice is now truth. “I have sung of forms changed into new bodies,” laments the poet, “but no more miraculous a change can be found than this one.”1 Her mutatio vitae begets his own: he abjures the license of his past, renounces women and poetry, embraces philosophy and religion, and becomes a Christian. The attractions of this imitation Ovid are many, not the least of which is the frugal symmetry with which the author integrates three 

  Introduction

Metamorphoses—a pseudo-Ovidian text into the genuine canon, the ersatz vetula into the real, the pagan love poet into the Christian philosopher­—under the rubric of the famous first line of the Metamorphoses, “forms changed into new bodies.” The appeal of the Ovidian amatory cult, its urbanity, irony, and philosophy of change, balances in self-ironic contest with the stoic moralism of the Christian cult. Each desires the other. What reveals most acutely medieval Europe’s cultic reception of Ovid, however, is the accessus or prose introduction appended to the De vetula that recounts the discovery of the codex: “Nuper autem in suburbio civitatis Dioscori, que regni Colchorum caput est, cum extraherentur quedam gentilium antiquorum sepulchra de cimeterio publico, quod iuxta oppidum Thomis est, inter cetera unum inventum est, cuius epigramma litteris Armenicis erat sculptum in eo, eiusque interpretatio sic sonabat: Hic iacet Ovidius ingeniosissimus poetarum. In capite vero sepulcri capsella eburnea inventa est, et in ea liber iste nulla vetustate consumptus.”2 [Not long ago, near the city of Dioscurias, the capital of the kingdom of Colchis, the burial plot of a certain ancient family was being removed from a public cemetery next to the town of Tomis, when one (tomb) in particular was found on which was inscribed an epitaph in Armenian, the translation of which proclaimed the following: “Here lies Ovid, the greatest of poets.” At the front of the tomb an ivory capsule was found, and in it this book unconsumed by age.] Cognates of the Latin cultus, “cult” and “culture” are equal con­ stituents of civilization. While the one defines the sum of a society’s ethical and metaphysical beliefs, the other defines its aesthetic, poetic, and intellectual predilections. Both ideologies are contained in a book and fetishized in a body; in both, the literary corpus is coextensive with the literal corpus. The accessus above marks a signal translatio in the history of European culture. In literary terms it figures a movement of language from Armenian to Latin, from a barbarous East to a cultured West, reversing Ovid’s banishment from urbane Rome to unlettered Tomis. More importantly, it follows the movement through time of a book encased in its own time capsule and with it the Augustan cultus of urbanity enclosed within Ovid’s literary corpus. In religious terms, the passage figures the translation of a body through death to love. Like Mary Magdalene before Christ’s tomb, we witness the miracle

Introduction  

of a missing body desired all the more for its absence, its physical unpossessibility. The juxtaposition is apt: like Christ, Ovid is a magister amoris, a teacher of a philosophy of love. Nor are their philosophies as antithetical as they may seem; just as Christian charity denies virtue to the desire to possess materially, so Ovidian love, as we learn from the De vetula and nearly every tale in the Metamorphoses, places desiring at odds with having. One of the great, unrecognized attractions of Ovid for Christian Europe is that Augustinian caritas and Ovidian cupiditas obey the same cultic injunction. Crucial to both the Ovidian and Christian cults is the miracle of apotheosis, the body’s triumph over mortality. If the De vetula is careful to observe the significance of the Metamorphoses’ first line in its discussion of the metamorphosis time works upon the young woman’s body, so it looks to the Metamorphoses’ last lines to give meaning to the “book unconsumed by age”: Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. cum volet, ilia dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi: parte tamen meliore met super alta perennis astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris, ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam. (Metamorphoses 15.871–79) [And now my work is done, which neither the wrath of Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo. When it will, let that day come which has no power save over this mortal body, and end the span of my uncertain years. Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome’s power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on men’s lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame.] The first-century BCE pseudo-Platonic Axiochus depicts a Greek afterlife epitomized by “discussions for the philosophers; theatres for

  Introduction

the poets; dancing; concerts; discreet conversation round the banquet table.”3 Epitaphs on Greek funerary monuments frequently recommended their tenants to membership in this cultural heaven, citing life achievement in philosophy, arts, and letters and friendship with the Muses.4 In this “religion of culture” that Roman Hellenizers emulated from the Greeks, to attain renown in the arts while living was to partake in that anagogic ideal, to undergo apotheosis by culture, to become immortal. The resemblance of these passages, the Ovidian original and its medieval imitation, to Greek epitaphs in tone and portent is not inconsequential. Building on Horace’s conceit of the verbal monument in Carmina 3.30, Ovid and his medieval imitator are doing exequies to the antique religion of culture. In the De vetula, the Ovidian corpus changed into the Ovidian opus effects a transformation that is also a transcendence, joining classical and Christian traditions of metamorphosis. One aim of this book is to unpack the societal and poetic consequences of the connection of corpus to cultus that I have gestured at above. That connection is summed up in the first sentence of the Metamorphoses, a line to which this book is a response. I do not mean, of course, to slight the rest. Ovid’s aitia, or stories of origin, amount to nothing less than the narrative of civilization in the making. They answer in poetic measure the questions of where social and political customs come from and why things have the names they do; they tear the counterpane off Olympian scandal and reveal the occult psychology of gods, heroes, and royalty to be every bit as mean and libidinous as we suspected; they collate and reshape Greco-Roman ethical postures from behind the foil of irony. But the invocation, and especially the first sentence, differ in tone and subject from what follows. Whereas the tales make up a history of custom, the invocation is a contribution to the history of ideas. Here the poet confides to us the kernel of his philosophy. In the straitened compass of a few lines, Ovid furnishes both a vocabulary and a method for describing civilization’s struggle to transcend the primitivism that dwells stubbornly in its unconscious and that erupts periodically in metamorphic spasms. In short, the incipit articulates a general theory of cultural evolution through a study of instances of bodily mutation. Metamorphosis, of course, was not a new conceit. But while the physics of flux was as old as Heracleitus of Ephesus and as current as Lucretius, Ovid was the first to construe

Introduction  

the mutability of form as the simultaneous principle behind both poetry and civilization. In prosecuting this reciprocity wherein poetic postures commute societal customs and vice versa, Ovid invented the history of culture. Culture or “cult” is the main abstraction of this book’s title, yet no less important to my argument are its ancillaries, “body,” “form,” and “romance,” and the generic theory that correlates them. Of these terms, the most overdetermined is the “body,” from whose coattails trail all manner of ideologies. Amid the recent welter of body studies, however, the actual body, as Caroline Bynum has noticed, is remarkably absent. In a seminal essay, she quotes as apothegm the complaint of a friend: “There’s so much written about the body . . . but it all focuses on such a recent period. And in so much of it the body dissolves into language. The body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid—that body just isn’t there.”5 There is something perhaps inherent to the scholarly temper that avoids the body, “hiding behind associative or institutional identities (academia, scholar, fellows, university, reading rooms, libraries) making observations without an observer.”6 Roland Barthes has attempted to redress that oversight for the modern period, and Bynum for the medieval.7 My focus, therefore, is not upon the body in its material presence but precisely upon that apophatic history of absence that Bynum and Barthes have lamented. The question that this book asks is: How can the absence of the body be construed as a formal, generically structuring presence? How does an erotic desire felt by the individual for the missing body give way to an intellectual desire for formal cohesion and wholeness that comes from accepting the material fact of absence? Put differently, how is an individual’s failure to regain possession of an absent lover in romance literature mitigated emotionally by synecdoches of a corporate body that deliver social inclusion in compensation for lack of individual fulfillment? Finally, how does romance respond when its protagonists recognize that the price of social inclusion, of assimilation to the form, spells the loss of a new and different body—not the desired other but the self in its autonomy? Inscribed in the history of genre between antiquity and the Enlightenment, the cult of bodily absence plies cyclically between immanent and transcendental, romance and epic phases. Christ’s risen body, for example, the questic object and fetishized subject of the

  Introduction

quem quæretis trope, occupies the central conceit of medieval Christian genres of literature in the romance mode ranging from drama to hagiography. In antique literature, a parallel cultic desire nucleates in absent elegiac, tragic, and epic bodies. Homer’s Helen, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, Propertius’s Cynthia, although traditionally belonging to genres other than romance, inaugurate a narrative pattern of desire for literal bodies that betrays a romance core. The cult of absence in its transcendental phase is characterized by a gradual abandonment of the physical body for the idea of form. W. B. Yeats perceived this erasure as a historical phenomenon linked to the advent of the early modern period. “I detest the Renaissance,” he once commented, “because it made the human mind inorganic; I adore the Renaissance because it clarified form.”8 Similarly, Russell Fraser has argued that in the Renaissance “the spectre of formlessness emerges from its long incubation [and] attention to form becomes obsessive,”9 a cult evinced by the tutelary deities of Milton’s Comus, who invoke their neo-Platonic insubstantiality (“We that are of purer fire . . .”). The cycle reaches its climacteric, finally, in Descartes’ definitive erasure of the body: “I think, therefore I am.” For its part, this book culminates in Adam and Eve’s departure into a postlapsarian world that Milton would like to divest of the traces of immanence. Paradise Lost is a work whose verse form declares a generic aggiornamento of the abstract body, denying the sensuality of rhyme and the centrality of romance with which it is associated. But the final organic image of Adam hand in hand with Eve equivocates, like Yeats’s Renaissance, in its purposes: an epic moment of foundation, it can be read equally as a romance affirmation of Adam’s archetypal desire for the immanent body, a ressourcement that returns Milton’s cult of form to the figures and motives of Ovidian romance. The preceding paragraphs have attempted to define a diachronic connection, somewhat obscure and not altogether satisfactory, between the history of the body and that of genre, arguing paradoxically that bodily absence, rather than presence, is the structuring force behind the formulas of emotional reward that we call genre. The chapters that follow treat the same problem synchronically: each discovers absent or incomplete bodies as a motor of desire. To the extent that the authors I read here all negotiate the restitution or reintegration of a body and largely fail, they also negotiate the generic parameters

Introduction  

of romance in and among genres, again without definitive success. In Marie de France’s Lais, the wounded bodies of Guigemar, Bisclavret, and Guilliadun seek completion and cure; in Chrétien de Troyes, the ethics of chivalric and eschatological reward are at stake in the abduction of Fenice and the quest for healing of the Fisher King; in Chaucer, Dorigen’s desire for the absent Arveragus summons into presence obstacles that challenge courtly and conjugal obligations, while symbolism of the hybrid Minotaur ominously superintends the disunity of the Athenian body politic; for Petrarch, the poetic desire to reassemble the tessera of his scattered rhymes into the literary corpus of the Rime sparse is an attempt to redress his failure to reclaim the physical Laura; in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet are crucially absent from each other in time and place, an asynchrony that finds generic overlap between romance and tragedy; finally Milton’s Adam pursues the absent Eve in contravention of social and poetic decorum. No less important to the prospect of this book, however, is the concept of form that exists in dialectic with the body and is its diachronic aspect. If absence defines the concept of body generically, unity, as Schiller has taught us, defines the body as an aesthetic and social object. Unity, of course, is not merely an aesthetic category, but if we accept Schiller’s contention that “in order to solve any political problem in practice, the way lies through the aesthetic,” it is also therefore a political one.10 This book borrows from Ovid the correlation of aesthetic with political unity, but the consequences of that connection and its role as the basis of social form beg definition. According to Johan Huizinga, central to cultural history is “the age-old metaphor that even myths and fables transferred the structure of the human body to abstract things, in order to be able to grasp them.”11 As an aesthetic object, in other words, the body is the default intermediary between content and form, the instinctive point of reference the human mind uses when moving conceptually between things and a single idea of thingness, concrete plurality and abstract unity. This synecdochal leap takes place most tendentiously in the social and political spheres, where it is used to consolidate power. Literature and art that evoke a desire for the body— that is, in the romance mode—become the ideal aesthetic conduits in the Schillerian sense for the manipulation of socio­political form. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid thinks about politics in terms of the body, making it the objective correlative in the evolution of culture from corporeal

  Introduction

to poetic to social and political forms. Ovidian romance, as I conceive of it in this book, is the literary form that treats the epic synecdoche of body and nation as a fiction of form, a mythology it deconstructs by narrating the individual’s alienation from the group or any unitary construct. The term social form as I employ it is not an arbitrary but a technical designation that exists in a dialectic with the concepts of the body and unity. Similar in many respects to the habitus of Marcel Mauss and Norbert Elias, it is a construct I have adapted from the sociology of Georg Simmel, who in turn developed it from Kantian form/­ content dualism. For Simmel, a body is a content (political or social) whose institutional organization may be hierarchical or cooperative, solidary or antagonistic, unitary or hybrid, but that is reflexively apprehended by the human mind in terms of its own phenomenological experience. Form, he argues in an essay on the philosophy of art, is the product of a kind of aesthetic self-awareness of the body, a reciprocity (“Wechselwirkung”) that occurs, for example, when one views a portrait. “The bodily appearance,” he contends, “because of its artistic affinity with the viewer, summons up in him the impression of a soul, which in return gives the portrait the appearance of a heightened unity, substan­tiality, and a mutual justification of features.”12 Literary representations of social groups provoke in macrocosm a similar phenomenological reciprocity. What we perceive reflected in the associative bodies of literature is a plural unity or “social form,” anatomy as societal taxonomy. Social forms, then, are the solid geometries of human association viewed in the mirror of artistic or literary representation. Part I of this book occupies itself with social forms. Part II treats form as a poetic or generic quantity, one that is bound in a material dialectic with a literary corpus—that is, with the book as body. As a concept poetry shares with philosophy, form has gathered some vogue of late. Christopher Cannon invokes the idea of form in an attempt to find an aesthetic unity in early Middle English literature’s morphological resistance to generic categories. For Cannon, literature has two aspects: form (the transcendent aspect) and “grounds” (literature’s material connection to place). The dichotomy of form and grounds functions for Cannon much as that of form and body does for me. And like this book, Cannon’s work struggles with the

Introduction  

perceived priority of form over matter, finding a compromise in the Aristotelian hylomorphism (although he does not call it that) that proved crucial to Aquinas’s philosophical and political thought.13 Drawing inspiration from Marx and Althusser, he posits form as “that which thought and things have in common.”14 This is a felicitous definition, although we can be more specific still. When Aristotle locates form between substance and essence, he credits it not with priority to matter but with posteriority. Thus in Metaphysics Z “Form explains matter, and yet the matter is what a given form requires for its realization.”15 What is at stake in this negotiation of priority is nothing less than the autonomy of the individual body, as both a political and a poetic object. Matter is that which confers individuality upon a thing, while form confers universality. If form is prior, as Plato would have it, individuals per se could not exist outside society; category would define the particular; the individual corpus—by which I mean a person or a book—would be entirely, wholly, generic. In such a totalizing, totalitarian world without the individual and individuality, art and culture would effectively cease to exist. Ovid’s Metamorphoses mounts a profound and nuanced opposition to precisely this political and artistic worldview, an opposition born of the author’s resistance to the totalizing rule of Augustus Caesar. While the Ovidian forma participates in an act of mediation between substance and essence, form can be conceived of only in terms of the body. Form is the shape of the body translated onto an object of human desire. The problem Ovid seeks to redress in this notion of forma is that history, ceding priority to form, finds in it a purposive predicate. To the extent that history recognizes the body at all as a structuring principle, it conceives of it as an institutional, corporate, political collective, because only in its unity, its rejection of eccentric or individual character, does the body have a social purpose in the progress of civilization. Yet history’s metamorphosis of the body into a form, a purposive predicate, violates the autonomy of the body in its immanence. The reverse is true of the metamorphoses that occur in Ovid’s book of cultural history. There the corporate, the collective, the institution invested with authority devolves into a mere body, while the defining human experience is that of privation, incongruence, estrangement

10  Introduction

from and frustrated desire for the group. “Romance,” says Geraldine Heng, “must be defined by the structure of desire which powers its narrative.”16 Existential estrangement is the structuring motive of romance desire. Romance’s narrative method is to create situations of estrangement that feed a vexed desire whose by-product is an art of loneliness and its consolations. It learns this technique from Ovid. Generically, romance situates its perspective of society from the position of the outsider, the marginal, the individual; it locates social value in the intimacies of at most two people. Anything more risks movement toward collectivity and social form and away from the phenomenal experience of the body in love. Finally, the cultural history I am proposing here that accords priority to the body and the individual over form and group risks confusing the reader familiar with traditional sociological approaches to literature. Let the following passage from Frederic Jameson’s Marxism and Form serve as an example and point of refraction: In the realm of literary criticism, the sociological approach necessarily juxtaposes the individual work of art with some vaster form of social reality which is seen in one way or another as its source or ontological ground, its Gestalt field, and one of which the work itself comes to be thought of as a reflection or a symptom, a characteristic manifestation or a simple by-product, a coming to consciousness or an imaginary or symbolic resolution. . . . Clearly, then, a sociology of literature has its origins in the Romantic era along with the invention of history itself, for it depends on some prior theorization about the unity of the cultural field.17

Whether or not Jameson is correct that this schema indeed typifies “the sociological approach” to literary criticism, it is the obverse of this book’s sociological approach. The “vaster form of social reality” is, in Ovidian romance, neither a “source” nor an “ontological ground” of the individual work of art but the opposite, while the product of its dialectic is not a reality but a cultural fiction or myth of social history whose most hallowed credo is unity. While Jameson goes on to criticize the “value-free” syncretism of this approach, his own Marxist lights obey a similar precedence of form and collective unity as rep-

Introduction  11

resenting social reality. The cult of form is, after all, a hermeneutic as well as a literary piety.

Drawing upon sociology, economics, and political theory, Part I of

this book dwells on the tensions between individual and group that attend the formation of the corpus politicorum. Chapter 1 examines that tension in the ritual of the hunt that appears as an anthropological allegory in Ovid and Marie de France. The hunt signifies in the three spheres simultaneously: the personal, the familial, and the political. On the personal level, the hunt reveals a schizophrenic duality within the male psyche. The ritual hunter pursues the most dangerous animal as a sign of the triumph of humanness over animalism, reason over primal bloodlust. Yet in emulating the predator he becomes the thing he seeks to conquer. In the familial sphere, that same desire for dominion informs the gendered metaphors of courtship. Man “hunts” woman. Here again, though, when the man has won his wife and incorporated her into his hegemony, her body makes their collective body vulnerable to adulterous predation. Vicariously, he becomes the sexual prey; his masculine act of sexual conquest forces him into a feminine posture, elements of which we find throughout medieval romance, from Marie de France’s Lais to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Troilus and Criseyde. Of course, hunting is a collective activity pitting the social and civilizing bonds of a comity against the lone power of the animal. Invariably, though, a lone hunter distinguishes himself from the group at the moment of the kill, earning individual renown and with it a jealousy from his comity that erodes their social bond. In all three spheres, a metamorphosis occurs of a type unique to Ovid, a reversion to an essential form of what one always already is. The literary burden of the chapter rests mainly upon Marie de France’s Lais, which, more than any other medieval work, comprehends the social and gendered tensions of the hunt and the weaknesses it exposes in the civic values of courtly life. The word cultus I have been using brackets a range of meaning at once broader and more specific than “culture.” Misplaced in our understanding of the term is its original context: cultivation, the tilling of the soil, whence derive the material conditions of high culture—­leisure,

12  Introduction

learning, religion. Vergil’s Georgics celebrated the cultus arvorum, the tillage of fields, as the nostalgic locus of conservative Roman values. And for good, if reactionary, reasons. Because agriculture provided the marketplace for the earliest economies of exchange in which the value of human labor was negotiated against the value of goods, it was also, therefore, the archetype for all systems of value, both economic and moral. The Latin word denoting work as an ethical quantity is the same as “business”: negotium, literally “nonleisure,” an issue that in conjunction with the former will occupy chapter 2. But even for republican Rome the rural cultus was at best archaic. Cicero speaks of an “uninhabited countryside” empty of forum and law court.18 In practice, and despite a certain political tendentiousness, Augustan Rome looked to the sophistication of its major cities for cultural self-definition. The urban cultus, as Ovid represents it, explicitly repudiates conservative nostalgia for the mores of a rural past, embracing modernity with both hands. Prisca iuvent alios : ego me nunc denique natum Gratulor : haec aetas moribus apta meis. Non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum, Lectaque diverse litore concha venit: Nec quia decrescunt effosso marmore montes, Nec quia caeruleae mole fugantur aquae : Sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos Rusticitas, priscis ilia superstes avis. (Ars amatoria 3.121–28)19 [Let ancient times delight other folk: I congratulate myself that I was not born till now; this age fits my mores well. Not because now stubborn gold is drawn from out the earth and shells come gathered from divers shores, nor because mountains diminish as the marble is dug from them, nor because masonry puts to flight the dark waters; but because culture (cultus) is with us, and rusticity, which survived until our grandsires, has not lived to our days.] Ovid understood culture to be only the incidental product of physical work. Philosophy, poetry, and the arts, the pillars of high culture, were rather the fruits of leisure, what Statius called otia docta, learned leisure.20 In pursuit of a model of urban culture, Rome’s Hellenizing

Introduction  13

poets, or neoteroi, as Cicero styled them, looked beyond the rustic idyll of Vergil’s Georgics, past Latin cultural precedent, to the Greek origins of the modern city-state, which discovered civilization’s dearest bequest to the citizen as the leisure necessary to contribute intellectually and artistically to the life of the mind.21 If chapter 1 is an examination of cultural values in the twelfth century, chapter 2 investigates the value of culture. The romances of Chrétien de Troyes depict a world divided in its vocations among agricultural work, prayer, and warfare, where the chivalric romance, an endeavor created and consumed in leisure, must invent an economic and ethical justification for itself as a cultural commodity. To this end, Chrétien invokes the Ovidian cultus and the nexus it forges among agriculture, warfare, poetry, and leisure, locating the poetic fruits of leisure in a feudal economy of contrapassum, the exchange of goods and services. The Canterbury Tales stages the reprise from chapter 1 of the problem of societal cohesion, the tension between the one and the many, played out in the drama of marriage. For Chaucer, a poet inordinately fond of one Ovidian sentence, “Non bene conveniunt maiestas et amor,” marriage exists in a dialectic of opposing desires for integration and dominion, love and mastery, both of which achieve a corporate union. Chapter 3 begins by placing Chaucerian marriage within the classical tradition of the family-state metaphor, wherein the rules of marital union in individual bodies govern as well the rules of association in the body politic. Two tales place the maiestas/amor opposition at the center of their social arguments: the Franklin’s and the Knight’s. The former, often viewed as Chaucer’s solution to the desire for maistrie in marriage, serves rather to illustrate the ineluctability of the desire for dominion by sponsoring a contest for who is “most fre,” making vice of virtue. My reading of what Kant calls “unsocial sociability” in the Franklin’s Tale lays the groundwork for a political reading of the associative bonds of love and friendship in the Knight’s Tale. Here the hybrid monstrosity of the Minotaur looms spectral over the proceedings of marriage, friendship, and political union, a cautionary symbol of the danger of love as an integrative force. In laying out the argument for Part II, I return to the Metamorphoses to insist upon the oddity of its first sentence. “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora” does not actually mean “My mind is

14  Introduction

bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms,” as nearly all current English translations, in some form or another, render it. What Ovid actually says is “My mind is bent to tell of forms changed [formas mutatas] into new bodies [nova corpora].” Syntactically and logically, this is an awkward formulation of the act of metamorphosis. Because forma can designate the shape of a body, translators have chosen to treat forma and corpus as semantically interchangeable. The difference is categorical: corpus refers to the body in its physical, historical immanence; forma, which can also mean “beauty” in Latin, refers to the body in its aesthetic transcendence. Treating the two terms as synonyms obliterates the alternate, metapoetic meaning of the first sentence. The Greek Alexandrian Callimachus, poetic father to the Roman neoteroi, famously began his hybrid epic Aitia by challenging the generic protocols of the epic, constructing his new form from a series of narremes conjoined by a shared theme of etiology. Imitating Callimachus, Ovid’s mind in the first sentence is also bent on the Metamorphoses’ epic forma and how genre can be changed by manipu­ lating sequence and linkages among textual elements (corpora) and the time frame against which they are transacted to create new formulas of emotional reward. Read this way, the Metamorphoses serves as a primer for generic experimentation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A metapoetic interpretation of the first sentence, however, was not possible during most of the Middle Ages for both cultural and terminological reasons. The medieval penchant for grammatical and rhetorical effectiveness, the method and strategy of persuasion, occluded those notions of literary affect and narrative quality that seem axiomatic to us. Criticism in the grammatical vein ventriloquized such models as Servius and Macrobius, antiquaries of rhetoric and mythology whose linguistic tastes lay in precincts remote from literary sensibility: lexicography, grammar, etymology. Literary kind and style, for them, were at most an actuarial account of variation. When at the beginning of his great accessus to the Aeneid Servius identifies his critical objectives (author, title, intention, etc.) he promises to treat the qualitas carminis or “quality of the poem,” a rubric that served thereafter as the medieval term for genre. Quality, in the modern sense of the word, requires literary taste and generic judgment. Servian exegesis, however, is peremptory and actuarial. The Aeneid’s meter, he

Introduction  15

concludes, makes it epic; the narrative is mixed, which is to say both diegetic and mimetic; the subject is likewise mixed, both true and fictive, divine and mortal; and the style is high, in both diction and sentiment.22 In other words, the quality of form is incidental to the artistic life of the work. The appearance of a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Physics in the thirteenth century, however, forever altered the critical sensibilities and language of poetic genre. In Physics, book 2, Aristotle lays out his theory of the four causes of created things. Matter, he argues, is the first cause, inasmuch as bronze can be said to be the cause of a sculpture. Second is the formal cause. “Then, naturally, the thing in question cannot be there unless the material has actually received the form [Gr. = paradeigma; L. = forma] or characteristics of the type, conformity to which brings it within the definition of the thing we say it is, whether specifically or generically [Gr. = geni; L. = genera].”23 What, then, asked early Aristotelians like Bartholomew of Bruges, is the formal cause of a particular book? His answer comes in a 1307 investigation of Averroes’ commentary on the Poetics: “The form of the treatise [forma tractatus] is the ordering of the book [ordinatio libri] in terms of all the factors which arise out of the relationships which obtain among many parts; the order is its form [ordo est sua forma].”24 His pronouncement is significant not only because it applies the new term forma tractatus to genre but because he correlates genre to the order and linkages among parts of a literary work. And because ordo is alterable, so genre is mutable. Medieval critical theory, then, has at last returned to the question at issue in the Metamorphoses’ first line. At the same time, others were arriving at the same point via a different route. Given the expense of bookmaking in the Middle Ages, literary manuscripts tended to collect a variety of works in a single tome. Governing this collection was the editorial principle of divisio or coherence of parts, which in turn necessitated a notion of affinity by kind, a process known as “transmissional genrification.”25 Accordingly, romances were often grouped with other romances, while didactic, homiletic, or hagiographical literature found like company. In fact, sumptuary motives drove manuscript compilers to ever more particular taxonomies; hence lyric was often grouped by subform (sonnet, ballad, etc.) or by decorum (pastoral, erotic, elegiac, etc.). Rarer, and comparatively late in development, was the mixed-genre

16  Introduction

anthology, which, beyond literary kind, also observed thematic affinities among works, leading to cross-genre groupings. Genre, in other words, was beginning to be understood as an equilibrium between a subjective and an objective qualitas carminis, between form and matter. Petrarch’s pioneering mixed-genre book the Rime sparse represents the great leap forward in the medieval notion of genre as mutable, changing forever the idea of forma by creating a romance out of a lyric sequence. Part II begins with Petrarch and his book of changed forms as a way of theorizing metamorphic genre in the Renaissance. In chapter 4, I argue that the Rime sparse coheres lyrically around the relationship of the poet to Laura, becoming a new generic ­hybrid—the lyrical romance. As a whole, the ensemble responds to the fear that it is not a whole, that its form, like its music, is fractured, dispersed, as the title suggests. When in Poem 23, the so-called “Canzone della metamorfosi,” Petrarch resists the flux that might separate him from Laura, “né per nova figura il primo alloro / seppi lassar” (nor for a new form could I leave the first laurel),26 his “nova figura” consciously translates Ovid’s “novas formas,” asking us to recognize at once his commitment to his lady and to the lyric form of elegiac poetry. The splintering, or, to use Thomas Greene’s word, Orphic “dismemberment,” of Laura’s body into parts scattered in poetic images across the corpus of the Rime also invites the opposite motion. Like an expanding universe of private emotion that has reached its moment of recoil, the Rime sparse has within it a centripetal impulse to re-member its subject and thus to reintegrate and reorder the discrete tessera of the sonnet sequence into something singular and formally new. Chapter 4, however, is also about how Petrarch’s editorial manipulation of the corpus of the Rime sparse, an obsessive thirty-year process of revision and reordering, stands in for his missing physical relationship with Laura and how these twin obsessions fetishize form into a cult. An acute reader of Ovid, Petrarch had imbibed his model’s near-constant poetic self-reflexivity, what Ovid called the culta carmina (stylish or rhetorically cultivated poetry),27 which, through the crambe repetita of imitation, would ripen into the mannered decadence of Petrarchism. By the seventeenth century, Ovid’s poetic cult had fathered the culteranismo of Góngora, whose thoroughly Ovidian Soledades and Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea push the metapoetics of form to the dizzy limits of comprehensibility. In English letters of the same

Introduction  17

period, Milton, in the generically mixed and poetically self-­reflexive Comus, had interpreted the Ovidian cult of form literally. When ­Comus, Milton’s sorcerer-priest, praises pagan sublimity—“We that are of purer fire / Imitate the Starry Quire”28—he is articulating a cultus whose gods (“Starry Quire”) are the poets and theorists of poetic form. The metamorphic rites at Ludlow Castle, Circean and Ovidian in their magic, Platonic in their philosophy, are designed to effect a synthesis of Christian virtue with classical art. First, however, Milton must acknowledge the beauty of pistic and poetic form, the “purer fire” inherited from Plato, Homer, and Ovid, who are his sources. A pastiche of genres and styles, Comus is itself a monument to form as a poetic virtue and object of artistic worship. The two salient characteristics of Ovid’s cult of form are (1) the trim link he defines between time and genre; and (2) the discomfiture he visits upon the notion of decorum, which is to say social and poetic formality. Central to the unifying architecture of the Metamorphoses is the temporal continuity of his myriad narratives. The second line of the invocation asks the gods to “bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time” [ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen] (1.4–5). The carmen perpetuum functions as both a temporal and a poetic principle. Its success as a formal innovation is ultimately designed to confer perpetuity on the poet himself, who will, as he boasts in the final lines of the poem, “live in fame through all the ages” [perque omnia saecula fama . . . vivam] (15.878–79). Ovid’s triumph over death achieved by making literary time the paradigm of human memory constitutes a key dogma of his cult. Playing on the double meaning of tempora in Latin, “times” and “temples” (of the head), Ovid wants to suggest that bringing down his song “to my times” (ad mea tempora) is equivalent to eternizing and consecrating the song in his mind by an act of memory.29 In the Renaissance, the carmen perpetuum challenged not only the concept of generic form and subject but more overtly the unities of time, place, and action and the Aristotelian dispensation by which they were commonly adjudicated. Genre theorists have long agreed that time is a critical correlate of genre: classical epic, as Northrop Frye has argued, follows long cycles of rise and fall, Vergil’s labentibus annis; tragedy, for Aristotle and a fortiori for Renaissance Aristotelians,

18  Introduction

was brief, moving in an ephemeral circuit; romance, as we learn from Bakhtin, is framed by random disjunctions in time and, as Patricia Parker maintains, by a logic of infinite temporal extension or resistance to closure.30 The plasticity of time in the Metamorphoses, which, manipulated to suit various emotional effects, manages to satisfy all the generic criteria just mentioned, is perhaps Ovid’s most consciously poetic device. Many of the tales (Phaëthon in particular) thematize the problem of time in a way that presented Renaissance authors with a poetic counterpoint to Aristotle. Shakespeare, for one, was particularly attentive to Ovidian timing. In light of his thoroughgoing Ovidianism, it is no wonder that he paid more attention to . . . jumping o’er times, Turning th’accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass. (Henry V Prol. 29−31) This practice contravenes, consciously I would argue, Aristotle’s warning against dramatic time limits, which, he argues, are not to be measured by perception and should not “time performances by the hourglass.”31 In chapter 5, I argue that early modern distinctions between the poetics of romance and tragedy begin in parallel readings of Ovid and Aristotle. Shakespeare, in particular, seems to have been concerned with the way the time signatures of dramatic genres clash productively. How does Ovid’s romantic mistiming—lovers’ inability to meet at the same time and place—produce both tragic and comic situations? The temporal relationship between romantic and comic timing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, or, as I discuss in chapter 5, romantic and tragic timing in Romeo and Juliet, is a poetic issue to which Shakespeare found answers in the tales of Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus, Phaëthon. For Shakespeare, at least, Ovid is the medium of coherence in a theory of romance that filled in the generic gaps left by the Poetics. Literary form, too, exists in sympathy with culture, or rather with those protocols of culture better captured by the words style, formality, decorum. Decorum is best known as a metric of social quality. Classically, however, decorum also designated a generic taxonomy of style,

Introduction  19

the stilus humilis, mediocris, and gravis. This influential doctrine was first articulated by Cicero, who asserted that “the same style and the same thoughts must by used in portraying every condition in life, or every rank, position or age, and in fact a similar distinction must by made in respect of place, time, and audience. . . . [Decorum] depends on the subject under discussion and on the character of both the speaker and the audience.”32 In cultivating generic plasticity in the Metamorphoses, however, in answering epic questions with elegiac responses, fleering at propriety by comparing great things to small and juxtaposing elevated characters and speech with humble, Ovid destabilized social equilibrium by destabilizing genre. “By yoking ­Roman history, sublime mythology, and techniques for picking up girls,” remarks Robert Hanning, “Ovid attacks the very notion of decorum: the noble becomes trivialized, the trivial elevated to nobility.”33 The phrase novas formas is designed as a challenge to decorum. Consider, for example, the impropriety with which Ovid treats the Muses in the peroration to Amores 3, where forma canvasses both the physical aspect of Ovid’s Muse and the poetic quality she represents: Hic ego dum spatior tectus nemoralibus umbris— quod mea, quaerebam, Musa moveret opus— venit odoratos Elegia nexa capillos, et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat. forma decens, vestis tenuissima, vultus amantis, Et pedibus vitium causa decoris erat. (Amores 3.1.5–10)34 [While I was strolling here enveloped in woodland shadows, asking myself what work my Muse should venture on—came Elegy with coil of odorous locks, and, I think, one foot longer than its mate. She had a comely form, her robe was gauzy light, her face suffused with love, and the fault in her carriage added to her grace.] Ovidian elegy is a picture of willing incongruity. With “odorous locks” trailing down to a clubfoot, Elegy is quite simply deformed. Through fault of meter, her gait is foreshortened from hexameter to pentameter, stately gravis to gimpy humilis, an effect that would seem comic if not for the charm with which Ovid limns his Muse in the last line of the passage. The key poetic words are forma decens (comely or

20  Introduction

decorous form) and causa decoris (grace or, literally, decorous cause). Form and decorum, for Ovid, share close affinity. To transgress the rules of form, he is arguing, is to discover a more sublime decorum in the grace of poetic sprezzatura. Nor is this the only moment in the Amores when Ovid mocks the impropriety of his own divagations from accepted genre. His first attempt, Ovid complains in 1.1, was at an epic of Vergilian gravity, but Cupid snatched decorum from his line: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus—risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. “Quis tibi, saeve puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris? . . .” (Amores 1.1.1–5) [Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was making ready to sound forth—in weighty numbers, with matter suited to the measure. The second verse was equal to the first—but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot. “Who gave thee, cruel boy, this right over poesy?”] When Tragedy intervenes indignantly to vie with Elegy for Ovid’s loyalties, the poet proposes compromise: “come then and join short verses with the long!” (Amores 3.1.66). So much is the concept of form at the center of Ovid’s poetry that his vocabulary of love must at all moments double as poetic terminology. Thus when Ovid relinquishes Elegy in the final poem he defends the decorum of love poetry, saying, “nec me deliciae dedecuere meae” (Amores 3.15), which the Loeb edition renders as “nor have these delights dishonoured me.” The treachery of this sentence, as another translator has remarked, lies in the metapoetic duplicity of the words deliciae and dedecuere.35 Deliciae (delights) can refer (1) to a lover, in this case Elegy; or (2) to light verse, much as nugae (trifles) can refer to prose that is not aimed at edification. Dedecuere (dishonor) from decus (decorous), means literally “to take away decorum.” Thus Ovid is saying both that his lover Elegy has caused him no dishonor and that his love poetry, despite its experiments in form, has retained, even furthered, the lyric genre. The Amores, then, is framed by an allegory of the relationships among genres; the pathetic sentiment shared by tragedy and elegy, the spec-

Introduction  21

trum of emotions the experience of love embraces, discovers in Ovid’s poetry broad pastures of generic overlap resisted by poetic convention, a resistance that, by chronicling, Ovid surmounts. Chapter 6 addresses the problem of decorum and generic drift in Paradise Lost, a text whose cultic connections with Ovid jar with its religious aspirations. Taking the Bible, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses as its poetic models, Milton’s prelapsarian paradise is a precarious experiment in cosmogony and poiesis, in the linkage between the world and the word, where all is held in fragile harmony by physical and verbal boundaries. In this world of linguistic contingency, even the most mundane infractions of decorum—Eve’s speaking out of turn—can untune power hierarchies and tilt emotional scales, shifting the ethical and generic balance of poem from epic toward romance. Of course, Milton’s Icarian project to soar “with no middle flight, / Above the Aonian mount” courts its own fall, yet, I argue, it cannot contain the poetic consequences as neatly as Stanley Fish has so influentially suggested. Facing Eve’s eternal banishment without physical love, and caught in the cultic predicament of desiring a missing body, Adam chooses to follow her into banishment, playing Echo to her Narcissus. These infractions of social and literary decorum provoke in Paradise Lost an acute crisis of generic identity. Parallel to the poem’s great theme of the Fall, we sense a fall in generic expectation, a compromise of Vergilian piety to Ovidian desire, Christian to Ovidian cults, epic to romance.

p a rt i

The Sociology of Romance

1

m Hunting for Civilization Marie de France and the Sociology of Romance

O powerful Love, that in some respects makes a beast a man; in some other a man a beast. The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.4−6

C

ivilization is a myth. A squinting formula perhaps, but it serves nevertheless to suggest the paradox Ovid perceived in Augustan culture and Marie de France (via Ovid) in the twelfth-century court, that a society’s concept of its own achievements in art and politics exists only in the foundational fictions it tells about its own begetting. In this sense, civilization is the myth of civilization. As a historical idea it functions identically to Louis Althusser’s definition of an ideology as “the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” which, he says, “we examine as the ethnologist examines the myths of a ‘primitive society.’ ”1 Myths of civilization or originary ideologies, call them what you will, are illusions that mediate the construction of cultural identity and without which culture can have no instantiation in time. Yet their falsifications need not be antihistorical. As Althusser argues, these are self-aware stories that ask to be interpreted skeptically in order “to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world.”2 25

26  the sociology of romance

Herein lies the difference between myths of civilization and histories of civilization, romance and epic ideology. Thucydides, for one, clearly understood Homer’s account of the Trojan War as history, the lightning strike that sparked the wildfire of Western civic enlightenment, the ur-moment in Greek intertribal political cooperation whose acme was the happy marriage of Athenian democracy too soon tilted toward divorce in the Peloponnesian War.3 Unlike Plato, however, Thucydides perceived no self-conscious mythopoiesis in Homer, none of those thickets of resistance within the text to the “facts” and ethical postures of the civilization it promulgated that bristle in ­Ovid’s ironic portraits of Augustan Rome. The counter­factual residuum we detect in Ovid or Lucan is worlds apart poetically from the epic propaganda of Vergil or Statius. Ovid’s story of civilization in the Metamorphoses is, in Althusser’s concept, a self-­scrutinizing ideology, history read through the skeptic lens of social anthropology. For Ovid, only the cultus, the quasi-religious belief in the eternizing power of art, mitigates what is otherwise a thorough­going Weltschmerz, that “discontent of the civilized with civilization” that afflicts the urban sophisticate.4 Ovid’s conviction in the capacity of society to recover from its inevitable demise rests, if anywhere, in the artistic triumph of transforming societal decay into aesthetic transcendence, the moldering facts of social history into the amaranthine forms of culture. Fettering human to animal, savage to noble, love to death, male to female, the hunt serves as Ovid’s arch-allegory for the paradoxes of the civilizing process. In the Ars amatoria hunting is the main paradigm of courtship; in the Metamorphoses, the metaphor of hunting frames fourteen of the narratives.5 The motif ’s signal feature is a reversal that is at the same time a metamorphosis: the turning back of the hunted upon the hunter; the subsequent turning of the hunter into the hunted, human into animal; the turning of the group against the individual. An amatory variation, what I call the love hunt, features a wound, often in the thigh (a detail originating in Odysseus’s famous scar in Homer) that recurs in Ovid’s story of Venus and Adonis and Meleager and the Calydonian boar and travels thence to medieval romance, where it plays a role in the stories of Tristan, Lancelot, the Fisher King, and Marie de France’s Guigemar and Chaitivel. The wound of the love hunt is also a reversal: it marks the hunter sexually, inverting

Hunting for Civilization  27

his agency from masculine to feminine and making him the target of vicarious sexual predation. A central plot element in fully half the Lais, hunting is Marie de France’s myth of uncivilization as it was for Ovid.6 Taken together, the Lais use the Ovidian hunt motif to expose and anatomize institutionalized savagery, the internecine, often masculine violence of aristocratic court society sublimated by twelfth-century romance into an ideology of chivalry that Marie finds frankly rebarbative. Marie’s project in the Lais seems to be to create a panoply of antimyths, a counterideology in the Althusserian sense of an illusion that solicits its own disenchantment, through which to reimagine romance courtliness. The courtly situation in Marie is awkward, embarrassed, calculated in its indecorum to expose romance civilities as an outward shell masking an inward, metamorphic primitivism. Whereas romances direct our attention without to the richly adorned spaces of public display, to prosopographies and clothes that make an ostentatious show of the wearer’s status, Marie withdraws to the intimate sphere of the body: the Ovidian inner sanctum of the Lady’s bedchamber in ­ Guigemar guarded at the penetralium by a mural from the Remedia amoris; the private chapel in Eliduc in which wife and mistress heal each other’s wounds and bond as sisters; a werewolf ’s clothes in Bisclavret left discarded and undescribed, a sign of natural nobility divested of the need to signify. If Marie is political in her social commentary on the state of civilization, she is so only inasmuch as her politics are tangent with her poetics. The sociologist of courtliness Norbert Elias, working through Max Weber’s notion of the state as exercising a “monopoly of force,” has argued that civilization, particularly that of the feudal West in the high Middle Ages, is the product of an artificial imposition of codes of conduct in courtesy literature, less a civilizing than a molding process.7 By modeling civilized behavior on the king’s body, what Elias calls the habitus, such literature served to concentrate absolutist power in the court, eventuating in the modern state. Courtesy manuals, for Elias, functioned as vehicles of sociogenesis biased in the favor of political authority, narratives that resolve the dissonance of group and indi­ vidual desire within culture to the advantage of the group in power. The habitus that Marie investigates is that of the political outcast, the individual whose wounded, transformed body contributes its form to

28  the sociology of romance

the social values of autarky and nonconformity that, while alien to epic, become central to romance as it evolves in the late Middle Ages. The final point of countercultural resistance to conventional romance ideology in Marie is the vernacular sources from which she drew her courtly exempla. Despite her affinity for Ovid, Priscian, and the “philesophes” of the Latin tradition, Marie’s protagonists are Bretons, and her forms of narrative are endemic. In the general prologue, she insists steadfastly that she will not translate Latin stories into “romaunz” ( 30), as there is no originality in it. Her resistance to romance, which is at once an engagement with it on its deepest levels, is not merely ethical but poetico-cultural. Strangely, early critics found Marie’s poetry quaint, naive, simple, untrammeled by the artifice of her male romance congeners.8 It is not. Rather, they have allowed themselves to be blinded by the fairy dust of a discourse that administers serious and calculated correctives in unassuming vehicles. Deliberate provincialism and cultural chauvinism are Marie’s poetic response to the formality of court society and the formal pretensions of the romance genre; her conjunction in the hunt motif of Celtic and Germanic material, the hoary folklore of the erstwhile barbarians of the age of migration, with refined Ovidian figures announces a romance civility that avows and underwrites its primitivism. To study cultural reception in the Lais requires, therefore, that the classics be read in tandem with Germanic and Celtic folk tales, a conjunction of Latin form with vernacular corpus that provides a template for later romance, remythifying while it demythologizes.

The Anger of Bisclavret “A man,” claims Marie de France in the Fables, “may be able to get around his nature, but he can’t escape it totally.”9 The nature she is speaking of in this other collection of animal stories is man’s inwrought animalism, the tethered rage that escapes in a moment’s vi­olence, transforming him into what he already is. That nature is antithetical to civilization comprehends, in essence, Ovid’s etiology of civic devolution in book 1 of the Metamorphoses. This he illustrates in the inaugural metamorphosis of the ensemble, the story of Lycaon

Hunting for Civilization  29

(Gr. lykeios = wolfish; greedy), the first king to emerge among the peoples, who also happens to be a werewolf. Son of the first man, Pelasgus, and founder of Lycosura, the first city, Lycaon epitomizes the qualities that are necessary for social ascent­—might, temerity, decisiveness—yet in their exercise prove most dehumanizing. A pennysworth of difference separates the angry man from the civilized beast; Lycaon is both or either. He reveals his character-defining animus in a willingness to flout the key taboos of antique civilization that separate man from animal: hospitality to the guest (xenia) and cannibalism.10 Zeus, investigating the state of mo­rality among the Iron race, visits Lycaon’s home disguised as an ordinary guest and asks lodging at this “inhospitable abode of the tyrant” (inhospita tecta tyranni). His host suspects the lodger’s identity and, angry at the deception, sets a hunter’s trap for the sleeping Zeus: he will attempt to kill him. If Zeus escapes, he will have exposed his divinity. Later at table, Lycaon serves Zeus human flesh. Indignant at having himself become the subject of a manhunt and having been treated to a feast suitable only for an animal, Zeus works a condign change upon Lycaon, the bloody ferality of his anger emerging in Ovid’s description of his untransfigured face: . . . ab ipso Colligit os rabiem solitaeque cupidine caedis Vertitur in pecudes et nunc quoque sanguine gaudet. In villos abeunt vestes, in crura lacerti: Fit lupus et veteris servat vestigia formae; Canities eadem est, eadem violentia vultus, Idem oculi lucent, eadem feritatis imago est. Occidit una domus, sed non domus una perire Digna fuit: qua terra patet, fera regnat Erinys. (Metamorphoses 1.233–41) [His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains the traces of his former shape. There is the same grey hair, the same fierce face (violentia vultus), the same gleaming eyes, the same picture of beastly savagery (feritatis

30  the sociology of romance imago). One house has fallen; but not only one house alone has deserved to perish. Wherever the plains of earth extend, wild fury reigns supreme (fera regnat Erinys).]

Ovid’s fera, cognate with Greek thira (hunting), translates the anthropological dimension of Lycaon’s hunting while reminding us homonymically of the Iron Age (aetas ferrae) that he embodies.11 His change of state into animal of the hunt is proleptic of the horror of regicide at the end of the Metamorphoses: the Roman mob turns upon Caesar like a group of envious hunters upon their leader, spelling a cultural return da capo. Or perhaps, Ovid allows, Caesar himself is the atavism of the lupine tyrant, and his execution—sic semper tyrannis—Jove’s punishment of another “house that deserved to perish.” Regardless of political inflection, “Lycaon” remains Ovid’s model of sociogenesis. As a myth of latent animalism and civic recidivism, Lycaon endures in the Middle Ages as a lingering threat of a return to anomie. Augustine cites Lycaon in his anthropology of violence in the Civitate Dei,12 while John of Garland glosses him, generalizing his social example to include all lycanthropy: “Dicit auctor quod tanta malitia regnat in mundo quod homines possunt dici mutari secundum Ovidium in lupos et in alia bruta animalia, per proprietates pessimas quas habent moderni, seviores et crudeliores sunt lupis.”13 (The author says that so much evil rules in the world that, according to Ovid, men may be changed into wolves and into other brute animals. In the worst qualities that men today have, they are more wrathful and cruel than wolves.) Marie’s lupus in fabula of the Lais is the werewolf Bisclavret. It is a surprising oversight that Ovid’s epyllion and Marie’s lay have never enjoyed the benefit of sustained comparison. Both are tales of lycanthropic metamorphosis, of hunting dressed in a legal-political tale of violence done and retribution exacted. Both treat the human-animal dualism, a binary echoed in the “bis” (L. bis, O.F. bise = double) of the title;14 both depict the loss of individual humanity through appetitive desire as the greatest threat to the body politic; in both, anger is the crux of sociogenesis. The value of the Ovidian exemplar for Marie, however, is in the subtle but significant points of resistance her version of the myth registers, and with them the social reflexes she encodes. First, while Lycaon loses his human form permanently, Bisclavret retains his social

Hunting for Civilization  31

identity when he transforms himself; donning his clothes, he regains his former shape and place in society. He is, in other words, inalienably human. Second, the group is never truly at risk from the individual. Courtly life is an autonomous social form, an arbitrary constant with absolute power to enfranchise or disfranchise the individual. To be a pariah, however, to be outside the boundaries of this body politic, is to lose actual corporeal integrity. Nor is the punishment for antisociality merely a transformation into an animal body in which a human nature is imprisoned, but the torture of an enduring somewhatness and somewhereness, a formal and topographical vagrancy on the boundary between animal and human, inclusion and exclusion. Third, Lycaon as king is the exemplar and synecdochal head of the Iron Age body politic; his predation is treated by Jupiter as a crime of the group, and his punishment is visited transitively upon society. As he says, “One house has fallen; but not only one house alone has deserved to perish.” No such political exemplarity, no synecdoche, no transitivity between individual and group psyche exists in Bisclavret. The final and most significant point of resistance, however, is that the anger that dooms Lycaon and the society he embodies becomes the vehicle of social redemption in Bisclavret. Anger for Marie is not the psychogenic trigger of cultural recidivism but a catharsis. The emotions of the body trump the social forms and formalities of the court. Marie introduces her story of a werewolf knight by darkly adumbrating what we may reasonably expect to come: carnage, enormity, wolvery. Garvalf, ceo est beste salvage Tant cum il est en cele rage, Hummes devure, grant mal fait . . . (9–11) [The werewolf is a savage beast. As long as he is in such a rage he devours men and wreaks great havoc . . .] Even before discovering her husband’s secret identity, the knight’s wife is loath to inquire into his unexplained absences for fear of his temper: “Mes jeo creim tant vostre curut / Que nule rien tant ne redut” ( 35–36) [But I am so afraid of your anger that I have never feared anything more], a fear seemingly ratified later by Bisclavret’s

32  the sociology of romance

own admission that as a werewolf he lives by “preie” (predation) and “ravine” (ravaging) (66). But if Marie advertises a story of a knight’s beastliness, she delivers instead a story of a beast’s knightliness. Predicting the loss of their love and his “loss of himself ” (“Kar de m’amur vus partirai / E mei meïsmes en perdreie,” 55–56), which is to say his humanity, he reluctantly reveals the details of his lycanthropy, particularly that he hides his clothes, without which he cannot return to human form, beside a chapel. The wife promptly takes a lover, whom she instructs to follow the husband and confiscate his apparel, dooming him to wolvish shape. Yet significantly he does not lose his humanity. Months later, the king, to whom the wolf-knight had been a loyal vassal, is out hunting in the forest when the hunting party comes upon the erstwhile favorite and gives chase. True to the paradigm, the wolf turns back upon its pur­suers but, rather than inflict a wound, humbles itself at the king’s foot. Astonished at this prodigy of bestial courtliness, the king returns to court with Bisclavret at heel, where he remains, comporting himself with an unexceptioned decorum that earns him the epithet “francs et deboneire.” In fact, nowhere does the werewolf knight demonstrate any of the destructive anger for which he was initially indicted until his erstwhile wife and her consort appear at a meeting of court. Suddenly, he sets upon the consort and soon thereafter the Lady, requiting her arrears of tenderness by tearing off her nose. If heretofore Bisclavret’s absent anger has been an oddity, odder still is the reaction of the king and court to its sudden presence. Wolves are dangerous and violent creatures. Yet rather than attribute Bisclavret’s assault to nature and fault the aggressor, the king and his court inculpate the victim. To compound injury with injury, the king, acting on advice from counsel, tortures the defaced woman to discover the motive of the wolf ’s animus. The secret will out. Bisclavret is restored his clothes and with them his human appearance, while the Lady is deprived of hers, banished, and cursed, we are told, with noseless issue even to the present. Among the most vexed dilemmas of medieval courtly literature is the opposition between reason and sensuality. A central problem in the Roman de la rose, reason yields to corporal imperative. Extrapolating to the collective, courtly society, despite its rigorous codes of formality designed to sublimate and rationalize human behavior, can

Hunting for Civilization  33

never achieve an ideal form. Other works following in the tradition of the Rose, such as John Lydgate’s Reson and Sensuallyte and Assembly of Gods, try to reconcile the dichotomy both as an individual psychological problem and as a sociopolitical one. R. Howard Bloch perceives a variation on this theme in the dichotomy of logic and the body in Marie de France’s Fables. Is the body fundamentally unreasonable? “For the question that Marie poses most consistently in the Fables is not whether man acts like an animal (this much is obvious), but whether that which makes him human, that is his capacity for reason, might overcome his fundamentally predatory nature.”15 If H. W. Bailey is correct in his contention that the name Bisclavret is a portmanteau of the Breton bleiz laveret (rational wolf ), then the question Bloch discovers in animals of the Fables is relevant a fortiori to the body of Marie’s werewolf.16 Humoral wisdom of Marie’s day held that anger could physically transform a person into a wolf. The author of the early thirteenth­century Ancrene Riwle explains the phenomenon: “wreððe hit seið. þe hwule  hit ilest. ablendeð so þe heorte. þet heo ne mei soð iknowen . . . wreððe is a uorschuppild ase me telleð ine spelles. vor heo bireaueð  binemeð mon his rihte wit.  changeð al his chere. and forschuppeð him urorm mon into bestes cunde. Wummon wroð is wulvene  mon wroð is wulf.”17 By contrast, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that “anger, sexual desire and certain other passions actually alter the state of the body.”18 Anger for Aristotle, however, does not eclipse reason and sociability in the way Horace and the Ancrene Riwle claim but serves rather as reason’s corollary: “When reason or imagination suggests that an insult or slight has been received, anger flares up at once, but after reasoning, as it were, that you ought to make war on anyone who insults you. Desire, on the other hand, at a mere hint from the senses that the thing is pleasant, rushes off to enjoy it. Hence anger follows reason in a manner but desire does not. Therefore, yielding to desire is more disgraceful than yielding to anger, for he that fails to restrain his anger is in a way controlled by reason” (7.6.1–3). Aristotle’s pathology of anger offers a political reason for the king to seek a rational motive behind the wolf ’s sudden attack, even if it means using violence himself. Marie’s comment about the wolf, “K’il nel fet mie sanz reisun” (208) [That he did nothing without reason],

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should be read with Aristotle. Indeed, Latin translations of parts of the Ethics had been made in the twelfth century to which Marie could have had recourse.19 My interest, however, is less in justifying the werewolf  ’s anger than in understanding the king’s instant and unwavering approbation, his investment of irrational confidence in individual rectitude before courtly decorum. Bisclavret’s odd temper is not unique. Sympathetic werewolves abound in twelfth-century literature. Their ur-model is the lycanthrope of the Latin Arthur and Gorlagon, the latter a king transformed by the treachery of an adulterous wife who learns of the metamorphic power of a particular tree.20 Touching its branch to her husband’s body, she utters the wrong incantation, “Sensum homini habeas” (instead of lupi), transforming him into a rational wolf who then exacts copious revenge upon her and other similar adulteresses. Here the sympathy, like the prodigy of bestial reason, is gendered male: the myth is a pure antifeminist fantasy of revenge. In the mirror of femininity, werewolves appear not merely more courtly and virtuous but more reliably endowed with reason (witness the lady’s bumbled Latin). Gorlagon’s anger is the righteous spite men hold for women. To read Marie’s motives as antifeminist in Bisclavret, however, given the roughly equivalent disdain she accords the misbehavior of men and women in the Lais, would be a mistake bordering on the absurd. Demoting her hero from king to vassal, Marie robs him of status and political power, eliminating feminine sexual rapacity as a usurping threat to masculine political order. She allows no sympathetic resonance to develop between the werewolf ’s behavior or the courtly ­favor he enjoys on the one hand and the audience’s chauvinist anger on the other. True enough, Bisclavret is still the object of a double hunt, the one conducted by the king and the other conducted by the Lady in targeting her husband’s property and feudal holdings, an attempt at material predation that likewise rounds on the predator. But the dominant problem Marie manages to distill from the hunt motif is sociological: the balance between the individual and the group, body and form, and the reversibility of power between the elements of each construct. In celebrating codes of dress and modes of address, romance participates in the movement of the medieval cult of the body from the physical to the textual realm, substituting the desire to conform to a collective ideal of manners, or habitus, for the individual, libidi-

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nal desires—­anger, love—that are the life force of knighthood.21 What distinguishes Bisclavret from all other medieval werewolves is the confidence Marie’s court places in the individual, despite, or perhaps because of, his social nonconformity. With Aristotle, Marie accords legitimacy to the reason of the body over the effete habitus of the group. And not only does she reward individualism, but she discovers in the antagonism it incites a stabilizing corrective to courtly culture. The claustrophobia of the exemplary individual within a closed society that we find in Bisclavret and the Lais in general bears much in common with the social theory of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Popper.22 Nietzsche, at odds with the arid formality of the Belle Époque, calls for a rebellion of the individual body against the stultifications of corporate identity: “The first shoots of fecundity, insofar as they are a sign of health and promote vigor and resistance, initially have the character of sickness. This first eruption of force and will to self-determination is a sickness that can destroy humanity; and even more sickly are the first strange and wild attempts of the mind to adjust the world to its own lights.”23 Bisclavret’s lycanthropy is just such a sickness. The vigor and resistance in him, the will to self-determination that seems to threaten humanity with rampant individualism, the anger that is valorized by the king, are but the latency of a cultural cure. On one level, Bisclavret is about the trauma of social exclusion. An individual is driven from court to forest, signifying a translation from civilization and law to a state of wild primitivism. Banishment, however, must also be understood as economic and social disfranchisement in the sense Gervase of Tilbury conveys in the story of the “disinheritance” of a werewolf. The once noble knight Raimbaud de Pouget is first disinherited, then wanders the wilds, cashiered and alienated, only to turn wild himself.24 His loss of status and animal transformation, however, is not a supernatural but a feudal phenomenon. In Images of the Medieval Peasant, Paul Freedman demonstrates that peasants were imagined and even thought physically to resemble animals.25 Bisclavret’s transformation, like Raimbaud de Pouget’s, may also be read ad status as a social demotion. Bisclavret’s plot charts three distinct courses. One narrative vector takes the story and its characters across geographic and social boundaries. Another sends them backward through literary and political history toward the story’s textual origins in antiquity. Still another

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propels him down the social ladder. Spatially, the narrative effects a cultural transgression; temporally, a cultural regression; and socially, a cultural demotion. The figural scheme that drives these movements is hunting. Hunters pursue and prosecute, exclude and dehumanize their prey—the knight unjustly by his lycanthropy, the lady rightfully by her mutilation. One need look no further for the political connotations of the hunt than the Old French word chacier, itself, which means both “to hunt” and “to banish,” a fate suffered in turn by the knight and the lady. Geoffrey of Vinsauf exhorts us to pay particular attention to the beginnings, middles, and ends of poetic works, and it is at the center, indeed the precise fulcrum of Bisclavret, that we find the first mention of the word chacier.26 For Marie, the act of hunting is connected to the king’s pursuit and prosecution of legal rights, and she employs chacier in the company of implicit and explicit legal terminology. Chacier connects first with the word dreit in a punning prelude to the explicit legalism to come. Bisclavret has now spent a year in the forest as a wolf when the king decides to go on a hunt: Issi remest un an entier Tant que li reis ala chacier. A la forest ala tut dreit, La u li bisclavret esteit. (135–38) [Thus a year passed by the time the king left to go hunting. He went straight to the forest, there where the werewolf was.] Line 137 affords a semantic ambiguity that sets the stage for a pretrial of Bisclavret’s nature. In taking the hunt “straight to the forest” (tut dreit) the king is also taking “all law” (tut dreit) in propria persona to Bisclavret. The double meaning of dreit allows Marie to make the hunt into a form of prosecution before the law, a trial by combat of sorts that Bisclavret, in turning to submit to the law, wins. In Marie’s verbal negotiations of the law, we witness what R. Howard Bloch describes as the advent of the legal inquest: “Inquest transformed trial, the mediatory locus of violence within any society, from a test of physical strength implicating the warrior group as a whole

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into an abstract, verbal encounter between the individual and the state.”27 The vocabulary of law is integral to the political undersong of the scene. Astounded at the wolf ’s behavior, the king pronounces a judgment in explicitly juristic vocabulary: “A la beste durrai ma pes, / Kar jeo ne chacerai hui mes” (159−60) [To the beast I accord my protection under the law, thus I will hunt him no more today). Judith Rothschild is quite right to insist here upon the reference to the “King’s peace” as “feudal legal terminology.”28 Under the new laws of Henry II, the king assumed the right to judge a breach of the peace, that is to say a felony involving violence directly affecting the public weal. In effect, Bisclavret’s anger, the supposed violence of his nature, has been pardoned before the actual offense against the Lady has been committed. The hunt has gone from allegory of social anarchy to one of social order. It mediates violence in an Ovidian sense with rough justice. Looking from middle to end, the next instance of chacier is similarly legal but more punitive than mediative: “La femme ad del païs ostee / E chaciee de la cuntree” ( 305–6) [As to the Lady, he expelled her from the country and banished her from the realm]. The question of law complicates the poetic solutions to a tale of the double hunt. Bisclavret does not sanction violence as a solution to violence, but neither does it shrink from talionic requital. Without a doubt, Marie’s legalisms and penchant for themes of courtly crime and punishment bear the traces of the late twelfth-century reform of jurisprudence initiated by Henry II. Legal historian Frederic Maitland speaks of “the reconstruction of criminal justice in Henry II’s time, the new learning of felonies, the introduction of the novel and royal procedure of indictment.”29 In Bisclavret a wise counselor justifies the wolf ’s aggression with forensic vocabulary and reasoning: “Unke mes humme ne tucha / Ne felunie ne mustra” (245−46) [He harmed no man and committed no felony]. Under Henry II, “ ‘theft’ and ‘manslaying’ got a newer and more hateful name: felony.”30 In effect, felony covered the same offenses and followed the same rationale as Greek thira, namely material and bodily predation of man by man. Under AngloSaxon law, a felon was considered by nature a wolf. Taking the wolf ’s shape fulfilled a ritual formula of outlawry, hence The Laws of Canut 7.3, “Lupinum enim gerit caput quod anglice wulfes heafod dicitur.”31

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Given this historical precedent linking violent crime to becoming a wolf and Marie’s thematic emphasis upon the right prosecution of the law, we may well ask why Bisclavret is the only character to suffer transformation in the tale, and then for a felony he did not commit. The answer, I think, is that the Lady’s banishment and mutilation must be considered a second lupine metamorphosis. In the Otia imperialia, Gervase of Tilbury records the folk tradition that a werewolf can regain his form by having a body part cut off.32 The reverse occurs to Marie’s antagonist. Cutting off the nose, a common penalty in the Middle Ages, gives the Lady the snub snout of a wolf.33 Her disfigurement inflicts an outwardly visible brand of inner wolvishness while it repays the tort-feasor for her crime of material predation tit for tat. Finally, the fact that the punishment is passed down to her future progeny gives the story a historical, predictive aspect, similar to Ovid’s “Lycaon” yet based in a Christian ideology of original sin. Identifying the Lady’s crime as that form of hunting I have called with Plato material predation or violent acquisition is crucial to understanding the legal and financial context of her punishment.34 The occasion of the attack is her arrival at court, the purpose of which customarily was to give an account of properties to the king for taxation or in recognition of services owed. Marie mentions this detail prominently: A une curt ke li reis tint Tut les baruns aveit mandez, Ceus ki furent de lui chasez. (186–88) [To the king’s convocation of court all the barons were summoned, those who were materially indebted to him by fief.] The word chasez, from Latin casa, designates a fief whose service is recompensed in the form of a private house or estate.35 The reader cannot mistake, however, the echo of the verb chacier. While the knight regains his property “tute sa tere li rendi” ( 303), the Lady’s ill-gotten status as “chasez” earns her the fate of being “chaciee.”

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Guigemar’s Wound Hunting is a ritual of masculine dominance, yet it is also the occasion of man’s greatest vulnerability and affinity with the feminine predicament. I use the word vulnerable for its Latin etymon vulnus, meaning “wound,” because wounds, and thigh wounds in particular, are a key symbolic nexus of the love hunt. Guigemar, the first of Marie’s lays, begins with two hunts. The second, somewhat more obvious than the first, though in retrospect equally important, finds the eponymous hero in the woods with dogs and men, where he shoots a magical hind with an arrow. The hind, mortally injured, rebounds, wounding the hunter in the thigh. Cursed by this preternaturally articulate deer, Guigemar must search for a cure in the realm of the feminine: he must be healed by the hand of a girl who will suffer for him as much as he for her. The reversal he experiences as a consequence of the hunt is literal and gendered. The first hunt, meanwhile, takes Marie herself as the quarry, and, at the tale’s first steps, the wound has already been inflicted. Ki de bone mateire traite, Mult li peise si bien n’est faite. Oëz, seignurs, ke dit Marie, Ki en sun ten pas ne s’oblie. (1–4) [Whoever deals with good material feels pain if it’s treated improperly. Listen, my lords, to the words of Marie, who, now that it is her turn, does not forget.] The identity of the injurious party is left a matter of some speculation, although the hunting analogy of the following lines clearly implicates poetic or political rivals at court: Celui deivent la gent loër Ki en bien fait de sei parler. Mais quant il ad en un païs Hummë u femme de grant pris,

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Cil ki de sun bien unt envie Sovent en dïent vileinie; Sun pris li volent abeissier; Pur ceo comencent le mestier Del malveis chien, coart, felun, Ki mort la gent par traïsun. ( 5–14) [People should praise anyone who wins admiring comments for herself. But whenever there is someone in a country, a man or woman of great renown, those who envy their good work often speak ill of them; they want to abase their renown. To that end they adopt the ways of the vicious, cowardly, criminal dog who bites people treacherously.] The victim of backbiting by the hounds of court—specifically men, if we read her address to the “seignurs” of line 4 as a threatening rejoinder—Marie now turns back on her pursuers, promising to heal or requite her wounds through this story of a hunt and a wound healed and requited by a reversal of gendered agency. The frame of the prologue thus complements and complicates the hunting motif of the tale. Marie’s poetics of wounding in both hunts takes its cue from the invocation to the Remedia amoris, another text about love’s wounds and cures, in which Ovid addresses an audience injured by the predatory love he had espoused in the Ars amatoria: Ad mea decepti iuvenes, praecepta venite, Quos suus ex omni parte fefellit amor. Discite sanari, per quem didiscitis amare: Una manus vobis vulnus opemque feret. (Remedia amoris 41–44) [Come, hearken to my precepts, slighted youths, ye whom your own love has utterly betrayed. Learn healing from him through whom ye learnt to love: one hand alike will wound and heal.] The Remedia, of course, is the book Venus is trying to dispose of in the wall painting that graces the entry to the Lady’s private chambers, the locus classicus that hovers spectral over the romantic commerce of the tale. Its relevance to the hunt at the beginning of Guigemar, though, resides first in the reciprocity of wounding and

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healing done by the same hand, the same as the terms the hind sets for Guigemar’s cure. We find too a parallel in Ovid’s and Marie’s metapoetic implication of poetry in the process of wounding and curing in the prologues to each book. But if Marie’s poetics are Ovidian in Guigemar, her “mateire,” the Breton tale whose truth she protests so vehemently (19–26), is decidedly Celtic. Marie’s narrative neatly organizes itself around the signal events of the wound and the cure, the former motif deriving from the classical hunt and the latter primarily from the Celtic. In a chapter in the Policraticus entitled “De venatica” (1.4), John of Salisbury indicts hunting as inherently prurient, arguing that violence is but an expression of desire. His examples are various and roundly suggestive, if not explicitly so, of the inherently sexual iconography of the hunt. There is Aeneas’s famous courtship of Dido in Aeneid 4 that begins with a hunt after which the queen surrenders to Aeneas’s sexual advances in a sylvan bower. Both topography and anatomy are important here, as the hidden wound Dido suffers (“tacitum vivit sub pectore volnus,” 4.67) and the hollow in which the injury occurs euphemize the vagina. John also shows himself to be an acute reader of Ovid when, in citing Actaeon, a hunter who chances on Diana bathing naked and is punished by being transformed into a stag and then hunted down by his own hounds, he faults the seemingly innocent hunter for a crime of “passion.” The scene in Metamorphoses 3 makes the case for Actaeon’s “passion” obliquely. The hunter’s entry into Diana’s grotto has the all the allegoric subtlety of Barbara Cartland, albeit executed with considerably more art: Vallis erat piceis et acuta densa cupressu, nomine Gargaphie succintae sacra Dianae, cuius in extremo est antrum nemorale recessu arte laboratum nulla: simulaverat artem ingenio natura suo; nam pumice vivo et levibus tofis nativum duxerat arcum; fons sonat a dextra tenui perlucidus unda, margine gramineo patulos incinctus hiatus. (Metamorphoses 3.155–63) [There was a vale in that region, thick grown with pine and cypress with their sharp needles. It was called Gargaphie, the sacred haunt of high-girt Diana. In its most sacred nook there was

42  the sociology of romance a well-shaded grotto, wrought by no artist’s hand. But Nature by her own cunning had imitated art; for she had shaped a native arch of the living rock and soft tufa. A sparkling spring with its slender stream babbled on one side and widened into a pool girt with grassy banks.]

Actaeon’s trespass is rewarded with the growth of horns (cornua) from his head, phallic slang as common in Latin as in English.36 The lesson of Actaeon, if there is one, is that although the internal dog-eat-dog social dynamic of the hunt is transacted in testosterone, the providential structures of authority and social cohesion that oversee it are feminine. The gods of the hunt are goddesses—Diana, ­Venus. Hunting’s reversals in Ovid are invariably of gendered agency. Ovid seems intent upon discharming the masculine presumption that success as a predator is a matter of matching brute force with brute force, a heroic solipsism that blindly militates against group cohesion. Women, regularly excluded, regularly prevail, if not directly then indirectly. Men who otherwise regularly prevail are regularly excluded and feminized. The Calydonian boar hunt of Metamorphoses 8, for example, includes two women in its cadre of male heroes: Atalanta and the transsexual Caenus. Atalanta’s interloping presence in a masculine body of men provokes Ancaeus into a crude, mine-is-bigger-thanyours pissing contest designed to challenge the legitimacy of feminine authority in and over the hunt: “Discite, femineis quid tela virilia praestent, o iuvenes, operique meo concedite!” dixit. “Ipsa suis licet hunc Latonia protegat armis, invita tamen hunc perimet mea dextra Diana.” (Metamorphoses 8.391–95) [“Learn now, O youths, how far a man’s weapons (virilia) surpass (praestent, implying length) a girl’s and leave this task to me. Though Latona’s daughter herself shield this boar with her own arrows, in spite of Diana shall my good right arm destroy him.”] As he rears up before the beast with his battle axe, erect and “swollen with pride” (tumidus), the boar, recognizing the direct agency of the attack, “anticipated his bold enemy” (occupat audentem), delivering

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a castrating blow “to the upper part of his groin with his two tusks” (8.400). And where the masculine approach is cut short, so the female surpasses: Atalanta is the first to strike the boar. For this deed, Mele­ ager awards her the animal’s hide, incurring the envy and wrath of his male comrades, who turn back upon him. So thoroughly does Ovid’s treatment of the Calydonian boar hunt embarrass the motives of masculine society that men can succeed only when they adopt so-called feminine agency. Atalanta, the supreme hunter, is bested by a man in a chase only when Hippomenes, on advice from Venus, tricks her with the golden apples. For some, feminine agency is not chosen but compelled. Adonis, killed during a hunt by a thigh wound from a boar, is feminized even before he is gored.37 In the Ars amatoria he is effectively Venus’s catamite, “Cura deae silvis aptus Adonis erat” (1.512); in their love play, she assumes the superior posture (Metamorphoses 10.557 ff.). The iconography of the thigh wound in the medieval love hunt has a long history in classical literature. The Greek word for knee (gonu), whence the Latin genu, yields a group of sexualized words for procreation, while the Latin for thigh—femur, femora—declares an etymological association with femininity.38 The early pseudo-Theocritan idyll “The Dead Adonis” spells out the anatomy of the hunting wound and sheds light on the gender innuendos that inform later hunts. Arraigned before the grieving Venus, the murderous boar apologizes, explaining that he dealt the fatal wound not for spite but for love: “I have smitten thy pretty husband but that I saw him there beautiful as a statue and could not withstand the burning desire to give his naked thigh a kiss [philasmai].”39 I have already underscored the significance of the boar’s turning as a moment of role reversal. Here that turning becomes a rape and a reversal of gender. The boar’s phallic tusk carves a vagina in Adonis’s flesh. Thus Shakespeare in his own Venus and Adonis: “the loving swine / Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (1115–16), translating the Latin vagina literally as “sheath.” The literary importance of this detail was not lost on medieval authors. The episode of Troilo’s dream in Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato contributes an important example of the hunt as sexual reversal, while Chaucer’s version in Troilus and Criseyde betrays the author’s famili­ arity with Boccaccio’s classical antetext. In the Italian, Troilo witnesses in a dream the attack of a rampaging boar upon a recumbent Criseida.

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The dramatic blocking of the scene is essential to its meaning. Situated at her foot (“a’ suoi piè”), the boar manages to gore her in the heart (“grifo el cor traeva”), by what route we are left to surmise. Strangely, the thrust causes her only pleasure (“ma quasi piacere / prendea di cio facea l’animale”). Rendering the same dream, Chaucer chooses a euphemism faithful to the Theocritan original: “And by this bor, faste in his armes folde, / Lay kissing ay his Lady bryghte, Criseyde.”40 But where, one might argue, is the gendered discourse in all this? Where is the act of feminizing? Troilus, particularly in Chaucer, experiences the assault secondhand, albeit bodily, as if it had happened to him. The scene portends the sexual conquest of Diomedes, Troilus’s rival, over Criseyde and by extension over Troilus himself. Chaucer omits the details of Criseyde’s penetration but implies that the wound, by some transitive sympathy, has attained Troilus’s heart. But whoso axed hym whereof hym smerte, He seyde his harm was al aboute his herte .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . I feel now so sharpe a new peyne . . . ( 5.1224–25, 1269) As John Fleming explains, “The beast’s assault on the woman’s heart will hurt the hero’s heart for the quite literal reason that her heart is his heart.”41 The hunt, then, engineers a transferal of gender roles (whether actual or literal) from female body to male body, or more insidiously from dominant to subordinate. Heretofore, I have discussed the medieval love-hunt as the echo of a classical phenomenon, a “matter of Rome.” Romance, however, particularly Arthurian romance, is the beneficiary of a wholly different subset of cultural archetypes from Celtic myth. Indeed, Marie’s Lais, as artifacts of Breton lore, are blood relatives to the Celtic tradition, albeit infused liberally with classical pretension. In Marie, Ovidian metamorphosis is bedfellow to Britonic magic. The same transferals of sexual and martial potency and reversals of gender that occur in the classical chase motif are essential features of the Otherworld chase. The Otherworld, like the Renaissance Green World, is a medieval locus of ritual subversion in counterpoise to the court. The difference of the Otherworld hunt from its classical counterparts, and one

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that Marie is careful to observe, is that men learn. Their wounds are remediable and with them heal the social ills of the courtly society of which their wounds are a synecdoche. Marie’s Breton material is of a piece and of an age with the Welsh Mabinogi.42 A hunt inaugurates the first branch. Much like Guigemar, the hero, Pwyll, is led by a stag into the Otherworld. There he meets and agrees to help the king Arawn, who asks for a service with the condition that Pwyll exchange shape and place with him for a year and in that time deliver him from his enemy Hafgan. Behind the bargain is a sexual test: “I will put you in my place in Annwfn, and give you the fairest woman you have ever seen to sleep with you at night.”43 Though sorely tested, Pwyll fulfills the bargain honorably by maintaining his chastity with his host’s wife. This sexually inflected reversal of roles evolves later into a reversal of gendered agency when Pwyll marries the controlling Rhiannon.44 In addition to the supernatural dominatrix, the Mabinogi contributes another important gendered detail to the hunt: the actual sex change of the male as a punishment for a sexual crime against women. It is akin in many ways to the Ovidian theme of love’s revenge against the affront of chastity that causes the metamorphosis of Teiresias and such hunters as Narcissus and Callisto. However, the Mabinogi pre­ sents the reversal as a more direct consequence of the hunt. Math vab Mathonwy is a hunt story that shares both the political and sexual sides of the motif. The eponymous Math is a king like the Fisher King whose leg has been injured, whose consort is raped, and whose rule is thereby threatened with usurpation. Math punishes his nephews who are responsible for these crimes by changing them in successive years into mated hunt animals: stag and hind, boar and sow, and wolf and bitch. Each year, in reminiscence of the crime, the two young men are forced to couple and procreate, alternating gender. In Celtic myth, role reversal functions both as a punishment for a sexual crime and as a contrapasso of political usurpation that inverts subject and ruler. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shares with the Welsh material many elements of the Otherworld hunt, particularly the submotif of exchange of service as erotic trial. Here again the hero’s wounds are crucial to his feminization. The Green Knight’s decapitation in the romance’s opening episode proves to be a gambit, drawing Gawain into a beheading game. When the Green Knight survives unfazed, he earns the right of

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reprisal, transforming Gawain from willing predator to honor-bound prey. On his way to collect the Green Knight’s return stroke, Gawain stops at the Otherworld castle Hautdesert and is received cordially by Bertilak (the unbeknownst Green Knight) and his seductive consort. There Gawain enters into yet another reciprocal bargain, again involving a hunt in which he is the unwitting prey. While the Green Knight hunts a series of animals, Gawain, remaining at home, becomes the object of lady’s amorous pursuit. At the end of each act of venery, he is to exchange his winnings with his host, although he is as yet unaware that the nightly hunt is also part of the bargain.45 The double hunt is portrayed in artfully juxtaposed scenes highlighting the irony of Gawain’s double role as agent and object, wounder and wounded. After a hunt Bertilak kills, dismembers, and decapitates a boar, then gives the spitted head to Gawain, saying, “Now, Gawayn, . . . this game is your owen” (1635).46 The full relevance to Gawain’s huntedness is contained in the alliterative pun on the syllables of his name combining “game” and “owen.” Against this backdrop of butchered animals, vulnerable hunters, and dissected language looms the impending mortal stroke, a thought that bedevils Gawain’s imagination. The poet deftly implicates his protagonist’s sexual conduct in his ultimate physical safety and chivalric honor. The lady, whom Gawain has resisted honorably thus far, offers him a moral compromise in the form of a magic talisman (“luf-lace”) that, while constituting a minor sexual breach of decorum, will render him invulnerable. Rather than trust in his masculine prowess, Gawain wears this most feminine ­ token as a defense during his exchange-of-blows contest with the Green Knight. Rather than blows, Gawain has exchanged sexual identity and gendered agency, transforming himself into an object of the double hunt. While the Green Knight rewards Gawain’s overall good faith in the exchange of winnings by sparing his life, he reproves his indiscretion with a glancing wound to the neck. Curiously, this “nirt in the nek” affects Gawain as if it had been to his genitals: it emasculates him. For Gawain, the wound represents a stigma to his masculine courage and chivalric integrity as oath-giver. He ends the romance, in effect, feminized, or, as Jerome Jeffrey Cohen remarks, having “learned his place . . . in the realm of the feminine.”47 Guigemar, despite its affinity, is not a story of courtly love pitched at the level of a Tristan and Isolt. There is no hymeneal ending. The

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disposition of the lovers’ relationship is left unresolved precisely because love as a mutualizing emotion is not the tale’s province. Unlike Eliduc, in which the scope of action and depth of characterization are borne equally between male and female protagonists, Guigemar identifies only with the male; the Amie remains nameless. Rather, it recounts a man’s quest to heal the masculine consciousness, a quest achieved the moment Guigemar performs his first, and last, deed of manliness—defeating his rival Meriadus in combat. The sexual wound that inaugurates the plot emblematizes the poet’s anger not against men per se but against the condescension of the masculine experience of love, the unwillingness of the virile to contemplate femininity as something other than a masculine construction. The healing process with which the tale is mainly concerned requires the hero’s displacement between male and female spheres of influence, what I would like to call with Christine de Pisan the City of Ladies and the City of Men. Balance returns only when Guigemar becomes a citizen of both. At the center of the story, and representing an essential counterpoint to Marie’s social project, is an Ovidian metatext. The Remedia ­amoris inhabits the Lady’s inner sanctum as a hermeneutic anchor to the theme of love’s wounds and remedies. Unlike those who have argued that the Ovidian paradigm of love in Guigemar is a negative exemplum, I read her dialectic of gender here as committedly, albeit conflictedly, Ovidian. The Remedia amoris is unique in the corpus of classical literature in addressing its advice separately to male and female audiences. Part of what makes it such irresistible reading is that the love secrets Ovid makes privy to men and women independently are in fact revealed to both. Its art is to allow, or rather to invite, each sex to view the process of courtship from the opposing camp, to play the roles of both hunter and quarry. Differences denuded, mysteries debunked, the reader comes away with the capacity, perhaps for the first time, to practice the ritual of love sans artifice. Sensitive to Ovid’s romantic irony, Marie dismisses his book with an ironic gesture that effectively propels it into the foreground of controversy. She too invites, or rather forces, her male audience into an appreciation of feminine sensibilities. Her Ovidianism, however, is not limited to the Remedia. One of the prime artistic accomplishments of the Metamorphoses is the way it renders the terror of the moment in which a character physically experiences his opposite. That is certainly the case with Narcissus’s

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iste ego sum, “I am he.” Transfixed by alterity, by the sexually unattainable, he has no recourse to any resolution but metamorphosis. Other Ovidian characters realize their sexual otherness—Teiresias, Hermaphroditus­—but Guigemar is closest in spirit to the hunters Narcissus and Callisto. Like them, he is a hunter whose physical beauty sets him apart (“El reaulme nen out plus bel,” 38) and whose disdain or indifference to love is ascribed to pride, what in Narcissus Ovid calls dura superbia. Indeed in Guigemar, Marie is responding less to Ovid’s “Narcissus” than to the love paradigm to be found in the twelfth-century lay Narcisus: metamorphosis as Amor’s revenge against the obdurate. Guigemar, already epicene, will be cursed by the White Hind he kills to be wounded by love, feminized and healed by a feminine hand. His curse is also his cure. The tale presents a series of narrative obstacles—linguistic, symbolic, intertextual—that must be resolved in detail before Marie’s larger arguments and finer distinctions become clear. How is the Hind’s curse linked to Guigemar’s “cure”? What is the iconographic meaning of the rebounding arrow? Should the wounding scene be construed as a rite of passage? What is its intertextual link to Ovid and Ovidianism? Finally, is Marie’s construction of love’s wounds and cures, like the Remedia, an apology for or a rebuttal to the Ars amatoria? It is a peculiar feature of this story that before there is a wound there is a “cure.” If, as Marie seems to argue, the wound is a means to a cure, the “cure” is a pretext to the wound. Marie introduces Guigemar to the reader with all the familiar eulogies to parentage, nobility, and beauty until she comes to the issue of his sexuality, of which she says: “De tant i out mespris Nature / Ke unc de nule amur n’out cure” ( 57–58). [So much did Nature hold him in contempt (or “did he disregard Nature”) that he had no care for love (or “that he never had a cure for any love”).] The meaning of much of what follows turns on the correct reading of these lines. One controversy regarding whether Guigemar wronged Nature (whence it can be assumed she took revenge) and so became indifferent (“n’out cure”) to love or whether Nature wronged Guigemar to the same end is to my mind settled on the latter.48 Love’s “curse,” as Guigemar calls it, or vengeful “destiny,” in the words of the White Hind, is independent of any slight against Nature.49 More important is the meaning of the word cure itself. Although it has escaped the notice

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of commentators, the logic of this passage’s syntax in Marie takes its direct cue from the famous first two lines of Aeneid 4 “At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / vulnis alit venis, et caeco carpitur igni” (4.1–2; emphasis mine) [But the queen, long since smitten with a grievous love-pang, feeds the wound with her lifeblood and is wasted with fire unseen]. The yoking of cura and vulnis here is proleptic of the central metaphor of book 4 beginning on line 68, in which Dido is figured as a deer wounded by an arrow in a love-hunt. In Vergil too, therefore, the pangs precede the wound, while the cure for the pain is also the cause. The emotional wound Dido feels at the beginning of book 4 is premonitory of the sexual wound she will suffer from Aeneas when they consummate their attraction after a hunt. More acutely, in Latin cura carries both a transitive and an intransitive meaning; it can mean both the pain felt by the lover and the object for which the lover feels pain.50 Thus semantically, Aeneas also both precedes and follows the wound. Finally, cura is semantically reversible in the sense that it suggests the pain felt and the “care” given to relieve that pain. This latter sense is best realized in the vernacularized cure. In Marie, it undoubtedly means both “care” and “cure,” as the Tobler-­Lommatzsch directs us.51 Thus we may read in English, “So greatly had Nature wronged him that he would never find a cure for any love.” We must take Guigemar’s sexuality, therefore, to be wounded even before his arrow rebounds, hitting him in the upper thigh. The rebounding arrow is a topos fraught with ulterior significance and linked in obvious and less than obvious ways to Guigemar’s sexual deficiency. While hunting in the forest, Guigemar spies a stag, gives chase, and then sees an antlered hind, whom he shoots.52 The arrow hits the beast, then ricochets, wounding the hunter in his groin. Contemporary readers could not but have seen in this passage a more than incidental analogy to William II’s well-known demise. The Norman king was a man well hated by his subjects, who faulted him for imposing capital punishment for deer poaching, and by the clergy, whom he taxed heavily. There was no undue surprise or lamentation, therefore, when he was suspiciously shot with an arrow through the heart while stag hunting in the New Forest in 1100. Clerical accounts widely impute the cause to divine retribution.53 The same motive frames ­Guigemar’s wound. Love in Guigemar is a punitive force (we find Venus casting love’s heretics into hellfire), and Guigemar’s

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a­ ffront, whether to Amors directly or vicariously through the Hind, results in an act of divine retribution. Marie’s gods, however, are purposefully punitive. The White Hind is very specific in her malediction: “N’avras tu jamés garisun De la plaie k’as en la quisse, De si ke cele te guarisse Ki suffera pur tue amur Issi grant peine e tel dolur K’unkes femme taunt ne suffri, E tu referas taunt pur li.” (112–18) [ You will never be healed of the wound you have in the thigh until a cure comes from someone who will suffer from your love with as great anguish and pain as ever woman suffered and in return you do the same for her.] It is not enough to read this “feminine pain” as the generic heartache of jilted lovers. Surely Marie would concede masculine heartbreak. This pain is local to Guigemar’s wound and, it seems, specific to women. I would like to read “to suffer from your love” (Ki suffera pur tue amur) literally, gynecologically, as well as emotionally.54 While the text does not oblige us to conclude thus, the suggestion that Guigemar must suffer the pain of first sex and its concomitant responsibilities from the feminine perspective is wholly consonant with Marie’s agendum. The loss of virginity, like menstruation, is a blood ritual of initiation into womanhood akin to the young man’s first kill in the hunt. Yet female first sex carries with it a dishonor, a sense of loss that young men never experience, and one that translates into a compunction to remain faithful to that first partner. Guigemar’s wound is most profitably read as the mimesis of a deflowering and an internalization of the responsibilities that attend it. In a single stroke the arrow feminizes and stigmatizes the hero, imposing feminine standards of shame upon his condition. Marie’s invention of a virginal Guigemar works a masterful twist upon the Tristan legend from which she draws the love wound and sexual healing motif. Many of the details are the same: both are wounded in the groin in hunts, both are victims of a retributive destiny,55 both can

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be healed only by one woman “through the act of physical love.”56 But the maturity of love between Tristan and Isolt and Tristan’s security in his sexuality make the experience of feminizing situations, of shame and social marginality, occasions for irony, not angst. Over Marie’s naive young knights hangs an invidious challenge to their manhood: Lanval’s heterosexuality is impugned viciously by Guinevere, and Guigemar’s buddies weigh the likelihood that he is a “peri,” a sodomite, before ­either young man has developed a stable sexual identity.57 Every subsequent act thus takes on the quality of self-­affirmation, assuaging a latent angst. While both Tristan and Guigemar lament their plight, Marie holds her knight responsible for it at all moments. His wound is selfinflicted, his destiny self-wrought. Moreover, Guigemar’s wound, like Dido’s in Aeneid 4 or Adonis’s love-kiss, figuratively transgenders him, making the sexuality of the episode a ritual of manhood in reverse. Similar ritual imagery is present in Béroul’s Tristran, but its argument asks us to draw no further conclusions regarding sexual norms. We feel a suffusion of irony at the indignities he suffers but sense no jeopardy to his amour propre. While hunting, Tristran is wounded in the thigh by a boar: Le jor devant, Tristan, el bois En la jambe nafrez estoit D’un grant sengler, mot se doloit La plaie mot avoit saignié.58 [The day before in the woods, Tristan was wounded in the leg by a huge boar. He was in great pain and he had bled a great deal.] The following night he trysts with Yseut, unaware as yet that a trap has been laid. Flour strewn on the floor of Yseut’s bedchamber would betray the interloper were it not for his mighty leap between beds over the flour. His exertion, however, reopens the wound: Les piez a joinz, esme, si saut, El lit le roi chaï de haut. Sa plaie saigne; ne la sent, Qar trop a son delit entent. Le sanc qu’inn ist les dras ensaigne .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

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Ha! Dex qel duel que la roïne N’avot les dras du lit ostez! Ne fust la nuit nus d’eus provez. (729–33, 750–52) [He put his feet together, estimated, and jumped. He landed on the king’s bed. His wound bled; he did not feel it, as he was too busy thinking of his pleasure. The blood from it stained the sheets. . . . Oh God, what a pity the queen didn’t strip the sheets from the bed! Then nothing could have been proven against them that night.] Beroul’s insistence upon the probative value of the bedclothes draws attention to their function in the narrative. Traditionally displayed the morning after the nuptials, bloody sheets give public proof of love’s consummation. The signs of marriage here, however, serve only to underscore ironically the illegitimacy of their relationship. Here Tristran, having spread his legs too wide, is doing the bleeding, and it is he who will suffer the humiliation of the morning after, a fate usually reserved for the woman. But it is an irony wholly contained within the episode. Tristan’s maturity allows him to make choices that Guigemar cannot, that Marie does not want him to be able to make. Wounds cause a rupture from society for both Tristan and Guigemar. For his part, Tristan blithely accepts versions of his sexual outsiderliness in the roles of vagabond and leper, and when he does flee with Isolt it is alone to the woods, living a life of quotidian normality content in its divorce from the life of the court. For Guigemar, who flees to the city, not the woods, his estrangement from his kin group has the effect of ostracism, instilling an insecurity that places him in sympathy with Ovid’s young sexual misfits in the Metamorphoses. Callisto, the virgin huntress and disdainer of love, endures a sexual assault from a god, much as Guigemar does from the Hind. Her reaction is typical of the naive love-initiate. Raped by Jupiter, she becomes pariah among her virginal comites for the sexual wound she has endured, doubly alien for her nonconformance to either gender.59 Her hunting represents a ritual membership revoked when she becomes the hunted. Likewise for Guigemar, hunting is an act that promises inclusion but delivers the opposite. The rest of the tale, the cure, depends upon Marie’s

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finding a way to reintegrate Guigemar from the margins, a fate that neither Tristan nor Callisto accomplishes.

Eliduc and the Feminine Comity Though Marie’s politics are at times equivocal in other lais, in Eliduc she picks up the gage early and unambiguously: “There are many kings in that land, and among them was strife and war” (90–91). Her concern, as ever, is masculine estrif and its solutions. Eliduc is the story of divided kingdoms and divided loyalties transacted against a realistic historical backdrop and displaced from immanent political reality into the world of romance by one scant but crucial element of fantasy: a miraculous healing of faith. That divisions of loyalty and compromises of faith command the ­attention of the plot is to be expected from an Anglo-Norman poet writing in the wake of a civil war in England that pitted rival monarchs— Stephen and Matilda—against each other and threatened to fracture irreparably the Channel Empire of the Angevins. Eliduc’s shuttle diplomacy between Brittany and England recalls the troop movements across the channel during the period of military maneuvering culminating in Stephen’s virtual abdication to Henry II. The movement between parts of the empire implicit in Eliduc, like the transgression of boundaries in Bisclavret and Guigemar, invites rigorous scrutiny. The story’s premise grows out of the perturbations these intermittent crossings cause to political and marital ties. Marie introduces the lay’s protagonists Eliduc and Guildeluëc as a loving couple whose bond of fidelity is broken by the intervention of war that takes him away: Mut s’entreamerent lëaument. Mes puis avint par une guere Que il alat soudees quere Iloc ama une meschine. . . . (12–15) [They loved each other very loyally. But then it came about through a war that he went off to military service and fell in love with a girl.]

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The history of love in this passage is ruptured both notionally and physically by the war couplet guere/quere of the middle lines. When the love theme returns, the mutuality of the original bond, heightened by the plural reciprocal “s’entreamerent,” has been severed: the subject and verb are now singular and transitive, “Iloc ama une meschine.” Thus the geography and politics of division penetrate to the lexical level. Discrepancies in grammar and rhyme spoil the pair’s syllabic coupling as war afflicts language. My interest, however, lies in the anthropological tensions Eliduc reveals between and within groups and individuals. Behind the emotional and geopolitical schism that war causes in Eliduc lies an antagonism between vying comities, on the one hand a feudal fraternity ­­beset with faction and envy and on the other a religious sorority dedicated to unselfish love. In patristic terms, the motives characterizing each group illustrate the fundamental dichotomy of invidia and caritas.60 Attentive readers of Eliduc’s opening lines will have noticed the similarity of the wife’s and mistress’s names—Guildeluëc and Guilliadun. Marie names them as if they were sisters, and indeed that is what they become. When Eliduc’s wife discovers her rival unconscious in the chapel near the estate, she expresses not jealousy but “pitié” and “amur” (1027). Eventually, with the participation of Eliduc, they become sisters of the cloth, sharing a divine faith and love that outlasts the bonds of feudal honor among men: Ensemble od eus se dure e rent Pur servir Deu omnipotent. Ensemble od sa femme premiere Mist sa femme que tant ot chiere. El la receut cum sa serur Et mut li porta grant honur. (1163–68) [Together with them (the wives) he lives and renders himself over to the service of almighty God. He placed his first wife together with the wife he held dear, and (the former) received her as a sister and accorded her great honor.] In the wives’ nunnery that Eliduc builds, Marie has constructed a feminine comity that supersedes the hunting band. Even the lay’s

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name changes as the relevance of the adventure shifts from martial to marital to sororal: D’eles deus ad li lais a nun Guildeluëc ha Guilliadun. Elidus fu primes nomez, Mes ore est li nuns remuez, Kar des dames est avenu L’aventure dunt li lais fu. (21–26) [The lay’s name comes from the two women, Guildeluëc and Guilliadun. It was called Eliduc at first, but later the name was changed because the adventure from which the lay derives happened to the ladies.] What, by contrast, has the fellowship of man to offer? The response comes in the hunting passage that begins the story. Eliduc is a knight whose loyalty to his suzerain is rewarded initially by a stewardship of the land: “U que li reis deüst errer, / Il aveit la tere a garder” ( 33−34) [Whenever the king had to go off, he [Eliduc] was charged with guarding the realm]. Eliduc’s prowess in the hunt earns him only slander at court, turning him abruptly into a hunted man: Par les forez poeit chacier; N’i ot si hardi forestier Ki cuntredire l’en osast Ne ja une feiz en gruçast. Pur l’envie del bien de lui, Si cum avient sovent d’autrui, Esteit a sun seigneur medlez Et empeiriez e encusez, Que de la curt le cungea Sanz ceo qu’il ne l’areisuna. ( 36–46) [He was allowed to hunt in the forest. There was no forester so bold as to dare to oppose him or to complain about anything. Because of the envy of his merits, as often happens to others, people tried to stir up trouble between him and his lord by denigrating

56  the sociology of romance him and accusing him, so that he was chased from the court without reasonable cause.]

The hunt turned around becomes a metaphor for political and later marital betrayal. But Marie takes the betrayal one step further, indicting a method of social order that doesn’t work, one bound by obligation rather than goodwill. Feudality both encourages and punishes individualism; the perquisites of service it buys with a fief it seeks to contain with oaths of fealty. In evidence Marie cites the proverb “Amur de seigneur n’est pas fief  ” (The love of the lord is not a fief ). Her message, strikingly discrepant from the courtly values she has upheld heretofore, translates roughly Christ’s dictum “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Thus Cil est sages . . . Ki lëauté tient sun seigneur, Envers ses bons veisuns amur (65−66) [He is wise . . . who shows loyalty to his lord and love to his neighbors]. “Honor thy lord but love thy neighbor” is more caveat than counsel. Perceptible in this last, revisionary lay is a shift of social hierarchy from vertical alliances among unequals (lord and liege man), for which the hunt serves as paradigm, to horizontal alliances among equals (monasticism). Both Guigemar and Eliduc begin with a wounding and end in an act of healing. In Guigemar, both events occur to a man. In Eliduc, it is the turn of women to heal the injuries caused by men. Curiously, Marie draws on a Germanic myth that connects Eliduc thematically to both Bisclavret and Guigemar. In Eliduc, the adulterous husband lands on the Breton coast and carries the body of his unconscious mistress Guilliadun to a chapel near his estate, returning frequently to mourn. His wife has him followed, and in the company of a valet discovers the girl and reconstructs the story of her husband’s grief. Yet in this lay, unlike every other lay in the ensemble, the victimized party does not seek vengeance. Instead, Guildeluëc heals Guilliadun by a peculiar means. One of a pair of weasels at play in the chapel scampers across

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the girl’s body and is duly smitten and killed by the valet. Guildeluëc watches amazed as the mate seems to mourn (“doel mener”) and then leaves. Returning with a flower in its mouth, it applies the flower to the wound, and the animal is instantly resuscitated. As they run out together, Guildeluëc orders the valet to throw a stick at the male weasel, causing it to drop the flower on its way out. Now Guildeluëc repeats the same procedure on Guilliadun with the same result. Essentially the same story occurs in the Old Norse Volsunga Saga, which, though written in the thirteenth century, draws on a far older tradition. As a whole, the saga is concerned with social cohesion, particu­larly that of the close kinship group and the oaths that maintain that cohesion. In one episode, Sigmund takes his son Sinnfjötli into the forest on a hunting-pillaging mission. His purpose is to harden the boy by “killing men for booty” so as to prepare him later to take “vengeance” (venja). While robbing an enchanted house they discover two wolf pelts that, when donned, turn them into wolves. Now in wolf form they intend to redouble their manhunting, but they take a vow not to outdo the others in homicide. Upon this point Sigmund insists, explaining to Sinnfjötli that violating the oath and showing up his elders in hunting will engender jealousy: “because you are very young and hotheaded and many men will want to hunt you [at vei∂a thik].”61 Heedless of this advice, Sinnfjötli kills more men than does his father and without help, a fact of which the boy boasts. Incensed, Sigmund, still in wolf form, leaps up and bites Sinnfjötli in the windpipe, killing him. Like Eliduc with Guilliadun, Sigmund carries the body back to their hut, repenting his jealousy until he spies two weasels fighting. One bites the other in the neck, repents, then runs off to the woods. It returns with a leaf in its mouth, which, when applied to the wound, heals the other instantly. Sigmund gets a raven to retrieve ­­the fallen leaf and repeats the process with Sinnfjötli. While interesting in itself, the analogue lends context and motive to the parallel episode in Marie. Through the Volsunga Saga, the relationship of the opening hunting scene in Eliduc, as a metaphor for the divisiveness of envy in the comity, to the healing scene makes sense politically. Both are hunts, but the second resolves the social problems the first poses. Moreover, the lycanthropy behind the older Germanic analogue enables us to forge a thematic link, if only by ­relay, with Bisclavret, in which vengeance on the offender is part of the

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legal solution. Eliduc tacitly rewrites Bisclavret’s solution by offering forgiveness, breaking the cycle of violence as a remedy for violence. In Bisclavret, the domesticated werewolf is a symbol of the containment of socially disruptive passions, although they irrupt nonetheless.62 In Eliduc, the passions are not contained but healed.

2

m Economies of Romance Systems of Value in Chrétien de Troyes

When can we begin to speak of medieval “culture”? This ques-

tion is essentially the same as asking when Western society became aesthetically self-conscious, when, like Narcissus before the pool, it first ventured a collective “Iste ego sum.” For Georg Simmel, the moment of acculturation is always narcissistic. It starts with an awareness of form in which bodies of practice and patterns of behavior, liberated from the unthinking blur of quotidian ritual, take shape as socially valuable objects of cultivation in themselves. What we call culture is thus the stage in societal development in which, for example, music recognizes modes, technical knowledge sciences, law ethics, story­telling genres.1 Distant from the historical particulars of cultural production, however, Simmel’s sociology provides only part of an answer.2 Culture for Marx (although he does not address the subject directly) is a form of social consciousness born at the moment when mental labor differentiates itself from manual labor.3 In claiming to transcend the truck and struggle of material production, mental labor, for him, conferred specious substance and illusory value upon ahistorical, purely aesthetic representations of society. Mental labor, in other words, was the stuff of romance. It is not surprising, therefore, that the awakening of medieval culture in the twelfth century coincided both with sudden evolutions in the division of labor and a market economy and with the advent of a new literary genre in romance.4 In an age of rapid urbanization and the rise of the city, the medieval West was experiencing a Copernican 59

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moment of self-awareness. The feudal ethos, its martial imperatives subsidized by epic, had always perceived individual masculine values as if they existed in their own hermetic universe of chivalry. Romance, however, saw chivalric codes as part of the culture at large and understood individual cultural values as subordinate to a larger value of culture. More precisely, what romance seized upon was that this value of culture, indeed value tout court, could be construed as simultaneously quantitative (economic) and qualitative (ethical), that is one of price and one of worth. Each system of valuation contends with, yet is contingent upon, the other. Romance in particular appropriated this idea as its signal province. Romancers as mental laborers and manufacturers of culture, foremost among them Chrétien de Troyes, suddenly had power and a place in the economy. From this point on, chivalry and its ideology would cease to be an independent sociopolitical phenomenon with sure and settled values and would be instead a fief to the fictions in which its values were negotiated. In positing causes and consequences of this romance renaissance of value, I do not intend to observe an order of factual precedence for so impalpable an event or to procrusteanize its unruly influences to fit a single perspective. Multiple histories—social, economic, literary—have equal claim. From a Marxist perspective, the roots of the revaluation of value lie largely in developments in agriculture that produced for the first time a leisure economy in which work was no longer synonymous with manual labor. The large-scale adoption of the horse-drawn plow coupled with an ergonomic harness significantly increased the amount of land that could be cultivated in a day over the far slower oxen team.5 Cultivators learned more reliably to use legumes in crop rotation to return higher quantities of nitrogen to the soil, reducing fallow land and increasing yields by up to a third. The foundation of the Cistercians in 1098, an order dedicated to manual labor and cultivation as a moral alternative to the inactivity of prayer, dramatically increased assarts throughout Europe in the twelfth century, bringing more land under cultivation and administering it more effectively through a system of granges. Cistercians also joined local monarchs in minting new coin, part of the twelfth-century monetary revolution. With myriad new coinage vying for acceptance on a European market, its value now became a corollary of confidence in the issuing body rather than in mere weight,

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shifting the criterion of value from an unchanging metric to a variable one and causing what one critic has called an “economic nominalism” in which money, “divested of universal value . . . became free to float— a floating signifier—according to prevailing market price.”6 Prominent churchmen, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, argued vehemently against the instability of free-floating value located in currency rather than natural, material measures, to no avail. Prices, long held relatively stable by a natural economy, had begun noticeably to inflate in the late twelfth century. With inflation, the vivid fantasy of intrinsic value began to fail.7 In Capital, Marx pursues the consequences of such a disillusionment for the concept of value: The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency, so much so that, although money is nothing but the value-form of commodities, price ceases altogether to express value. Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honor, etc., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and thus of acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without a value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it.8

This class of notional commodities such as honor and uncultivated land (what medievals called waste land) are of crucial importance to twelfth-century romance. Indeed, romance becomes their marketplace and their value the seedbed of economic theory. Amid this economic ferment, an ideology of leisure as the cornerstone of an intellectually vibrant culture had begun to leach into the vernacular consciousness from classical sources. By the end of the twelfth century, nearly all of Aristotle had been translated into Latin, among which the Ethics and Politics proffered attractive paradigms for civilized society. In his discussion of schooling (Gr. skole = leisure) in

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the Politics, Aristotle observed that “leisure is the single fundamental principle of the whole business” and invited his reader to consider that “if we need both work and leisure, but the latter is preferable to the former and is its end, we must ask ourselves what are the proper activities of leisure?”9 Cicero gave one well-known answer to this question in the De officiis. Leisure is merely intellectual work for the benefit of the public: “He is never less at leisure [otium] than when he is at leisure.”10 Ovid famously concurred. But whereas Cicero felt that the work of leisure was properly philosophy, Ovid argued cheekily for love and the practice of erotic poetry, with which, for him, love was synonymous. Chrétien de Troyes’ ideology of work and value in his romances is that of a cleric steeped in the classical values of the contemplative life, entering a market economy whose consumers subscribe to the values of the active life. Culture, for him, is a seed that must be cultivated carefully both in the knightly audience and in the patron, drawing its imagery from agriculture and its lessons tendentiously from biblical and Ovidian exempla and forging a seamless ideological accord among them where none had existed before. His task is dual: (1) to reconcile two, fundamentally different modes of living within a society just beginning to grapple with the consequences of the division of labor, leisure time and the liberties it affords, and (2) to synthesize the martial values of a warrior class with the cultured ones of a priest class, a synthesis upon which the value of poetry and his livelihood depend.

Love and Honor in Clig è s To quibble with the conduct of legendary heroes, be they Alexander or Tristan, seems, in a peculiar way, to be Cligès’s unifying narrative strategy, a strategy of criticism, for as much as the story is a romance itself it is equally a parodic requital of its genre and the values it exemplifies.11 Quibbles, by which I mean wordplay, work for Chrétien as the vehicles of social correction, and one cluster of homonyms, seemingly frivolous embellishments individually but collectively amounting to a coherent recoding of chivalric mores, attracts my particular interest. The quibble at issue teases from the very beginning of the romance. Having bandied the word los about several times in the open-

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ing lines,12 Chrétien gives it dialectical definition in the apostrophe of Alixandre, the young protagonist, before he sets off to the court of King Arthur: Maint haut home par lor peresce Perdent grant los qu’avoir porroient, Se par la terre cheminoient. Ne s’acordent pas bien ansanble Repos et los, si com moi sanble, Car nule rien ne s’alose Riches hom qui toz jorz repose, Einsi sont contraire et divers .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Biau pere, tant com il me loist Los conquerre, se je tant vail, I vuel metre poinne et travail.13 (152–59, 162–64) [Many noble men through their laziness lose great honor they could have had if they had traveled the world on errantry. Repose and honor, it seems to me, do not go well together, for a man of substance who is always idle never wins himself renown. Therefore these qualities are contrary and discrete. . . . Dear father, so long as I have the chance to win honor, if I’m up to it, toward that end I intend to devote all my efforts and work.] Los finds its way into romance from Latin laus, laudis, meaning “praise” or “fame,” having undergone the normal processes of sound change. In the vocabulary of the twelfth century, it serves as a term of chivalric esteem that defines itself in opposition to peresce (laziness) or more precisely repos (leisure), which is to say all endeavor not undertaken in the saddle. It may be glossed simply as “honor through action.” Chrétien’s disquisition on los in the introduction, badgering the reader with its insistence upon an antithesis with repos—a commonplace hardly in need of repetition—is obtrusive for its obviousness. Indirectly, Gaston Paris’s impatient dismissal of Cligès’s introduction as otiose and boring explains this obviousness, although not quite in the way he suspected. The beginning, he carps, “makes the readers wait too long for the true beginning of the action.”14 However crabbed

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and ungenerous, Paris’s narrative sensibilities are not indiscriminate. Indeed, they are shared by Chrétien himself, who, elsewhere in the romance, eschews elaborate description (4588–90) to allow the plot to move forward unencumbered. Alternatively and more attractively, the dilation that los/repos affords may be seen as an occasion for the first ironic gesture of the romance: an example of verbal inaction in praise of the virtues of industry and a mise en alerte to the audience of future ironization of the theme. Peter Haidu imagines an identical gesture further on, again regarding narrative dilation: The author has just read to them [the audience] Alexander’s monologue: he raises his eyes from the text, the corner of his mouth twitches, and he speaks directly to his audience of friends after taking a long breath:

Granz est la complainte Alixandre . . . [865] and pauses in his reading to allow laughter to die down. As in modern French, granz can mean both quantitatively large and qualitatively great. Here, it puns, and bears both meanings.15

Rather than endorse the values of “honor through action,” Chrétien seems to be propping them up in effigy. Reading Cligès, we would do well to heed René Girard’s pointed comment regarding Chrétien’s treatment of honor in Yvain, claiming him as a “satirist unraveling what he regards as the topic of devouring ambition in the feudal aristocracy of his time.”16 Yet we need not resort to imaginary performances to appreciate the ironic chords such examples of mannered temporizing, what I would like to call verbal repos, might have touched in a noble audience. In a world that endorsed industry at arms as a precondition to honor, the majority of a knight’s time would have been spent at home or at court. There time passed in managing the business of land and in the unhurried occupations of hunting and feasting. Court life, if we are to believe the descriptions of romance culture from the courts of Champagne and Flanders, or take seriously such treatises as Andreas Capellanus’s De amore, was dominated to the point of obsession with the theory and aesthetics of love, to the extent that love became a synonym to leisure. That Ovid famously claimed love to be another form

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of military service in the Amores provided romancers with a classical precedent, albeit ironically inflected, for treating amorous exploits with the same consequence as chivalric adventure. For Chrétien’s leisured audiences, the antithesis of los and repos would certainly have been an anxious matter, pitting contending ideals of courtoisie against each other. Indeed, Erec et Enide, Yvain, and Cligès share an interest in maintaining masculine honor in a world in which feminine rules and authority are on the increase. Cligès in particular both accommodates and criticizes the chivalric biases of romance culture. And let me be clear: the chivalric “criticism” that I impute here to Chrétien is not heavy-handed or conclusive but playful, propositive, oblique, destabilizing. In Cligès, los/repos appears not as a thematic issue to be disputed among the characters, as in Erec and Yvain, but as a subject of ironic negotiation between author and audience, a problem of semantics to be resolved in the verbal texture of the narrative. Moreover, it receives a distinctly romance treatment. No longer is honor a matter of battlefield industry and feudal loyalty as it is in La Chanson de Roland; instead, it is a choice between kinds of love, the love of fame versus the love of woman. Of course, the conflict of love and honor enjoys a hallowed tradition in epic literature as well. With roots in Greek political theory and the mos maiorum, the unwritten law of Roman custom, it percolated up as a theme through pagan and later Christian Europe, reaching the surface in the chansons de gestes and romans antiques to which Cligès is reacting. For the Greeks, philotimia, the love of fame, was counted the preeminent virtue of the soldier inasmuch as it harnessed the passions of the individual to the service of the state. Honors (kleos), as Plato maintains in Laws 921e, are the “soldier’s wages”; “the brave men who preserve our whole state,” he says, “shall receive honors.”17 Erotic love, by contrast, operated in society as an insidious, fractious, selfish passion encouraging independence and threatening the loyalties that bound the individual to the group. In the Iliad, for example, the lover Paris is little esteemed in comparison to his brother Hector, the selfless soldier. Indeed, Homer serves as the locus for the epic reproach of the lovelorn shirker. Helen joins Hector in rebuking her husband, Paris, for his truancy from battle, wishing she were “the wife of a better man than this is, one who knew modesty and all things of shame that men say.”18 And when Andromache, ­ Hector’s

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wife, ­exhorts him to remain home, he voices the conventional principles of arete: “I would feel great shame before the Trojans and the Trojan women with trailing garments if like a coward I were to shrink from the fighting. . . . I have learnt to be valiant . . . winning glory [kleos] for my own self and for my father.”19 Latin and late-Latin epic imbibe Hector’s shame ethic. In the Gesta Danorum, Saxo Grammaticus celebrates the admirable alacrity of Hjalte in abandoning his woman for battle, while Walther, the eponymous hero of the ninth-century pagan epic Waltharius, demurs to marriage for the same reasons.20 On the threshold of cultural change, the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland still epitomizes the early medieval shame ethos left over from the classical past in which virtue was decided seemingly by public referendum rather than private conviction. Faced with certain annihilation at the hands of the Saracens, Roland crucially refuses Oliver’s advice to sound his horn for reinforcements for fear of shame in the eyes of France. Dist Oliver: “Paien unt grant esforz, De noz Franceis m’i semblet aveir mult poi! Cumpaign Rollant, kar sunez vostre corn: Si l’orrat Carles, si returnerat l’ost.” Respunt Rollant: “Jo ferreie que fols, En dulce France en perdreie mun los.” (1049–54) [Oliver says, “The pagans have a considerable force, and our French forces seems to have greatly diminished in strength! Roland my friend, sound your horn. Charlemagne will hear it and turn the host around.” Roland replies: “I would be acting foolishly and I would lose my renown in France.”] Like Hector who fights for honor both for himself and his patrimony, Roland is motivated by an awareness of public opprobrium, or, as D. W. Robertson Jr. puts it, by “certain ideals of vasselage, among them that kind of fame that is maintained not for ourselves but for others.”21 The pattern of the Homeric theme of marital versus martial love revives in Erec et Enide. Erec begins the romance as a paragon of knightly self-involvement whose sole concern is for his good name.

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Early on, however, he becomes besotted with his wife, Enide, and, like Paris, lapses into supine doting. Mes tant l’ama Erec d’amors Que d’armes mes ne li chaloit, Ne a tornoiemant n’aloit, N’avoit mes soing de tornoiier; A sa fame aloit donoiier. De li fist s’amie et sa drue: Tot mist son cuer et s’antandue An li acoler et beisier; Ne se queroit d’el aesier. Si conpeignon duel an avoient, Antr’aus ssovant se semantoient De ce que trop l’amoit assez.22 (2434–45) [But Erec loved her so much that he no longer took interest in arms nor went to tournaments, nor cared to joust. He went to court his wife. Of her he made his sweetheart and his mistress; he put all his heart and mind into cuddling and kissing her, seeking no other pastime. His companions were sorry about this, and they often discussed among themselves how he showed her too much love.] For her part, Enide, like Helen before her, holds a mirror up to Erec’s behavior, galvanizing him, if indirectly, to embark on a quest to redeem lost los (2480–82). Yet Chrétien does not adopt wholesale the classical models of women as midwives to masculine honor. Unlike Helen, Enide accompanies Erec on his adventures and is a crucial participant in his “redemption.” Moreover, her vision of her husband’s honor is realistic. She sets just tasks for him, in contrast to Mabonograin’s lady in the Joie de la Cour episode, who requires that he defend the enchanted castle against all comers. In general, Chrétien’s romances do not perpetuate the formula of honor before love that the chansons de geste and romans antiques do, but refine this distinction to reflect developing social and political realities. If the epic narratives of the chanson de geste are, as Sarah Kay has argued, about irremediable conflict, romance is about verbally mediated solutions.23 In Yvain, Gauvain forewarns the protagonist of the

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potential dishonor of love but, himself a noted lover, declines to condemn outright love’s dalliances. Comant! seroiz vos or de çax, ce disoit mes sire Gauvains, qui por leur fames valent mains? Honiz soit de sainte Marie qui por anpirier se marie! Amander doit de bele dame qui n’est puis droiz que ele l’aint que ses los et ses pris remaint. Certes ancor seroiz iriez de s’amor, se vos anpiriez; que fame a tost s’enor reprise, ne n’a pas tort, s’ele despise celui qui devient de li pire el rëaume dom il est sire. (2486–2500) [What! Will you now become one of those, said my lord Gauvain to him, whose worth diminishes because of their wives? Shame on him, by Saint Mary, who marries only to debase himself! Anyone who takes a beautiful lady [to wife] should be the better for it. And it is not right for her to love him once his honor has lapsed. Indeed, you will be angered by her love if you degenerate, for a woman soon withdraws her love—nor is she wrong to—if she despises a knight who, once he is lord of her realm, degenerates.] His line of argument breaks significantly with epic tradition in favor of a new romance theory of love and honor as complementary impulses, both active. In like mind, the Gauvain of Wace’s Roman de Brut rebuts Cador’s warning that love saps martial energies, arguing to the contrary that courtly parley and love affairs spur knights on to acts of glory.24 If Chrétien’s reconciliation of love with honor does indeed represent a chivalric ethic new to romance, it is colored in particulars by the history of his age. As he was attached for at least part of his career to the court of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, his notions of chivalry may well have been designed to suit the power-

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ful predilections of Eleanor and her second husband, ­Henry II. Their marriage, rumored to have been the fruit of a love affair, was widely recognized as a love match, one that happened to bring Henry the happy perquisite of dominion over half of France.25 Love, in Henry’s case, was unquestionably an expedient to honor. Cligès’s audience would have had little difficulty discerning the analogue of Cligès’s love triangle with Fénice and the Emperor Alis and its dynastic consequences with that of Henry II, Eleanor, and Louis VII. Strangely, it is the earlier epic formula that dominates chivalric ­mores in the secular didactic literature of the following century. Neither of the two most important thirteenth-century writers on the formation of the knight, Philippe de Beaumanoir in Coutumes de Beauvaisies or Ramon Llull in his Libre del orde de cavalleria, mentions either love as a goad to prowess or the feminine role in masculine honor.26 Not until the fourteenth century and Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie do we find a succinct expression of the theory prevalent in Chrétien. Though his motto “Qui plus fait, miex vault” appears to be a eulogy to the traditional industry of the mestier d’armes, he considers love, what he terms “amer par amours,” to come under the general rubric of knightly action: There is another category of men-at-arms. . . . They put their hearts into winning the love of a lady [amer par amours]. And they are so fortunate that their ladies themselves, from the great honor and superb qualities that reside in them, do not want to let them tarry or delay in any way the winning of that honor to be achieved by deeds of arms, and advise them on this and then command them to set out and put all their efforts into winning renown and great honor where it is to be sought by valiant men. These ladies urge them on to reach beyond any of their earlier aspirations.27

Chivalric culture for him involves not merely honor through amorous service to women but a general level of competence in leisured avocations such as speaking, dancing, and singing in female company.28 Of course, Geoffroi de Charny must be appreciated in the context of the Hundred Years’ War. Jean II, king of France, was desperately seeking trained men to fight the English. Geoffroi’s argument that ladies desire their men to distinguish themselves at arms ­ provides

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added incentive for young men to enter knighthood, subserving at some level Jean’s recruitment propaganda. Nonetheless, the picture of repose that emerges from Geoffroi’s etiquette is of an essential fixture of courtly life, one built symbolically into the practice of knighthood and, though latent, present in chivalry at least since the twelfth century. An example is the dubbing ceremony, which was preceded by a ritual interlude in bed. There the initiates, according to ­Geoffroi, “should go and lie in a new bed in clean white sheets; there they should rest [se doivent reposer] as those who have emerged from a great struggle against sin and from the great peril of the devil’s torment”; the bed signifies salutary rest, “repos de bien.”29 Geoffroi’s placement of love and leisure within the scheme of honor codifies precepts already germinating in Chrétien. Even within the three-decade span of Chrétien’s corpus in the latter half of the twelfth century, the concept of repos and where it belonged in the chivalric ethos was undergoing cognitive evolution. As for Geoffroi, the paradigmatic situation of rest in Chrétien evolves in the frequent and little-studied scenes of knights in bed. Whereas in Erec, the earliest of Chrétien’s romances, the bed was the scene and totem of the knight’s disgrace, for Gauvain, who sits on the Lit Merveilleus in Le roman de Perceval and survives its violent concomitants, it presents an occasion for honor, a ritual “repos de bien.” The same ritual quality to bed rest is apparent in Lancelot’s experience in the Perilous Bed. After his episode in the cart, Lancelot, foremost among Chrétien’s knights for honor attained while recumbent, is forbidden to lie down in a bed reserved for knights of esteem.30 He insists and narrowly escapes immolation when a flaming lance shoots down at him from the ceiling. Nonchalant, Lancelot extinguishes the fire and carries on sleeping, confirming not only his sang-froid but the importance of repose. Chrétien reconfirms this ethic in the words of Meleagant’s father, who praises Lancelot as a knight in pursuit of honor and thus due a rest.31 Rhyming aloser with reposer, he argues that Lancelot is come to make his “pris croistre et aloser, / S’eüst mestier de reposer” (renown grow and increase in honor, and it would be useful for him to rest).32 Lancelot has been wounded, and Bademagu’s proposal of a convalescent respite is reasonable, yet at the same time it is detrimental to Lancelot’s honor. Lancelot’s “mestier d’armes,” he suggests provocatively, entails a “mestier de reposer.”33 The same contingency returns

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in Le roman de Perceval when the protagonist spends the night at Bel Acceuil. The lady of the castle wakes him from sleep and recounts from his bedside the story of Clamadeu’s siege and her intention to commit suicide before Clamadeu can storm the castle and carry her off. Having sown the seeds of chivalric obligation, she leaves, excusing herself for interrupting his sleep (“Or me remetrai a la voie, / Si vos laisserai reposer,” 2036–37) and making his remaining rest a meditation upon action. To amplify the significance of the moment, Chrétien carries on the rhyme, promising the audience that Perceval will win honor in this affair if he dares to act upon it (“Par tans se porra aloser / Li chevaliers, s’il faire l’ose,” 2038–39).34 Scenes of repose and withdrawal, in other words, have become opportunities for engagement, moments in which the plot recovers from action and reflects upon the scope and motive of future honor. In this light, the highly conventional los/repos dichotomy at the beginning of Cligès should be interpreted with cautious skepticism. Rather than a serious defense of traditional values, it may be more accurately a proposal inviting revision, a clerical and courtly culture’s ironic perspective on older aristocratic mores, an ideal of honor that can, and perhaps should, no longer be practiced by the nobility. There can be little question of Cligès’s classical inheritance and the values of empire building and maintenance it acquires from Homer, Statius, and Vergil through the intermedium of the romans antiques.35 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski has argued persuasively that Cligès borrows two discrete, historically determined motives from the Roman d’Enéas and the Roman de Thebes. Against the backdrop of Henry II’s newly formed Norman-Angevin empire, Enéas is a celebration of the warrior values necessary for winning an empire, while Thebes is a cautionary tale warning against internecine war that brings down empire from within.36 Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s thesis goes a long away toward explaining the possible historical motives for Chrétien’s ambivalence toward traditional martial valor; I suspect, however, that Cligès’s specific treatment of los/repos is less historical than literary in inspiration. Chrétien’s most substantial artistic debt is to a parodic literary tradition present from classical times that sought to turn epic moral cate­ gories and tenets in upon themselves. The socially provocative image of the lover as soldier, for example, appears in its earliest expression in a fragment from the Greek Middle Comedy poet Alexis: “Who will

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deny that a lover’s life involves hard work? First of all he must be very much like a soldier, and capable of the utmost physical labor.”37 Later, Horace takes up the metaphor before Ovid formalizes it in the famous “militat omnis amans” (every lover is a soldier) topos of Amores 1.9:38 ipse ego segnis eram discinctaque in otia natus; mollierant animos lectus et umbra meos. inpulit ignavum formosae cura puellae iussit et in castris aera merere suis. inde vides agilem nocturnaque bella gerentem. qui nolet fieri desidiosus, amet! (1.9.41–46) [For myself, my bent was all to dally in ungirt idleness (in otia natus); my couch and the shade had made my temper mild. Love for a beautiful girl has started me from craven ways and bidden me take service in her camp. For this you see me full of action, and waging the wars of night (agilem nocturnaque). Whoso would not become lethargic, let him love!] Ovid’s deft verse takes the pejorative otium (the Latin equivalent of repos) and sublimates it into that kind of action which connotes a practical involvement in the military affairs of the state.39 Given the Ovidian curriculum that Chrétien announces in the first sentence of Cligès,40 the reader should not be surprised to find the hero likened favorably to Narcissus (2727), the ultimate example of idle love, or to find Alixandre reduced to sleeplessness not by the tireless pursuit of the los he invokes at the outset but by “Amors . . . Ne nel lesse an lit reposer” (613). Both, despite themselves, behave as night warriors in the Ovidian mold; both come to treat knight work as a servitium amoris, the “repos travaillant,” as Jean de Meun would later call it.41 At first, the chivalric objectives of Cligès may seem straightforward: a generic acquisition of honor through heroic exploits. “Conquerre pris et los” at line 15 and again at 85 forms the response of a litany Chrétien drums into our heads in preparation for future wordplay. However, the phrase, overdetermined as it is, begins to collapse in on itself under the ironic pressure Chrétien exerts upon its syllables. Parsing Chrétien’s play on los demands of his readers a sense of the relationship between honor and time, that constant, guilty awareness

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in both audience and character that honor, like sand in an hourglass, dissipates in the flux of minutes expended idly in love and talk. Narrative dilation in Cligès is both the vehicle and the impediment to honor. The plot first quickens with the treason against Arthur of Angres, the appointed steward to the realm, furnishing Alixandre with his first opportunity to “conquerre los.” But even this righteous cause is set in pejorative context well in advance by Chrétien’s odd mention of Arthur’s holiday to Winchester, “tant qu’a Guincestre sont venu / Ou li rois estoit a sejor” (293–94). Usually, a sejor would refer not to a holiday but to the official itinerancy of the king, who could be expected to hold court in various castles throughout his lands. But this trip is clearly something of a vacation from the duties of governance; hence the highly unusual and dangerous step of deputizing Angres as interim head-of-state. By indirect comment on Alixandre and Soredamors in attendance at Winchester, Chrétien lets us know that the king’s court has been gone a long while (“An Bretaigne lonc tans esté,” 1043), rhyming richly esté (“to stay”) with esté (“summer”) in the next line, highlighting a full season’s absence. Thus, by the time the news of usurpation reaches Arthur, his “sejor” has become an issue of negligence: Tot droit a l’entree s’oitovre Vint uns messages devers Dovre De Londres et de Quantorbire Au roi unes noveles dire Qui molt li troblent son corage. Cil li ont conté le message Que trop puet an Bretaingne ester. (1043–51) [Right at the beginning of October, messengers came via Dover bringing news to the king that greatly troubled his spirit. They recounted the message that he risked staying in Brittany too long.] Arthur’s long rest, underscored by the passage’s march of seasons, is a tacit cause of his dishonor. Negligent absence, as exemplified by Mordred’s treason against the absent Arthur in Wace’s Brut or, in Bédier’s Tristan, the governor of Lyoness’s revolt against Rivalen while the latter is in Cornwall, was a characteristic flaw of medieval

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romance governance. Likewise for Chrétien’s Arthur, leisure breeds malfeasance. Yet Arthurian romance upholds the contrary proposition as well. Waiting for adventure is traditionally the main business of the Arthurian company at the outset of a romance: the king whiles away time feasting and storytelling in anticipation of an event that will propel the company into action. Yvain, for example, begins with the story of Calogrenant during just such an anticipatory lull. Delay of this sort serves as a useful framing device for the romance’s action, lending it dialectical significance. In Cligès, most of the major conflicts are preceded by an idle spell signaled by words like sejor, atarder, or atandre. Preparing for the tournament of Oxford, Cligès profits from the ample rest he has gotten before it (“Mes ainz porroit molt sejorner / Cligès,” 4547–48), downtime that heightens the eagerness for action, both literary and knightly. The “sejor” leaves the knights tired of waiting, champing at the bit, “plus ne se vont atardant, / Car plus sont engrés et ardant / De l’asanblee et de la joste” (4635–37). Building a parallel between manual and mental labor, and matching Cligès’s agitation at delay with his reader’s, Chrétien promises his audience not to drag out the story of the tourney with long lists: “Cuidiez vos or que jo vos die/ Por feire demorer mon conte: / ‘Cil roi i furent, et cil conte . . .’  ” (4588–90). This tension between salutary and dishonorable leisure, between the time spent doing deeds and hearing about deeds done, finds no resolution, but rather, as is typical of this poem, further elaboration in the form of a pun. Throughout his account of the Oxford tournament, Chrétien harps on the question of honor gained through active and passive modes of agency. So great is Cligès’s prowess at arms, we are told, that his opponents are said to win more los in ceding to him than in taking others prisoner: Ne cil n’est pas sanz grant proesce Qui por joster vers lui s’adresce, Einz a plus los de lui atandre, Que d’un autre chevalier prandre; Et se Cligés l’en mainne pris, De ce seulemant a grant pris Que a joste atendre l’osa.

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Cligés le pris et le los a De trestot le tornoiemant. (4651–59) [Nor is he even without great prowess who makes his way toward him (Cligès) to joust. Indeed, he attains more honor than in capturing another knight. And if Cligès leads him away captive, he has great honor from merely daring to face him in a joust. Cligès wins the honor and the renown above all others in the tournament.] This is strange and unmanly praise. Atandre can mean both “to attain” and “to wait for.” Thus we cannot help but hear in the heroic “los de lui atandre” (to attain honor from him) of 4654 a passive note, a “waiting for honor” in defeat as opposed to the forceful initiative of taking (“prandre”) a knight in the next line. “Atandre los,” like “conquerre los,” is further diminished as a heroic trope when transfigured into the timid “atendre l’osa” (4657). Here “l’osa” (oser = to dare to act) shares an ironic homonymy in the next line with the decisive “Cliges le pris et le los a.” The standard of knighthood that earns honor among the general mass of Oxford’s competitors is a travesty of knightly industry, Chrétien is suggesting. Of course, the purpose of the adnominatio is to set Cligès’s chivalry in relief, yet it achieves a secondary, destructive effect. It trivializes further an already brittle ethical formula rendered nearly barren of meaning from overuse, with the intention, we can only speculate, of scouring off its patina. The destructive flurry continues as Chrétien works the los/repos pun around yet another word. Between rounds, Cligès takes “repos” in an inn (“ostel”) in town, but his rest is threatened by interruption from admirers on a quest for honor of their own, namely to discover the owner of the black arms, or as Chrétien phrases it, “L’ostel as noires armes querre” (4665) [to seek the hostel with the black arms]. By now, we are attuned to the catch-phrase “querre los” and recognize its jumbled elements in “L’ostel . . . querre.” Gradually, relentlessly, the quest for reputation is being debased to the level of the mundane, and with it the honor of the hero. Versions of los can now be won by capitulation, fame achieved vicariously by merely seeking out the famous. Cligès’s abortive combat with the Duke of Saxony provides another example of ironic los. The Greek emperor Alis, Cligès’s uncle, is returning from Germany, having married Fenice, the German

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e­ mperor’s daughter. She, however, has already been promised to the Duke of Saxony, who vexedly plans to recover her by force. The duke, we are told ominously, “will not be wasting his time” (pas ne sejornera, 3336) in preparing to waylay the Greeks. The ambush, however, presents Cligès with the opportunity to distinguish himself (“Cliges . . . vialt acquerre los,” 3622) and, in the ensuing chevauchée, he kills the duke’s nephew, rescues Fenice from a botched kidnapping, and accepts a retributive duel with the Saxon chief. Again, Chrétien expresses the combatants’ heroic ardor in terms of time: Cligès pleads for immediate satisfaction (“Ne sai por coi vos i queïsse / Lonc respit ne longue demore,” 3954–55) and is swiftly granted combat (“Il n’i ot pris respit ne terme: / Einçois qu’il fust ore de prime,” 3960–61). But once again, their urgency in anticipation is not realized in deed. After some swordplay, the duke begins to tire (“Einz qu il fust del tot lassez,” 4106). He respects Cligès’s valor (“Molt te voi corageus et preu,” 4087) and would gladly make peace, were it not for his nephew, whose death prevents him from “letting up.” Volantiers feïsse a toi pes Et la querele te lessasse, Ne ja me plus ne m’an lassasse. (4090–92) [I would gladly make peace with you and yield the combat to you, and ever more let up.] But having made conscience of his nephew’s cause and attributed his resolve not to “let up” (lasser) to self-abnegating honor, he does precisely this. The duke’s temporizing parley, his attempt to save face through words, runs counter to his former mood of urgency. But Chrétien refuses to let his behavior escape without ironic comment. In the aftermath of the duel, Chrétien exploits the homonymy between los and variants of the vocable las (lesser, lasser), meaning variously “to tire,” “to capitulate,” “lazy,” “recreant.” With sham chivalry, the duke suggests a truce on the grounds that he would earn no honor from vanquishing so young an opponent (“Que los ne pris ne acquerroie,” 4117). Cligès, recognizing the argument for the tail run that it is, makes clear that he will accept only public surrender. What began

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as a test of arms now ends in verbal posturing, the activity of los having given way to las, which is to say verbal repos. Cligés en ot le los et le pris Et li Grezois grant joie en orent; Mes li Sesne rire n’en porent, Car bien orent trestuit veü Lor seignor las et recreü. (4140–44) [Cligès had from it the honor and the glory, and the Greeks took great joy in it. But the Saxons couldn’t join in the merriment, for they had clearly seen their lord to be lazy and recreant.] The victor is the one who emerges with the superior epithet. Dialogue supplants battle, mitigating definitively the quality of valor. The lesson we learn here is a serious one, however, and one that reinforces a similar resolution of conflict in the first part of the romance. Significantly Alixandre’s first act is to feed a self-serving desire for personal honor, to “conquerre los.” His ultimate act, however, shows how far his character and values have evolved into a concern for good governance above individual reputation. Poised at the verge of his greatest military victory—to set aright the usurpation of his brother Alis by force of arms—he accepts instead a bloodless peace, or, as Chrétien phrases it, “Por ce loent tel pes acquerre” (2506). Despite its derogatory puns, Cligès’s settlement (“pes”) with the Duke of Saxony, in echo of his father’s conflict declined, reminds us of the value of “acquiring peace” over “conquering honor,” of alternatives to epic solutions. In many ways, Cligès is Chrétien’s most unchivalrous romance. Scenes of love-dialogue interrupt and counterpoint action at every turn, nor is this courtship a suave polemic of gesture and reply but a timid, unmanly equivocation. Love here is transacted less with lethargy than with complete paralysis. Fast on the heels of brilliant battlefield success against the Saxons, Cligès shares an interlude between battles alone with Fenice, yet neither can summon the courage to speak. Instead a mute moment of “waiting” (atante) passes between them, embellished only by our author’s disdain, which he delivers in a beautifully turned example of the world-upside-down topos:

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Mes il [Cligès] qu’atant, de coi se tarde, Qui por li est par tot hardiz, S’est vers li seule acoardiz? Dex, ceste criemme don li vient, C’une pucele seule tient, Sinple et coarde, foible et quoie? A ce me sanble que je voie Les chiens foïr devant le lievre, Et la turture chacier le bievre . . . . . . . . . Si vont les choses a envers. ( 3796–3804, 3812) [But why does Cligès hesitate, he who is always bold on her behalf, yet behaves so cowardly toward her when they are alone? God, from where does this fear come that a girl on her own—simple, timid, weak, quiet—holds for him? It seems to me that I am witnessing the dogs fleeing before the hare, the fish chasing the beaver. . . . So topsy-turvy are things.] The strangled eloquence of their oeillades is little relief from the importunity of silence. Nor do they improve upon the example of Alixandre and Soredamors, who earlier set the precedent for paralytic courtship. At the start the romance, the momentum of the treason plot is postponed for an exquisitely attenuated scene of frustrated love between the two principals in which action, much like Cligès’s duel with the duke, cedes to dialogue. After 150 lines of labored oarage, the dialectic moves to conclusion: Soredamors, recognizing both her and Alixandre’s inability to express their feelings, let alone act upon them, resolves to lead him on a quest, guiding him by covert words and signals to “dare to act.” “Or del sofrir tant que je voie Si jel porroie metre an voie Par sanblant et par mos coverz Tant ferai qu’il an sera cerz De m’amor, se requerre l’ose.” (1031–35)

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[“Now from the suffering that I see, if I could only put him back on track by signals and covert words, I would accomplish so much that he would be sure of my love and dare to act.”]

Here the smiling mimicry of the language of adventure is crowned by the now familiar ironic anagram of the romance’s signal ethic, “requerre los.” In essence, Soredamors is fulfilling the role pioneered by Helen, reenacted by Enide, and recommended by medieval commentators upon chivalrous love: egging the knight on to greater glory. Hers, however, is a parodic inversion of the values Helen and Enide promote. Her los (“l’ose”) is a purely amatory construct designed to bring him to bed, not to get him out of it. Rewriting los as l’ose, she feminizes the rhyme, taking it from a strong, end-stopped stress to a weak one, and with it the valence of the commodity it articulates. Significantly, while Chrétien avails himself frequently of opportunities to criticize his characters’ conduct, the only ethical defense he mounts on their behalf comes from Ovid. Vos qui d’Amors vos feites sage, Et les costumes et l’usage De sa cort maintenez a foi, N’onques ne faussastes sa loi, Que qu’il vos an doie cheoir, Dites se l’en puet nes veoir Rien qui por Amor abelisse, Que l’en n’an tresaille ou palisse. ( 3819–26) [You who make a study of love and maintain faithfully the customs and practices of his court, and who have never broken his law whatever misadventure he has brought you, tell me whether one can see anything made beautiful by love that doesn’t make you tremble or blanch?] Trembling and blanching are commonplace Ovidian symptoms of infatuation.42 Indeed, Ovidian love comes to represent the source of dissenting authority on chivalric behavior, the parodic antidote to epic virtue.43 From Ovid comes the “Court of Love” whose customs and laws Chrétien expects his audience to adhere to with religious zeal

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(“foi”), a court that hands down the refutation to Cligès’s apparent cowardice: Qui amer vialt, crienbre l’estuet, Ou autrement amer ne puet; Mes seul celi qu’il aimme dot Et por li soit hardiz par tot. Donc ne fausse ne mesprant mie Cligés, s’il redote s’amie. ( 3855–60) [He who would love must fear or else cannot love. But he should fear only her whom he loves and on her behalf always be bold. Thus Cligès neither breaks nor misconstrues any rule if he fears his beloved.] Fear as a concomitant of love is a precept gleaned from the Ars amatoria, yet one that must somehow be reconciled with traditional concepts of knightly conduct.44 Cligès’s honor, Chrétien is at pains to explain, is not in question as long as love causes him to fear only Fenice while inspiring his bravery on her behalf. From Ovid, then, is born the chivalric heterodoxy of love as motive for courage, which in Cligès becomes the orthodoxy of an ironic textuality responding to the role of courtiers at the court of Henry II. A famous critic once remarked that all studies of Chrétien’s art must take as their basis the scrupulous analysis of Cligès’s literary details.45 If so, the playful quibbles with the crucial idea of los in Cligès represent a key to Chrétien’s ethical project throughout his corpus. By ironizing the formal vocabulary of honor, he manages to bring the ideals of knightly behavior down to the reality of a nobility with time on its hands. And by invoking Ovidian authority, in itself parodic of epic mores, Chrétien redrafts romance sensibilities, rebutting his opening dictum: “Ne s’acordent pas bien ansanble / Repos et los.”

Perceval and the Seeds of Culture In Cligès, the problem of value is cast in ethical abstractions for a chivalric economy of deed. In his later romances, Perceval and Guillaume

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d’Angleterre,46 Chrétien recurs to a specifically mercantile context and a quantitative economy that seek to join piety and materialism through the agricultural metaphors of Pauline caritas and contemporary experiences of carestia, or inflation brought about by poor harvests and uncultivated land. Ultimately, the reward Chrétien seeks for this daring manipulation of the terms of economic value in twelfth-century discourse is financial. Chrétien’s powers of poetic subtlety are at their azimuth in the prologue to Perceval. A masterpiece of disingenuity, it succeeds both as a gentle homily on charity and the virtues of giving in the Pauline tradition and as a classical petition for patronage or captatio benevolentiae.47 It is, as Cicero prescribes, an exordium by insinuation.48 Rhetorically, it frames a material argument (financial support of a client by a patron) within a conventionally religious one (the reward of the sower by God). Its poetic architecture is even more intricately tiered. Holding the prologue together conceptually is a self-conscious theme of culture (L. cultura = tillage of the soil) that develops parabolically from the image of sowing and reaping into the exchange of artistic commodities that Marx disparages as the mental labor of bourgeois society. Chrétien here is cultivating the body of his patron with the seed of culture, whose rich tilth will yield a hundredfold harvest of charity. Like Perceval’s quest to restore the land to fruitfulness through the Fisher King’s body, Chrétien’s is a project to fructify France culturally through the body of Philippe de Flandres. Beyond patronage and charity, Chrétien’s overarching purpose in the prologue seems to be to formulate a labor ethic to unite the religious, commercial, and humanistic spheres of medieval culture. Their common point of tangency lies in the medieval economic rule that “the laborer is worth his hire” (Luke 10:7), that work, whether manual or mental, deserves reward. Scripturally inspired, classically informed, and historically determined, concepts of work, leisure, and profit are essential grist for the prologue’s rhetorical and poetic pretensions. The language of value in Perceval’s prologue presents itself as a series of dialectical distinctions unified poetically by the supermetaphor of sowing and rhetorically by an insistent bilateral structure. A Pauline gloss, the first line introduces us famously to what will become an abiding theme of cultivation, “Ki petit seme petit quelt” (who sows little, reaps little).49 Immediately a disturbing and economically

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realistic backdrop of famine, dearth in potentia, descends upon what might have been a carefree début printanier. (This will come in the first lines of the romance, “Ce fu au tans qu’arbre foillissent . . .” [69], but not unvisited by the same ominous specter, “la gaste forêt soutaine se leva . . . ,” 75–76). Nor is this potential wasteland an occult curse, as the Fisher King’s will be; rather, it is the mundane consequence of human negligence, of idleness and lack of agricultural industry.50 Within the ambit of the first line, then, we enter a world of moral responsi­­bility contingent upon human agency and calculable in an economics of numbers and ratios. The moral calculus of culture implicit in the exchange of work and reward in the first line becomes explicit by line 4: Et qui auques requeillir velt, En tel liu sa semence espande Que Diex a cent doubles li rande. (2–4) [And whoever wants to have something to harvest should scatter his seed in such a place that God gives him a hundredfold return.] Now, with the promise of a “hundredfold return” Chrétien introduces the notion of reciprocal profit—intellectual, spiritual, and material­—familiar to the Middle Ages from the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:3–23),51 a formula that features centrally in the introductions of Cligès and Guillaume d’Angleterre. Writing no more than a few years before the composition of Perceval, the author of Partonopeu de Blois, like Chrétien, looks to Scripture for exordial themes of cultural profit: Sain Pols, li maistre de la gent, Nos dist en son ensegnement Que quanqu’est es livres escrit, Tot i est por nostre porfit.52 (95–98) [St. Paul, the teacher of the people, instructs us in his teaching that everything that is written in books is for our profit.]

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Chrétien, however, uproots literary profit from the tame soil of moral edification and replants it in the ambiguous arena of economic exchange. Chrestïens seme et fait semence D’un romans que il encommence, Et si le seme en si bon leu Qu’il ne puet [estre] sanz grant preu, Qu’il le fait por le plus preudome Qu’il soit en l’empire de Rome. C’est li quens Phelipes de Flandres. (6–13) [Chrétien sows the seed of a romance he is beginning, and he sows it in such good ground that it cannot be without great profit, as he does it for the most worthy man there is in the Roman Empire. That is the Count Philip of Flanders.] There can be little doubt from lines 6 to 10 that, for Chrétien, the “porfit” from writing a book entails a personal reward (“Qu’il ne puet [estre] sanz grant preu”), a “grand preu” ( preu = L. prodis, prodesse, meaning “price,” “profit”),53 which he expects from his patron in return for work rendered. Indeed, soliciting funds is but another example of the parabolic cultivation of line 1. Nor should it be assumed that the logic of material investment contradicts the economy of salvation through charity that Chrétien ascribes to Paul later on: “God is charity, and whoever lives by doing charity according to the scripture, Saint Paul says it and I repeat, he dwells in God and God in him” (47–50). “If,” as Paul asks in his own captatio benevolentiae, “we have sown a spiritual crop for you, is it too much to expect from you a material harvest?” (1 Cor. 9:11). Paul, we must remember, was the only apostle to earn his own living as a merchant and to support his mission by fundraising. His frequent use of commercial metaphors of investment and return serves as a rhetorical bridge between petitions for financial support from his followers and the substance of his addresses, namely the spiritual reward from the work of charity.54 Caritas, moreover, is a term drawn from the language of finance meaning literally “high price,” a connotation that endured throughout the Middle Ages.

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From here forward the bucolic paradigm of planting and reaping may be interpreted as a formula of exchange, a commercial dialectic between God and sower, author and sponsor, whose subject is the commodity of culture. What the linked metaphors of sowing and centuple reward force us to consider is the deeper unity of two culturally opposed but linguistically equivalent systems of value in the romance: the chivalric and the spiritual. Before we move on to a more detailed reading of the language of value and its antecedents, there is one final association to be made between the sowing topos and the issue of work. At the end of the prologue, Chrétien makes a vehement claim for the labor of literacy: Dont avra salve sa paine Crestïens, qui entent et paine Par le comandement le conte A rimoier le meillor conte Qui soit contez a cort roial: Ce est li Contes del graal, Dont li quens li bailla le livre. Oëz coment il s’en delivre. (61–68) [Wherefore Chrétien will have safeguarded his effort as he strives and labors, at the behest of the count, to compose in rhyme the best story that has ever been told at a royal court: that is the Story of the Grail, for which the count lent him (Chrétien) the original book. Hear then how he acquits himself of the task.] Through multiple adnominatio ( paine/paine, conte/conte/quens, livre/­ delivre), Chrétien demonstrates as much as argues for the work-value (“paine”) of crafting words into literature. In so doing, he rebuts a classical antipoetic prejudice that had come to plague the lettered clerics of the Middle Ages that literature is a worthless occupation, an otium, as opposed to the fruitful business (negotium) of farming. In dissent, Chrétien is not only following Ovid’s metaphor of literature as profitable cultivation in the Epistulae ex Ponto but tying up the theme of cultural semence from the beginning. The book that Philip of Flanders gives to Chrétien (“Dont li quens li bailla le livre”) is at once the material “seed” from which the romance will grow and a

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token of charity, the gift (“li don . . . de carité / Que li bons quens Phelipes dones,” 52–53) that is the seed of spiritual growth. The centuple-reward motif of the prologue gives oblique expression to an essential theory of profit deeply rooted in all aspects of medieval culture, one upon which many of the key terms of value in Old French romance are predicated. This theory holds, commonsensically, that profit is the result of an exchange between things of value, goods or services, that are fundamentally unequal in kind, degree or number—for example, an exotic orange for a bushel of common apples, or a bushel of apples in return for help with the harvest. One source is Aristotle’s disquisition on reciprocal justice or contrapassum in Ethics 5, a legal theory that proved essential to the economic theories of Albert the Great and Aquinas.55 Justice (“dike”), Aristotle reasons, represents a condition of equality or halvedness (“dicha”) deployed as a corrective to the material inequities inherent in society.56 Because social fortunes are naturally uneven and wealth accrues to people according to their occupation and status, reciprocal justice seeks to fix ratios in which people of dissimilar status may trade goods of disparate kind and worth ( 5.5.9). Thus the social condition of a physician and the kind of service he renders are unequal in degree and kind to those of a farmer but must be reckoned commensurate for both to trade and derive mutual profit. Likewise the commodities of a builder (house) and shoemaker (shoes) are equally in demand but unequal in worth and thus must seek out some mean value as the basis of exchange ( 5.5.9–10). Like Aristotle, Augustine views nature as the paradigm of value inequity.57 In De civitate Dei, he posits two opposing value systems operating within the hierarchy of creation (“gradibus et differentiis creaturum”): the first estimates worth according to perceived need (“usus utilitatis”) and the second by reason. Hence “Reason weighs a thing according to its intrinsic place in the great scale of being; necessity, however, calculates what it must obtain and for what reason.”58 Whereas an economy regulated by reason reduces value to a balanced equation, need knows no limit. For Augustine, commerce is governed by need—that is, by the law of supply and demand—and thus equations of price and profit reflect need’s disproportions. Moreover, he carefully defends commerce and profit taking upon the principle that as long as merchants do not pursue profit immoderately by lies and

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schemes designed to inflate prices artificially, their financial gains are not sinful, a view endorsed by Hugh St. Victor in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth.59 An insistent structural characteristic of Chrétien’s writing is the way he applies these prevalent theories of profit to unequal exchanges in which at least one element, usually the reward, is subjective: honor, love, Christian virtue, that is to say objects of notional value distilled by the mental labor of the author who depicts them. Examples abound in the romances and works attributed to Chrétien and constitute, I believe, a hallmark of his narrative technique. The most telling examples occur in his much-neglected lyrics in which the paradigm of amorous exchange rendered in a vocabulary of value gives a foretaste of Chrétien’s later treatment of chivalric and spiritual exchange. Of the works lingering in the penumbra of Chrétien’s authorship, five love lyrics have made the most convincing claim for the master’s paternity, two of which, R. 121, “Amors, tençon et bataille,” and R. 1664, “D’Amors qui m’a tolu a moi,” are certain. These two adopt the traditional lyric posture of complaint between lover-poet and beloved, subordinate “I” and intransigent “Thou.” In both poems, love is transacted as an inherently inequitable exchange between these two characters in which courtly service is proffered without hope of reward, an inequity not unfamiliar to the chanson courtoise, in which acts of abnegation typically purify love.60 Squarely within the Ovidian tradition of love as a cheap commodity when easily obtained but priceless when unattainable, the enterprise of love in Chrétien’s lyrics obeys the economic law of supply and demand. Indeed, the dominant paradigm of both poems is not love exactly but the more suggestive “dearness” (OF chierté; L. carestia, variant of caritas), which introduces into the weave a rich, connotative nexus between “love,” “high price,” and “lack” or “scarcity.” In “Amors, tençon et bataille,” Chrétien’s lyric narrator portrays himself as a champion of selfless love: “Qui que por Amor m’asaille, / Senz loier et sanz faintise / Prez sui qu’en l’estor m’an aille” (9–11).61 His love is valuable, he argues, because he will accept no wages (“loier”) for it. The commercial metaphor amplifies in the following strophe, where Love sells entry into her domain for the price of reason:

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Qu’ele vuet l’entrée vandre: Et quels en est li passages? Raison li covient despandre Et mettre mesure en gages. (21–24) [(Love) wants to sell entry (into her fiefdom). And what is the toll? One must pay her with reason and hock one’s moderate judgment.] Soon the lover accepts the bargain, hoping selflessly that his loss of money (damages) will turn to Love’s profit (“prou”): “Or me plaist, senz raison rendre, / Ke ses prou soit mes damages” ( 31−32) [Now, without being able to explain why, it pleases me that my loss turns to her profit]. By strophe 5, the exchange of courtly values is complete and Chrétien introduces his master term: “Molt ma chier Amors vendue­ / S’onor et sa seignorie” (33−34) [Very dearly has Love sold me the right to win honor from her and have her as my lord]. Before us, then, is a lexicon to the conceit of love (chierté) as commerce ( loier, gages, prou). But Chrétien is scarcely its innovator. “­Chierté,” as becomes clearer in “Amors qui m’a tolu à moi,” is a concept whose complexities were first elaborated in Ovid’s gnomic paradox of love and plenty (copia), articulated memorably by Narcissus: “quod cupio mecum est: inopem me copia fecit” (What I desire, I have: plenty makes me poor) and rephrased in Remedia amoris 541 (“copia tollat amorem . . .”). For Narcissus, possessing himself vitiates the desire he feels for himself; to love is to be in a constant state of lack, of hunger insatiate. Likewise for Chrétien, Cuers, se ma dame ne t’a chier, Ja mar por cou t’en partiras .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Ja, mon los, plenté n’ameras, Ne pour chier tans esmaier; Biens adoucist par delaier, Et quant plus desiré l’auras, Plus t’en ert douls à l’essaier. ( 37–38, 41–45)

88  the sociology of romance [O my heart! If my lady does not hold you dear, you will nonetheless never leave her. . . . Never, O my honor, will you take pleasure in abundance, nor should you be dismayed by dear times (famine); goods grow sweeter through delay, and the more you desire something, the sweeter it will be to you to taste.]

Love’s appetitive reward (“biens”) grows like hunger (“adoucist”) in the absence of fulfillment (“par delaier”), an Ovidian commonplace that Chrétien will place in the mouth of Gauvain later in Yvain: “Bien a donc cist ou delaier / Et plus est dolz a essaier” (25117–18).62 Like the “copia” in Narcissus, which stands in opposition to poverty (“inopem”), plenty (“plenté”) stands in opposition to “chier tans,” not “poverty” exactly but rather a time of dearth in which the price of goods (“biens”) rises, what came to be known as carestia in medieval Latin.63 What makes Chrétien’s version of the “dearness” topos innovative is that his gustatory vocabulary (adoucist, douls, essaier), words that also express essential worth, subserves the economics of inflation (chier tans/carestia) grounded in the abundance of food. A century ago, the German historical economist Heinrich Curschmann noticed a semantic conflation of two terms for famine, fames and carestia, the one meaning “famine” and the other “high price,” in cartularies of the thirteenth century.64 Medieval clerics, realizing that the famines of the early twelfth century were accompanied, not surprisingly, by a climb in the cost of foodstuffs and other basic commodities, began to use the two terms interchangeably. The association, of course, had been present since antiquity: hence Cicero “This, then, was the situation: high prices in the present [praesens caritas] and the prospect of hunger [futura fames].”65 The agro-economic connotation of carestia extended as well to its cousin and variant caritas. Thus Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, forbear of Chrétien’s patron Philip, earned his epithet and reputation for charity from agricultural and economic provisions he instituted to combat the effects of the early twelfthcentury famines upon the poor, decreeing that “whoever sowed two measures of land in the sowing time should sow another measure in peas and beans, because these legumes yield more quickly if the misery of famine and want should not end in that year.”66 By the time Chrétien composed Perceval, the charity of the counts of Flanders was

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firmly connected to their increase in the productivity of the soil as a countermeasure to famine. How early the equivalency of fames with carestia became prevalent is unclear. What is clear is that Chrétien’s chier tans makes the same economic associations that later clerics did, associations that anchor all notions of love, dearness, or generosity—charité/chierté, caritas/­ carestia—in the fertility of the soil. The motif of sowing and reaping in Perceval, then, would have symbolized to its audience the natural and divine vicissitudes of value, the waxing and waning of intrinsic worth in inverse proportion to abundance, with love (caritas) as the primary poetic and religious metaphor of that relation. Gazing backward from Perceval upon Chrétien’s earlier works, we perceive a shift in the terms and models of exchange from secular and chivalric to religious and commercial, bearing out Eugene Vance’s contention that “mercantilism and its values began to reverberate in the more established discourses of the twelfth century world as a sublanguage promulgating a new ideology of change and exchange.”67 Cligès, Guillaume D’Angleterre, and Perceval all employ exchanges of values as an opening gambit. All begin with a promise to, or, more polemically, an ethical contract with, a social superior—emperor, priest, patron, mother, king—to return with interest an initial investment. Invoking the formula of centuple reward, each contract mortgages present wealth against an assurance of future recompense. In Cligès, it is between gold and knightly honor ( pris); in Guillaume, possessions for Christian virtue. In Perceval, three separate exchanges take place: the first, as we have already seen, occurs between author and benefactor, literary activity for “grant preu”; the second is the implied agreement between mother and son, unfulfilled and ambiguous in its motives, involving “grans biens” in return for obedience to chivalric and religious decorum; and the last, between Arthur and Perceval, is the exchange of arms for service, “onor” for “preu.” The introduction of Cligès, more explicitly than the prologue of Perceval, features an appeal for financial support. Amid a eulogy to the virtues of largesce, the young knight Alixandre asks his father the emperor for a donation toward his expedition to England—“Biau pere, por enor aprandre: / Et por conquerre pris et los, / Un don, fet il, querre vos os” (84−86) [Dear father, in order to learn honor at arms and to win glory and renown, I seek, he said, a gift from you]—for which he

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receives two boatloads of gold and silver.68 Conquerir or gagner pris or los is a common twelfth-century expression drawn from the language of chivalry, meaning in a general sense “to win esteem and renown.” As Georges Duby reminds us, however, pris carries a strong quantitative component. From the Latin pretium meaning “price,” gagner pris at tournaments meant to win both glory and a monetary prize.69 Los (fame, knightly industry), meanwhile, is a quality placed in opposition to repos (inactivity), and thus Alixandre is arguing that money should be invested in a peculiarly chivalric kind of work—­action, specifically the hard labor of war deeds: “Biau pere, tant com il me loist / Los conquerre, se je tant vail, / I vuel metre poinne et travail” (162–64). It is interesting, then, to compare the value of martial action and the poetic formula of exchange in Cligès to Perceval, in which the rewards are similar but the commodity is altogether different, even antithetical. The prodome in Cligès who invests in “pris” reaps a 50,000 percent profit: Aussi la, ou largesce vient, Dessor totes vertuz se tient, Et les bontez que ele trueve An prodome, qui bien s’esprueve, Fet a cinc çanz dobles monter. (211–15) [Likewise there, where largesse is present, it overtakes all other virtues, and demonstrably increases the good qualities it finds in a worthy man five hundred−fold.] In Perceval the prodome is asked to fund not deeds but the literary account of them. At stake are the ideals not of chevalerie but of clergie, not the active but the contemplative life. The pris and los subsidized in Cligès define value in a more narrowly feudal and objective sense than the grant preu in Perceval, whose tenor is subjective and decidedly Christian humanist. If the example of Alixandre in Cligès represents an early model of the romance exchange of values, it is significant for its lack of ethical distinction between quality and quantity as benchmarks of value. Pris and preu are wholly measurable. Numbers of knights captured, barges of gold, companions helping, tally knightly merit with actuarial fini-

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tude. But as Chrétien ventures more deeply into the social and religious nuances of value in his later romances, inward measures begin to appear alongside outward signs, provoking a confusion of value systems and terminology. Lancelot’s leap into the cart, for example, his preference for service to a lady above his own status as nobleman, inverts that perdurable social axiology of the Middle Ages separating priests from peasants and warriors, oratores from laboratores and bellatores. How, if not by easily recognizable class markers, are we to assay individual worth? In their attempt to reconcile the Christian ethic of material poverty and spiritual wealth with the romance ethic of noble privilege, a qualitative value model with a quantitative, Guillaume d’Angleterre and Perceval succeed in upending social hierarchy as well, bringing about a confusion more profound still than in Lancelot. Guillaume d’Angleterre is about the checkered fortunes of a wealthy and religious king and queen who count charity and humility among their greatest virtues (“Li rois fu pleins de charité; / Mout ot an lui humilité,” 27–28). God tests their faith at the outset with an occult message bidding Guillaume give away all his possessions. This he and his pregnant wife do, with a priest’s assurance of a hundredfold reward. In penury, she gives birth to two sons, who are snatched, then fostered by merchants. The king, meanwhile, loses his wife and himself becomes a merchant, rising from poverty to comfort by virtue of innate business instinct. The sons suffer cruelty from the merchants, who yet display moments of love and generosity toward their adopted children. Eventually the boys mature in the service of a nobleman at war with a rival whose land the queen comes to inherit. Finally the principals are brought together in a moment of anagnorisis, and wealth and happiness are returned upon them a hundredfold, as per the initial augury. The romance world of class privilege and quantitative value survives divine intrusion. Charity, we learn, even that of the merchants, is always rewarded richly. Addressed to a wealthy, merchant patron, Guillaume is a romance of consolation designed to assuage his benefactor’s fear of Christ’s daunting dictum “A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Its seminal text is Matthew 19:29: “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold [centuplum acciepit] and shall have everlasting life.” The promise of

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centuple reward is what John Fleming has called an “adversary exchange,” trading one set of goods—family, lands, wealth—for another greater set.70 The question for Chrétien as author and exegete, however, is, how far is he willing to console his patron? Does the centuplum imply an exchange purely along the vertical axis, that is, material wealth for anagogic reward, or can that reward be understood to be literal as well? The key passage for our purposes contains a suspect redoubling of the formula of centuple return at the moment the priest recommends to Guillaume that he divest himself of his belongings. Now, the two extant manuscripts, P (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fr. 375) and C (Cambridge, St. John’s College, B9), diverge. C reads, “Et saichiez li terms vandra / Qu’a.c. doubles lou vous randra, / Lou guerredon et la merite” (159−61) [And be assured that when the time comes, your reward and fortune will be returned to you a hundredfold], while P has “Et Diex quant li termes vandra / Qu’a cent dobles lou vous randra,” adding, “Ne decroistra pas vostre moebles / Car vos rares tot a cent dobles / Lou vous randra” (When the time comes, God will restore your fortune a hundredfold. Your belongings will not diminish, for you will be rewarded and recompensed a hundredfold). The main difference between the two is that C leaves unclear whether the “reward” will be merely spiritual. P, however, repeats the formula, stipulating an unequivocally material return—“moebles.” We should keep in mind that in Matthew 13:23 centuple reward is a metaphor for correct interpretation: “The seed that fell into good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it [qui audit et intellegit], who accordingly bears fruit and yields a hundredfold.” The equivocation between the two variants at this juncture is interpretatively crucial: it bears witness to both a moral and a hermeneutic confusion at the heart of the poem. The “guerredon” and “mérite” that God promises to exchange with Guillaume are values unequal in kind, one chivalric, the other spiritual, and have not, by the rules of contrapassum, been brought into equation. Here, the romance’s economy of virtue is rendered paradoxical by the king’s participation in profit making as a way of fulfilling God’s injunction against “covoitise” and, on balance, by the author’s benign depiction of merchants and merchantry. How to interpret social, economic, and religious value is a knotty quandary that remains unre-

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solved in Guillaume and appears incidental rather than controlled and meaningful. Perceval, by contrast, lays claim to that same confusion, making the ambiguity of value and profit and the language in which it is expressed integral to the plot. In Perceval, the seed really is the word. The hundredfold profit resides in hearing the words designating “profit”—preu, biens—and understanding them in context. At Perceval’s leavetaking, his mother reveals a peculiar family history that will furnish his imminent quest to restore the Fisher King with a socioeconomic overlay. She recounts their story of a fall from affluence and privilege in the larger context of a disintegration of the political structures that hold class and status equivalent to individual worth. Vostre peres, si nel savez, Fu parmi la jambe navrez Si que il mehaigna del cors. Sa grant terre, ses grans tresors, Que il avoit come preudom, Ala tot a perdition, Si chaï en grant povreté. Apovri et deshireté Et escillié furent a tort Li gentil home aprés la mort Uterpendragon. . . . (435–45) [Your father, in case you didn’t know, was wounded through the leg so that his body became crippled. His great lands, his great treasures that he possessed as a man of substance, all went to rack and ruin, and he lapsed into great poverty. After the death of Uther Pendragon, the nobility were drained of their wealth, stripped of their inherited properties, and exiled wrongly. . . .] The father’s wound is to a body politic. The decay of his estate and his possessions that define financially his status as preudom (“Sa grant terre, ses grands tresors, / Que il avoit come preudom”) serves as a metonymy for the disfranchisement of the nobility (“Apovri et deshireté”). Perceval’s quest will be in one sense to restore preu to the preudom both for his own family and as a vindication of his class.

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An important complication presents itself in the strange identity between the father and the Fisher King—Perceval’s uncle, as we later learn—who bears an identical wound and who suffers a similar decay of estate. Their uncanny resemblance suggests the question: In what sense is the Fisher King’s redemption also a restoration of preu? Caught in a double bind, Perceval must learn to distinguish chivalric preu from Christian preu, to discover what is valuable in each system by negotiating the vocabulary of exchange. He receives several relevant lessons in semantics in the beginning of the romance, the most important coming from his mother, Gornemans de Gorhaut, and Arthur. Upon his arrival at Carduel, Perceval asks Arthur to dub him knight. Arthur gladly agrees, phrasing their covenant in terms of an exchange that will profit mutually “my honor and your gain” [A m’onor et a vostre preu] (984). Chrétien interrupts the flow of the narrative to allow the characters time to meditate upon the word preu as a chivalric commodity. Is the king proposing a trade of abstract virtues or a commercial bargain of goods for services? Perceval, not wholly in the wrong, opts for the latter and asks to be granted the arms of the offending Scarlet Knight. In this he is encouraged mockingly by Keu—“Friend, you’re in the right. Go over and confiscate those arms for they are yours” (1003–5)—but defended by Arthur, “Encore puet preus vassax estre” (1016) [He can still become an honorable vassal], suggesting that he may yet comprehend the nonmaterial nature of the exchange. Eventually Perceval realizes, much as the lyric lover did, that to profit, to rise in courtly esteem, he must fulfill the contract in unequal measure. At the end of five years, we are told, he has sent sixty knights of worth to Arthur’s court, an act whose value Chrétien underscores with a rich rhyme on the word pris: “Soissante chevaliers de pris / A la cort le roi Artu pris / Dedens cinc ans i envoia” (6233−35) [Within five years, he sent captive to the court of King Arthur sixty worthy knights]. Ironically, the moment he comprehends one standard of values he registers his ignorance of another: “Thus he spent five years without ever remembering God” (6236–37). Fulfilling the chivalric bargain with Arthur makes him negligent in the one with his mother. Like Arthur, both Perceval’s mother and Gornemans de Gorhaut give lessons in value and profit. “Listen well,” his mother starts off,

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recalling Matthew’s theme of understanding as reward, “and if you remember my advice, great good will come to you” [Grans biens vos en porra venir] (529–30). The difficulty is that biens, like preu, is materially ambiguous; it can mean either “good” or “goods.” Thus her subsequent advice that Perceval should come to the aid of damsels and receive in return a ring (“De l’anel prendre . . . ,” 555) is received as a quid pro quo impelling him later to demand equal recompense in the form of a ring from a damsel to whom he has offered service. Gornemans, receiving the bumpkin Perceval into his tuition, also invokes a contractual exchange of unequal terms. Employing the mother’s cliché “grans biens en porra venir” (great good(s) will come of it), he will teach the young knight chivalry for the price of faith in his instruction. Perceval requests, “Que vos me hebergiez huit mais.” —“Molt volentiers fait li preudom, Mais qu vos me otroiez un don Dont grant bien venir vos verrés.” —“Et quel,” fait il. —“Que vos querrez Le conseil vostre mere et moi.” (1412–17) [“That you give me lodging, nothing more.” “Certainly,” said the worthy man, “provided you grant me a favor from which you will realize great benefit.” “And what is that favor,” said he. “That you seek to follow the counsel of your mother and me.”] But in assaying the value of knowledge, Perceval will once again misconstrue the lesson that understanding is its own “good,” comparing it instead to material belongings (avoir). Thus he replies, Et [Perceval] dist que tot a delivre Ne querroit ja un jor plus vivre En avant, ne avoir [n’]eust, Qu’il ensi faire le seüst. (1459–62) [And he declares without the slightest hesitation that he wouldn’t want to live a day longer or amass any wealth if he didn’t know how to do this.]

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The spiritual economy of value through faith that the mother is at pains to inculcate is further confused by the worldly bias the wealthy Gornemans lends to his own lessons. While the preudom may tip his hat to the authority of the mother, he countermands his deference with criticism. Perceval must not, he warns, cite his mother as teacher. More significant is his disinvestiture of her authority implicit in the act of replacing her “cote mal taillie” (badly tailored tunic) with standard chivalric attire. Here, perhaps, is Perceval’s most explicit lesson in value determined not by intuitive utility but by arbitrary convention: “Biax sire, Vos porriiez assez mix dire. Li drap que ma mere me fist, Dont ne valent il miex que cist?” .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . —“Vallet, foi que je doi ma teste, Ne foi que je dois mes deus oex, Ainçois valent cist assez miex.” Fait li vallés: “Ais valent pis.” (1609–15) [“Good sir, you could make a somewhat more reasonable suggestion. Isn’t the clothing my mother made me worth more than this?” . . . “Young man, I swear by my head and my two eyes that this is a good deal better.” “No, they’re worth less,” said the young man.] The problem of chivalric versus spiritual value is muddied from the beginning by the parallel authorities of the father—whose wound, though identical to the saintly Fisher King’s, is characterized by material poverty, whereas the Fisher King’s is an abstract, anagogic impoverishment­—and compounded by the deceptively similar yet subtly conflicting authority of the mother and Gornemans. This confusion resolves slowly, though never satisfactorily, through a gradual semantic refining of the words preu and biens. Recycling the mother’s vocabulary much as Gornemans had, Perceval’s cousin delivers the knight a bitter reprimand for the debacle of the Grail Castle:

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Que tant eüsses amendé Le buen roi qui est mehaignez Que toz eüst regaaigniez Ses membres et terre tenist, Et si grans biens t’en avenist! ( 3586–90) [You could have mended so much for the good king who is crippled that he could have regained the use of his limbs and managed his land. And from that great good would have come to you.] “Grans biens” finds new experiential meaning in Perceval’s vocabulary of value. Later the hermit, faced with Perceval’s stubborn simplicity, translates the Christian logic of reward into the chivalric scheme. “Find preu and pris in works of faith,” he exhorts. “Al mostier ainz qu’en autre leu / Chascun main, si avras preu” (6443−44) [If you want to have honor, go to church before anywhere else every morning], and “Encor porras monter en pris, / Si avras honor et paradis” (6457−58) [You may still rise in (chivalric) worth, yet have both honor and paradise]. Profit, reputation, and renown belong as well to the miles Christi. Centuple reward serves, then, as a metaphor for the cultivation of values, of self-cultivation, of “understanding the word.” It entails a theory of profit through unequal exchange of goods and service for a “good” of subjective worth. These abstract values, whether they be love, as in the “chierté” of Chrétien’s lyrics, or the charity and faith of his later romances, are reified by the agrarian model of investment and return, as is the language that conveys them.

Having probed the sympathy of economic and spiritual motives

in the opening gestures of Perceval, we may now return to the same ground to recover the connection between economic and poetic motives. The topos linking the labor of cultivation to the labor of writing, repaying one type of culture with the interest of another, originates in Hesiod.71 Among the Romans it returns, growing in scope and subtlety most notably in Cicero and Ovid, both of whom extend the reach of the sowing metaphor to the reciprocal relationship of patron to artist. Cicero’s Brutus, in the dialogue of the same name, gratefully

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acknowledges his debt to the writing of his friend Atticus, which, he says, proved to be a “salvation” (saluti) in crisis, but confesses at once that he cannot repay him, as one does other debts, from the reserves of grain in his storehouse. The payment must be literary: “I must therefore sow something in soil uncultivated and abandoned, and by careful cultivation make it possible to increase with interest the generosity of your gift; that is, if my mind can respond as well as a field, which after lying fallow for many years generally yields a richer harvest.”72 On the same theme, Ovid is more personal and reflective. “Cur igitur scribam?” ( Why do I write?) is the question he poses to his friend Maximus in correspondence from exile.73 Like Brutus’s reasoning, Ovid’s answer, intimate, ironic, yet quietly reaffirmative of the value of poetry, was to leave a lasting impression upon the profession of letters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the following passage he ponders first the motives and rewards of his craft, then discusses its status as labor, using his favorite metaphor for writing: at, puto, fructus adest, iustissima causa laborum, et sata cum multo faenore reddit ager? tempus ad hoc nobis, repetas licet omnia, nullum profuit—atque utinam non nocuisset!—opus. (Epistulae ex Ponto 1.5.25–28) [I suppose, a reward is at hand, the most justifiable reason for toil, and the field is returning the seed with much interest. To the present, no work of mine, though you enumerate them all, has brought me profit—would that none had harmed me.] If profitless, still poetry may not be useless. Shifting ground, Ovid confirms its utility as work: ego, qui, sterili totiens cum sim deceptus ab arvo, damnosa persto condere semen humo? .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . sic ego constanter studium non utile servo, et repeto, nollem quas coluisse, deas. quid potius faciam? non sum, qui segnia ducam otia : mors nobis tempus habetur iners. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

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cum bene quaesieris quid agam, magis utile nil est artibus his, quae nil utilitatis habent. consequor ex illis casus oblivia nostri: hanc messem satis est si mea reddit humus. gloria vos acuat, vos, ut recitata probentur carmina, Pieriis invigilate choris. (Epistulae 1.5.32–34, 41–44, 53–58) [I who though so many times deceived by the barrenness of the soil, persist in sowing my seed in ground that ruins me. . . . I continually hold to a profitless pursuit, returning to the goddesses whom I would I had not worshipped. What rather shall I do? I am not one to lead a life of idle leisure (otia): I regard idleness as death. . . . Nothing is more useful than this art which has no use. From it I win forgetfulness of my misfortune; this harvest is enough if my ground but yields it. As for you, devote your wakeful hours to the Pierian band.] Chrétien’s debt to these passages goes far beyond the seminal conceit. They contain poetic advice that Chrétien heeds well in the final lines of the prologue, where he makes a closing bid for renown coupled with a stalwart reminder of the work involved in writing. Like Ovid, he seems intent on validating the labor of poetry, but from both a clerical and a classical perspective.74 Dont avra bien salve sa paine Crestïens, qui entent et paine Par le comandement le conte A rimoier le meillor conte Qui soit contez a cort roial: Ce est li Contes del graal, Dont li quens li bailla le livre. Oëz coment il s’en delivre. (61–68) [Wherefore Chrétien will have safeguarded his effort as he strives and labors, at the behest of the count, to compose in rhyme the best story that has ever been told at a royal court: that is the Story of the Grail, for which the count lent him (Chrétien) the original book. Hear then how he acquits himself of the task.]

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Our critical reflexes, as I have already mentioned, are triggered immediately by the triple adnominatio ( paine/paine, conte/conte, livre/­delivre), a trope Chrétien uses here to alert his audience to the essential bookishness of his enterprise. The pun on conte, “le meillor conte qui soit contez a cort roial,” cleverly flatters both the patron (“the best Count”) and the author (“the best story”) with a claim to literary preeminence, while the final line of the prologue punningly draws attention to another facet of the profession of authorship: delivery. In this, he is behaving in accordance with the classical precepts of the literary profession; as Ovid counsels, “Your goal may be renown; to read your poems and win approval.” But there is also a uniquely medieval, strongly clerical tenor to the final lines. As suggested earlier, the end of the prologue fulfills the initial bargain of sowing and profiting, the subsidy of culture Chrétien negotiates with his patron. Paul’s eleemosynary metaphor of “sparse sowing, sparse reaping” stipulates that God will also provide the seed for sowing and that in furnishing Chrétien the book from which the romance is made, Philip is performing God’s side of the bargain on a mortal scale. Yet while boastful in the Ovidian style,75 the final lines also betray a monkish humility suggested by the first pun on paine. Here Chrétien juxtaposes the noun paine, “effort,” against the verb pener, “to work hard.” But this is not just any kind of effort or hard work. As in modern French, paine means both “duress” and “punishment,” which, coming from a cleric such as Chrétien, assumes a penitential quality. Of course, as Jacques Le Goff points out, “the meaning of all monastic labor was penitential.”76 We recall from Genesis that labor in the fields, cultivating by the sweat of the brow, was Adam’s punishment for original sin. Both kinds of monastic work, whether in the fields or in the scriptorium (for writing was also considered labor), reenacted Adamic toil as penance.77 Chrétien’s “entent et paine” has its provenance in part in the scribal humility formulas appended to manuscripts describing their labor as an acknowledgment of sin.78 However, his use of the formula in Perceval, as opposed to earlier works, places a new inflection on the importance and legitimacy of literary work. In the prologue to Lancelot written for Marie de Champagne, Chrétien denigrates his role in the work, arguing that the countess provided the matière and the san, while he invested only his labor. There he renders the formula in passive

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nouns: “rien n’i met / fors sa peinne et s’antanciön.” Here in Perceval, however, he validates, even aggrandizes his poetic labor using entent and paine as active verbs. In short, the final lines of the prologue form a defense of the work-value of writing that marries clerical humility with Ovidian brag, otia monastica with otia poetica. Chrétien’s emphasis upon the intellectual work invested in writing betrays his vulnerability to the antique prejudice against the assumed idleness of poets as much as to medieval disdain for the otium of the literate class. Ovid, along with Propertius and ribald Catullus, had been among the first to protest the stigma. In the invocation to the Amores he writes, “Why, consuming Jealousy, do you charge me with a life of idleness [otia], and call poetry an occupation for sluggish spirits [inertus opus] . . . ?” (1.15). He prosecutes the case further in the Tristia when, addressing Caesar, he actually renames poetry “otia” (2.224), the work of leisure, suggesting that it is the proper occupation for a monarch’s spare time. This metonymic equation of poetry with otia achieved such currency in the late twelfth century that Gervasius of Tilbury could title his Ovidian compilation of tales dedicated to Otto IV Otia imperialia (The Leisures [Stories] of the Emperor) without an implied offence of indolence. My point, then, is that Chrétien, like Ovid to Caesar or Gervasius to Otto, is offering up his work to Philip in the spirit of a reassessment of poetic value as labor rendered in a newly inflected vocabulary of work. Evidence that the arguments for the work-value of romance literature that Chrétien espoused, derived from classical tradition, actually entered medieval chivalric ideology can be gleaned from the thirteenth-century Spanish law code Las Siete Partidas. There in part 2, title 21.20, we find a law, citing the authority of the “ancients,” that obliges knights to read or hear literature as a way of filling their idle time with profit during times of peace: In time of war, they [knights] ought to learn the science of arms by sight and by experience, so in time of peace, they ought to acquire it by means of their hearing and understanding. For this reason they [the Ancients] established as a custom that narratives of great deeds of arms performed by others should be read knights while they ate. . . . They also did this when they were unable to sleep, for each one caused himself to be read to, or had the matters aforesaid related

102  the sociology of romance to him in his own lodgings. This was done in order that, hearing them, their minds and hearts would be enlarged and strengthened by the performance of good actions, and awaken a desire to attain to what others had accomplished, or to surpass their efforts.79

Literature, in other words, counted not as leisure, but as an impetus to action. “Literature” as Erich Köhler has rightly observed, “remains at all times the mirror of a society at one moment of its evolution.”80 Historical context in mind, it is not surprising that the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, written amid the social ferment of what Roberto Lopez has called the “commercial revolution” of the twelfth century,81 should meditate upon the effect of changing notions of work, profit, and leisure upon the chivalric ethos. In the Middle Ages, work and agriculture were synonymous. Farming represented the economic foundation of feudal society upon which all notions of value, social and religious, were in some way predicated. By the twelfth century, however, technological advancements in agronomy had greatly increased agricultural yield and profit, liberating some laborers to pursue other forms of human endeavor. By the time Chrétien finished Perceval in the late 1180s, the old feudal distinctions among the estates that correlated status to occupation—“those who work, those who pray, and those who fight”—had begun to blur in the face of a growing diversity of employment. Commercial and mercantile concerns became increasingly important elements in Chrétien’s romances: maidens exploited in a textile sweatshop in Yvain, a merchant protagonist in Guillaume d’Angleterre, and portraits of the marketplace in Perceval. Diversity of work in turn expanded the medieval concept of what was valuable to the products of mental labor. We can only imagine, then, what a grand paradox romance must have presented to its audience. In theory, it valorizes knightly combat as the epitome of the active life while in practice it caters to a society in repose, exposing on some level the prevalent hypocrisy of chivalric work. Simultaneously it touts and impugns the value of action. In this light, the prologue to Perceval may be read as an attempt to redefine and revaluate time and action for a society that has evolved beyond the mores of a subsistence economy and, in a moment of supreme self-awareness, has embraced the economic complexities of what can properly be called culture.

3

m States of Union Maiestas, Marriage, and the Politics of Coercion in the Canterbury Tales

Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur maiestas et amor. [Coercive power and love do not go well together nor tarry long in the same dwelling-place.] Ovid Metamorphoses 2.846–47

O

ckham unshaved: the simplest solution is often wrong. Such is the case with the myth that the medieval polity was a confection of unity and homogeneity. Let the otherwise sophisticated Ernst Cassirer, in an aptly named essay “The Myth of the State,” be the mouthpiece of this hoary credendum: Medieval culture has often, and justly, been admired for its deep unity and homogeneity. It seems to lack all those conflicts, all those contradictions and dissonances that are the stigma of our modern civilization. In the Middle Ages, all forms of human life— science, religion, moral and political life—were pervaded and saturated with the same spirit. Yet all this cannot make us forget that medieval life was the outgrowth of two conflicting moral and intellectual forces. It needed the heroic effort of all the great scholastic thinkers to bridge this gulf and bind together the opposing elements of thought and feeling.1 103

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Two problems with this version of affairs surge to the fore. Cassirer confuses policy with reality, and humanistic synthesis with a will to power. First, the desire for unity did indeed exert a compelling social and literary force in the Middle Ages, but it was a desire at odds with the reality of evolving sociopolitical organization. Second, the “binding together of opposite elements” by scholastics, among others, is a phrase whose formulation tellingly implicates union as an imposition of form from without, designed to infringe pluralism rather than to nourish organic cultural cohesion. Vectors of exogenous control complicate if not negate the existence of simple unity. What uniform political cohesion the Middle Ages experienced was purchased, coerced, subsidized, emplotted mythopoetically in the great literature of the age, a trick cadged from Roman epic poets under the totalizing rule of Augustus. Unity as ideology, however, had a powerful influence not only over political theory but over the political consciousness of the commons. “Monarchy, validated by God,” argues Gerald Harriss, “reflected the unity and hierarchy of the divine order to which human society should aspire.”2 The important word here is the insidious should. Symbolically, this top-down conceit of a whole body politic, epitomized in the coronation ceremony depicting “the mystic marriage of monarch and kingdom symbolized by the ring,” permeated medieval notions of the structure of union down to the private level of marital conjunction and household governance.3 Yet in practice the coercive ideology of union, as David Wallace has shown for Chaucer and the fourteenth century in his book Chaucerian Polity, was simultaneously being undermined by a welter of contending models of endogenous union: communalism, corporate identity, associational form. Nor did any model of unity go without poetic resistance and subversive countermovement. The Knight’s Tale, for example, does indeed resolve an antagonism between the opposing categories of thought and feeling as Cassirer describes, but it does so coercively and in such a way as to provoke more questions regarding the nature of union, political and spousal, than it resolves. Theseus’s conception of the state and the state of marriage conforms to what Kant calls an “imperium paternale” and Weber “the patriarchal structure of rule”:4 a static, homogenous whole embodying that utopic form of polity, described in Plato’s Republic as “the pattern set up in the heavens” that may not “exist anywhere or ever will exist,”5 from which Augustine bor-

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rows the title The City of God. Yet in the Knight’s Tale, Thesean dirigisme veers too readily toward totalitarianism in its effort to expunge rationally the dissident energies of “feeling,” or erotic love in the Ovidian mold, that threaten simple unity with a stubbornly corporeal and individualistic model of hybridity and mixing. Having authored a text that is itself a loose confederation of stories and genres, that is itself openended, Chaucer shows himself sympathetic to Theseus’s anxiety over formal cohesion. But while Chaucer endorses the idea of the corporate body, of unity and desire for social form, he simultaneously registers the stultifying abuses that exogenous imposition of uniformity can have upon cultural pluralism and the autonomy of love. The Canterbury Tales itself, sociologically and poetically, is a study in the tension between association and individualism, unity of purpose and narrative variety. As Wallace argues, the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales “contains an extraordinary number of subgroups that operate within and against the unifying structure of the felaweshipe; it also contains a number of extraordinary individuals (the Pardoner and the Wife) who remain unassimilable.”6 The structural issue that needs to be explored in Chaucer’s vision of the medieval state, then, is not unity but, in Kantian terms, complex unity, a dialectical multiformity that thrives on what Schiller calls the “antagonism of powers [that] is the great instrument of culture,”7 and not only complexity and antagonism but the vectors and sources of power, political and literary, that impose or engender unity in the body politic, coloring the motives behind the corporate and intimate bonds people form. Infused with love’s inherent resistance to coercion, Ovidian romance emerges in the Franklin’s and Knight’s tales as a refractory countercurrent to enforced unity within the Canterbury Tales, private and public, and to the institutional control of love. My point of entry into this issue is the quotation from the Metamorphoses that appears as epigraph for this chapter and that is paraphrased prominently in both the Franklin’s and the Knight’s tales, “Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur maiestas et amor.” The word maiestas that is the quotation’s—and the chapter’s—­ideological fulcrum is a term of broad semantic competency. From the Latin magnus (“great”), it designates the nonspecific “greatness” of a monarch, contributing to the English majesty its connotations of pomp, dignity, and authority, and to mastery an air of menace. I have translated it as “­coercive power” because that is the sense it most often takes in fourteenth-­century

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­ olitical discourse and the connotation it evokes in Ovid’s story of p Jove and Europa (whence the quotation), a story of rape and mutatis mutandis the arrant imposition of political power. Chaucer’s keyword maistrie, which derives directly from maiestas, is the ideological bone of contention among the narrators of the so-called Marriage Group, building a semantic bridge between the fustian amenities of imperial greatness and the workaday bullydom of domestic “mastery,” which is to say the struggle for dominion between husband and wife, man and woman. Chaucer’s mingling of the issues of marital mastery with those of its cognate majesty realizes to the utmost their etymon’s potential for irony. More than a mere ironic vehicle, though, marriage also serves as Chaucer’s stalking horse for comment on political maiestas in the Canterbury Tales. In this, he takes his cue from Ovid’s satiric portrait of the majesty of a taurine Jove lolling at the feet of an unwitting Europa, an image that appears literally and spectrally in the Canterbury Tales as the master trope and skeleton key to issues of dominion and communion in society: maistrie, soveraynetee, felaweshipe, compaignye. A return to the redundant soil of Chaucerian politics and associational form can be justified, I think, only by refocusing the origin of the question beyond eleventh-century Italian republicanism, which has stood heretofore as the terminus a quo of historicist arguments, on the classical resistance to imperialism in Augustan Rome. To that end, this chapter will present three different reactions to the model of Augustan coercive union, all of which exercised significant influence over political, poetic, and amatory ideologies in Chaucer: (1) Horace’s pro-Augustan Ars poetica, which translates political policy into poetic/ aesthetic theory; (2) Cicero’s De amicitia, which explores homosocial patron-client bonds as a basis for social cohesion and salutary competition; and (3) Ovid’s stories of Jove, Europa, Theseus, and Cadmus, which treat the dynamics of empire foundation and locate his notion of maiestas in a reaction to Augustan marital legislation.

The Family-State Metaphor Spectral to the Canterbury Tales and much of the politically inflected literature of Ricardian England is the analogy of love to government,

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household governance to public rule. Speaking about the structural evolution of medieval monarchy and the premodern state, Max ­Weber argues that European polities merely borrowed the structure of an “oikos economy” or household government for the public arena: “The patrimonial administration was originally fitted to the needs of a purely personal, largely private household. The attainment of ‘political’ rule, i.e. the rule of one master of the house over others who are not subject to his domestic authority, means, sociologically speaking, the assimilation to domestic authority of power relationships differing from it in degree and content, but not in structure. . . . The king’s rule over the country was nothing other than an extension of or addition to the prince’s rule over his household.”8 Weber’s observation is based in Aristotle.9 In Politics 1.2 and 1.5, he discovers a tripartite sympathy among the government of the self, the household, and the state that was to exert formative influence upon the political theory of the fourteenth century. John Gower’s advice to Richard II in book 7 of Confessio amantis, for example, treats Aris­ totle’s distinction as defining the basic philosophical categories of governance: ethics, or governance of the self; politics, or governance of the city; and economics, or governance of the household: Practique stant upon thre thyngs Toward the governance of kinges, Wherof the ferst Etique is named. The whos science stant proclamed To teche of vertu thilke reule, Hou that a king himself schal reule .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . That other point to Practique Belongeth is Iconomique Which techeth thilke honeste Thurgh which a king in his degre His wif and child schal reule and guie .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Practique hath yit the thridde aprise, Which techeth hou and what wise Thurgh hih purveied ordinance

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A king schal sette in governance His Realme and that is Policie.10 (7.1649–54, 1669–73, 1679–83) Gower’s “iconomique” is economics in its original sense (Gr. oikos = home) and meant for him “the law of the household.” In Moerbeke’s medieval Latin translation of the Politics, it designates the study of monarchy, “oeconomia vero monarchia.”11 For the Aristotelian Giles of Rome, economics was the exercise of private hegemony: “So understanding the government of the household is pertinent to all citizens. But it is particularly relevant to kings and princes because just as a kingdom or a city presupposes that there is a house, so the governing of the kingdom and city presupposes the governing of a household (and of oneself ). For never should anyone be made ruler of a kingdom or a state unless he knows how to govern himself and his household as he ought.”12 Similarly, in Nicholas of Oresme’s French rendering of the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, “Le principal de la maison fait signes et regles ou ordonnances de gouverner sa famille et soy au resgart de sa famille.”13 But in his reading of Aristotle’s Politics, Oresme exploits a problematic wrinkle in the argument by conceding household dominion to the woman as well as to the man: “Il convient que la femme ait domination sus toutes les choses qui sunt dedens la maison” (826). Such a statement may well raise an eyebrow. Since the advent of Athenian democracy, the segregation of oikos from polis, the social from the political, the private sphere from the public, had allowed men to exclude women from the locus of political legitimacy. Acknowledging women’s sumptuary control over material disbursement and sole rights to economic management is tantamount to conceding political legitimacy to the private, social realm. Does Aristotle, and do medievals with him, really accord women political dominion based upon their status in the household (domus)? Significantly for Chaucer and the question of maistrie in the marriage-group, the answer is both yes and no. To be fair, Aristotle’s ideas of feminine economic agency and political status, located in one key passage in the Politics, are easy to misinterpret. In his Aristotelian gloss on the passage’s treatment of natural lordship over an inferior, Jean Buridan scrutinizes two of Aristotle’s three examples—the freeman’s dominion over slaves and

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children—but, as if in mute defeat, omits any mention of the third and thorniest quodlibet, women.14 Nor does the issue gain certainty among Aristotelian theologians of the fourteenth century. They consider Paul and Timothy’s accordance of priority to masculine rule incontestable. Man is the head, the rational faculty that must control feminine concupiscence and prevent carnal love from blossoming into idolatry.15 However, in his diptych De dominio divino and De civili dominio, John Wyclif, interpreting the same Aristotelian passage as Buridan, argues that “lordship is the relational disposition of a rational nature according as it is characterized as being over some person or thing that serves it” but stipulates that the rational faculty and lordship pertain exclusively to the relationship of God to human beings.16 In the postlapsarian world, he goes on to argue in the second treatise, man possesses no natural right to civil dominion, in support of which he quotes Richard FitzRalph’s On the Saviour’s Poverty 4.4: “Since ‘lord’ (dominus) is said [to come] from the house (domus) over which the lord ought to rule, it is clear that since a sinner does not thus rule the house but is subjected to it and to the other things he holds unjustly, truly he should be reckoned a slave and not a lord.”17 Rather, dominion is granted by God on an individual basis by merit alone, thus to man and woman alike and without bias of status.18 Returning to the source of the problem, Aristotle seems to nominate masculine authority in the household as preeminent and a priori just. I would like to suggest, however, that Ricardian readers of Moer­ beke and Oresme, who could draw on over a century of intense scholarly scrutiny of Aristotle’s political doctrine, were well equipped to appreciate the niceties of the distinctions that trouble the issue in its locus classicus: And since, as we saw, the science of the household [oikonomikis] has three divisions, one the relation of the master to the slave, of which we have spoken before, one the paternal relation, and the third the conjugal—for it is part of the household science to rule over wife and children (over both freemen, yet not with the same mode of government but over the wife to practice republican government [politikos] and over the children monarchical); for the male is by nature better fitted for command [thileos hegemonikoteron] (except in some cases where the union has been

110  the sociology of romance formed contrary to nature) and the older and fully developed person than the younger and immature. It is true that in most cases of republican government the ruler and the ruled interchange in turn (for they tend to be on an equal level in their nature and to have no difference at all), although nevertheless during the period when one is ruler and the other ruled they seek to have a distinction by means of insignia and titles and honours . . . but the male stands in this relationship to the female continuously. (Politics 1259a38–1259b10)

A correct reading of this passage is essential to appreciate the range of familial organization that medieval commentators and politically informed authors such as Chaucer and Gower would have entertained as legitimate. Several concepts give pause. First, Aristotle hastens to particularize the authority of rule that a husband exercises over a wife as politikos, here rendered as “republican” but a term that at one time designated democracy.19 Republicanism, of course, is the last of the three normative forms of government in Aristotle—of the One ( pambasileia), of the Few (aristokratia), and of the Many ( politeia)— and comprehends a voluntary arrangement in which “the ruler and ruled interchange” and “tend to be on an equal level in their nature” (whence Dorigen and Arveragus’s mutualism of interchanging rule in the Franklin’s Tale, whereby “freendes everych oother moote obeye,” 5.762). We may infer from this that the wife holds equal right to rule but by custom defers to the husband (again as in the Franklin’s Tale 5.749–52), though, as Aristotle stipulates, not in marriages contrary to nature, that is, those in which the woman is naturally possessed of a more vigorous or decisive constitution. Second, when Aristotle says that men are “better fitted to command” than women he does not mean that they are inherently more intelligent. “Better fitted” translates Aristotle’s rule that virtue is a corollary of function (Politics 1260a16–24) and thus that because women are physically weaker than men their virtue is customarily, although not necessarily, expressed in the function of maintaining the household rather than protecting it. Men’s suitability for command is also based upon Aristotle’s perceived difference in the emotional constitution of the sexes. In the balance between emotion and reason, women’s judgments, according to Aristotle, are akyron, that is lacking in the conviction of dispassion-

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ate purpose. Unlike slaves, women have a deliberative capacity that is in no way impaired. They recognize what is judicious as well as men do, but they tend to be more easily swayed in their decision making by countervailing emotions.20 As a politeia ruled by intellectual equals, then, household government may by law and nature, if not by custom, involve a sharing of power and even a turn at female rule. Nor is this implication of feminine economic authority limited to Greek philosophy. In actual Roman practice, Oresme’s contention that women exercise dominion over everything within the house, which is not to say the entire household, is not only a wholly legitimate proposition but a conventional one. The Roman tradition of feminine authority over the goods of the household is represented iconographically in her holding of the keys and forms part of the material and hegemonic rights in marriage cum manu outlined by Dionysius of Halicarnassus.21 Under the law of Romulus and in subsequent medieval law codes, a wife’s abuse of her key-holding rights, specifically the making of a false key, was one of the three grounds for divorce (the others being adultery and attempted murder by poison), whence May’s infraction in the Merchant’s Tale.22 Finally, John Wyclif, interpreting the disposition of property in a household under divine dispensation in Mark 10:29, invokes the following Aristotelian distinction: “Corporeal goods [are] signified by ‘mother’ because in Book IX of the Natural Treatises, Aristotle says that in carnal procreation the man gives the form and the woman the matter, so the goods are valued in correspondence with the goodnesses of the sexes.”23 That is to say, the household as a notional construct is under masculine hegemony but as a material one under female dominion. The prevalence in Ricardian England of a family-state metaphor closely adhering to Aristotelian precept is relevant to Chaucer in three ways. First, it demonstrates the impossibility, both for the author and his audience, of discovering the private realm of the household without commenting on public policy. Thus Grisilda’s skill at household economics in the Clerk’s Tale translates naturally into managing the “commune profit” of the state:24 Nat oonly this Grisildis thurgh hir wit Koude al the feet of wyfly hoomlinesse, But eek, whan that the cas required it,

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The commune profit koude she redresse. Ther nas discord, rancour, ne hevynesse In al that land that she ne koude apese. (4.428–33) Second, the accurate reading of Aristotle on marriage and gendered rule brings all the various marital power arrangements of the Marriage Group back within the pale of political legitimacy and plots them between the axes of an ongoing interpretation of Aristotelian republicanism and monarchy. Third, because politics for Aristotle is a subcategory of ethics, specifically the status-immune ethics of domestic life shared by peasant and king alike, state governance was a topic on which the commoner could offer guidance. The Wife of Bath’s marital “experience” constitutes, in this sense, the commoner’s legitimate license to opine politically, to counsel on the subject of majesty in a fashion and with a self-arrogated authority otherwise unthinkable. Of course, entitlement is not the same as sanction. Political voluntarism, the notion that a monarch rules in part by the will of the individual, had lent a prerogative note to the writing of many late fourteenth-century didactic writers: Gower, Langland, Deschamps, and (disastrously) Usk and Clanvowe.25 By comparison, Chaucer’s political advice is far more timid, really no more than political exemplification, portraying domestic power struggles in a manner more opaque than his congeners Gower, Usk, and Clanvowe, who also wrote politically edged love poems. Timid, perhaps, but coherent. The exception to Chaucer’s political hedging is “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” whose admonitory coda addresses itself specifically to Richard. Thus burdened, the poem blazes an easier trail to follow than the winding paths that Chaucer takes into issues of good governance in the Canterbury Tales. In it, Chaucer knits together political and conjugal themes, Aristotelian and Ciceronian arguments for the interconnectedness of public and private domains with the metaphor of kingship as a marriage with the people, figuring private union as public contract. Remarkable is the way the poetic language slips almost imperceptibly into political and legalistic rhetoric, as if the poem existed both as an intimate appeal intended only for the eyes of the monarch and as a civic document promulgated before the people for all to witness. Mingling the vocabulary of ethics and politics, the poet repines, “Vertu hath now no dominacioun” (16),

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where “dominacioun” (L. dominus = lord; ruler of the household) imputes to the personified Vertu both a regal and a domestic negligence. Reading the line, we sense the anxiety that England’s moral drift is pegged to the king’s personal, moral discomposure, a connection made commonplace by Cicero’s “Talis est res publica, qualis aut eius natura aut voluntas qui illam regit” (De re publica 1.31; De legibus 3.14) [Every state is such as its ruler’s character will make it].26 In the opening lines that define the lack of steadfastness as a political ill, the poetic language again modulates, this time into something approaching a legal contract: Somtyme the world was so stedfast and stable That mannes word was obligacioun And now it is so fals and deceivable That word and deed, as in conclusion Ben nothing lyk . . . . (1–5) The necessary juncture of word and deed in “Lak of Stedfastnesse” immediately brings to mind the changes in vasselage that occurred under Richard II, a move to pecuniary contracts and voluntary agreements between lords and liege men or “bastard feudalism,” and a nostalgia for the chivalric oaths of yore.27 What here resembles a slippage between a historical ill and a poetic abuse reemerges with deliberate vigor in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales as the fundamental poetic formula uniting the pilgrims in common concourse. Citing Plato the ethicist, Chaucer avers with self-conscious gravity that “The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” (1.742) against the future hypocrisy of his narrators’ example. The azimuth of this conceit arrives finally in the Manciple’s Tale, where the political tendencies of Chaucer’s mind are made manifest in the categories of example he chooses to illustrate the word-deed contract: The wise Plato seith, as ye may rede, The word moot nede accorde with the dede. If men shal telle proprely a thyng, The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng. I am a boystous man, right thus seye I:

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Ther nys no difference, trewely, Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree, If of hir body dishonest she bee, And a povre wenche . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Right so bitwixe a titlelees tiraunt And an outlawe or a theef erraunt, The same I seye: ther is no difference. (9.207–15, 223–25) The Manciple’s analogy juxtaposes three contracts: word with deed (Gower’s “etique”), husband with wife regarding duties in marriage (“iconomique”), and ruler with people (“policie”). At the end of “Lak of Stedfastnesse,” Chaucer makes conscience of these latter two categories as well. Present in the latter is, of course, the larger sense of the contract between monarch and people to work for the common good, whose infraction signals tyranny. By the end, though, the poem’s implicit contract—the notion that “mannes word was obligacioun­”—takes on the sense of a marriage vow, and the “lak of stedfastness” a divorce or marital infidelity that must be repaired by the resolemnizing power of a new oath. Earlier, Dante and Petrarch had pioneered marriage as the symbol of the monarch’s relationship to the city-state.28 Chaucer’s poem’s closing “Envoy to Richard” now does the same, articulating a wedding vow between the people and their lost virtue in which the king is both minister and, as incarnation of the body politic, surrogate partner: “Dred God, do law, love trouthe and worthinesse, / And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse” (27–28). According to David Starkey, by the middle of the fourteenth century England had entered an “age of the household” in which the negotiation of capital and power within its large landowning families had begun to drive national politics and economics.29 Recently, in The Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary, D. Vance Smith has explored the household as the dominant notional trope of romance and the locus of medieval anxiety over the limits separating having and being, property and alterity, or more generally what might be called a private sphere in which things are imagined to be possessed and a public sphere in which they are desired, or imagined to be possessable.30 While Smith finds primary theoretical recourse

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in Marx, he discovers the seed of his materialism in Ovid.31 Although he never attempts to forge a historical or poetic connection between fourteenth-century household politics and the classical sources he cites, one certainly exists. In preparing the ground for an intertextual reading of Chaucer against Ovidian political motives, I would like to make at least some cursory gestures at establishing the importance and nature of the connection that existed between Ricardian England and Augustan Rome in terms of the ideas of marriage and the household. Karl Galinsky has spoken of the “confluence of private and public aspects typical of both Augustus’s style of government and Augustan culture.”32 Indeed, the history of how the private becomes part of the public realm begins with Augustus Caesar, who was the first monarch to meddle officially in the bedrooms of the equestrian order for political ends through the imposition of morality codes. Transmitted to the Middle Ages through legal history ( Justinian’s Digest), political biography (Suetonius), and satire (Ovid, Apuleius, Macrobius), the social consequences of Augustus’s intrusions frame much of the anxiety Smith locates in the medieval romance household. In inviting its audience into the homes and marriage beds of its narrators and characters, the Canterbury Tales construes the home as a notional edifice founded on marriage as the normative default. For Chaucer, the home is a space both of contention between the possessive desires of husbands and wives and of transgression of oaths and contracts. The Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale in particular problematize domestic issues in this way. Yet while Chaucer’s frank and intimate scrutiny of marital economies may seem unremarkable, it represented a marked break with antique culture. In Greek and Latin literature, the intimate sphere of the home, inasmuch as it was defined by the marital relationship, was inviolable. When Odysseus retires to the bedroom with Penelope, the crowning moment of his return, Homer is careful to close their door to his audience. Likewise, no Roman authors, even the love poets, ever invaded the marriage chamber. Adultery, family administration, household finances, domestic violence were at most objects of allusion, never poetic inquiry. The walls of the home, in other words, represented their own kingdom where sovereignty belonged to the paterfamilias and patria potestas was law. The crumbling of those walls, the transgressive crux in the history of the family-state metaphor, came with Augustus’s moral and

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marital­ legislation. So radical was it that its social intrusions were still on the lips of Boccaccio over a millennium later, and Ariosto, challenging Vergil’s panegyric, could grumble, “Non fu sì santo né benigno Augusto.”33 Beginning about 18 BCE, Augustus passed a raft of statutes targeting sexual behavior in and outside wedlock, mandating both marriage and paternity for patricians for the purpose of increasing and strengthening the aristocratic stock.34 To the same end, he criminalized adultery with the new and drastic appellation of laesa majestatis (treason against the crown), in a single gesture confiscating authority from the family and politicizing conjugal sex. The aura of maiestas surrounding the imperial crown had now outflanked the cordon sanitaire of private dominion, making domestic sovereignty fief to imperial whim. The responses of historians to this sea-change were as forthright as the poets’ were ironic. Exercised to indignation, Tacitus adjudged harshly the amatory “treason” of the Lex Iulia de adulteriis: “For designating as he did the besetting sin of both sexes by the harsh appellations of sacrilege and treason [laesarum majestatis], he overstepped both the mild penalties of an earlier day and those of his own laws.”35 Popular opposition to it, as Suetonius notes, reached the pitch of open revolt.36 The Greek historians Plutarch and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both animadvert the Lex Iulia and its concomitants in the strongest terms for their violation of the patria potestas, in particular their interference in the executive balance of power between husband and wife. Hence Plutarch states that “the variety of [the Censor’s] ­powers was great, including that of examining into the lives and manners of the citizens. Its creators thought that no one should be left to his own devices and desires without inspection and review, either in his marrying, or in the begetting of his children. . . . Nay, rather thinking that these things revealed a man’s character more than did his public and political career, they set men in office to watch, admonish, and chastise.”37 And according to Dionysius, “The Romans, throwing open every house and extending the authority of the censors even to the bed-chamber, made that office the overseer and guardian of every­ thing that took place in the homes; for they believed that neither a master should be cruel in the punishments meted out to his slaves, nor a father unduly harsh or lenient in the training of his children, nor a husband unjust in his partnership with his lawfully wedded wife.”38

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The taboo of private hegemony that Augustus broke, however, had served to protect the monarch’s privacy as much as the individual’s. Now the imperial household, the monarch’s marriage and his body, inasmuch as they gauged the character of the res publica, were legitimately vulnerable to public scrutiny, a situation aggravated by Augustus’s homegrown adultery. Macrobius, writing the Saturnalia at the end of the fourth century, records saltily the scandal concerning the rumored adultery of Augustus’s daughter Julia, whose lover he consequently exe­ cuted.39 Suetonius, whose Lives of the Caesars served as the template for the biographical pseudohistory of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus and Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, enumerates Augustus’s own adulteries, noting that he committed them in part to gain intelligence on the internal goings-on of important Roman families.40 Most significant for the history of the family-state metaphor, though, was the way medieval history reduced Augustus’s rule to its most sensational dichotomies. School texts, like the late antique Liber de Caesaribus of Sextus Aurelius Victor, condensed Suetonius’s broad-ranging estimation of Augustus into a one-paragraph epitome contrasting public policy and private morality, family and state. In a brief portrait in the Fiore that follows the Liber de Caesaribus very closely, Brunetto Latini praises Augustus for forging the pax Romana and fostering the vibrant cultural life of the empire, then makes an about-face to criticize vehemently the hypocrisy of his private life: “Era molto lussurioso, e crudelissimo castigatore delli altri che peccavano in quello vizio” (He was very lustful and a cruel punisher of others who sinned in the selfsame vice).41 The lustful “altri” to whom Brunetto alludes were not merely Julia, whom Ovid had defended in the Fasti by analogy to the falsely accused Claudia, but Ovid himself, whose exile was traditionally linked to his having addressed the Ars amatoria to Augustus, or by some accounts having witnessed the emperor’s adultery firsthand.42 The poetic consequences of Augustan moral legislation were no less far-reaching than the historical. Love elegy, particularly that of Catullus and Ovid, and all romance narrative since meditate on, even glorify, illicit passions and transgressive loves. Suddenly, with the passage of the Lex Iulia, what had been naughty adventure became political raillery. Lines such as Ovid’s ironic rebuke to the unmannered cuckold in the Amores, “The man’s a boor who is too offended by his wife’s adultery” ( 3.4.37), could not be read as anything but a barb against the regime.43

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In the second century, Apuleius satirizes the Lex Iulia by name in a delightfully upside-down passage from The Golden Ass (6.22) in which Venus accuses Cupid of laesa majestatis for his dalliance with Psyche, an affront rectified by their marriage. In the same tradition, Troilus and Criseyde, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Canterbury Marriage Group all invest in imperial marriage satire by poetic convention as well as by historical precedent. To sum up this Augustan excursus, then, in the fourteenth-century literary and historical imagination, Ovid was at the center of a great collision of public and private spheres, a participator in, focal critic, and casualty of the imperial abuses of the household imaginary whose lesson he crystallized in the maxim “Majesty and love do not go well together, nor tarry long in the same dwelling place.” About majesty there lingers a residuum of divine immanence akin to the nimbus of a holy person, albeit less meritorious in those for whom majesty is a matter of title. When in 27 BCE Octavian was granted supreme power by the Senate and adopted the title Imperator Augustus (“exalted emperor”), he invited a portion of comic censure. Nor was majesty a quality in Augustus that merited all the deference it demanded. In Ovid, and by emulation in Chaucer, the claim to majesty provokes two critical reactions. The one, influenced by the myth of maiestas in the Fasti and adapted to comedy by Chaucer in the Merchant’s Tale, resists direct involvement in polemic; the pretense of gods and men to dominion is merely a lighthearted, bawdy, ludicrous spectacle. The other, a more serious, grudgingly polemical, and edgily ironic vision of sovereign power, can be found in the Metamorphoses and in the Knight’s, Franklin’s, and Wife of Bath’s tales. Let us turn, by way of illustration, to the Ovidian passage in question. In Metamorphoses 1 we witnessed Lycaon’s affront to maiestas in serving Jupiter human flesh, and we did not smile. In book 2, indulging the humor of impropriety, Ovid tells the story of Jove’s self-willed animalism and asks his audience for a complicit snigger: non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur maiestas et amor; sceptri gravitate relicta ille pater rectorque deum, cui dextra trisulcis ignibus armata est, qui nutu concutit orbem, induitur faciem tauri mixtusque iuvencis mugit et in teneris formosus obambulat herbis. quippe color nivis est, quam nec vestigia duri

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colla toris exstant, armis palearia pendent, cornua vara quidem, sed quae contendere possis facta manu, puraque magis perlucida gemma. nullae in fronte minae, nec formidabile lumen: pacem vultus habet. miratur Agenore nata, quod tam formosus, quod proelia nulla minetur; sed quamvis mitem metuit contingere primo, mox adit et flores ad Candida porrigit ora. gaudet amans et, dum veniat sperata voluptas, oscula dat manibus; vix iam, vix cetera differt; et nunc adiudit viridique exsultat in herba, nunc latus in fulvis niveum deponit harenis; paulatimque metu dempto modo pectora praebet virginea plaudenda manu, modo cornua sertis inpedienda novis . . . . (Metamorphoses 2.846–68) [Coercive power and love do not go well together, nor tarry long in the same dwelling place. And so the father and ruler of the gods who wields in his right hand the three-forked lightning, whose nod shakes the world, laid aside his royal majesty along with his sceptre and took upon him the form of a bull. In this form he mingled with the cattle, lowed like the rest, and wandered around, beautiful to behold, on the young grass. His colour was white as the untrodden snow, which has not yet been melted by the rainy south wind. The muscles stood rounded upon his neck, a long dewlap hung down in front; his horns were twisted, but perfect in shape as if carved by an artist’s hand, cleaner and more clear than pearls. His brow and eyes would inspire no fear, and his whole expression was peaceful. Agenor’s daughter looked at him in wondering admiration because he was so beautiful and friendly. But, although he seemed so gentle, she was afraid at first to touch him. Presently she drew near, and held out flowers to his snow-white lips. The disguised lover rejoiced and, as a foretaste of future joy, kissed her hands. Hardly any longer could he restrain his passion. And now he jumps sportively about on the grass, now lays his snowy body down on the yellow sands; and, when her fear has little by little been allayed, he yields his chest for her maiden hands to pat and his horns to entwine with garlands of fresh flowers . . . .]

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The passage is at once ludicrous and disturbing, or rather disturbing because ludicrous. We should begin by noting the ambiguity of the word sedes, which sets up the terms of the family-state metaphor. Sedes means “throne,” “home,” “foundation of a building”; in other words, it brackets an authority that belongs equivocally to both household and state and thus breaks down the boundary between oikos and polis. We are reminded by the word sedes that this rape is a crime of adultery that rocks the foundation of the home and the seat of ruler­ ship. We should note too that Jupiter does not possess majesty as an inalienable right; Cicero, after all, called maiestas the “grandeur and the glory of the State,” not of the monarch.44 Bestowed by public benefaction, it inhered in the position of rulership, not the ruler. Thus, if the household rift Jupiter causes by setting his cap for Europa is not severe enough, to “lay aside his royal majesty” as Ovid says, to abdicate kingship and its civil incumbencies, is to break ethical rules, with dire economic and political consequences. In Metamorphoses 3, Ovid tells the story of Cadmus’s search for the lost Europa, which leads to his founding Thebes. Thus the troubled throne of Thebes, whose inheritors are Palemon and Arcite, is built on the sedes of Jove, whose own authority is undermined by his dalliance with Europa. Indeed, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, as the opening pronouncement on the theme of maiestas, is burdened with the task of stilling the ripples of state and family misrule launched by this singular event. For Chaucer in particular, Jupiter’s rapes of the Thebans Io and Europa, the first two such in the Metamorphoses, have a special significance in political history: they mark the end of the Golden Age of peaceful egalitarian rule that Boethius praises in the Consolation of Philosophy 2.5.1–30 and that Chaucer echoes in his Boethian poem “The Former Age”: The Lambish peple, voyd of alle vyce Hadden no fantayse to debate, But ech of hem wolde other wel cheryce. No pryde, non envye, non avaryce, No lord, no taylage by no tyrannye; Humblesse and pees, good feith the emperice. (49–55)

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But at this halcyon moment of justice and right rule, Jupiter enters the poem on a note of lechery, corrupting ethics and launching government down a slippery slope to depravity: Yit was not Jupiter the likerous, That first was fader of delicacy Come into this world . . . . ( 56–58) The real offense of this rape, however, lies in the damage it does to masculinity and masculine political authority. Ovid’s images of Jupiter discountenance the dignity of the imperium (what Chaucer calls “emperice”), of heaven, and thus obliquely of the office of empire held by Augustus. The measure of Jupiter’s ethical debasement in Ovid is genetic and gendered: we are shown first the god transmogrified into an animal of the herd, Ovid’s trope for cultural primitivism, and then his prostration before a mortal female creature, his “lay[ing] his snowy body down on the yellow sands” in a travesty of supplicancy. An index of the medieval reception of the trope may be found in Walter Map’s twelfth-century antimatrimonial tract Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum, upon which Chaucer draws in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. There he treats Ovid’s Jupiter as the moral forbear not only of contemporary English rulers but of husbands who must be warned of marriage’s detriments to masculine maiestas: “Jupiter, an earthly king, who was also called king of the heavens on account of the outstanding power of his body and the incomparable elegance of his mind, was driven to mooing after Europa. Friend, consider: goodness exalted him above the heavens, but a woman made him equal to the beasts. A woman can make you moo too, unless you are greater than Jove, whose majesty no one else equalled.”45

Maiestas, Nobility, and Competition in the Franklin’s Tale The Franklin’s Tale is a peculiar place to begin a discussion of maistrie and love in the Canterbury Tales. The copestone of Fragment V, it

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serves most naturally as an ending place, making it hard to scruple Kittredge’s neat bow on the parcel of the marriage problem, “The Marriage Group begins with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and ends with the Franklin’s Tale”—an opinion seconded by many, if only to silence the importunity of the other pilgrims on the matter.46 For those weary of harangue, the Franklin offers a welcome oasis of compromise, reasonableness, and forward thinking, where the gender wars of the Knight’s and Wife of Bath’s tales in particular find both an equitable desinence and a solicitous open-endedness in Chaucer’s closing tender: “Whiche was the moste fre, as thinketh yow?” Across the water from Kittredge and the idealists stands the Robertsonian camp, whose coadjutors discover ironic exemplarity in the tale’s epicurean narrator, in the character flaws of its principals, and in the pat tidiness of its marital solution.47 While I do not see the Franklin as a type of Folly, I share the ironists’ material skepticism about his mores and the cogency of his theories of marriage and nobility. Yet for the most part, the ironists remain unruffled by the demande’s ethical premises; neither do they perceive commerce, as do I, between the demande and the tale’s controlling argument for maistrie and gentilesse. Between these opposing positions, a third line of reading the Franklin’s Tale has established itself of late, a cordon sanitaire supported by Anne Middleton’s subtle analysis of the Franklin’s social and rhetorical liminality as a “new man.” For her, the Franklin is an ethical expostulator, a performer rather than an overt exponent of emergent social ideals and literary attitudes, whose true convictions about mastery and gentility must remain invisibly subordinate to the literary performance of gentility as a latitudinarian proffer of alternatives, a strategy of indirect social self-promotion. The terminal demande, in this regard, represents the crowning gesture of largesse in the Franklin’s self-performance of nobility, his “courtly game of ideal talk.”48 Middleton’s middle ground has done much to rehabilitate the Franklin as a midwife rather than a progenitor of ideologies of maistrie and as a character invested in social hierarchy without being wholly committed to the pursuit of narrow self-interest or the support of aristocratic power independent of considerations of justice. Finally, she has redirected critical attention to the Franklin as master rhetorician and refocused scrutiny upon the centrality of the tale’s final question as a gesture implicated in disguised discourses of promotion,

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a focus that serves as a useful preface to some of the arguments concerning maiestas and nobility I will adduce here. My purpose is to direct attention to the ways class anxiety and the desire for power emerge even in moments when they are being disavowed. My agenda will be to read backwards from the demande to Ovid’s dictum and the Franklin’s use of it to articulate a theory of the ideal circulation of power in marriage and thence in the body politic. I am alone among commentators, it seems, in thinking that the demande betrays (to read with the ironists) a fundamental flaw in or (to read with Middleton) a calculated misrepresentation of the Franklin’s stated ideology of maistrie and nobility. The crux of my discomfort is that answering the question engenders a spirit of class competition for a virtue—nobility, generosity of spirit, freedom—that undermines that virtue’s abnegative character. To vie for a title of nobility is at best infra dig; at worst, it jeopardizes the fellowship upon which the nobility of the three characters is predicated. The demande, I will argue, is the last in a series of impossibilia or ethico-rhetorical paradoxes beginning with the doctrine of mutual obedience in marriage and including the vanishing of the rocks, all of which invite scrutiny of the inequalities of human association and prerogatives of societal order. In this light, the closing paradox of the Franklin’s Tale is an ideal place to begin to consider maistrie, fredom, and felaweshipe because it returns us so neatly to a similar dilemma raised at the end of the General Prologue that frames the same issues for the Canterbury Tales as a whole. The nexus I would like to isolate in the Franklin’s Tale between a household economy and notions of maiestas and nobility has inter­ woven in it threads of related terms and concepts that need some unraveling. Inherent to maiestas is an economic connotation whose Latin sense may best be translated as “magnificence”—that is, a king’s liberality (liberalitas) or “freedom” in giving money—whence the double entente of the Franklin’s closing question. Freedom or liberality in turn belongs to the communal ethos of the Golden Age, when natural abundance made possessive desire, class distinction, and the apparatus of government unnecessary and all were free of avarice. Thus Gower in the Confessio amantis: The worldes good was ferst comune, Bot afterward upon fortune

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Was thilke comun profit cessed: For whan the people stod encresced And the lignages woxen grete, Anon for singulier beyete Drouh every man to his partie.49 Gower’s distinction between “commun profit” and “singulier beyete” is meant to illustrate the notion that individual materialism is the historical motive for institutional “nobility” at the expense of the commonwealth. True nobility, according to this thesis, discounts, as does the Wife of Bath, “gentilesse as is descended out of old richesse” or the aristocratic landowner’s accumulation of “possessioun / But if a man be vertuous withal” ( 5.686–87), as does the Franklin,50 and instead seeks to promote “commun profit” through largesse as a political ideal. This liberality in turn augments nobility through its public display of charitable condescension, at once uniting the desire of lord and commoner for wealth and welfare of the state and reinforcing the vertical hierarchy of possession and prerogative. In Chaucer, the policy of “commune profit,” whose pursuit leads to Ciceronian heaven in the Parliament of Fowles, is powerfully at issue in the General Prologue. John of Paris, interpreting Aristotle on the common good, argues in De potestate regia et papali (1303) that “every community is scattered when each individual person seeks his own interests, and it is dispersed into different paths unless directed to the common good by some one person whose task it is to be concerned with the common good.”51 This, generally speaking, may be taken as a political Grundnorm for the General Prologue. Polemically, however, Chaucer ironizes a crucial aspect of John’s thesis. The spirit of “felaweshipe” that prevails at the formation of the pilgrims’ “compaignye,” the common profit they derive from telling tales, is immediately undercut by the contest that Harry Bailly, the governor nominally concerned with the common good, devises. The contest’s effect is to sponsor individual interest at the expense of the group. Public and private spheres of possession collide. The pilgrims’ potential Golden Age idyll of “commun profit” is spoilt by a “singulier beyete” recapitulating Gower’s history of class and materialism. The desire for maiestas, political and economic in the case of Harry Bailly and personal in the case of the pilgrims, threatens to overwhelm the

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values of amor in this ad hoc “family” and in all subsequent representations of political or marital union in the rest of the tales. The Franklin’s Tale, more clearly than any other of the Canterbury Tales, problematizes the complex politics of individualism versus communalism in terms of Ovid’s maiestas/amor distinction. The Franklin states the case early in paraphrase of Ovid’s dictum: For o thyng, sires, saufly dar I seye, That freendes everych oother moot obeye, If they wol longe holden compaignye. Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye. Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon! Love is a thyng as any spirit free. ( 5.761–67) Invoking the spirit of friendship, fellowship, “compaignye” as a political summum bonum, the Franklin forges an immediate analogy between voluntarism and “Love” on the one hand and individualism and “maistrie” on the other. The domestic economy of amor, then, operates on an ethic antithetical to the regnant political and social hierarchies of the day. In political terms, maistrie represents a descending (vertical), feudal system of social order based on dominance, while compaignye represents an ascending system based on popular affirmation and affiliation in which the vectors of power range laterally among “freendes.”52 The central dilemma of the Franklin’s Tale is a contest, explicit in the final question, between vertical and horizontal sociopolitical organization. In fact, the social aspect of this ascending-descending tension is already worried in the opening lines of the tale. The love Ovid depicts in the Jove-Europa episode of which the amor/maiestas sentence is the crowning dictum is the great equalizer of unequals.53 All are equally vulnerable, equally domitable by the love god’s rule. Ovidian love, however, thrives on the froward resistance to established law; it takes essential nourishment from the human psychological opposition to decorum and sanctioned hierarchies. It also needs those hierarchies to exist. Ovidian loves are impossible, subversive, societally disastrous, yet dependent on an unchanging framework of status against which

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to react. The political agency of Ovidian love, then, is idiosyncratic: it seeks to invert social hierarchies and to bring the high to low degree, effecting individual union at the expense of the integrity of the social fabric, yet not so much as to effect root-and-branch societal change. The Franklin’s use of Ovid’s amor/maiestas dictum is designed to subsidize what he perceives as Ovid’s egalitarian societal model, without appreciating Ovidian love’s reliance upon the dynamic of inequality that nourishes it. In his love /maistrie speech of lines 5.764 ff., what the Franklin extrapolates from Ovid is a radical reorganization of the idea of nobility. What he misunderstands, and what Chaucer does not, is the need for love and mastery to coexist in unresolved conflict. From the very beginning, the love of Arveragus for Dorigen acknowledges its inequality despite the Franklin’s quixotic protestations to the contrary. He fears approaching her on the grounds of her social superiority: For she was oon the faireste under sonne, And eek therto comen of so heigh kynrede That wel unnethes dorste this knyght, for drede, Telle hire his wo, his peyne, and his distresse. ( 5.734–36) For her part, Dorigen, recognizing the disparity in status, deigns to love: But atte laste she, for his worthynesse, And namely for his meke obeysaunce, Hath swich a pitee caught of his penaunce That pryvely she fil of his accord To take hym for hir housbonde and hir lord. ( 5.738–42) At first, we are led to believe that Dorigen will flout social degree— the vertical system of maiestas—for a love that values “worthynesse,” native nobility grounded in deeds. Instead, her attraction to Arveragus proves socially conservative. She fancies him less for his “worthynesse” than “for his meke obeysaunce,” to which she responds with “pitee” rather than esteem, affect born of condescension. And lest

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anyone suggest that “pitee” at the lover’s distress is a courtly commonplace, Chaucer implies Dorigen’s particular discomfiture at her choice, noting, “pryvely she fil of his accord” ( 5.741). Not only is the moment of love’s fulguration euphemized from a “falling in love” to the lukewarm “falling in accord,” but it occurs silently, without public acknowledgment.54 This is, then, a picture, not of a lady of high standing possessed by the abandon of a love that conquers all, but of a woman settling for an acceptable and pleasingly deferent partner, a conventional if not ideal choice. And far from being redressed by marriage, the disparity of their courtship is compounded. Arveragus makes a prenuptial guarantee “Of hys fre wyl” (745) that stipulates Dorigen’s superiority, according to which Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . But hire obeye, and folwe hir wyl in al, As any lovere to his lady shal. (746, 749–50) The values of “freedom” for which the Franklin stands, implicit in his title and explicit in his ideology, are subtly under assault here. That the Franklin feels it necessary to mention Arveragus’s swearing “of his fre wyl” suggests the opposite, especially when its purpose is to “folwe her wyl in all”—that is, to yield freely and abjectly to mastery. Arveragus’s domestic “soverayntee” (751), traditionally held by the man, is a sham, a public illusion concealing the “shame of his degree” (752).55 In sum, the terms of their marriage are strikingly aberrant. The familiar courtly ideal of masculine submission in courtship is nowhere recommended for marriage itself; indeed, it contradicts biblical injunction.56 In Aristotelian political terms, their marriage contract is a domestic constitution framed ostensibly as a republic but actually as a tyranny. Logically, the details of Arveragus and Dorigen’s marriage should serve as prelude to the sanguine theory articulated a few lines later that “Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrie.” Instead, the ­couple’s actual marital power dynamic affirms a concept of hierarchical nobility that contradicts the later theory, a maiestas that effectively constrains amor by oath in imitation of feudal contracts of service. Thus the Franklin praises a marriage of “humble, wys accord” (5.791)

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while at the same time describing one of troubled class distinctions, founded on “shame,” “pitee,” and “obeysaunce” bound by contract. Later we are shown the same marriage overshadowed by a masculine, feudal maistrie characterized by oaths in which Arveragus assumes the right to “forbede” Dorigen “up peyne of deeth” ( 5.1481) in contravention of his nuptial promise but rescued by an affair that dissolves feudal oaths in favor of individual liberties, where the lover resolves to “relesse” Dorigen “into youre [her own] hond / Quyt every serement and every bond” ( 5.1533–34). Finally, we are asked to choose between readings of the tale that accord preference to the nobility of either the ascending or descending models of domestic rule, but with a question whose phrasing makes the choice either nonsensical or self-­defeating. What singular message, then, are we to draw from these seeming contradictions? Before I argue for Chaucer’s deployment of figures of contrariety or impossibilia as a unifying strategy, I should state as clearly as pos­sible the larger implications of the dissonance between ideal and actual household politics in the Franklin’s Tale, and hence the dissonance in critical reception of the tale’s social idealism. The Franklin’s Tale uses the Ovidian dichotomy of love and mastery, I suggest, to juxtapose a republican model of government based in a “libertee” desired equally by men and women (“Wommen of kynde, desiren libertee / And nat to been constreyened as a thral; / And so doon men . . . ,” 5.768–70) with a descending, feudal model in which compliance is coerced by a system of oaths and hierarchical authority. Chaucer’s challenge to his readers, I would argue, is to resist making the either/or choice that both Ovid’s dictum and its corresponding political alternatives seem to want us to make. Both impetuses to freedom and impetuses to constraint, according to Ovidian psychology, must coexist for love to endure. In the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant made the same argument for the state as an expression of human desire both for individualism and for social incorporation, a distinction that helps clarify Chaucer’s decision to set rival political models in contest at the end of the General Prologue and in the Franklin’s Tale: “The means which Nature uses to develop all of its capacities is antagonism, the same as that in society as long as that antagonism is the origin of lawful order in society. I understand this antagonism to mean an unsocial socia­ bility [ungesellige Geselligkeit], the propensity of humans to enter

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into society, which is at the same time bound up with a constant resistance that perpetually threatens to divide society. The propensity for this lies clearly in human nature.”57 Both the fellowship of the pilgrims and the gentilesse of the Franklin’s principals work on Kant’s principle of antagonism; both are communities held together by “unsocial sociability,” mutual love (amor) and desire for dominion (maiestas) that in contest define virtues and talents through salutary strife. In the Canterbury Tales, marriage is the clearest proving ground of this thesis. By one account a virtue proceeding from charitable love and embracing a spirit of communion yet by common practice a social institution enforcing maiestas through custom, nobility is the Franklin’s Tale’s subject of antagonism. The origin of this dilemma of love and its relationship to nobility as a social institution lies in part in the history of maiestas et amor as a medieval trope. Among the many topics of Thomas the Cistercian’s compendious twelfth-century Commentary on the Song of Songs, the author addresses the contingency of kingly and noble rulership upon divine goodwill. To illustrate, he moves quickly from Nebuchadnezzar’s bovine metamorphosis and loss of maiestas in the book of Daniel to Jove’s in Ovid.58 Quoting “non bene conveniunt maiestas et amor,” he adds the line “nobilitas sub amore iacet” (Nobility is prostrate under love) from the Phaedra-Hippolytus letter of Heroides 4.161. For him, nobilitas is an extension of the regal privileges of maiestas; they are essentially synonyms. A similar conflation of nobilitas and maiestas occurs in Andreas Capellanus’s Art of Courtly Love. Here, however, the argument is directly pertinent to Arveragus and Dorigen’s relationship in the Franklin’s Tale. For Andreas as for Ovid, the greatest impediment to love as well as its greatest attraction is inequality—of affection, of status, of inherent worth. To help the ardent lover overcome unequal status, Andreas provides six model arguments of love between men and women of different classes. In the first dialogue, a plebeian attempts to flatter a middle-class woman with an argument against inherited nobility and for intrinsic nobility or probitas. Like Gower, he offers a myth of origin: “In the beginning the same nature created all men and to this day they would have remained equal had not greatness of soul [magnanimitas] and worth of character [morum probitas] commenced to set men apart from each other by the inequality of nobility.”59 Note, however, that the man’s

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myth of noble origin is diametrically opposite to Gower’s. Where Gower argued that nobility (“lignages”) grew out of greed and was designed as an institution to enforce material advantage, the plebeian defines nobility as a natural hierarchy of virtue (“maganimitas et morum probitas”) that transcends class. The woman, however, will have none of his idealism. She paraphrases Ovid not, as the Franklin does, to defend an ideal of amatory equality but to demonstrate, as I think the action of the Franklin’s Tale does, that the vertical structure of maiestas triumphs over or coexists unhappily with the horizontal structure of amor: “If I am as noble as you are trying to make out, you, being a man of the middle class, should seek the love of some woman of the same class, while I look for a noble lover to match my noble status; for nobility and commonality ‘do not go well together or dwell in the same abode’ [Nobilitas enim et popularitas nec in una sede morantur].”60 In rewriting Ovid, the woman makes explicit the analogy of maiestas/amor to nobilitas/­ popularitas that is at the core of the Franklin’s Tale’s sociopolitical argument. We may reasonably extrapolate that maiestas for her represents a system of social preference while amor inspires a communal ethos. Rather than valorizing the man’s nobility-of-natural-virtue polemic as a basis for love among disparate classes, she recognizes it as an attempt on the part of the disfranchised to gain social advantage by redefining the criteria of class hierarchy. The man’s desire, as the woman rightly perceives, is not to subvert the vertical model but to exploit it anew, hardly an example of morum probitas. Indeed, his flattery amounts to rhetorical maiestas, a chat-up line designed to obtain individual profit and amatory dominion. Here then is the intertextual lesson Chaucer appropriates from Andreas for the Franklin: beware rhetorical maiestas, a discourse of equality in which the motives of domination underlie the stated ideology and “wordes” are not “cosyn to the dede.”61 If I am correct in my interpretation, the Franklin’s exit question “whiche is most fre?” invites the audience with a graceful gesture of poetic largesse to think of nobility as a graded hierarchy of value. At the same time, it troubles the very notion of degree logically, grammatically, and socially and by extension calls into question the liberal solutions to the problem of love, marriage, and nobility that the Franklin’s Tale proffers. The word most is a superlative deriving from

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the Latin comparative maior, maius, whence maiestas, maistrie. Grammatically and etymologically, then, we are being offered a chance to assert our own maistrie over the text, for to interpret is to rule. But that offer of textual dominion runs contrary to the spirit of “freedom” that the tale purports to foster. Notionally, freedom is an absolute, a positive; it does not admit of degree; one cannot, in a fundamental sense, be more or most free. Lady Philosophy’s argument to the imprisoned Boethius is essentially the same: freedom and happiness are unchanging states of being independent of circumstance and degree. Freedom as “nobility” likewise resists comparative and superlative. As both Gower and Chaucer maintain, nobility is a value that defines itself by negating the perquisites of status, that seeks common rather than singular profit, queering the pitch economically and morally with an expression of caritas. And if nobility implies generosity, to be more generous, more “fre,” would be to suggest prodigality rather than libertas, superabundance (copia) rather than caritas.62 This is precisely the point Andreas Capellanus makes at the end of the Art of Courtly Love in a passage that speaks directly to the squire Aurelius beggared at the end of the Franklin’s Tale by the exorbitant fees he must pay for his love for Dorigen: “From love comes hateful poverty, and one comes to the prison of penury. For love inevitably forces a man to give without regard to what he should give and what he should not; and this is not generosity, but what ancient common sense calls prodigality, a vice which sacred Scripture tells us is a mortal one.”63 Aurelius is “most fre” and therefore ignoble. The phrase “most fre,” then, articulates the question of nobility in a grammar of increase and a rhetoric of advantage, that is, in terms of maiestas (most-ness) over amor. Read this way, the end of the Franklin’s Tale erects a rhetorical house of mirrors designed to test the reader’s sociopolitical convictions, to tax his ability to perceive the verticality of power in human relations and resist the enduring desire to dominate. But what reason do we have, one may rightly ask, to concoct so intricate a hermeneutic exercise around so seemingly straightforward a question? What cause is there to suspect Chaucer of giving us, through the foil of the Franklin, a lesson in rhetorical maiestas, particularly when the Franklin pleads ignorance of “rhetoryk,” which “been to me queynte” (5.726)? Besides in The Art of Courtly Love, where do Chaucer or his immediate sources sponsor such a rhetoric? At the

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risk of answering my own question and thus conniving in the discourse of dominion, I submit that several tales dealing with marriage in the Canterbury Tales advance such a strategy from contemplation to full-dress execution. In the denouement of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, for example, the bachelor knight’s abdication of marital authority to the beldam is the response to a demande that is simultaneously a test of his comprehension of maiestas. Asked to choose between an ugly and old but faithful wife and a beautiful but potentially inconstant one, the knight demurs decorously: “Cheseth youreself which may be moost plesance / And moost honour to yow and me also” ( 3.1232–33). We should be careful not to mistake the knight’s motives here. His rejection of the demande’s rhetorical premise is less an index of uxoriousness than a sign that he has fathomed the tacit test she has set for him—that to answer is itself an act of maistrie. In his analysis of the Franklin’s demande, H. Marshall Leicester inadvertently points us toward another example. Profitably, he contrasts the Franklin’s query to the Knight’s “Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamoun?” (1.1348), which the Knight then immediately brushes aside: “Now demeth as yowe liste, ye that kan, / For I wolle telle forth as I began” (1.1353–54). Where for the Knight, argues Leicester, the demande proffers a perfunctory narrative authority as a rhetorical gesture, a “trivial courtly game,” to the Franklin it is a “genuine request.”64 Genuine perhaps to the Franklin, but to Chaucer part of a more complicated poetic strategy. What Leicester neglects is the special significance of the connection between the Franklin’s and Knight’s tales: they are alone in glossing Ovid’s amor/maiestas trope as part of a larger question of nobility and domestic sovereignty. They are also alone among the Canterbury Tales in posing demandes to their audiences, a fact that suggests this feature is somehow integral to Chaucer’s ethical and political argument. Where the Knight dismisses fellowship in his question only to solicit it (suspectly) at the end of the tale, the Franklin invokes the value of fellowship throughout only to undermine it (unwittingly) in his closing query. Both rhetorical questions, then, illustrate failures on the part of the narrator to appreciate the Ovidian issue at the core of their social ideologies. Both tales, of course, are Boccaccian retellings, in itself an act of poetic mastery. While the Knight reinscribes the Teseida, the Franklin imports the situation of the Filocolo in which a married woman

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attempts to stop a lover’s importunity by requesting an impossible gift of fruit from a tree in winter.65 A similar love triangle and contest for virtue ensues. Boccaccio’s narrative begins and ends with demandes querying the relative value of honor, wealth, and amorous pleasure but differs from Chaucer’s in rendering judgment in favor of the husband’s honor and generosity. In adapting his source, Chaucer not only refrains from answering the question but also modifies its terms from a comparison of different values—an eminently answerable question­—to one of degrees of the same value, a shift that yields significant narrative interplay. First, a question of degree resonates in sympathy with the Franklin’s ideas of social “degree.” More important, because freedom or nobility in its ideal sense exists outside degree, the demande becomes in itself a figure of the impossible gift, translating the ethical problem into a rhetorical and philosophic conundrum. If Ovid contributes the trope, Andreas the rhetoric of advantage, and Boccaccio the narrative invention to Chaucer’s demande, to him alone belongs the fusion of the three into an experiential poetics that, like Stanley Fish’s reading of Paradise Lost, implicates the reader in the “ethical imperatives of political and social behavior.”66 Like Fish’s Milton, Chaucer challenges us with a series of hermeneutic paradoxes and attractive solutions, additive in their effect upon us, that lead subtly into error. The first of these is the maiestas/amor antinomy, which the Franklin solves with the parabolic “freendes everych oother moot obeye” ( 5.762). That such bald casuistry has proven so attractive to generations of commentators is remarkable. The Franklin begins with a misprision of Andreas Capellanus’s Art of Courtly Love to the effect that “all lovers are bound, when practicing love’s solaces, to be mutually obedient to each other’s desires.”67 “Freendes,” of course, are not the same as lovers practicing sexual ministrations, nor are they equivalent in bonds of obligation to married partners. That aside, obedience, whether inspired by willing deference or sham control, is still a form of maistrie. Jill Mann opens a clever back door when she suggests that Arveragus’s simultaneous “lordshipe and servage” are really sequent, that his and Dorigen’s marriage “is founded not on equality but on the alternation in the exercise of power and the surrender of power.”68 As Chaucer knew from Statius, however, this arrangement of alternate power sharing had been tried and had failed. In the Thebaid, Eteocles and Polynices, joint inheritors of the Theban

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throne, agree to share governance by taking turns at rule. But after Eteocles’ tenure expires, Polynices is rebuffed and the Theban War ensues, an epic story upon which Chaucer’s romance epyllion of the rival cousins Arcite and Palamon is modeled.69 Famously, their love for Emelye could not be shared alternately precisely because maistrie precludes the desire for mutuality. For the Franklin’s Tale, though, the issue is moot. While Dorigen endures her share of “suffrance,” she is never shown to get a turn at “lordshipe.” The next of the Franklin’s Tale’s impossibilia is a pendant to the first and like the first proceeds from a misunderstanding of the nature of maiestas and its corollaries. Dominion, the Franklin argues, is accorded to the “moost pacient”; he who seems to be in “servage” ultimately exercises “lordshipe.” Looke who that is moost pacient in love, He is at avantage al above. Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn, For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn, Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne. ( 5.771–75) “Moost pacient” echoes “mooste fre” in its attempt to discover degree in a positive absolute. As with nobility, patience should be its own reward; used as a tool to “avantage al above” it ceases to be patience and becomes instead a form of coercive maistrie akin in spirit to a child’s holding its breath to get its way. There is a whiff, too, of the grammar school lesson in this passage. Skeat was the first to detect the spoor of Cato here: “Quem superare potes, interdum vince ferendo. Maxima etenim morum est semper paciencia virtus.”70 An incautious glossator might find here an apostrophe to the moral preeminence of a “pacience” that, to use the Franklin’s words, “venquysseth” (superare) some other person—that is, patience as a martial quality that subjugates. But lest we duplicate the Miller’s carpenter who “knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude,” we should beware the elliptical object of the sentence, “quem . . . potes,” for which we must furnish an agent as Cato’s translator in the Vernon MS does: “The mon thou maist overgo, with suffrance him overcome.”71 A subtler and, I would submit, more percipient interpretation locates Cato’s “mon thou maist

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overgo” in oneself. Patience, after all, is self-restraint. Read this way, patience is the desire to overcome in ourselves the desire to overcome. Only by this act of sublimation may we transcend the discourse of dominion that implicates all the Marriage Group’s “solutions” in the problem of maistrie and in so doing achieve true “freedom.” My point, then, is that Chaucer invites his reader to confront in himself the conflict between the desire to be “moost” and “beste,” to have “avantage al above,” yet to possess the egalitarian virtues of nobility. The impossible task of the disappearing rocks at the center of the tale translates the paradox of these conflicting social desires into a visual medium. Here the clerk’s Gallic “magyk” creates seeming in the natural world in the same way rhetoric does in the fictional. Indeed magic is a kind of maiestas, at least for Aurelius, for whom it serves as a vehicle of advantage, of social promotion by superlative. Dorigen’s mock promise to Aurelius that if he can “remoeve alle the rokkes” by some supernatural feat she will accord him maiestas in love—that is, promote him to preeminence (“Thanne wol I love yow best of any man,” 5.997)—is a formula of status echoed later by Aurelius: “To love me best—God woot ye seyde so, / Al be that I unworthy am thereto” ( 5.1329–30). Indeed, the rhetorical vectors of promotion mirror the magical deed itself. For Aurelius to ascend, the rocks must descend, not be “removed,” as Dorigen says originally, but “sonken under grounde” ( 5.1269). Nature’s vertical hierarchy, then, moves by magic parallax to social hierarchy. It would be convenient to conclude, as Kittredge and the idealists do, that Aurelius’s sudden resolve to release Dorigen from her contract is impelled by a deeper understanding of the nature of love through probation of the thesis “Love wol nat be constreyned by maistrie.” Aurelius would realize that love, by its very nature, does not submit to feudal rules of contractual obligation and that, like nobility, it does not admit of degree. True, he could compel Dorigen to abide by her pledge to love him, but mastery won by illusion can only be illusory. But Aurelius, hardly a cerebral man, is certainly no idealist. Like the lady to Andreas’s plebeian, Chaucer will have none of that. Aurelius’s nobility is as much a public illusion as the rocks’ disappearance or Arveragus’s marital maistrie. While it may seem as though the squire is driven by a desire to be noble by merit, to refrain from ­committing a “cherlyssh wrechednesse / Agayns franchise and

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alle gentillesse” (5.1523–24), in fact he is driven by the desire merely to be seen to be noble. The distinction is subtle but acute. Like Dorigen, who earlier seems to value Arveragus’s “worthynesse” only to decide for the lesser virtue of “obeysaunce,” Aurelius, inspired by a husband’s noble resolve to become a cuckold and a wife’s selfless deference to her husband’s daft logic, does the noble thing . . . almost. Meeting Dorigen in town and hearing of her resolve, the squire addresses his deed of nobility not to her but to her husband: “Madame, seyth to youre lord Arveragus . . .” ( 5.1526). And having made his bargain with her a matter of conscience, he concludes, “Thus kan a squier doon a gentil dede / As wel as kan a knyght, withouten drede” ( 5.1543–44). Sadly, by competing in nobility with the knight, by desiring to appear noble in Arveragus’s eyes, Aurelius shows his ignorance of the true generosity of spirit, of Christian grace, that is the touchstone of no­ bility. Rather than amor, his is a status-conscious act of maiestas. Chaucer seems content to allow the political and ethical alternatives of this love triangle to hang in ambiguous irresolution. In the end, we are unable to sort out the real valences of power in the marriage of Arveragus and Dorigen. Is he still her social inferior? Is his gift of “soverayntee” to her requited with equal love, as with the knight and beldam in the Wife of Bath’s Tale? Chaucer’s brief epilogue leaves more questions than it answers: Arveragus and Dorigen his wyf In sovereyn blisse leden forth hir lyf. Nevere eft ne was ther angre hem bitwene. He cherisseth hire as though she were a queene, And she was to hym trewe for everemoore. Of thise two folk ye gete of me namoore. ( 5.1551–56) The phrase “sovereyn blisse” makes the first sentence difficult to parse. To begin with, in the larger argument of the Franklin’s Tale it is an oxymoron akin to the earlier rhetorical impossibilia, conflating as it does political dominance with marital harmony, “maistrie” with “love.” As a political term, sovereyn connotes single rule, monarchy, yet grammatically sovereignty belongs to both of them (“hir lyf  ”). Perhaps the Franklin is suggesting they are equal in sovereignty. But

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the next line makes that reading implausible. “She” is the only sovereign mentioned: as per their initial terms of marriage he treats her like a “queene.” In return for majesty she gives him not love but faithfulness, which of course she has given him all along. Two centuries earlier, the Goliard poet Walter of Châtillon identified the problem of liberality that would face both Aurelius and the Clerk by paraphrasing Ovid: Unum est pre ceteris, quod cuncti mirantur, quod vix hi, qui largi sunt, vel numquam ditantur; si forte divitie largis sociantur, non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur.72 [One thing is more remarkable than all the others: those who are generous are scarcely ever rich; if by chance riches and generosity come together, they don’t get along well together, nor do they remain in the same place.] Aurelius, for his part, ends the tale out of favor and out of pocket, impoverished by his gallantry and newly whipsawed between models of nobility. For him, the question is where the real value of gentilesse lies. He is loath to forgo his cleronomic privileges yet by the same token also loath to forfeit his honor in the bargain with the clerk: Myn heritage moot I nedes selle, And been a beggere; heere may I nat dwelle And shamen al my kynrede in this place, But I of hym may gette bettre grace. ( 5.1563–66) The merits of a horizontal economy of exchange here vie with those of a noble, vertical economy of inheritance. One must yield to the other. Put differently, the choice Aurelius faces is between nobility as a class-based system whose purpose is to restrict the flow of wealth through inheritance or “heritage”—what Gower calls “lignage” and Chaucer decries as “Vyce [that] may wel be heir to old richesse, / But there may no man, as men may wel see, / Bequethe his heir his vertuous noblesse” (Gentilesse 15–17)—and the nobility of a capitalistic system of

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free circulation of wealth through exchange where honor is a matter of keeping financial agreements. Neither construction of socioeconomic value comprehends virtue as having inherent worth. Aurelius’s hope to “gete bettre grace” from the clerk in settling his debt, a treacherously polysemic phrase, makes oblique appeal to the only noncommutable system of value in the Franklin’s Tale. “Grace” is both a theological measure of nobility, a kind of Christian “fredam” or liberality originating in Christ’s self-sacrificial love for man, and an economic term designating an extension on the repayment of a debt or “grace period.” In seeking financial grace, Aurelius forgoes inherent grace and the values of an ideal nobility. Indeed, in a Christian sense, getting “better grace,” like being “moost fre,” or “moost pacient,” is an impossibility. In the various bargains and exchanges of the Franklin’s Tale, this highest form of grace or nobility seems to accrue only to the clerk, who has perhaps the best claim to nobility in the story. Of course, as a clergyman he is not in a position to accept for himself Aurelius’s exorbitant fee, and he has little else to gain from his act of generosity besides the virtue of the act itself. Yet even the clerk’s grace is muddied by the stain of competition for status inspired by the Franklin’s final question. Thus the Clerk betrays his motives: “Leeve brother, Everich of yow dide gentilly til oother. Thou art a squier, and he is a knyght; But God forbede, for his blisful myght, But if a clerk koude doon a gentil dede As wel as any of yow . . . .” ( 5.1607–12) The temptation to read the Franklin’s Tale as the “end” of the Marriage Group, as if it solves those problems of gender and class dominion that taint an otherwise perfectible institution, runs afoul of anachronism. We may infer from the endings of the Franklin’s Tale, the General Prologue, and the Canterbury Tales as a whole, all in some sense deferred, inconclusive, provisional, that Chaucer’s principles of closure fulfill very different cultural needs from our own and that he “appreciated the significance of suspension of closure.”73 The late fourteenth century, with its challenges to church and feudal

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hier­archies, its coming of age of the household as economic nucleus, represented a period of social and political question posing without a need for immediate answers or conciliation. “Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrie,” the Franklin’s centerpiece of political and domestic order, likewise resists the synthesis of its two elements. The opposition between love and mastery, we should note, is categorical, not volitional; love “wol nat,” not “shold nat,” be constrained. Rather, it should be understood as a formula of antagonism between dispositive impulses in the home and society that remain unintegrated. As a marital issue, the clearest judgment on Ovid’s sentence comes from Marie de Champagne in her categorical indictment of married love: “We declare and hold as firmly established that love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other. For lovers give each other everything freely, under no compulsion of necessity, but married people are in duty bound to give in to each other’s desires and deny themselves to each other in nothing.”74 Chaucer’s similarly unequivocal opinion of marriage in the “Envoy to Bukton,” written at the end of his life—“God graunte yow your lyf frely to lede / In fredam, for ful hard is to be bonde” ( 31–32)—discovers in it no happy compromise. Given the patent conclusion that Arveragus and Dorigen’s marriage is one of contract and compulsion that reinforces vertical power structures, one can hardly expect Chaucer’s sympathy with the Franklin’s syncretic solutions to the same dilemmas. Indeed, the admonition of the “Envoy to Bukton” to lead one’s life “frely” resonates ironically with the Franklin’s “moste fre.” Just as Dorigen and Arveragus’s conjugal bliss is won at the sufferance of contractual bonds of compulsion, so the liberality or sumptuary “fredam” of the other candidates is “bonde” by ambition within a competitive economy of class. As a political issue, love and maistrie in the Franklin’s Tale may be understood in terms of Aristotelian republican versus aristocratic or monarchical models of association, all of which represent normative polities. The Franklin’s ideals of mutual love and the nobility of virtue that characterize his household republic, however, unravel over the course of the tale, and with them the hope that public governance can fare any better than marriage. The end, with its invitation to the reader to exert textual maistrie in the guise of endorsing a nobility defined by unselfish love, betrays Chaucer’s skepticism that

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the desire for individual status can ever be subordinated to communitarian motives. The tale, in other words, leaves us cynically resolved that both the household and the state are ungeselligen Gesellschaften, that, for precisely the same reasons, marriage and government harbor an irremediable antagonism that undermines the basic conditions of freedom.

Models of Unity and Hybridity in the Knight’s Tale To appreciate the politics of union in the Middle Ages, we must first fathom the prevalent, theologically inspired fear of a society of individuals as a social form that contravenes divine order. Elias of Thriplow, an eccentric thirteenth-century scholar from Cambridgeshire, captures the rationale of this political ideology in a passage from his dialogue Serium senectutis that merits quotation in full: In paucissimus igitur (et me sanumque sencienti quouis, ut auguror, examinatore) differt ab omnino delirante, qui vano voluntatis sue solummodo motu sibi conviuentibus sublunariter vniuersis dissimiliter viuere contendit inutiliterque conatur; vnum profecto Deum viuentibus expediens est esse solum, ne sub inconuenencia pluralitatum vicia vilitatum subemergerent et dissidiorum: frequencius enim firma stabilique descensus ab ciuitate confusionis incontinenciam parit in pluralitate. Queuis enim potestas, sed precipue summa mediocrisue uel minima, consorcii semper et parilitatis eciam quodammodo genialiter est et inexorabiliter abhominatiua; semper viuit sompniculosissime studiosa quo sola suo sit sine comparticipante poetstatiua. Consuetudinarium profecto pridem fuit et adhuc eciam quodammodo naturale peribetur a peritissimis esse communiter a compossidente compossessum negligi facillime, suam­que corrumpi compossessorem pati partem voluntarie dum parti perniciter invidet aliene. Restat igitur quod si Deus est, ut indubitanter est, summa solus deitatis in sublimitate sit unus. [As I (or any other clear-thinking investigator) see things, the man who strives uselessly at the vain prompting of his will to live differently from everyone else on the face of the earth hardly differs

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from a madman; indeed, it is expedient for a man that there be only one God, lest the plurality give rise to the vices of baseness and disagreement, for divergence from a firm and stable community quite often gives birth to self-indulgent confusion in plurality. Indeed, powers of any size, great or small, are always inexorably opposed to partnership and equality by nature: they always live wakefully vigilant so that they alone might hold power without a co-possessor. Wise men have always said it is natural for joint possessions to be neglected by one possessor: he will allow his own part to suffer damage while he hastily envies his partner’s share. So it remains true that if God exists, as He undoubtedly does, He alone dwells in the supreme sublimity of the godhead.]75

Extrapolating from classical epic and Roman law, Elias conceives of unity as the consequence of coercive subjection from above, be it monarchic or divine, impinging and restraining the will of the individual and any hint of pluralism in the collective.76 While Chaucer may demur from so radical a position, Elias’s opinion may reflect the political lights of the Knight. Chaucer himself furnishes evidence of a theological antipluralism framing his notions of unity. His final utterance of the Canterbury Tales, “that I may been oon of hem at the day of doom that shulle be saved,” discovers a dual anxiety. To be saved singly is not enough. Salvation holds value for him only as a social construct: to belong to a group (“oon of hem”) is its criterion sine qua non. If heaven, as Augustine envisions it, is a city of God, citizenship in a community of equals is itself the reward of individual redemption. The equation of the one with the many that we find in Chaucer belongs to an overarching architecture in the Canterbury Tales present in all human relationships: in the civic association of the pilgrim to the compaingye; in the political filiation of the commons to the monarch, or the people to the governour; in the romantic, marital, and amical ideal of two-in-one fusion. Tracing the concept of unity from the General Prologue and Knight’s Tale to the Parson’s Tale and Retraction, the Canterbury Tales’ logic of association moves soritically from the interpersonal, to the political, to the divine. This eschatological arc begins appropriately in the story of Theseus, whose construction of a monolithic maiestas, tending toward Elias’s model, anxiously resists abasement to communitarian impulses. To become merely “oon of hem,” to join a felaweshipe, would be for

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Theseus to lose individual identity, to abandon the autonomy of rule. The Thesean notion of community eschews any sort of social mixing or synthesis until the very end, and then perhaps only as an end run around the central problem of the Knight’s Tale in which I am invested here, a tension between classical models of societal cohesion, political and aesthetic ideologies, the epic ethos and that of the romance. Chaucer’s philosophy of oneness and manyness bears witness to the intellectual currents of his age. In the wake of the Norman Conquest, Englishness in the Middle Ages was itself a study in synthesis by force. Yet examples of hybrid culture, an internally self-regulating political form that fostered intermingling ad libidum while respecting diversity, haunted the English imagination. The Iberian Convivencia, for one, was a thumb in the eye of a united Christendom of Europe. Closer to home, the threat of Jewish alterity, as Geraldine Heng has persuasively argued, provoked a retrenchment of English majoritarian identity, forced conversions, the imposition, in Europe, of social and economic apartheid on the most zealous Jews, and eventually the use of expatriation as a means of consolidating the nation.77 The specter of mixed and mingled bodies, she argues, is at the center not merely of individual romances such as Richard Coer de Lyon but of romance in general. In the absence of postcolonial theory, the Middle Ages was grappling philosophically with the problem of the one and the many in Greek metaphysics and Aristotelian politics. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Duns Scotus, whose thought Chaucer would have encountered through his friend the “philosophical Strode,” was theorizing the body as a hybrid or individual composite (hacceitas) of universals and particulars in which the plurality of form need not infringe the unity of creation. By the second half of the century, the scholastic nominalism of Peter Aureolus and William of Ockham had challenged any connection between abstract universals and immanent particulars, object (res) and presentment (verba).78 Politically, the schisms of the fourteenth-century made all the more exigent Aristotle’s models of state unity and raised questions of whether the stablest government might not, as Cicero argued, effect a “mixing” of forms (regimen mixtum).79 David Wallace has helped delineate the protean terms for social “mixing” or association in the Canterbury Tales in the social context of fourteenth-century Europe, beginning with the compaignye of the General Prologue and identifying the Knight’s immediate resistance

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to felaweshipe in fragment 1. The union of the family through marriage and procreation was likewise fraught with questions of legal and biological dominance in both classical and contemporary interpretation. Citing Bernardus Silvestris’s comment on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology, where Jupiter is designated “progenitor genitrixque deum, deus unus et idem,” Jane Chance has argued that the Knight’s Tale’s structure begins with figures of doubleness in the first three parts but concludes with “singleness­—oneness, harmony, resolution of conflict” under Jovian aegis.80 The impetus to cohere may be implicated as well in contemporary experiments in literary oneness. Petrarch’s Rime sparse achieve a unity of form as a romance narrative, as I shall argue in chapter 4, despite their plural existence as “scattered” lyrics; likewise Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales bind disparate narremes in a synthetic whole. The poetics of oneness in the fourteenth century in turn brings us to Ovid’s carmen perpetuum that serves as archetype to all notions of generic and genetic mixing, and further to a psychology of connection and combination that is at the core of interpersonal relationships and concepts of societal cohesion in Chaucer. Metamorphosis articulates, in a sense, a nominalist thesis in its insistence upon the impossibility of singularity, that one thing is ineluctably in the process of becoming something else, both individual bodies and the societies they constitute. At the same time, metamorphosis illustrates an irresistible desire for oneness through fusion, affection as a universal centripetal principle. Often, however, the unity through fusion that metamorphosis effects is disastrous and fearful. Pasiphaë’s commingling with the Cretan bull in Metamorphoses 8 realizes in the Minotaur what Jove’s rape of Europa only intimates, a cross-specied monstrosity that leaves a genetic stain on the endemic peoples associated with the hybrid. Or, to take another example, Actaeon’s garbling of his hounds’ names in his moment of transformation to a deer may be understood as an allegory of the loss of the individual voice to the indistinct clamor of the crowd, and of the cession of articulate humanity to bestial noise, yet another Ovidian instance of culture’s regression to barbarism. Becoming literally two-in-one or one-in-many radicalizes social and sexual conjunction into monstrous plurality. Impelled by a natural desire to associate, the pilgrims of the General Prologue undergo something of a metamorphosis in the latter sense,

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one rife with similar desires and solicitudes. Their incorporation, their fusion into one body, is at once welcomed as an expression of shared purpose and pilgrim identity, yet resisted by many as an assault on individuality and status. For Chaucer’s Theseus, whether it be the embarrassment of Jupiter’s taurine metamorphosis alluded to obliquely in the maiestas/amor trope of lines 1.1624–26 or the more overt Minotaur that is his symbol, the threat of hybridity from social or sexual intimacy represents his greatest fear. This he shares with his ideological counterpart Emelye. Where Theseus’s hobgoblin is the lusty bull, hers may well be “Attheon,” transformed for the sexual trangression of seeing the chaste Diana naked, whose “houndes have hyym caught / And freeten hym, for that they knewe hym naught” (2065–68). As an Amazon and votary of Diana, Emelye is as dedicated to homosocial association as Theseus is in his friendship with Perotheus. And although he is the subject of maiestas and arbiter of marriage and she the object, both resist socio-sexual mingling with equal vehemence. Near the beginning of the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer makes the earlier of two allusions to Ovid’s Jove and Europa in the Canterbury Tales, introducing into the tale’s web a pattern of licentious union conducing to discord. Provoked by the lapse of Palamon and Arcite’s fellowship into rivalry, the Knight, in his first authorial apostrophe, promulgates what will be the tale’s central problem of political dominion: O Cupide out of alle charitee, O regne, that wolt no felawe have with thee! Ful sooth is seyd that love ne lordshipe Wol noght, his thankes, have no felaweshipe. (1624–28) The political dilemma Chaucer frames in this passage may be fairly simplified to an opposition between models of sociopolitical oneness. “Regne,” a feudal notion of homogeneous unity won through a coercive “lordshipe” imposed from without, or in modern discourse “colonial power,” here vies dialectically with “felaweshipe,” a heterogeneous unity achieved through mutualizing love or “charitee.”81 The quotation forms part of the tale’s larger argument for political and poetic unity. Where Theseus struggles with the imperial mandate of forging a single nation from warring factions (Athenians, Amazons,

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Thebans, Argives), Chaucer must fuse a coherent narrative ethos from mutually resistant generic ideologies—epic (Statius), romance (Ovid), and philosophy (Boethius). The maiestas/amor trope exists as a pentimento to an ideological cold war of classical authority in the tale’s allusive background that I would like to bring forward into critical prominence. In counterpoint to the Ovidian image of social and biological hybridity stands the conservative vision of Cicero, Horace, and Statius. At issue is whether political and social unity is best achieved through a colonial maiestas on the one hand, a medieval version of the Foucauldian surveiller et punir in which the governing authority forcibly contains agents of hybrid association in society (e.g., the incarceration of Palemon and Arcite) or seeks to subsume minoritarian identities into the dominant paradigm in an act of conquest (e.g., the silence of Ypolita and the disappearance of Amazonian or Theban identity into Athenianness through a marriage of coercion), or on the other hand a policy of amor, nuptial or amical, that encourages liberal commingling and the formation of new, hybrid identities. “Marriage,” writes D. W. Robertson, is “a principle of order in the individual, in the church, and in lay society; in medieval terms, a well-ordered hierarchy of almost any kind may be thought of as a ‘marriage.’ ” It resolves the “problem of love” in the Canterbury Tales by subjugating woman to man, sensuality to reason.82 The Knight’s Tale, he was the first to argue, inaugurates the marital discourse in the Canterbury Tales with Theseus’s wedding to Ypolita, which figures the subjection of femenye to masculine rule; Palamon’s wedding to Emelye, which sees concupiscible passions sobered through willing submission to Thesean authority; and the alliance of Athens with Thebes, whose history of libidinous rule is brought to rein by Athenian political temperance.83 A useful conspectus, it nonetheless oversimplifies the love relationships both in the Knight’s Tale and in the marriage group at large and thus obscures subtler social and political distinctions. More seriously, Robertson’s reading of the Knight’s Tale fails to accord sufficient significance to the example of Jove-as-bull, in whom sensuality overwhelms the rule of reason. There is much in the Knight’s Tale’s moral cast that I am loath to credit to a humorlessly exegetical Chaucer. In revising Boccaccio’s revision of Statius, Chaucer is forced to reform a scurrilous, dysfunctional family of gods into a simple unity, “a thyng that parfit is and

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stable” (3009). Following Robertson, we are at risk of confusing intentio operis with intentio auctoris. Jupiter, who nobly mediates the “strif  ” “Bitwixe Venus, the goddesse of love, / And Mars” and is “bisy it to stente” (2440–41, 2442), is the obvious monarchic model for Theseus, who accomplishes the same on mortal scale. But is this the same god Chaucer elsewhere denominates the ur-tyrant, progenitor of lascivious rule, “Juppiter the likerous, / That first was fader of delicacy” (“The Former Age” 56–57)? Given Chaucer’s invocation of the amor/ maiestas trope that opens the door to an Ovidian museum of unflattering associations, should we really assume he endorses the Knight’s ideal Theseus? Of course, in answer one may argue that aside from a sidelong reference, that other Jupiter, the Ovidian one, has been scrupulously excised from the story, both by Boccaccio and by Chaucer. Yet that redaction, those multiple instances of occultatio and stifled analogy, what I would call Chaucer’s Ovidian paralipomena, point a trail of suppression more obtrusive for their pattern of absence. These I propose to recuperate for a more nuanced picture of the Knight’s Tale’s “problem of love” as a problem rather of political and poetic repression. The dominion of Mars in Theseus’s statesmanship, which strikes a dissonant chord both in the Knight’s Tale and in the earlier Anelida and Arcite, shapes both his public policy and his private relationships. Theseus is a conqueror not only of kings but of women; his victory over Creon’s “tiranye” is matched by his conquest of Ypolita and the “regne of Femenye” (1.866). That he makes her a bride by force is both as relevant and disturbing an introductory gesture as Chaucer, I think, intends it to be. As thematic counterpoise to his dominion of the state stands his dominion of the household. Chaucer figures Theseus’s coercion of Ypolita to marry as an act of sovereign seizure politically equivalent to Thebes’. But matrimony and conquest, love and mastery, as we know from Ovid, make uneasy bedfellows. That unease finds immediate circumstance in Chaucer’s account of the couple’s battle followed by a shotgun wedding that should end in bed, in coition as an act of union, rapprochement, mutuality, love, mingling, but that, for reasons more compelling than mere modesty, does not: And of the grete bataille for the nones Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones;

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And how asseged was Ypolita, The faire, hardy queene of Scithia; And of the feste that was at hir weddynge, And of the tempest at hir hoom-comyng. But al that thyng I moote as now forbere. (1.879–85) The artistry of this antiepithalamium lies in its narrative chiaroscuro, the interplay between what is mentioned and what is not, the illuminated presence of strife and the darkened absence of love that musters nebulous in the tempest of “hoom-comyng,” a detail absent from Boccaccio. Punctuated by Chaucer’s abrupt “forebearance,” the description of Theseus’s and Ypolita’s wedlock asks to be read as a political statement defining Theseus’s rule according to the Aristotelian tripartition. Theseus’s dispassion and decisiveness betoken his ethical self-government; the marriage by force of two people and two nations, “Atthenes and Amazones,” declares a policy of private and public monarchy abrogating any whiff of a regimen mixtum. In the foreground looms the wedding, part victory parade, part performance of majesty, together an emblem of maiestas triumphant over amor. Whereas in the Teseida Boccaccio sends Theseus back to Athens victorious with a Hippolyta “who possessed and ruled his heart,”84 Chaucer’s Theseus is beyond affect, having once served Love (“For in my tyme a servant was I oon,” 1814) but presumably no longer. It is an unhappy moment for both parties. On the woman’s side, the prospect of forced marriage, judging by Emelye’s resolve to remain chaste, can only be ruthless. Hippolyta, in the corresponding moment in Statius, bears the marriage bond with “patience” (“patiensque mariti foederis,” 12.534–55). If love is absent, so too is the joy at victory, limited as it is to an abortive “feste” interrupted first by Chaucer and then by the mourning of the Argive noblewomen whom Theseus greets irritably: “What folk ben ye, that at myn homcomynge / Perturben so my feste with criyinge? Have ye so greet envye / Of myn honour, that thus compleyne and crye?” ( 9 05–8). The irrationality of this outburst affords unguarded ingress into Theseus’s psychology. The duke construes the Argive women’s display as an affront to his majesty and regal decorum. Ludicrously, he goes so far as to ascribe to them “­envye / Of myn honour,” the selfish

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intention­ to steal the spotlight of his martial/marital triumph with the pathos of their martial/­marital catastrophe, demeaning by comparison his achievements as groom and conquering monarch. But there is method to the madness. Taken together, the offhand asides referring us to a troubled amatory past, an uncomfortable memory of service to the overlord Cupid, the omission of Boccaccio’s rule of the heart, and finally a defensive ill-humor are symptoms of Theseus’s political pathology. Chaucer’s collocation of hints and gestures in the Knight’s Tale betrays a wider strategy of excerption that countermines the Knight’s paragonic Theseus, a strategy that points us to political and amatory motives hors texte. The Knight’s Tale paints a surprisingly complex portrait of imperial culture and its tensions. The broad strokes of class and gender, to be sure, are patent and copious. Yet their obviousness has obscured more ambiguous subjectivities that exist in between race (or “kynde”), gender, and class (“degre”), hybrid identities all the more subversive for their transgression of the conventional categories of political difference.85 Troubling Theseus in this moment of spleen is the phenomenon of 1066: the prospect of postnuptial, postcolonial hybridity, the mixing of blood and culture that occurs in the aftermath of a state marriage between two people and two peoples. Its symbols, the domesticated Amazon and the conquered Minotaur whose image he bears on his pennon, represent reaction formations in the language of psychoanalysis, what translates as occultatio or paralipsis in the language of rhetoric and in Chaucerian political idiom as maistrie. That is to say, the Amazon and Minotaur are projections of a desire to sublimate an object of anxiety by imagining it as mastered or masterable. The roots of Thesean anxiety are mythic and historical. A decisive moment in classical political apocrypha, Theseus’s victory over the Amazons marked the emergence of the Athenian polis and the ascendancy of rationalism over an older matriarchy that threatened the early state with feminine political and sexual power. In the De civitate Dei, Augustine, following Varro, tells the story of pre-Athens as a precivilized “femenye” of sorts, a city in which women not only exercised the right to vote but, like Amazons, chose their own mates and enforced a tradition of matriheritance, effectively controlling the institutions of both household and state. When a vote was proposed

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to choose the city’s tutelary deity, the women, who outnumbered the men, elected Athena over Poseidon, incurring the latter’s wrath. “Thus,” Augustine writes, “that city . . . the greatest glory and wonder that Greece could show . . . received its name of Athens . . . from the victory of the female through the women’s vote. And when it was struck by the conquered male, it was compelled to avenge the victory of the victorious female.”86 To appease Neptune, Athens’s ruler Cecrops revoked both women’s voting privileges and matriheritance, laying the foundation for patriarchal dominion in both the public and private spheres. Theseus’s war on femenye and subjection of Ypolita by marriage avenges the feminine excesses of early democracy and re­asserts a uniformity of masculine rule. This Amazon captivity, however, was never historically definitive. Where Statius settles the issue of femenye with the victory over the Amazons at Thebes and Hippolyta’s orderly raptus, Plutarch, polling a jury of Greek mythographers, finds an indocile and undaunted Amazon nation that lays a three-year siege on Athens to recover its queen, a war that ends not in Athenian victory but in a compromise treaty tantamount to defeat.87 Similarly, Ovid perceives in the Amazon conflict an event adjourned, popularized, and reenacted allegorically in the power jockeying of contemporary courtship. Having armed his male audience with amatory advice in the first two books of the Ars amatoria, Ovid addresses the third to women in an attempt to prolong the love contest whose inconclusiveness spells Cupid’s victory: Arma dedi Danais in Amazonas; arma supersunt, Quae tibi dem et turmae, Penthesilea, tuae. Ite in bella pares; vincant, quibus alma Dione Faverit et toto qui volat orbe puer. Non erat armatis aequum concurrere nudas; Sic etiam vobis vincere turpe, viri. (Ars amatoria 3.1–6, my italics) [I have armed the Danai against the Amazons; there remain arms which I must give to thee, Penthesilea, and to thy troop. Go into battle on equal terms, let those conquer whom kind Dione favors, and the boy who flies o’er all the world. It were not just that defenseless maids should fight with armed men; such a victory, O men, would be shameful for you also.]

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Even if, in this reinvocation, Ovid is writing more in the spirit of persiflage than political conviction, the mutualizing impulse he articulates rearmed medieval femenye, hypostasizing the Amazonian myth in contemporary reenactments. Medieval women of influence who dared spurn the bridle of matrimony often styled themselves (or were styled by others) as Amazons. Notoriously, Eleanor of Aquitaine, mock arbiter of Andreas Capellanus’s Ovidian courts of love, having joined her husband Louis VII on the Second Crusade, hove into view attired as Penthesilea with a retinue of three hundred shield maidens in train, all accoutred as Amazons.88 Her spectacular and, to be sure, politically charged entrance is eternized by Benoît de St. Maure, whose Roman de Troie, dedicated to Eleanor, flatters with a portrait of Penthesilea modeled on his patroness.89 So destabilizing to the masculine enterprise did this symbolism prove that the bylaws of the Third Crusade explicitly forbade women’s participation thenceforth. Ultimately, twelfth-century history confirmed the image of Eleanor’s Amazonian nature in stories of prodigious promiscuity and disregard for marital constraint. Having discarded Louis VII on grounds of consanguinity in 1152 to marry Henry II later in the same year, she subsequently rebelled against her second husband, siding with her sons in their usurpatory bid for the English throne. Theseus’s disquietude in his marriage and concern for the security of his rule thus have ample justification in contemporary Amazonian atavisms. To speculate on Theseus’s consciousness as monarch and new husband, as Chaucer, I think, asks us to do, cannot legitimately be accomplished from a modern, post-Freudian vantage. Late antique and medieval psychology lies in the province of allegory, and marriage occupies the symbolic centerpiece in what could be called a psychic allegory. Psyche’s marriage to Cupid in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, for example, represents the soul’s initiation through love into Platonic mysteries, and Philology’s marriage to Mercury in Martianus Capella’s book represents the immortalization of the human intellect through learning. In his commentary on Statius’s Thebaid, Fulgentius discovers a similar conjugal allegory, beginning with Laius’s marriage to Jocasta and ending with Theseus and Hippolyta, that balances sexual with political themes:

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Thebes is pronounced in Greek like theosbe, that is, the goodness of God. This is the soul of man, which the goodness of God created in his own image and likeness, capable of comprehending all knowledge. It is well called a city, for like the inhabitants of a city, valor, prudence, justice, temperance, and other virtues dwell and abide in it by inherited right. In this city which is the soul of man the ruler is Laius, that is sacred light, for Laius is lux ayos—ayos being interpreted in Greek like sanctus in Latin. Thus Laius ruled in Thebes, that is, sacred light in the soul of man, which is adorned with perception of all knowledge to the exclusion of the shadows of ignorance. Furthermore, he had a wife named Jocasta, that is chaste joy (iocunditatem castam). For the mind of man is made joyful by the sacred light it possesses, but possesses impurity that is separate from the defilement of pride. Jocasta as the wife of Laius is well named, for as her husband rules so she like a true wife is subject to him.90

Fulgentius’s Thebes is a redoubt of masculine intellectual virtue, “valor, prudence, justice, temperance.” The city’s stability, however, depends upon enforcing a regime of sexual apartheid. For Laius’s ruling equanimity to endure, Jocasta must be etymologized into a happy, subservient eunuch, “separate” and “subject.” Political and genetic chaos follows on the couple’s procreation. The product of Laius and Jocasta’s sexual intermingling is the man-animal hybrid Oedipus, who “being born is licentiousness. The name Oedipus is taken from edo [L. haedus = young goat], a truly licentious beast.”91 Oedipus is not only a prodigy of misrule begotten of his father’s lapse of maiestas into amor but a spectacle of hybrid miscegenation equivalent and reciprocal to the human-animal Sphinx. The political and genetic themes are married just as Thesean rule is married, as we shall see, to the image of the Minotaur. The psychomachia that begins with Jocasta and Laius, whose marriage and rule are thrown into disarray by Oedipal incontinence, is at last righted by Theseus’s marriage to Hippolyta, through which intellect regains dominion from the animal-female over Thebes’s “soul of man.” The Knight’s resistance to all forms of amor as an ordering principle at home and in the state has its origins in both Middle Eastern and classical injunctions against species mixing. In the Timaeus, Plato

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recounts a story told to Solon, the framer of the Athenian constitution, of the constitution of an Egyptian city, that of Sais in the Nile Delta, also dedicated to Athena. Crucial to Sais’s laws was a cultic principle of nonmixing, at once sexual and social: “In the first place, there is a caste of priests which is separated from all the others; next there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix.”92 Similarly, among the ancient Hebrews, holiness, as one prominent anthropologist has argued, “means keeping distinct the categories of creation.”93 Halacha, or laws of cleanliness governing everything from sexuality in marriage to diet (kashrut), establishes a rigorous taxonomy of species whose infraction signals a violation of natural order (tebhel). Hence Leviticus: “You shall not have sexual intercourse with any beast to make yourself unclean with it, nor shall a woman submit herself to intercourse [miscebitur] with a beast: that is a violation of nature [L = scelus, H = tebhel)” (Lev. 18:23). And again, hybridity is a metaphoric intermingling: “You shall keep my rules. You shall not allow two different kinds of beast to mate together. You shall not plant your field with two kinds of seed. You shall not put on a garment woven with two kinds of yarn” (Lev. 19:19).94 Christianity, in its preoccupation with original sin, extends the taboo of species purity to gender. Thus Paul considers heterosexual union a defilement of masculine holiness, second only to adultery, which countermands the laws of both nature and custom.95 Earlier in this chapter I outlined the threat Augustus located in unregulated sexuality and the legal measures outlawing adultery that he instituted to prevent a mixing of the classes and dysgenic abasement of the equestrian order. This legislation opposing hybridity in turn found its way into a larger Augustan cultural ethic and thence into poetry and the arts. Horace’s Ars poetica weaves a poetic theory about an idea of wholeness and conjunction that is, at heart, a racial screed. His purpose is to model a social ideal upon an aesthetic one, to curb sexual license in society at large by prescribing poetic decorum. “To join a human head to the neck of a horse,” the famous example opening the epistle, is found derisory because it is neither single nor uniform (“simplex et unum,” 23). Horace’s reasoning is both aesthetic and socio-sexual: poets and painters are enjoined not to pursue license so far that “savage/coarse should mate with tame/tranquil [placidis coeant immitia]” and that species of one nature should miscegenate with those of another, a distinction that describes none too obliquely the com-

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mons and the aristocracy.96 Decorum in Horace is a coercive system designed to recognize a societal whole as a manifold of discriminate elements superintended by stringent rules precluding dissent, which is to say an imperium. Statius, a subsequent mouthpiece of Augustan Empire, observes the Horatian decorum of simplex et unus in the Thebaid. Thus Hippolyte’s return to Athens is met with shock that “she has broken her country’s austere laws, that her locks are trim, and all her bosom hidden beneath her robe, that though a barbarian she mingles [misceat] with mighty Athens, and comes to bear offspring to her foeman-lord” (Thebaid 12.537–39). Hippolyte’s identity in Statius, that is to say, is wholly subsumed by Athens, culturally and genetically. For Schiller, aesthetics served as an ideological Trojan horse enabling those in power to introduce ideas subliminally into cultural and individual consciousness. Terry Eagleton is more precise still: “The aesthetic signifies what Max Horkheimer has called a kind of ‘internalised repression,’ inserting social power into the very bodies of those it subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective mode of political hegemony.”97 The aesthetics of Horace’s Ars poetica accomplishes precisely this. The purpose of the ideology of simplex et unus is to defend conservative cultural models of socio-sexual separateness against debasement by a liberal aesthetic of change and commingling of which Horace’s younger contemporary Ovid became the prime exponent. Ovid’s political antiaesthetic is likewise an ideology of the body: metamorphosis as hybridity. Its formal principle has affinity with the Aristotelian tenet that nothing is but is becoming, a position at odds with the singular sempiternity of Platonic form. Late antique and medieval arguments for unity and oneness added an ethical corollary to the Horatian antihybrid aesthetic. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius conceives a neo-Platonic universe perfect and whole inasmuch as its elemental variety can be contained within a static hierarchy of station and degree. Where Ovidian genesis envisions an entelechy, a cyclical of coming into being through synthesis, separation by kind, and remixing, beginning with what Arnulf of Orleans referred to as “Cahos mutatur in species,”98 the Boethian pejorative notion of mixing holds that metamorphosis, or hybridity, is the work of a chaos whose cosmic agency is to uncreate. To the extent that unchanging order is equivalent with the good, metamorphosis or genetic mixing for Boethius signals moral decay,

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both in the individual mind and, inevitably (because Boethius, himself a political prisoner, cannot help but think politically in the Consolation of Philosophy), in the body politic. In this cast of mind, he posits a theory of species that answers and contends ad rem with the Ovidian. So, Lady Philosophy: You learned a little time ago that everything that is, is one [unum esse], and that oneness itself is good [unum bonum esse] and from this it follows that everything, since it is, is seen also to be good. In this way, then, whatever falls from goodness ceases to be; wherefore evil men cease to be what they were—but that they were men till now their still surviving form of the human body shows—and therefore by turning to wickedness they have by the same act lost their human nature. . . . So it follows that you cannot adjudge him a man whom you see transformed by vices [ut quem transformatum vitiis videas]. The violent plunderer of others’ wealth burns with avarice: you will compare him to a wolf. The wild and restless man exercises his tongue in disputes: you will compare him to a dog [etc. . . .]. A man is drowned in foul and unclean lusts: he is gripped by the pleasure of a filthy sow. So he who having left goodness aside has ceased to be a man, since he cannot pass over into the divine state, turns into a beast. (Consolation 4.3)

Notice that Boethian metamorphosis works its degradation via metaphor. Physical transformation is a poetic trope for a psychic change of state away from divine similitude. Virtuous man, he is arguing, is one inasmuch as he identifies himself with the image of the divine, which is goodness and which is singular in its abstraction; man qua form of the good. When he identifies himself with fleshly passions, man qua corpus, he abandons the supersensual for the sublunary world of multiplicity, of individual bodies that, because corporeal, admit of change and decay. This lapse of will transforms the body aesthetically by representing the self as mutable and hybrid. Accordingly, Thomas the Cistercian conceived metamorphosis as “the [first level of wisdom, which] is to be fled because it . . . deforms the image of God [imaginem Dei] [and makes man] like the horse and ass, which have no understanding.”99 It is significant, moreover, that Boethius’s prose excursus on mutability serves as prelude to the poem immediately sequel, which

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treats the story of Ulysses, Circe, and the transformation of the men into swine. A psychic and political allegory, Circe’s erotic rule, which contains masculine vigor and anaesthetizes masculine intellect with feminine art, reveals gendered politics as the root of species anxiety. Theseus’s worldview in the First Moevere speech rests squarely upon antique and medieval theories of wholeness versus hybridity, while its discourse may be best characterized in terms of modern theories of authority. In it Theseus enunciates what Foucault calls “the authority to differentiate between individuals or states of things,” and in so doing he “defines the possibilities of . . . delimitation,” which is to say the means, terms, and motives of hybrid containment.100 Like Horace, Theseus discovers an aesthetic unity in nature wherein “every part dirryveth from his hool, / For nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng / Of no partie or cantel of a thyng, / But of a thyng that is parfit” (1.3006–9). Invoking Boethian schemes, he then frames a theory of genetic purity whereby “speces of thynges and progressiouns / ­Shullen enduren by successiouns” ( 3013–24), suggesting a resistance to mixing over generations. Curiously, though, Chaucer allows Theseus’s Boethian confidence in the unity of creation and its capacity to “enduren” unalloyed in “speces” and “degre”—the political conviction that chaos and unmeaning can be held in check by a system of cultural apartheid—to be subtly undermined by the saturnine wisdom of his father. In anticipation of Theseus’s linear theory of species “progressioun” and “successioun,” Egeus proposes the retrograde, circular theory of human “transmutacioun” (2839) as decay, whose physics, at least, is Ovidian and Lucretian. The shift from a Boethian vertical axis of change toward an Ovidian metamorphic model is striking: Egeus “knew this worldes transmutacioun­ / As he hadde seyn it change bothe up and down / Joye after wo, and wo after gladnesse” (2839–41). The enduring upward progress of woe to joy that Theseus sees in the fate of Arcite, Palamon, and Emelye, a perception he articulates in the sanguine assertion that Emelye’s marriage to Palamon will “make of sorwes two / O parfit joye, lastynge everemo” ( 3071–72), proves in Egeus’s experience reversible to “wo after gladnesse,” a fate descriptive of Theseus’s own marital history. Nor can we argue that Egeus’s fatalism merely tracks the full circuit of Fortune’s wheel from high to low. Rather, he concludes in an image of horizontal passage that denies all stepwise increment to a

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world of “pilgrymes passynge to and fro” (2848). “Reason,” as Schiller says, “does indeed demand unity; but Nature demands multiplicity, and both these kinds of law make their claim upon man.”101 My point, then, is that we may recognize in the Knight’s Tale a sustained and embodied antagonism between reason and nature, one and many, progress and metamorphosis, vertical hierarchies and the recursiveness of horizontal or cyclical models of society. Let us turn now from the problem of union with a hybrid to the hybrid product of such a union, from Amazon to Minotaur. I have argued heretofore that the Knight’s Tale is framed by a rhetoric of suppression that both mirrors and subverts Theseus’s suppression of cultural blending.102 Faced by the need to unite Theban, Amazon, and Athenian in a single state, yet fearing the moral chaos of synthesizing the rational Athenian with the sensual Theban/Amazon, the Duke of Athens opts for a model of cultural heterogeneity that complements the Knight’s own feudal sensibilities. If synthesis must happen, the sensual and the hybrid must be subsumed completely, forging a state that is, to use Horace’s words, “simplex et unus.” Theseus’s need to suppress, control, or subsume diversive elements in the state is epitomized in his domestic union to Ypolita, who, barring a single moment of intercession, remains mute, obedient, denatured throughout the tale. Yet the poetics of suppression—Chaucer’s use of occultatio and parenthesis to edit the contexts and direct the political biases of his main sources, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Statius—is both the tool serving the Knight’s Thesean policy and a weapon against it. Beginning with Ovid’s truncated dictum from the Jove and Europa episode that love and mastery do not go well together, Chaucer excerpts Ovid to bolster the Thesean values of maiestas over amor, of the rational absolute over the synthetic sensual. In fact, by decontextualizing conspicuously this famously political dictum, the full-knowing reader is reminded of the allusion’s ironic sting: Jupiter loses maiestas in his lust for Europa by turning himself indecorously into a bull, a fact that redounds upon Theseus, whose authority and coat of arms are modeled on the Jovian bull. Other occultationes, such as the story of Theseus’s victory over the Amazons, are similarly treacherous. My attention now is drawn to another example of poetic suppression or excision that shares with Jove and Europa and the Amazon conflict a menace of hybridity.

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Nowhere is the policy of hybrid suppression more demonstrative than in Theseus’s adoption of the Minotaur as his personal insignia. Euripides perhaps best captures the physical and psychological significance of the Minotaur when he calls it not simply monstrum biformis, as Ovid and Vergil do, but doubly double, “a mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape . . . two different natures, man and bull,” a prodigy, that is, of aesthetic and genetic dimensions.103 Statius, in an ekphrasis of the insignia on Theseus’s shield, adds to this image of double doubleness a political inflection—a struggle for subjection and forcible uniformity: At procul ingenti Neptunias agmina Theseus angustat clipeo, propriaeque exordia laudis centum urbes umbone gerit centenaque Cretae moenia, seque ipsum monstrosi ambagibus antru hipida torquentem luctantis colla iuvenci alternasque manus circum et nodosa ligantem bracchia et abducto vitantem cornua vultu. terror habet populos, cum saeptus imagine torva ingreditur pugnas: bis Thesea bisque cruentas caede videre manus. (12.665–74) [But from afar Theseus, son of Neptune, dwarfs the ranks with his huge shield, and bears upon its boss the hundred cities and hundred walls of Crete, the prelude to his own renown, and himself in the windings of the monstrous cave twisting the shaggy neck of the struggling bull, and binding him fast with sinewy arms and grip of either hand, and avoiding the horns with head drawn back. Terrified are the folk when he goes to battle ’neath the shelter of that grim device, to behold twin Theseus and his hands twice drenched in gore.] Statius’s Horatian poetics evokes the specter of hybridity in the biformed Minotaur but contains it aesthetically in the windings (“ambages”) of the cave and knotlike armlock (“nodosa ligantem”) the hero puts on the monster, whose involution, like that of its iconic complement the labyrinth, suggests a mingling of form while actually­

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inhibiting­ fusion. Notice that Theseus’s role, like the labyrinth’s, is to contain, not to kill the Minotaur. As libidinous id to Theseus’s disciplinarian superego, its active antagonism is essential to this dialectical construction of identity. Curiously, in Statius’s diptych Theseus doubles not only the beast but himself. The twin (“bis”) Theseus on the shield stands regnant over the duplex beast just as the real Theseus stands under the figural representation of his fame. While this doubleness may seem to violate the imperial socio-aesthetic of simplex et unus, in fact it exemplifies it. Unlike Horace’s monstrous human-equine fusion, Theseus, though paired with the Minotaur, acts to withhold and optically oppose its dimorphism. Gory-handed in art as in life, he is identical to his artistic depiction, not two therefore but one. In the Knight’s Tale, the Minotaur adorns the penoun, not the shield Theseus takes into battle with Thebes. The mention is parenthetic, yet the symbol’s presence, because of its alteration, is redolent with the spoor of intertext. Chaucer knew the Thebaid firsthand.104 Because no reference to the Minotaur appears in the Teseida, we may conclude two things: first, that Chaucer goes out of his way to change the Statian original, and second, that such discommodity is not without purpose or reward. In Chaucer’s corpus, another uncomplimentary portrait of Theseus and the Minotaur vies for authority with Statius’s, one that Chaucer follows nearly verbatim in the Legend of Good Women: Ariadne’s lament in Ovid’s Heroides 10.105 It too concerns itself with Theseus’s doubleness:106 Nec tua mactasset nodoso stipite, Theseu, ardua parte virum dextera, parte bovem; nec tibi, quae reditus monstrarent, fila dedissem, fila per adductas saepe recepta manus. (Heroides 10.101–4)107 [And would that thy upraised right hand, O Theseus, had not slain with knotty club him that was man in part, and in part bull; and I had not given thee the thread to show the way of thy return— thread oft caught up again and passed through the hands led on by it.] The same images of imbrication and symbols of violence and control are in evidence here as in Statius: the “knotty” club; the focus

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upon Theseus’s hands manipulating the salvific thread that unravels the labyrinth only to ensnare Ariadne figuratively in its coils. Like the Minotaur entangled in Theseus’s grip, so Ariadne ends contained, suppressed, imprisoned helpless on an isle. But whereas Statius’s aesthetic arithmetic factors down to an identity of one to one, the doubleness Ovid finds in Theseus, echoing the famous anti-Thesean charges of Catullus 64, reduces to duplicity: a marriage oath broken, a knot dissolved, a protagonist confronted with an image of himself as monstrous other. Ariadne’s complaint in Ovid employs a romance calculus of union opposite to Statius’s epic: Saepe torum repeto, qui nos acceperat ambos sed non acceptos exhibiturus erat, et tua, quae possum pro te, vestigia tango .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Incumbo, lacrimisque toro manate profusis, “pressimus,” exclamo, “te duo—redde duos! Venimus huc ambo; cur non discedimus ambo? Perfide, pars nostri, lectule, maior ubi est?” (Heroides 10.51–53, 55–58) [Oft do I come again to the couch that received us both, but was fated never to show us together again, and touch the imprint left by you. . . . I lay me down upon my face, bedew the bed with pouring tears, and cry aloud: “We were two who pressed thee—give back two! We came to thee both together; why do we not depart the same? Ah, faithless bed—the greater part of my being, oh, where is he?”] Or in Chaucer’s words, “And to her bed ryght thus she speketh tho: / “Thow bed,” quod she, “that has receyved two, / Thow shalt answere of two and nat of oon!” (Legend of Good Women 6.2210–12). Despite a rather hirsute translation, Chaucer captures Ovid’s essential conceit of two-in-one. The marriage bed, locus of sexual union, promises a literal mingling of bodies abstracted in the vestigial imprint of conjoined forms, two parts of a collective individual (“pars nostri”). The bed’s perfidy serves as objective correlative for Theseus’s betrayal of marital union. After his departure, one imprint remains, to be sure, but it is a symbol of aloneness, not unity.

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Simplifying the dyadic symbol of the Minotaur and twin Theseus from Statius’s shield to the monadic icon of the Minotaur alone, the Knight, like the perfidious bed, suppresses the Statian image of doubleness to eliminate any pejorative association with the duplicity of Ovid’s Theseus. Complementing the banner of Mars with spear, the pennon leaves us then with an example of martial triumph, of taurine maiestas purged of the adulterations of Jovian amor, a sign whose signifiers have been erased and reinscribed to conceal a romance history and subsidize the Knight’s epic ideology. Look closely, however, and we notice that while Chaucer has borrowed the Knight’s Tale’s policy of hybrid suppression from Statius, the aesthetic conceit—an emblem pared down from two forms to one, from duplicity to singularity— comes from Ovid. Theseus’s Minotaur pennon reads like Ovid’s bed. Vestiges remain of a palimpsested discourse on hybridity pitting Statian against Ovidian sociopolitical paradigms. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses 8, we are invited to recall the Minotaur as the hybrid product of Pasiphae’s lust for the Cretan bull and thus to locate in the symbol a victory over female and bestial incontinence in one, echoing Theseus’s mastery over hybridizing femenye. From the Heroides, however, we will remember in Ariadne’s plight the isolation and societal atomization that is the concomitant of a policy of mastery, of a world devoid of love’s intimate connections that haunts Theseus’s hard-won majesty in the dying words of Arcite, “What is this world . . . / Allone, withouten any compaignye?” (2777–79). From Statius’s Minotaur, Chaucer extrapolates a policy of private and public containment. Theseus’s shield, though absent in the Knight’s Tale, serves as hors-texte analogy to his marriage: union with Ypolite is like the armlock on the Minotaur in that it effects ostensibly a mingling of bodies and cultures but actually enacts a forcible separation from and repression of the hybrid other. By reference to the shield, Theseus’s identity reveals itself to be bound up in a dialectic of reason and sensuality: the Minotaur’s restraint, like Palamon and Arcite’s imprisonment, symbolizes the custody of the sense by the intellect. While politically their containment plays out a drama of judicial authority and control, aesthetically it announces an unresolved, perhaps unresolvable, dichotomy between discrepant models of societal union. Theseus’s stranglehold on the forces of societal homogeneity, we are meant to realize, cannot but

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prove a temporary and ultimately futile stay, which in the final tableau of the Knight’s Tale relaxes. There the Statian armlock seems to give way to an Ovidian embrace, Theseus’s marriage of coercion to Palamon and Emelye’s of mutuality. The Augustan model of marriage as a transgressive, exogenous union, then, does not command Chaucer’s unanimous sympathy in the Knight’s Tale. The alternative, deriving from Empedoclean cosmology and epitomized in the Middle Ages by the hymeneal hymn that opens Martianus’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, presents marriage as a paradigm of societal union in which amor serves as a harmonizing principle: “Sacred principle of unity amongst the gods, on you I call; you are said to grace weddings with your song; it is said that Muse was your mother. You bring the warring seeds of the world with secret bonds and encourage the union of opposites by your sacred embrace. You cause the elements to interact reciprocally, you make the world fertile; through you, Mind is breathed into bodies by a union of concord which rules over Nature, as you bring harmony between the sexes and foster loyalty by love.”108 Ovid’s poetry, in his own age and in the Knight’s Tale, stands out as a lone spur of resistance to Augustan and Horatian notions of societal uniformity and sole representative of the erotic model. Indeed, the story of Jove and Europa is designed to point out the glaring fault in the dominant ideology. Love, an endogenous and irresistible desire to mingle, whether sexually or socially in mutualizing fellowship, is the spoiler in the system of “separate wholeness.” Nothing in Ovid’s metamorphic universe can be simplex et unus, least of all male-female relations. The king of the gods and by extension also the emperor of men must themselves yield to hybridity of flesh and spirit. Despite himself, Theseus must be both a felawe and a duc, minister and groom in a marriage of state who, like Chaucer’s ideal Richard in “Lak of Stedfastnesse” both weds his people to righteousness and is wedded to them in bonds of common purpose and affection. Ovid, then, serves as spokesman in Chaucer for a notion of maiestas diametrically opposed to the Augustan. Cupid’s maiestas is amor raised to the level of cosmic imperative. His military victories are won not by opposition but by conversion, what, in his famous conceit of Amores 1.9 he calls enlisting in Cupid’s camp, becoming a miles amoris among whose ranks count both Mars and Jupiter.109

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The marriage scene of the Knight’s Tale is precariously disposed between these two classical prototypes. As husband and conqueror, Theseus enters symbolically and allegorically as the antithesis to the miles amoris, capable of overcoming the synthetic sensual with the rational absolute. Likewise the tale itself begins wedded to Augustan solutions to the problem of societal hybridity over the Ovidian, to Statius’s Mino­ taur over Ovid’s bovine Jupiter. Yet by the tale’s end political sympathies seem to have gravitated toward the Ovidian camp. Theseus, it is true, remains largely impassive to love, but authorial favor graces the miles amoris in Palamon, whose prayers to Venus conquer Arcite’s to Mars. Whereas the tale begins in a nuptial of victory marked by absent affection and monarchic rule, it ends in a nuptial of loss inflected rather by love and fellowship. We may remark the seeming magnetic realignment in ethical and political cast. Seeking political union “with certein contrees alliaunce” (1.2973), Theseus calls a “parlement” and delivers a speech that by the end signals a change of spirit in both household and state policy. As if in recognition of the cosmic ineluctability of Ovidian love in tacit agreement with Arcite’s contention that “A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed” (1169), Theseus resolves “To maken vertu of necessitee” ( 3042) and embrace a philosophy of mutuality. Thus, after soliciting “conseil” and “th’avys heere of my parlement” ( 3096, 3076), Theseus unites Palamon and Emelye in marriage, sanctifying—O horror of Horace!—“of sorowes two / O parfit joye” ( 3071–72), the long-resisted love monster of two-in-one. Reading the end of the Knight’s Tale as an endorsement of the liberal values of fellowship or as a heartfelt embrace of an Ovidian Weltanschauung, as I have just proposed, however, is precarious. To do so we must posit a Chaucer at ideological odds with the Knight, a tension that owes more to suggestion than to proof. While the ideology of a blended society—unity versus hybridity, simplex et unus versus two-in-one—is clearly at issue, the Knight as social reactionary is hardly about to change his stripes. Nor is Theseus. From the Knight’s conservative perspective, the marriage that concludes the tale contains rather than concedes the Ovidian subversion of maiestas by amor. The model of societal union the Knight seems to endorse, rather, is Ciceronian amicitia. That Theseus is not in love with his wife, that he prefers homosocial bonds to blood relations, is something Ovid had observed

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long before Chaucer or Boccaccio did. In the Heroides, Phaedra expostulates with Hippolytus: “Praeposuit Theseus—nisi si manifesta negamus­—Pirithoum Phaedrae Pirithoumque tibi” (4.111−12). [Unless we deny what is manifestly true, Theseus has come to esteem Pirithoüs more than Phaedra—more even than you.] In principle, the gender hybridity of heterosexual union and the children produced of it are as socially transgressive as the Minotaur’s pedigree. I have already noted how the Knight prejudices the situation of marriage by eliminating Boccaccio’s description of a Hippolyta “who possessed and ruled Theseus’s heart.” To that I should add the recent claim that “what Chaucer does [in the Knight’s Tale], in effect, is use brotherhood as shorthand for a (theoretically) indestructible male relationship in order to highlight the power of an even stronger force that destroys it—love between the sexes.”110 Nor is the Knight’s hostility to hetero­ sexual love idiosyncratic; rather, it follows a conservative, Pauline construction of marriage. St. Paul phrases his views on love between the sexes unequivocally: “bonum est homini mulierem non tangere” (1 Cor. 7.1). We may infer that his opposition comes from a horror of genetic or corporal mixing: “Do you not know that your bodies are limbs and organs [membra] of Christ? Shall I take from Christ his bodily parts and make them over to a harlot? Never! You surely know that anyone who links himself with a harlot becomes physically one with her [unum corpus efficitur] (for Scripture says, ‘The pair shall become one flesh’ [duo in carne una]), but he who links himself with Christ is one with him spiritually [unus spiritus est]” (1 Cor. 6.15–17). As an alternative to heterosexual love, the Knight gives us a paean to Thesean friendship absent in his source: So wel they lovede, as olde bookes sayn, That whan that oon was deed, soothly to telle, His felawe wente and sought hym doun in helle. But of that storie list me nat to write. (1.1198–1201) Chaucer’s descant on friendship makes obtrusive another Ovidian antetext by teasing ellipsis—as he has done with Jove-Europa, the Amazonian campaign, and the Minotaur—whose details outline the thematic structure of the tale. The missing story of ideal friendship

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and infernal descent springs from Ovid and his fourteenth-century expositor Pierre Bersuire.111 In his commentary on Metamorphoses 8, Bersuire recounts a Pirithous besotted with Proserpina who cajoles Theseus into abetting him in a lover’s reconaissance. Made prisoner by Pluto, they receive help from Hercules, who manages to free only Theseus. The end of the story finds Pirithous irremediably separated from his bosom companion, “a suo socio divisus est.”112 Arcite and Palamon mirror Theseus and Pirithous in nearly every detail: their tenure in Hades betides Arcite and Palamon’s in their love-prison, where Emelye plays the new Proserpina. Chaucer tweaks the irony of this parallel when he has Arcite lament his release from prison: Allas, that ever knew I Perotheus! For elles hadde I dwelled with Theseus, Yfetered in prisoun everemo. (1227–29) For Arcite, Theseus is Pluto, but one whose Hades constitutes a paradise. Perotheus is Hercules, the rescuer whose succor he resents. The situations are subtly inverted. Immured, both friendships suffer rupture ending in singular death—except for the fact that Chaucer’s Theseus and Perotheus do not suffer rupture. Rather, the backstory of friendship divided is itself excised, leaving intact an ideal of masculine political association untroubled by feminine desire, in which all disruptive elements may be safely isolated and resolved without threat to gubernatorial prerogative. Before arguing for a distinction between Athenian and Theban friendship in the Knight’s Tale as models of unity and fusion based in an ideological contest between Ovidian and Ciceronian ideals of love and social cohesion, I need to clarify the connection between friendship and society and to answer the question of why unity grounded in Ciceronian amicitia serves as an alternative to one grounded in Ovidian amor. The Latin word that hews closest in meaning to “fellowship” is societas. Theseus and Perotheus in Bersuire are, as above, socios, that is, fellows or friends. In macrocosm, friendship or fellowship represents the basic coherent force uniting unrelated men in a society. I stipulate “unrelated men” because Greek and Latin civic identity sought

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to distinguish itself from older forms of societal coherence grounded in consanguinity that was traced—as among the Jews—matrilineally (one can only really be certain of maternity). Such matrilineal forms of society, epitomized by the Amazons, are predicated on the right of the woman to choose her mate. The myth of Cecrops fictionalizes this societal shift away from matrilineality and kinship ties and toward a patriarchal society where “friendship” or “fellowship” forms the fabric of lateral political association, a movement echoed in the medieval shift from cognatic to agnatic models of kinship and inheritance.113 The success of the new schema, if we are to accord the myth of Cecrops the same euhemeristic authority Augustine does, depended on the sexual disfranchisement of women. By revoking the Athenian women’s right to choose their mate and instituting in its stead a patri­ archally administered, coercive system of marriage, Cecrops could neutralize feminine promiscuity, what J. J. Bachofen called “hetairism,” as a vehicle of societal order.114 Theseus’s coercive marriage to the Amazon Ypolite exemplifies this revisionist model of societas, one resisted explicitly by the Wife of Bath, whose marital ideology, not to mention sheer estrus, announces her Amazonian affinities. The first measure of the Knight’s Tale’s investment in the classical ideals of homosociety, then, is Theseus’s subjection of marriage to the vetitive power of civic authority.115 Emelye’s marriage to Palamon, in which Theseus co-opts the parties’ choice of love partner, may thus signal not a concession of epic to romance solutions, or of Augustan notions of class genetics to the hybridizing forces of Ovidian love, but a political strategy to contain and control a feminizing cultus that threatens the vectors and valences of masculine society. Chaucer arti­ culates the threat of the cult of amor to societas twice in the tale, the first time, as we have noted, in the authorial apostrophe, O Cupide out of alle charitee, O regne, that wolt no felawe have with thee! Ful sooth is seyd that love ne lordshipe Wol noght, his thankes, have no felaweshipe . . . (1.764–67) and the second in the inscription on Venus’s temple,

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Thus may ye seen that wysdom ne richesse, Beautee ne sleighte, strengthe ne hardynesse, Ne may with Venus holde champartie, For as hir list the world than may she gye. (1947–50) While both quotations canvass the same Ovidian trope with the same rhetorical devices (“ne . . . ne”), the latter identifies Venus as the regnal power behind Cupid. According to the Knight, then, feminine rule, as practiced both by Venus and by her deputy Cupid, is by nature a form of “regnum” or tyranny governed by whim (“as her list”). Hostile to the principles of mutuality (“champartie,” “charitee”) that characterize masculine fellowship, and that Theseus epitomizes in his friendship with Perotheus, the feminine rule of amor, whether practiced by women or men under the influence of women (i.e., Cupid, Arcite and Palamon), is fundamentally antisocial. Theseus’s use of marriage as a tool to reorder greater Athenian society is of a piece both with Cecropian edict and with Augustan marital legislation. The second measure of homosociety in the Knight’s Tale is friendship. Until lately, the importance of Ciceronian theories of friendship to the Knight’s Tale have gone nearly unremarked. Given the lack of critical foundation upon which to build a framework for interpreting Chaucerian friendship, I would like to propose the following distinction between classical amor and amicitia as fundamental. Amor and amicitia, as many medieval treatises duly note, are etymologically and thus notionally joined. Some of those, extending Paul’s principle of unus spiritus, treated friendship as a subcategory of love, going so far as to argue that friendship “mixes” souls and works an actual two-in-one union (“cor unum et anima una”).116 That is not, however, the classical notion. Amicitia is an agreement among men designed to mutual moral, societal, and political advancement, or, as Cicero phrases it famously, “Friendship is nothing else than an accord [consensio] in all things human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection” (De amicitia 6.20). Amor, and amor alone, effects a literal fusion of souls. As Ovid implies in Heroides 4, the friendship of Theseus and Pirithous is properly one of amor. It is wholly appropriate, then, when in Metamorphoses 8 Theseus refers to him in the language of love elegy:

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Ibat in adversum proles Ixionis hostem Pirithous valida quatiens venabula dextra; cui “procul” Aegides “o me mihi carior” inquit “pars animae consiste meae!” (Metamorphoses 8.403–6) [Pirithous, Ixion’s son, was moving toward the enemy brandishing a hunting spear in his powerful right hand. The son of Aegeus (Theseus) said to him: “Stay back, O thou dearer to me than myself, other half of my own soul!”] In Metamorphoses 12, Theseus defends Pirithous against the aggression of the centaurs at his wedding to Hippodame: “ ‘Euryte, pulsat,’ ait, ‘qui me vivente lacessas / Pirithous violesque duo ignarus in uno?’ ” (12.228–29). [“What madness impels you to this, Eurytus, that while I live you dare to offend Pirithous and so, unwittingly, attack two men in one?”] On the surface, Ciceronian friendship seems to share with Ovidian love a theme of corporal and spiritual mingling, and indeed, medieval Christian readers of the De amicitia often misread him in precisely this way.117 His position, rather, conceives of the amical bond as the model for societal cohesion along homosocial lines, which, albeit conservative, does not share the purist zeal of the Augustan social project. His argument is nuanced: “[Animals] require and eagerly search for other animals of their own kind to which they may attach themselves . . . then how much more, by the law of his nature, is this the case with man who both loves himself and uses his reason to seek out another whose soul he may so mingle with his own [cum sua misceat] as almost to make one out of two [quasi unum ex duobus]!” (De amicitia 21.81).118 Notice how the activity of friendship straddles a narrow line between two forms of antisocial behavior. Loving oneself is very nearly narcissism, the ultimate withdrawal from human society into the self, while loving the other to the point of spiritual synthesis, “almost to make one out of two,” narrowly skirts the loss of singular identity that so offended Horace’s aesthetic of singleness and unity. This mingling, then, is an act not of true hybridity but of homogeneity: like seeks out like, animal his own species, man his social compeer. The two-in-one topos illustrates a principle of propinquity rather than union among those of the same gender and class.

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The brinksmanship of Cicero’s “almost” is crucial to understanding the negative exemplarity of Palamon and Arcite’s friendship.119 Their problem is that their youthful affection is immoderate: they “disobey Chilon’s precept by overdoing everything,” as Aristotle says in his topos of youth in the Rhetoric, “they love too much and they hate too much.”120 Their similitude transcends “accord” (consensio); they go beyond Cicero’s “almost one out of two” (quasi unum ex duobus) to an actual “duo in uno,” in subversive imitation of Ovid’s Theseus and Pirithous. In the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer builds the young men’s rivalry in careful emulation of Cicero on deficient friendship, literalizing him in multiple details. Thus, when Cicero’s Scipio opines, “The most ardent attachments of boyhood are often laid aside with the boyish dress; but if continued to the time of manhood, they are broken off, sometimes by rivalry in courtship, or sometimes by a contest for some advantage, in which both the parties to the friendship cannot be successful at the same time” (De amicitia 10.33–34), Boccaccio and Chaucer comply in their characterization of the unregenerate cousins. More significantly, Chaucer looks to Cicero’s analogy of animals’ like-to-like species attraction as a model for Arcite and Palamon’s association. In the duel of part 2, Chaucer again literalizes his author, likening the combatants to animals morbidly attracted to each other by similitude. Thus “Palamon / In his fightyng were a wood leon, / And as a cruel tigre was Arcite; / As wilde bores gonne they to smyte” (1655–58). In the tournament of part 4, the cousins’ figural hybridity is confirmed by the seconds they choose, both of whom are humananimal hybrids and mirror images of the other: for Palamon, Lygurge of Thrace, whose visage is “lyk a grifphon” (2133), the half-lion halfeagle monster of Roman legend; for Arcite, Emetreus of Inde, whose gaze (“as a leon his lookyng caste,” 2171) and accoutrements (“Upon his hand he bar for his deduyt / An egle tame,” 2177–78) duplicate his counterpart’s physiognomy. If similes such as these posit a “quasi” hybridity, Chaucer takes care to reify the conjunction in flesh and blood when, fighting up to their ankles in their mixed blood (1660), they become literally two-in-one. The irony of this scene, we should note, lies in its travesty of the ritual of brotherhood practiced by knights in affirming brotherhood, who, “having caused a vein to be opened, mingled their blood in token of indissoluble friendship.”121

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Cicero’s notion of amical union, by contrast, is clear: it restricts itself only to the apparent, to similes and similitudes, never to the literal, which is the province of love. “He who looks upon a true friend,” he says hedging cautiously, “looks, as it were, upon a sort of [aliquod] image of himself  ” (De amicitia 7.23). While friendship preserves an essential otherness, Arcite and Palamon, like their seconds, are indistinguishable. Thus they first appear on the battlefield “liggynge by and by,” a figure of both verbal and physical redundancy. And while Theseus’s Minotaur declares his opposition to hybrid identity as if it were a point of chivalry, the cousins, in violation of chivalric custom, are “Bothe in oon armes” (1012), literally two-in-one, a version of the Minotaur. To the Knight, who asks rhetorically, “Who hath the worse, Arcite or Palamon?” (1348), they are duplicates, just as in the eyes of Theseus and Emelye they are fungible suitors. The operant distinction, then, is that while Theseus and Perotheus are equivalent, Arcite and Palamon are identical. They violate a classical societal ideal that demands a quantum of difference among its constituent parts. The word societas in Latin carries a distinct political meaning in Roman history. In 91 BCE, Rome became embroiled in an internecine conflict in which its former allies (socii) turned against her, hence the “Social War.” Society, in other words, constituted a system of allegiances among unrelated and unlike peoples who united for mutual advantage. Cicero, who fought in the Social War, framed De amicitia on the associational distinction between friends and allies, exploring the extent to which the affective element of friendship complicates the political allegiances that define society. The dialectic of friendship in Cicero, like that of Theseus to Perotheus in Chaucer, balances delicately between involvement and restraint, mutuality and independence. The ideal friend practices autarky, a self-cultivation that inspires virtue in others who would associate themselves with him: “To the extent that a man relies upon himself and is so fortified by virtue and wisdom that he is dependent on no one and ­considers all his possessions to be within himself, in that degree is he most conspicuous for reaching out and cherishing friendships” (De amicitia 7.29–30). This self-possession in turn forms the grounds for affection, which in macrocosm functions as society’s afferent principle: “When men have conceived a longing for this virtue they bend towards it and

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move closer to it, so that, by familiar association with him whom they have begun to love, they may enjoy his character, equal him in affection, become readier to deserve than to demand his favours, and vie with him in a rivalry of virtue [honesta certatio]” (De amicitia, 9.32). Cicero, in other words, envisions friendship as existing within a society of pure subjectivity liberated from any material dependency or need to possess or control. What holds it together is a communal ideal in each individual that strives to overcome the objective discrepancies of quality that separate them—that is, a “rivalry of virtue.” In his selfpossession—his amour propre, so to speak—Theseus realizes the subjective ideal of amicitia as an alternative to amor. Arcite and Palamon, in their common desire to possess an object extrinsic to themselves, which is to say their cupidinal love for Emelye, enter into a rivalry of turpitude that precludes friendship. Yet to remain in the realm of the subjective, Ciceronian amicitia must also suppress the desire for sexual love, which is by nature possessive. Ovid’s model of homosocial interaction is more objective and cynical. For him, rivalry in affection is always destructive; there can be no honesta certatio. The Ars amatoria is dedicated to dishonest competition. Lovers must act like tyrants. As he counsels in the Ars amatoria, “Effuge rivalem: vinces, dum sola tenebis; / Non bene cum sociis regna Venusque manent” (Ars amatoria 3.563−64) [Avoid a rival: you will prevail, so long as you alone have power; in partnership neither thrones nor love stands sure], reinscribing the amor/maiestas antinomy.122 In opting for a decisive tournament, one in which Palamon and Arcite’s rivalry ends in death, Theseus is choosing an Ovidian over a Ciceronian solution. Only when Arcite’s impending death becomes a fait accompli, when he occupies an inferior position to Palamon as per the Ciceronian model, can their friendship be “restored.”

I began this study of hybridity and suppression with a single line, a

scrap of wisdom uprooted from Ovid and replanted in hostile soil, yet one that rewarded further indulgence with relevance to its new political environs. Strictly speaking, the excerption of the amor/maiestas topos in the Knight’s Tale is not an example of occultatio, although, as I hope to have shown, it shares the strategy of demonstrating by withholding. Chaucer, I have suggested, is at pains to betray the Knight’s

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narrative withholdings, to furnish ironic comment on the narrator’s policies through a series of cleverly deployed classical footnotes. I would like to end now with another Ovidian scrap closely related to the first, indeed immediately subsequent in the narrative order of the Metamorphoses, that Chaucer deploys as prologue to the first. After her rape, Europa wanders Boeotia lost to her family. The father sends Cadmus, her brother, to discover her whereabouts. But after a fruitless search, he abandons the quest, becoming an exile (“addit exilium,” Metamorphoses 3.4), until Apollo grants him oracular direction. He will find a heifer in the wilderness that has never borne a yoke, which will lead him to a bosky site where he will build a great city. This comes to pass immediately. But when Cadmus enters a grove in search of a libation of spring water to offer Jove, he discovers a great serpent with three rows of teeth that kills his companions. After a quick eulogy to the values of friendship, “ ‘aut ultor vestrae, fidissima pectora, mortis, / aut comes’ inquit ‘ero’  ” (Metamorphoses 3.58−59) [O ye poor forms, most faithful friends, either I shall avenge your death or be comrade in it], he manages to kill the serpent. Here, though, a divine voice curses him to become like a serpent among men (“tu spectabere serpens”), its mirror image in function. Pallas aids the nonplussed Cadmus by telling him to sow the serpent’s teeth, the instruments of its venom, in newly plowed soil. Up spring armed warriors, who warn Cadmus “not to take part in their fratricidal strife” [nec te civilibus insere bellis] ( 3.117), whereupon the brothers slay each other (“atque ita terrigens rigido de fratribus unum comminus ense ferit” [3.118–19]). Only the second generation of Cadmus’s autochthonous sons survive, and then only through the intercession of Pallas, who enjoins the brothers to lay down their weapons. These aid Cadmus in building the walls of Thebes. Chaucer picks up the thread of this story just as Palamon and Arcite, “exiled upon his heed / For everemo” (1344–45), in emulation of the exiled Cadmus, are led as if by divine hand to a fateful grove. He follows the narrative closely, displacing the Ovidian events as he goes, until Theseus, emulating Pallas, intercedes, commanding the cousins, “By myghty Mars, he shal anon be deed / That smyteth any strook that I may seen” (1708–9), and beyond to the “marriage” that solves the problem of Theban strife. So striking is the parallelism, and so nuanced the changes Chaucer works on the original, that the details deserve

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closer scrutiny. Once in the grove, Arcite alludes metatextually to the same moment in Ovid’s narrative—“Of Cadmus, which that was the firste man / That Thebes bulte” (1547–48)—breaking off to recall his ruined friendship with the “wrecched Palmoun,” just as Cadmus remarks upon the loss of his cohort. Where Cadmus swears before the snake to “avenge your [his friends’] death or be a comrade in it,” Arcite forswears his oath of friendship (“For I defye the seurete and the bond / Which that thou seist that I have maad to thee,” 1604–5), vowing revenge upon his erstwhile comrade (“Thou sholdest never out of this grove pace, / That thou ne sholdest dyen of myn honde,” 1602–3). Brilliantly, Chaucer turns Cadmus’s confrontation with the serpent and fratricides into Palamon’s fratricidal conflict with Arcite. We will recall that Ovid surprises Cadmus with the news that he will become literally the mirror image of the snake (“tu spectabere serpens”) through the intestine violence he will wreak, news that confuses Cadmus, who perceives no resemblance or kinship between himself and his serpentine doppelgänger. In the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer sets up the confrontation of the cousins first by changing Arcite into Philostrate (Gr. = lover of war), the violent aspect of what he already is, in a metamorphosis that involves a mirror: “And with that word he caughte a greet mirour, / And saugh that chaunged was al his colour, / And saugh his visage in another kynde” (1399–1401). By allusion, he does indeed change his species (“kynde”) and color. This metamorphosis, of course, allows Palamon, like Cadmus, credibly not to recognize the man whom Chaucer portrays as his double so that the revealing scene may build to anagnorisis. The homology of these two moments of self-confrontation mounts with the intrusion of the divine voice in Ovid that heralds the governing theme of the episode: the violent impulse to conquer that threatens to overwhelm the affective values of fellowship that unite people. The Knight’s authorial intrusion into the battle scene—“O regne, that wolt no felawe have with thee!”—­accomplishes the same task with nearly the identical message. Like the Knight’s Tale, Ovid’s Cadmus concludes with a marriage at the end of a fratricidal battle, a scene in which Martian and Venutian impulses fuse in a moment of political founding. Both, that is to say, are foundation myths, of which Chaucer’s represents a carefully observed imitation of the Ovidian model. The narrative of the Meta-

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morphoses’ carmen perpetuum observes a principle of apposition: Ovid assembles a montage of disparate narremes and fragments whose linkages exploit either similitudes or contrasts (what Sergei Eisenstein, speaking about cinematic technique, called “collisions”) that set off jarring but meaningful cross-resonances. Such a collision occurs at the end of Ovid’s version of the founding of Thebes in book 3, where he juxtaposes the scene of battle and cultivation of the teeth as an act of first founding to Cadmus’s later marriage to Harmonia (unnamed per se in Ovid) as an act of second founding: Iam stabant Thebae, poteras iam, Cadme, videri exilio felix: soceri tibi Marsque Venusque contingerat; huc adde genus de coniuge tanta . . . (Metamorphoses 3.131–33) [And now Thebes stood complete; now thou couldst seem, O Cadmus, even in exile, a happy man. Thou hast obtained Mars and Venus, too, as parents of thy bride; add to this blessing children so worthy of a noble wife] In the absence of Harmonia’s mention as Cadmus’s spouse, a character who again appears anonymous in book 4, we are left to extrapolate from Ovid’s ambiguous “iam . . . iam” (now . . . now) when this marriage actually occurred and to whom. From the previous scene we may recall the serpent’s paternity in Mars; we may thence begin to suspect an allegory of marriage in the violent agon that resolves in an act of insemination, a union in blood that engenders, in the confluence of war and love, a hybrid nation. War as marriage is, of course, a familiar topos to the Middle Ages, one that both begins and ends the Knight’s Tale.123 But the version that we have in Ovid and the Knight’s Tale subserves a rare and more vexed discourse on the politics of hybridity. ­ Ovid’s figurative scene of marital hybridity as political solution of book 3 is proleptic of Cadmus’s literal marriage in book 4 to Harmonia, who, in name and parentage, promises to end the libidinal causes of Theban strife with a conjunction of what the Wife of Bath calls the “Martien” and “Venerien” impulses. There too, Ovid ­translates ­ marital union by analogy to cross-species sex, as Cadmus, now condemned to serpentine form in revenge for his earlier killing of the sacred snake, seduces his human wife:

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. . . ille suae lambebat coniugis ora inque sinus caros, veluti cognosceret, ibat et dabat amplexus . . . . . . at illa lubrica permulcet cristati colla draconis, et subito duo sunt iunctoque volumine serpunt. (Metamorphoses 4.595–57, 598–600) [He licked his wife’s face and glided into her dear breasts as if familiar there, embraced her. . . . But she only stroked the sleek neck of the crested dragon, and suddenly there were two serpents there with intertwining folds.] The fecund commingling of man and his reptilian other is not the figural oddity that it appears. As Leonard Barkan explains, Cadmus’s grandson Teiresias, who for disgust strikes coupling snakes in the woods and in return is transformed into a woman, discovers a sexual duality in the tangle of serpentine coition where “entwining serpents form a perfect representation of a mirror-image relationship, where gender distinguishes the images on either side of the mirror.”124 In this context, the Cadmean tableau is of a piece iconographically with the other image of hybrid government and marital conjunction we have met. Like the union of Theseus and Ypolite mediated through Statius’s symbol of the entwined Minotaur and redoubled Theseus, the joining of Scythia and Athens relies upon the motifs of duality, identity, and the horror of dysgenic hybridity. While Arcite and Palamon are doubtless the immediate objects of Chaucer’s Cadmean allusion, Theseus too is implicated in Cadmus’s plight. In the Knight’s Tale, Theseus assumes Pallas’s role in settling this lingering Theban blood curse of fratricide in Palamon and Arcite. Yet he must also understand the degree to which his own behavior as monarch, his coercive “regne” and resistance to “felaweshipe,” is implicated in their quarrel. Just as the Knight would suppress Theseus’s romantic duplicity only to be undermined in his efforts, so Chaucer would have us realize here that Theseus too must, like Cadmus and Philostrate, see himself mirrored in the serpent. In political terms, he must realize that “the effect of colonial power is . . . the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority.”125 In this he fails. So too the end he brings to Theban strife

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is blind to the model Chaucer so deftly proffers. Theseus’s solution is not Pallas’s. While her fiat ends the bloodshed outright, his merely postpones it “fifty wekes” so that all may profit from the spectacle in a more chivalrous setting. Nor is his purpose peace; rather, it is an “ende,” as he pronounces upon the cousins, “That oon of yow ne shal be deed or taken” (1865–66). In other words, he rededicates the Cadmean story to violence while at the same time reaffirming the social policy of simplex et unus. Where in Ovid, Mars and Venus unite in the Cadmean marriage, in the Knight’s Tale, through their deputies in Arcite and Palamon, they vie in a marital contest. Ultimately, Ovid recognizes that the problem of pluralistic identity in a mixed society and the tensions that accompany it can be resolved only over generations of intermingling where two become indistinguishably one. Hence his end to the fratricidal feud hurries the passage of time to the arrival of a second generation. Chaucer, too, hurries time but to different ends. The interval of fifty weeks between the cessation of the duel and its reprise passes unrecorded, an emotional coma marked by no amendment or reparation of hostility, in fact no progress whatsoever toward a real solution. And when the marital solution does come, it concludes unconsummated: no mingling, no synthesis, no credible answer beyond a chimerical promise of enduring love already impugned by a father wiser to life’s vicissitudes. The cultural lessons of the Knight’s Tale are the sober reflections on the aftermath of totalitarian rule and its aesthetics of unity, as relevant to Augustan Rome as to fourteenth-century Europe or to modern coercive empires. Commenting on the loosening grip of the Soviet Union upon the forces of pluralism in the wake of glasnost, culturologist Anatoly Kuklin observes, “It seems that the very idea of unity of culture in our time, both in relation to its maintenance and purposes, has been almost catastrophically discredited. Alas, even approaches from afar to wholeness of this sort are immediately beset by the dense shadow of totalitarianism.”126 The Thesean empire, itself in the shadow of totalitarianism, partakes of the late-Soviet crisis of unity. Whether in the coercive marriage of Theseus to Ypolite, the tortuous grip on the Minotaur, or the raveled coupling of serpents, the poetics of wholeness mirror the anxious politics of unity. In the Ars poetica, Horace moves from a consideration of indecorous images of hybridity to decorous conjunctions (iuncturae) of words, meter, and

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theme under the tacit assumption that language and narrative obey the same rules as biology.127 In fashioning his own iuncturae in the Knight’s Tale from Boccaccio, Statius, Ovid, Boethius, and Cicero, Chaucer at least realizes that all conjunctions involve suppression. The lesson he learns from Ovid’s carmen perpetuum is that any narrative achieved by fusing two (or more) into one does violence to the corpus so assembled. Theseus’s marriage of coercion thus becomes Chaucer’s trope for the poetic project he is about to undertake; Theseus’s distemper at the beginning of the Knight’s Tale echoes, however remotely, Chaucer’s unease at the prospect of forging a poetic whole, a carmen perpetuum, from a disparate and intransigent multiplicity.

p a rt i i

Romance Form and Formality

4

m Missing Bodies and Changed Forms Literal Metamorphosis in Petrarch’s Rime sparse

“G

enres,” as Derrida affirms to deny at the start of his essay on genre, “are not to be mixed.”1 This is a law whose value to genre theory resides more in the breach than the observance. Whereas in Part I of this book I have attempted to show how romance worries the complex unities of social form in metaphors of the body, in Part II my interest turns to the question of how romance accommodates social hybridity in poetic form. Following the problems of forma and corpus from the first line of the Metamorphoses, Part II coheres around the observation that the mixture or hybridization of literary forms in the Renaissance may best be understood in terms of bodily metamorphosis, a fact that becomes evident in the great poets’ stubborn recourse to Ovidian myth as a metapoetic template. Romance, whether it be a genre proper or, as Frye has argued, “the structural core of all fiction,” is undoubtedly the point at which other genres, to the extent they admit romance motives within themselves, mix.2 That in mind, in the pages that follow I will read a series of texts that, while containing strong romance elements, are traditionally ascribed to other genres. In so doing, I hope to define the interstitial character of romance visà-vis lyric, tragedy, and epic in the early modern period.

The Literal Metaphor Advancing the form of the elegiac sequence from its Augustan origins in Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus, the Rime sparse is perhaps 179

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the first fully realized and poetically self-conscious example of a new genre in the late Middle Ages—the lyric romance or roman amoureux.3 Its title, Rime sparse, or Fragmenta, as Petrarch himself calls it, implies the author’s desire to collect its fragments into a newly coherent form by a process Alastair Fowler calls “aggregation,” a generic transformation “whereby several complete short works are grouped in an ordered collection—as the songs in a song cycle” and that is “generically distinct both from its component parts and from unordered collections.”4 Classical elegists, of course, had already theorized aggregation under the rhetorical principle of variatio, according to which single poems are placed in dialogue with each other in a sequence whose diapasonal strategy is to effect a “contrast of mood or style, of content or metre.”5 Promising a “vario stile” for the Rime, Petrarch purposefully places himself midstream in this generic tradition.6 Whereas some consider the sonnet sequence a “genre [that] sprang full grown from the mind of Petrarch,”7 recent textual scholars have traced the Rime’s generic innovations to thirteenth-century experiments in lyric form and its mode of presentation as a “song book” or “text of texts.” Beginning with the tenzone or literary debate across poems, and the corone, or sonnet cycle, Italian lyric prior to Petrarch betrayed in the compilations of Monte Andrea and Guittone d’Arezzo a self-conscious poetics of form, albeit lacking, until Petrarch, “a single thematic or formal linking device.”8 But if the Rime sparse’s incarnation of the elegy as romance manifests itself in a new level of narratological self-consciousness and structural cohesion, its influence upon romance and on all genres that have to do with romance is the self-reflexivity of its central conceit. The Rime is simultaneously a meditation on the love of a woman and on the love of a book about a woman. In his frustrated love for Laura, Petrarch can claim with Ovid, sentit amans sua damna fere, tamen haeret in illis, materiam culpae persiquiturque suae. nos quoque delectant, quamvis nocuere, libelli, quodque mihi telum vulnera fecit, amo. (Tristia 4.1.33–36) [The lover is oft aware of his own ruin yet clings to it, pursuing that which sustains his own fault. I also find pleasure in my books

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though they have injured me, and I love the very weapon that made my wounds.]

Petrarch’s relationship to the body of the literal Laura and the aestheticized form of the literary Laura is productively conflicted in precisely this way. In drafting a metapoetics of the body and inscribing the literal metaphor indelibly in the chapbook of Renaissance conceit, the Rime sparse develops an allegory grounded not in scriptural exegesis but in textuality: poetics as the new anagoge. In so doing, Petrarch also introduces to the Renaissance a new, humanist hermeneutic for subreading the classics. Richard de Bury, famous bibliophile and acquaintance of Petrarch, comments at the beginning of his Philobiblon, “In books I find the dead as if they were alive.”9 Petrarch literalizes Richard. In Petrarch’s mind, no distinction exists between the literal and literary Laura. Their bodies are coextensive. Evidence of this peculiar pathology resides in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Petrarch’s copy of Vergil. The flyleaf bears the following biographical dedication: Laura, illustrious through her own virtues and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of the Lord 1327 on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was at Verona, unaware of my fate. The sad tidings reached me in Parma, in the same year on the morning of the 19th day of May, in a letter from my Ludovicus. Her chaste and lovely body was laid to rest at vesper time, on the same day on which she died, in the burial place of the Brothers Minor. I am persuaded that her soul returned to the heaven from which it came, as Seneca says of Africanus. I have thought to write this, in bitter memory, yet with a certain bitter sweetness, here in this place that is often before my eyes, so that I may be admonished by the sight of these words and by the consideration of the swift flight of time, that there is nothing in this life in which I should find pleasure; and that it is time, now that the strongest tie is broken, to flee from Babylon; and this, by the prevenient grace of God, should be easy for me if I

182  romance form and formality meditate deeply and manfully on the futile cares, the empty hopes, and the unforeseen events of my past years.10

That a confession of this sincerity and religious conviction should appear not in a Bible but in a book Petrarch consults with equal fervor yet greater regularity is not without its ironies. First, we should note that the legitimacy of his love for Laura is given credence by its presence inside an object that epitomizes his love of poetic art. Petrarch’s description of Laura’s interment in the Church of St. Clare effectively exhumes, then reentombs her body in a book whose cover serves as tombstone and inscription as epitaph. By this same act, however, she also becomes a marginal comment on Vergil’s text. Implicitly, Petrarch translates her into a type of Dido, who likewise perished tragically before her time. Laura’s Nachleben as literary gloss is doubly ironic in that it serves as a generic requital of Vergil’s epic sensibilities for Petrarch’s romantic ones. Aeneas is “pius” in abandoning Dido and in causing her death precisely because he must fulfill an epic destiny of national founding. So Petrarch, possessed by similar national sentiments and desire for glory, expresses sorrow that he himself was absent at the time of Laura’s death. Yet romantically Petrarch cannot let her go, and like Ovid in the Heroides he generically transforms Laura/Dido from an epic heroine to the puella of an elegiac cult. This brings us to Ovid as the poetic paradigm for Petrarch’s cult of form. Petrarch’s theological lodestar in the Rime sparse is Augustine’s Confessions. Petrarch, a devout Christian, is under no illusions that his love for Laura is anything but an “errore,” idolatrous and therefore sinful. To this end, the Rime is structured as a retrospective confession or palinode in which the author looks back upon a “prima etade” of his sin and experiences a reconversion to Christian love in imitation of Augustine’s conversion under a fig tree.11 Petrarch’s adherence to the Augustinian doctrine of charity, however, shares equal ground with a humanistic love for letters and the literary corpus. Just as the Metamorphoses ends with Ovid’s eternization through literature, so both the Secretum and the Familiari reaffirm in their final lines Petrarch’s commitment to literature and in the latter his desire for undying glory through it. Petrarch’s poetics in the Rime sparse are Ovidian to the extent that they indulge a love (perhaps even to the point of idolatry) for Laura

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qua textual body. Her individual corporeal members, described in isolated tessera, correspond to the fragmentary lyrics collected into a romance by a process of re-membering.12 Just as the Familiari represents Petrarch’s attempt to renew an epistolary genre in imitation of Cicero, so the Rime sparse’s primary template of generic innovation is the Metamorphoses. Both are experiments in new hybrid forms: a love-epic in Ovid’s case and an elegiac romance in Petrarch’s.13 Quintilian says of Ovid that in the Metamorphoses he was “compelled to assemble the most diverse things into the appearance of a unified body [in speciem unius corporis colligentem].”14 So too Petrarch. Both texts are composed of fragments of varied genres or subgenres that are pieced together into a more or less coherent mosaic. Both seek formal unity through a process of ordering chronology, the history of the world to Augustus Caesar in Ovid and the Christian calendar year for Petrarch.15 The frame of reference for that ordering in both cases is the body, wherein reordering conjugates metapoetically the idea of metamorphosis, here of a literary corpus. Finally, the Rime is structurally indebted to the poetics of individual Ovidian myths. If the Metamorphoses is the Rime’s poetic supertext, Apollo and Daphne represents its central intertext. Just as important, yet strangely underprized, is the Rime’s intertext with Orpheus and Eurydice and the Orphic erotico-poetic cult. Before reading these intertexts, however, it will be worthwhile to consider carefully Petrarch’s material relationship with the book and the terms and metaphors in which he understood the authorial role.

Forms and Bodies Petrarch’s Rime exists in two autograph manuscripts, the first a chapbook of drafts-in-progress, MS Vaticano Latino 3196, and the second MS Vaticano 3195, the only copy written substantially in Petrarch’s own hand and the only one that makes manifest Petrarch’s conception of the final order and unity of the Rime. Written, rewritten, and reordered obsessively over a period of thirty years, the Rime sparse is quite literally a labor of love. Petrarch minutely scrutinized and harmonized all the formal elements of the manuscript—order, subgenre, meter, and page layout—in line with a holistic poetic morphology. In analyzing MS Vaticano 3195, for example, Wayne Storey

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has identified what he calls a “visual poetics” in which the author assigns each of his five subgenres—sonnet, sestina, ballata, madrigal, and canzone—a unique layout on the page, echoing the metrical, rhetorical, and temporal particularities of each form in a visual gestalt.16 Although these layouts have been ignored by subsequent scribes and modern editors of the Rime, Petrarch’s holograph copy preserves what was for him an intimate material connection between textual embodiment and form, or, in Ovidian terms, forms translated into new bodies. We can literalize this insight still further. Petrarch seems to have substituted for his missing physical relationship with Laura a physical relationship with the book about Laura. This romance fetishism of the literary corpus, this obsession with the form of the text expressed through editing and rearranging its lyric members, betrays at once the ritualism of religious worship—what I called earlier the cult of the missing body—and a displaced sexuality visited upon the constituent parts of the literary Laura, sometimes violent in its emendations and disruptions of sequence and at other times reverential in its shaping editorial caress. How Petrarch actually understood the editorial process and the mediate metaphors through which he articulated it is not readily discerned in the highly wrought weft of the Rime. It is, however, in the more intimate productions of the Familiari and the Secretum, both of which reflect directly and obliquely upon Laura and the making of the Rime. It is to these that I now recur in an effort to understand Petrarch’s editio princeps: the acts of scattering, collecting, and recollecting, and the bodies formed and souls reformed by this process. The Familiari begins with the story of its origins, an etiology that is part myth, part history. In the preface, we enter with Petrarch the disused attic of his Provence home in search of letters and scraps of writing, the “temple of the mind” of Plato, Lucretius, and Ovid.17 As if by serendipity, we discover around sudden corners an allegorical inscape cluttered with significance. In this intimate space of the mind the author encounters the literary artifacts of memory and imagination, strewn artfully in “confused heaps” and “formless piles.”18 The chaos is at once topical and primeval: as in Genesis, the act of poetic making is a microcosm of a universal movement from chaos to order. Scattering and collation, however, is also a self-consciously generic

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process: “Indeed I am richer, or perhaps I should say more hampered than I thought, because of the great number of writings of different kinds [diversi generis] that lie scattered and neglected throughout my house” (Familiari 1.1). Significantly, the Familiari mirrors in prose the same themes of compilation that the Rime demonstrates in its assembly of scattered lyrics. Petrarch’s purpose, he says, is to collect “this work, which was begun haphazardly [sparsim] in my earliest years [sub primum adolescentiae tempus] and which now I gather together again in a more advanced age and redact to the form of a book [in libri formam redigo]” (Familiari 1.1.4). These letters begin in a mature mind, as does Petrarch’s account of his infatuation with Laura in the Rime, looking back with some regret on the “primum adolescentiae tempus” as he does the “primo giovenile errore” of Rime sparse 1 and the “dolce tempo de la prima etade” of 23. Again like the Rime, the Familiari follows the integrative process of literal collection and conative recollection that is consummated literally in a completed book but also in a realization of the author’s fundamental change of spirit, a metamorphosis of the soul that in the Rime is moral and in the Familiari is intellectual. Thus Petrarch asks himself: “What stops you from looking behind like a tired traveller from a vantage point after a long journey and slowly recalling the memories and cares of your youth?” This thought finally dominated, and while the work involved did not appeal as a grand under­ taking, ­neither did trying to recall the thoughts and memories of times past seem too unpleasant. But when I began turning over the papers piled at random in no particular order, I was astonished to notice how varied and how disordered their general aspect appeared. I could hardly recognize certain ones, not so much because of their form as because of the changed nature of my own understanding. (Familiari 1.1.4)19

This last line affords particular insight into Petrarch’s understanding of the role of metamorphosis in the assembly of the literary body. Ovid’s first line expresses the enigmatic desire of the mind (“anima”) “to tell of forms changed into new bodies.” Petrarch accepts the Ovidian troika—anima, forma, corpus—as constituting the basic

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nomenclature of literary metamorphosis. Like Ovid, Petrarch insists upon the perdurance of form. Forms are in esse indelible. Lyric formulas of emotional reward remain discrete in quality, temporality, and inflection from those of other genres. Yet Petrarch’s theory of genre admits into its core a critical Berkleianism: esse est percipi. While changes to the body of literature cannot in and of themselves change the form, changes of emotion or understanding to the percipient mind of the author can. That is, lyric can be read as romance, or epic as romance. Genre identity depends not on the body of transmission but on the mode of reception. The genius of the Familiari’s preface is that it operates on both a literal and an allegorical (or metapoetic) level simultaneously without strain or preciosity. The first, though hardly obvious, corporal conceit is the attic of Petrarch’s house. Safely inside his head, we encounter his ideas not as abstractions (as ideas should be) but as material bodies, piles of paper that constitute a corpus of memory. This small paradox unfolds, as we have seen, into a nice distinction demonstrating how the reader’s understanding (anima) functions (to borrow from Aristotelian terminology) as the efficient cause of a book, giving it generic identity, and how the form takes precedence over the literary corpus that is its material cause. But beyond the implied body of the house, and the literary body of the paper contained within it, we must also contend with the author’s body (representing the creative or poetic faculty) that has entered the house to give order to the book. As we are sorting out the multifaceted allegory of body and mind, we notice the first signs of a subliminal animus lingering ghostlike in this strange anamnestic space. Where earlier Petrarch was merely “beset and encircled” by the paper, now he is outright “attacked by a bothersome mouse and by a multitude of highly voracious worms” (Familiari 3). Of course, he hardly chooses such harmless creatures to represent credible threats to his physical well-being, but rather because both attack vicariously by eating holes in the literary corpus that is and yet is not his body. Richard de Bury imagines a similar moment in the Philobiblon when he recounts the excitement of disinterring lost books in a monastery: “These long lifeless books, once most dainty, but now become corrupt and loathsome, covered with litters of mice and pierced with the gnawings of the worms, and who were once clothed in purple and fine linen, now lying in sackcloth and

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ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become habitations of the moth.”20 But while both authors are manipulating the same topos, Richard sees the book primarily as a body attacked. Petrarch, because these are his own writings, treats the book as an abstracted body of memory. The words that had once served to indemnify and fill the gaps in his own memory now have gaps themselves. The account of this moment, metapoetically, amounts to a refilling of the negative space of oblivion with an allegorical gloss on the act of forgetting and remembering. Paradoxically, Petrarch’s remembering becomes a fictive act of portraying the moment of forgetting. But Petrarch diverges most significantly from the topos as articulated by Richard de Bury by providing a third, still more virulent and suggestive assailant from among the scattered piles: “the spider, enemy of Pallas, attacked me for doing the work of Pallas” (Familiari 3). This time the attack is not vicarious but direct, not on the paper that is the book’s material cause (spiders do not eat paper) but on the author himself, or rather on the author within the author, Petrarch’s creative-poetic faculty. It is here that Petrarch encodes the originary myth of textuality in the story of Arachne from the Metamorphoses. Turning on the etymology of “text” (L. texere = to weave), Ovid’s story of the weaving competition between mortal and goddess is essentially a contest of different narrative modes, or decora. In terms of universal hierarchy, it is a clear breach of decorum for Arachne to depict the crimes of Jove against humanity (the rapes of Europa, Leda, Asterie, Antiope, etc.) without divine license and to give the human form the same scale and import as the divine, whence her devolution from human to spider. The more interesting indecorum, however is poetic. Structurally, Arachne’s narrative, as Leonard Barkan observes, “piles stories helter-skelter together so that they flow in a seamless mass, joined not by the logic of cause and effect or of morality but by the thread of metamorphosis itself,” a poetic that Ovid renders rhetorically with parataxis and anaphora: “she wrought Asterie . . . she wrought ­Leda . . . she added Jupiter” (1.110–13).21 What offends Pallas as much as Arachne’s content, no doubt, is the narrative form she employs, her iconographic grammar and syntax, so to speak, which vulgarizes the epic stylus gravis traditional to stories of divinity into something resembling the episodic rambling of a tawdry romance, or, as

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Ovid no doubt intended, the episodicity of the Metamorphoses itself. In Pallas’s tapestry, the contrary spirit prevails. Behind her ordered, stately panels that place the main gods centrally in their static majesty and banish to the margins a host of reprobate mortals commuted to beastly or inanimate shapes we perceive the flash and rumble of a thundering didaxis not less apparent in the manner than the mode of presentation. One can well imagine, given the metaphors of textuality and form that predominate in this preface, that Petrarch’s interpretation of the Arachne story hinges on issues of rhetorical decorum and literary kind. “The work of Pallas” with which he associates himself expresses his desire for an orderly dispositio to the congeries of material he encounters pell mell in his attic. Considering, however, that as prose the Familiari is stylistically humbler than poetry, and that its topics are mortal if not mundane, the desire is vain. Indeed, like Ovid, Petrarch is forced at the end of the preface to concede his poetic partisanship with the spider in despite of decorum. Picking up Ovid’s double entente on the “mille colores” of both tapestries, a phrase that connotes variety in trope and genre, Petrarch concludes: “These letters, therefore, woven with multi-colored threads, if I may say so, are for you. However, if I were ever to enjoy a steady abode and the leisure time that has always escaped me, something that begins to appear possible, I would weave in your behalf a much more noble and certainly a unified web/tapestry” (Familiari 1.1, 13). The spider in Petrarch’s mind, at its most theoretical, represents the limits on the perfectibility of literary form within a space of time allotted to the poet’s body, or, less abstrusely, the necessary concessions of decorum that art makes to mortality. As victim of divine wrath, the spider also represents another impulse central to both Petrarchan and Ovidian poetics—violence, or more precisely a tension between the editorial desires to dismember and to reassemble.22 Actaeon and Orpheus, among others, may end in pieces in the Metamorphoses, but the guiding aesthetic of the carmen perpetuum is to integrate those pieces seamlessly into a unified corpus. In the classical tradition, the mutilated body is a common metaphor for an author unedited. Thus Ausonius describes an editor’s having “gathered together the mutilated corpus of sacred Homer” (sacri lacerum collegit corpus Homeri),23 and Horace observes that poetry is

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“not merely the act of fitting correct diction into regular patterns by taking advantage of allowances for metrical word order. Thus if one were to rearrange a Horatian essay one would not find the limbs of a dismembered poet [disiecti membra poetae] as would be the case with the work of Ennius.”24 In his preface to Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, Boccaccio embroiders the trope into the warp of an elegant captatio benevolentiae. A dialogue between the author and a nuncio of his patron Hugo IV, king of Cyprus and Jerusalem, the proemium fictionalizes the process and reasons for compiling such an anthology. Cataclysms have ruined the great libraries of antiquity, argues Boccaccio, rending and scattering Western culture. Now he must reassemble the dismembered corpus of Greco-Latinity. “Everywhere to your heart’s desire I will find and gather, like fragments of a mighty wreck strewn on some vast shore, the relics of the Gentile gods. These relics, scattered through almost infinite volumes, shrunk with age, half-consumed, well nigh a blank, I will edit into such a unified genealogical body as I can to gratify your wish [fere attritas in unum genealogie corpus, quo potero ordine, ut tuo fruaris voto, redigam].”25 Later, he envisions the same redaction as an act of healing: “I can’t quite realize this labor to which I am committed, this vast system [corpus] of Gentile gods and their progeny, torn limb from limb and scattered among the rough and desert places of antiquity and the thorns of hate, wasted away, sunk almost to ashes; and here am I setting forth to collect these fragments, hither and yon, and fit them together, like another Aesculapius restoring Hippolytus.”26 The tension between violent centrifugal and centripetal impulses in Petrarch’s poetics, however, leads beyond literary history to contemporary events and intimate experiences. Dismayed at the desuetude and disarray of Rome, which he visited for the first time in 1337, Petrarch undertook to recover its monuments and recreate its topography, a desideratum similar in its editorial inclinations to his tireless search for and rediscovery of lost Latin classics. Yet his friendship with Cola di Rienzi, whose Italian nationalism and nostalgia for the cultural coherence of the late Roman Republic he shared, caused him to lend initial support to Rienzi’s plan to unite Italy under a new republic, a movement that proved as bloodily divisive in practice as it was confederal in theory.27 Victims of the Black Guelphs, Petrarch’s family followed Pope Clement V into exile in Avignon during the so-called Babylonian

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captivity, and later as papal legate Petrarch experienced the internecine conflicts of a church that soon after his death would lapse into schism. His private life was similarly conflicted by an unresolved contention between corporal and spiritual desires, a flirtation with the cloistered life matched by an attraction to humanistic liberties. Thus his love for Laura is matched by resentment, his desire for literary glory balanced in equal measure by self-doubt and self-hatred. Indeed, violence and healing are the laws of the Rime sparse’s psychological universe. They exert a reciprocating force that plies contrarily between subject and object, radiating outward to fragment and recollect Laura’s body as poetic object, and inward on the poetic subject—Petrarch’s soul (or mind)—again to fragment in the experience of love and recollect in the act of literary compiling. I have spoken so far about the scattering of the poetic object as it relates to figural bodies. The Secretum is about the obverse, the integration of the poetic subject that is first and best articulated in the third book: “I will stay to myself as much as I can, and I will re-collect the scattered fragments of my soul [sparsa anime fragmenta recolligam].”28 A series of three ethico-poetic dialogues with a pseudo-­Augustine (hereafter Augustinus), the Secretum’s third book is conceived as a Boethian consolatio in which Augustinus reprises the role of Lady Philosophy in an attempt to heal Petrarch of his insane love for Laura and through her for glory. Ethically, Augustinus’s curative program is an odd coupling of the doctrine of caritas from the De doctrina and advice from Ovid’s Remedia amoris, with liberal additions of stoic ballast. Healing begins with admitting painful truths, among them Petrarch’s tacit resentment of Laura, which in the Rime never musters conviction as anything more than poetic posture (even her cruelty is an attraction): “Think how this woman has injured your soul, your body, your fortune. Remember what you have borne for her, all to no purpose: how many times you have been mocked, despised, scorned; think what you have cast upon the wind; think how, again and again, she has heaped all this on you with an air of haughty disdain, and how if for a moment she showed herself more kind, it was but for the passing of a breath and then was gone.”29 While the latent animus we sense here, as we had done in the Familiari, does not irrupt outright into a phantasmagoria of retribution, it does modulate, in Augustinus’s hands, into a curiously nuanced image of dismember-

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ment. His program of healing begins in a platitude from the Remedia, taking flight from there into a series of surprising analogies: “Old love affairs must always yield [vincitur] to new.” And without a doubt it is the truth, for the mind thus divided up and parcelled out between different objects feels itself moved with less force toward each one. So the river Ganges, they tell us, was divided up by the Persian king into countless channels, and this river, that was so deep and formidable, was cut up into a thousand inconsiderable streamlets. And so an army, broken up and scattered, becomes vulnerable by the enemy; so fire dispersed dies down; in a word, every power, if concentrated, increases, but by dispersion is reduced.30

Although the logic may seem opaque at first, the analogy proceeds from the scattering or dispersal motif ubiquitous to Petrarch’s metapoetics. Desire in the mind of the lover functions, in pseudo-­Augustinian psychology, like a spatially finite body, dissected and thus diminished by each subsequent attraction. Literalizing the martial connotations of Ovid’s “vincitur,” the metaphor’s similitudes move asymptotically from love to war, affection to violence, and in so doing shift the object of dissection from quality to quantity, inside to out, anima to corpus. To illustrate, Augustinus cites a series of notional bodies dismembered in acts of war: Xerxes’ “cutting up” the Ganges, as a body of water, to ford troops, which themselves, as a body of men, are then “broken and scattered.” Metamorphosis in Ovid both realizes and disperses violent energies. Because for him bodies alone are the objects of violent attraction, transmuting them eliminates any desire to violate them. Thus the rabid Apollo bent on raping Daphne is, upon Daphne’s metamorphosis into a tree, instantly converted to tame, almost pious solicitude. As she becomes a different object, he becomes a different subject; as her corpus changes so his anima. Their transaction demonstrates a rule: metamorphosis in Ovid is transitive and reciprocal. Christianized to reflect the greater resonance of the anima as soul, reciprocity is crucial to Petrarch’s poetics in the Rime. Its origins lie in the Secretum with Augustinus. Still exercised by the theme of violent scattering, Petrarch remarks how Laura’s mere presence fractures his mind, voice, language (“confusa mens . . . vox fragilis luctu rauca, fractusque

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et interruptus verborum sonus”) into stuttering incoherence.31 Like Apollo to Daphne, Petrarch’s spirit responds reciprocally to her body: “Every change of her countenance transformed your spirit [illius mutata frons tibi animum mutavit]; and if she were sad, you forthwith were filled with sadness. In a word, your life became wholly dependent on hers.”32 Sonnet 5 of the Rime records precisely this confusion and scattering of the poet’s verborum sonus where, provoked by Laura’s memory, the sound of Petrarch’s sighs that we first hear in “scattered rhymes” in Sonnet 1 return deconstructed into shards of Laura’s name: Quando io movo is sospiri a chiamar voi e ’l nome che nel cor mis scrisse Amore, LAU-dando s’incomincia udir di fore il suon de’ primi dolci accenti suoi; vostro stato RE-al . . . (5.1–5) [When I move my sighs to call you and the name that Love wrote on my heart, the sound of its first sweet accents is heard without in LAUd. Your RE-gal state . . .] And if Petrarch’s “mens” and “vox” are altered by her in Sonnet 5, so a fortiori is his body in the “Canzone della metamorfosi” (23). Here the poet’s attempt to convert Laura into a poetic quantity redounds upon him: “Ei duo mi trasformaro in quel ch’i’ sono / ­ facendomi d’uom vivo un lauro verde” (23.38–39) [Those two (Cupid and Laura) transformed me into what I am, making me of a living man a green laurel]. Again, as in Apollo and Daphne, metamorphic reciprocity works between corpus and anima, physical object and perceiving subject, a fact the lover-poet notes as he watches the members of his own body “respond” in wood to his soul/mind: “com ogni membro a l’anima risponde” (23.46). Other object-subject shifts follow. In the Secretum, healing involves an integration of soul and body. Reciprocity and its poetics, to the extent that they recognize subject and object to be fundamentally discrete, are at odds with the psychology of integration. Indeed, reciprocal metamorphosis in the Rime is a symptom of abiding illness. Perhaps Augustinus’s most important task in the Secretum, then, is to demonstrate to Petrarch the indivisibility

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of the self by clarifying the interrelation of its parts. At this point, I must enter a plea for taking the terms anima, corpus, and forma as common to both Ovid’s and Petrarch’s vocabulary of the metamorphic self. The difference in usage in the Secretum, I shall argue, is that Augustinus’s transcendental schema observes anima/corpus as the central dialectic whereas Ovid’s aesthetic schema takes forma/corpus. Petrarch, while morally committed to the theology of the first, is, I shall argue, morbidly attracted to the aesthetics of the second. As I mentioned earlier, the final book of the Secretum is peculiar for attempting a rapprochement of Ovidian and Augustinian ideas of love, whose comic polarity suggests that the Secretum’s dialectical argument, like Petrarch’s dialectical loves, is consciously resolved to irresolution. That does not stop Petrarch from fictionalizing at least two moments in which Augustinian and Ovidian love doctrine do agree, one of which we have already treated. The other, to which I turn attention now, is demonstrably more significant to the Secretum and more vexed. To start with, a brief summary of the issue. Augustinus has indicted the author for idolatry, that is to say for a voluptuarian love for Laura that culpably obscures his love of God. As both ­ Robert Durling and John Freccero have argued, however, this idolatry, “l’idolo mio scolpito in vivo Lauro,” as Petrarch phrases it in Sestina 30, is pleached into the Rime’s narrative structure.33 As a Christian, Petrarch is by no means impenitent. He shows genuine contrition for the meaner aspects of his worship. But taking Laura as a purely poetic construct whose literary form is coextensive with the corpus of the Rime, he cannot abrogate it without physically destroying the Rime itself. And having suffered the death of Laura the woman, he will not kill Laura the idea, Laura the book. Augustinus’s inaugural comment that Petrarch is like a man shackled to love and glory in chains of gold who is yet charmed by those chains divagates brilliantly from its wellspring in Plato’s cave and the philosophical search for the forms, distracting us instead with the paradoxical power of the aesthetic bonds that envelop us. Gold chains are manifestly weak, yet prove unbreakable at the end of the dialogue when the humanist in Petrarch rejects Augustinus’s counsel to forgo secular letters, saying, “I am not ignorant that, as you said a few minutes before, it would be much safer for me to attend only to the care of my soul, to relinquish altogether every bypath and follow the straight

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path of the way of salvation. But I have not the strength to resist that old bent for study altogether.” Similarly, Poem 264, which marks the beginning of the poems in morte di Laura and the start of his repentance of sinful love, ends in a capitulation, “veggio ’l meglio et al peggior m’appiglio” (I see the better but I lay hold on the worse), that the sequence never unequivocally rebuts. For Petrarch, however, the problem of idolatry does not factor down to the moral binary of cupidity versus charity. Love of the form rather than the body can be akin to righteous worship, and ­Petrarch meditates deliberately on such in the Secretum. As apologia to the Rime, the Secretum conjures an ersatz antagonist precisely so that Petrarch may confront the moral and intellectual issues of his art in a forum whose semantic distinctions he controls. That is not to say that ­Petrarch’s Augustine is a straw man; rather, he is a projection of a mind conflicted in its fondnesses for a classical cult of form and a Christian cult of spirit. In character, Augustinus is as real and as fictional a moral critic as St. Jerome’s God who in the Letters accused him of being “ciceronianus non christianus.” By way of illustration, let us turn to the language of the charge, particularly to the use of the word forma, which teeters, as it were, between the Ciceronian and the Christian: “Every creature should be dear to us because of our love for the Creator. But in your case, on the contrary, held captive by the charm of the creature, you have not loved the Creator as you ought. You have admired the Divine Artificer as though in all his works He made nothing fairer [nichil . . . formosius] than the object of your love, although in truth, the beauty of the body [forma corporea] should be reckoned least of all.”34 The measure of Petrarch’s polemic tailoring here is in the passage’s divergence in the Latin from its most significant antetext in the Confessions.35 How many allurements without number have men added to the things which entice the eyes through the various acts and by the work of craftsmen, in the form of vessels and other such artefacts, clothes, shoes, even in paintings and all kinds of statues—­exceeding all necessary and moderate use and all faithful representation. So men go outside themselves to pursue things of their own making, and inside themselves they are forsaking Him who made them and are destroying what He made in them. But I, my God and

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my glory, also dedicate a hymn to you and offer praise in sacrifice to Him who sanctifies me; for all those beauties which pass though men’s souls into their artistic hands comes from that Beauty which is above souls and for which my soul is sighing day and night. From it artists and enthusiasts for eternal beauties derive the criterion [adprobandi modum], by which to judge what is or is not beautiful, but they do not find the rule for making the right use [utendi modum] of these forms of beauty. (Confessions 10.34)

This is essentially an antimimetic homily whose object of opprobrium is the artist and his sensualism. Reading the former through the lens of the latter, Augustinus’s comments emerge subtextually as a condemnation not of Petrarch the lover but of Petrarch the artist, Petrarch the artificer of a poetic Laura, a much more sophisticated charge and to be sure more difficult to defend. To this end we will notice that the real Augustine’s vocabulary of beauty ( pulchritudo) and its figural representation (imago)—think Vogue cover—is quite different from that of Augustinus, who (and here I agree with the translator) speaks of beauty in the rarer and more connotatively loaded term forma and its comparative formosius. Forma denotes the modern “form” in the abstract geometrical sense; from late antiquity it carried its Platonic meaning of a transcendental idea or paradigm, usually with Christian, neo-Platonic overtones; and from the thirteenth­century revival of Aristotelianism under Albertus Magnus and Aquinas onward it also designated that shared quality inherent to a group or body of things that justified its being called a “species” or “kind,” whence its application to literary genre. With only gentle attenuation, forma could also suggest beauty of a particular sort, one visible to the educated mind rather than the vulgar eye, one that resonates from an underlying structure intuited subconsciously through innate principles of symmetry, like the lines of a neoclassical building or a woman’s bone structure; a beauty of innuendo; a beauty of recollection; the idea that remains when the image has faded. The importance to this passage of the phrase “forma corporea” as a simultaneously aesthetic and philosophical concept cannot be overestimated. To begin with, it is thoroughly un-Augustinian, a metaphysical paradox. Forms (in the second sense given above), insofar as they are products of the divine intellect, cannot inhere in bodies; and

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souls, not bodies, are predicated on forms.36 As Leo Spitzer clarifies, “The dualism ‘soul against body,’ so dear to Christian poetry, is not associable with classical Latin words which are lacking in any suggestion of the psycho-physical perplexities of the Christian mind, of that suture between body and soul which Montaigne recognizes in Christianity.”37 “Forma corporea” is, however, thoroughly Ovidian. In Ovid, form (like love) is a cosmic rather than divine quantity; because gods have bodies that transform like those of mortals, they are subject to the laws of form, and although they can change shape they have limited control over form itself. Apollo, for example, cannot change Daphne back into a woman. Finally, unlike anima / corpus, forma / corpus is a dichotomy, not an antinomy: the association of one with the other does not permit moral axiologies or mimetic prejudices. Why then the manipulation? Petrarch, I think, wants to trouble the assumption that the love of the “forma corporea” could possibly be of the same kind as the love of the corpus. He wants to draw attention to a transcendental inherency of forms in bodies, an idea that, while eccentric, is more in line with the Aristotelian than the neo-Platonic construction of form. More simply, Petrarch wants to show that his love for Laura need not be culpable. Thus, in the text of Augustinus’s charge, Petrarch is already preparing the terms of his subtextual defense. To highlight what is admittedly a subtle ulteriority in the Secretum, Petrarch the character plays moron to Augustinus’s sage. His reply to the charges productively misunderstands the idea of form-body that Augustine, despite himself, neatly articulates. Twice the poet protests a greater love for Laura’s soul than for her body, disregarding completely the earlier insistence upon the love of form as the root of his idolatry.38 Pressed now to the brink of confession and at the emotional azimuth of the Secretum’s curative program, Petrarch resorts to Ovid: “I see where you would drive me. You want to make me say with Ovid: ‘I love at once her body and soul’ [animum cum corpore amavi]. . . . You will have to put me to the torture ere I will make any such confession.”39 Read blind to care or caveat, this self-incrimination would seem to seal the case for idolatry and mark Petrarch’s tacit understanding that to heal himself and integrate his moral conscience with his artistic sensibilities he must recognize that there is at least as much difference between loving a woman’s soul and

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loving her body as between a hawk and a handsaw, and that loving both together is no more than concupiscence belied. That Petrarch’s Augustine wholeheartedly endorses and amplifies Ovid’s sentence, however, is one step de trop. The reasons for discerning irony here are patent and plentiful. First, one cannot help but smile that in a narrative underwritten by Augustine’s Confessions the actual moment of confession comes from Ovid. Second, the phrase in question is cadged from the Amores, which, unlike the Remedia, inappropriately utters provocations to love. Significantly, as a lyric sequence the Amores serves as a structural antetext for the Rime, while in the often abusive treatment of the flawed Corinna it is the Rime’s emotional antitext. Third, and most in point, the quotation’s continuation countermands the distinctions Petrarch and Augustine draw from it. Petrarch the lover truncates the full meanings and contexts of many Ovidian quotations in the Secretum, a fact for which Augustinus takes him to task, and he does the same here.40 Ovid in fact is lamenting the character of his beloved, who has turned prostitute. Formerly, he says, I “loved at once your character and body / now your shape [figura] is marred by the fault of your mind” (animum cum corpore amavi; / nunc mentis vitio laesa figura tua est).41 There is nothing spiritual or transcendent in this love. Where Augustinus parses anima as soul, Ovid links it in the next line to mentis, which suggests he is faulting her character. Ultimately, his rejection of her is on aesthetic grounds (her figura has been ruined in his eyes). Perhaps, of course, Augustinus accepts the authority of Ovid here because the full quotation denigrates Laura by analogy and would serve to estrange her from Petrarch’s love. But this possibility, to be effective, must be exploited, and because it is not it seems improbable. Rather, I prefer, and not without grounds, to see in the Secretum a palimpsested ideology of unity, of re-membering that exists as equipoise to the centrifugal schisms of Petrarch’s moral and historical universe. To conclude, then, both the Familiari and the Secretum play an essential prolegomenary role in interpreting the large movements of the Rime sparse. The scattering and dismemberment brought into focus by Petrarch’s fragmentary perception of Laura’s anatomy or the syllables of her name itself, as well as the theories of recollection and self-integration, are all rehearsed, theorized, and mythologized in

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these books, although provisorily. It is up to the Rime to find metaphors strong enough to recover the scattered bodies that are Laura, Petrarch, the book, a task for which he will again resort to Ovid.

Daphne and Apollo: Metaphor and Metamorphosis Two Ovidian metatexts—Apollo and Daphne and Orpheus and Eurydice—stand out like magnetic poles in the Rime sparse, each exerting its own attraction upon the collection’s poetic structures and affective formulas. Both stories question, as Petrarch does, the ultimate value of poetry and whether it actually holds the power to affect the world as it is or even as we see it. Both are stories of poetry’s response to failure, one positive, the other negative. In the first, Apollo, god of lyric, fails to possess the body of a woman he desires but sublimates his loss by claiming her as a symbol.42 What metamorphosis thwarts literally, metaphor reinstates figuratively. According to Apollo’s reading of Daphne, poetry in the transumptive mode succeeds. In Orpheus and Eurydice, the demigod of lyric is bereft of his wife on his wedding night. Unsatisfied with Apollo’s solution to loss, Orpheus treats lyric poetry as a tool to recover the literal body he desires. In the utilitarian mode, poetry fails, and in consequence the poet, not his object, suffers metamorphosis. Clearly each story and each version of poetic agency has its place in the Rime’s machinery of narrative. What that place is, I think, may best be expressed in terms of the difference between metamorphosis and metaphorism. Barring a couple of letters, these two words are quite nearly the same word. They also designate nearly the same act. Both effect changes in the immanent world, one in the thing itself and the other in the way we construe a thing, a difference with philosophical corollaries—ontology and epistemology, objectivity and subjectivity. Both also exist in a dialectic with the immanent world. But where metaphor seeks to create a surprising identity with something it is not, metamorphosis surprises by forging an identity with something it essentially is. In the aftermath of both, albeit for different reasons, those who experience each kind of change firsthand or witness it secondhand are left discomfited by not getting exactly what they wanted, yet feeling too (especially in the case of Petrarch) that

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they are morally or intellectually to blame for their own discomfiture. Metaphor and metamorphosis are how Petrarch deals with the problem of change and identity in his own poetic experience, and the Rime chronicles his path to understanding the feelings of confusion, failure, frustration, and self-doubt that each causes. The task of reading this chronicle, as it were, necessarily involves a reappraisal of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne in light of Petrarch’s appropriation. Given the crowd of critics who have shouldered this burden in recent years, this story may seem to be a horse that has been definitively and mortally flogged.43 In my defense, scourge in hand, I can only affirm that it is surprisingly still alive. Perhaps one reason is that to my knowledge the myth has never been interpreted metapoetically, as it deserves, in terms of a contest of lyric decorum, a foot race of meters between Apollo’s heroic and Cupid’s erotic, with Daphne as the metrical prize of contention. Apollo, fresh from his conquest of Python, views with palpable scorn Cupid’s use of the bow for frivolous, nonmartial matters: “ ‘Quid’ que ‘tibi, lascive puer, cum fortibus armis?’ / Dixerat: ‘ista decent umeros gestamina nostros’ ” (Metamorphoses 1.456−57). [“What hast thou to do with the arms of men, thou wanton boy? That weapon befits my shoulders.”] Invoking the epic language of “arms” and “men,” the rebuke points out the impropriety in generic terms. Picking up the gage, Cupid, for his part, clearly treats it as a poetic challenge. We know this because he flies to the top of Mount Parnassus to deliver the return missive that will convert Apollo’s heroic subjects to amatory ones and to translate his lyric locus from the battlefield to the woods and pastures of the stylus humilis. Overmastered by love’s arrow, Apollo is forced into an unbeseeming pursuit on foot, where speed is a measure of metrical decorum. His pleas for moderation and judicious meter, “moderatius, oro, / curre . . . moderatius insequar ipse” (1.510−11) [Run with less speed, I pray . . . and I too will follow with less speed], are followed by indignation at his trespass into uncouth precincts bucolic and pastoral: “Cui placeas, inquire tamen: non incola montis, / non ego sum pastor, non hic armenta gregesque / horridus observo” (1.512−14). [Nay, stop and ask who thy lover is. I am no mountain dweller, no shepherd I, no unkempt guardian here of flocks and herds.] The metapoetic conceit culminates in the famous catastrophe of the hunt when Daphne is transformed into the laurel tree:

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Vix prece finita torpor gravis occupat artus, mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro, in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt, pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret. (Metamorphoses 1.548–51) [Scarce had she thus prayed when a down-dragging numbness seized her limbs, and her soft sides were begirt with thin bark. Her hair was changed to leaves, her arms to branches. Her feet, but now so swift, grew fast in sluggish roots.] This moment, which dwells dead center in Petrarch’s poetic imagination, is the locus of the literal metaphor in the Rime sparse; it is also the manifold through which Petrarch begins to ponder the poetic connection between metamorphosis and metaphor. Ovid’s phrase for Daphne’s skin newly become bark is typically precise and roundly suggestive. “Tenuis liber” means both “thin bark” and “slender book.” While today we may think of a book as flat and rectangular, Roman books, made from the soft inner bark (liber) of trees, were often scrolls whose concentric pattern of incarnation Ovid picks up in the word cinguntur.44 Daphne’s metamorphosis from a literal to a literary corpus (L. corpus = trunk) is remarkable in Ovid because it simultaneously transforms (object to object) and translates (object to idea). But we may translate this phrase one step further toward specificity. “Tenuis liber” is also a trope for a book of the pastoral, lyric genre.45 The most famous example of this usage, and one Ovid is toying with intertextually here, comes from Vergil’s sixth eclogue, in which Apollo admonishes the shepherd Tityrus on the grounds of decorum to forgo the martial subjects of epic for the shorter, more appropriate lyric. Cum canerem reges et proelia Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit: “pastorem, Tityre, pinguis pascere oportet ovis, deductum dicere carmen.” (Eclogues 6.3–5) [When I was fain to sing of kings and battles, the Cynthian plucked my ear and warned me: “A shepherd, Tityrus, should feed sheep that are fat, but sing a lay fine-spun.”]

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Contextually, Ovid’s ironic requital of Vergil hardly needs elaboration. Cupid makes a Tityrus of Apollo, chastening his early epic pretensions. But the idea of poetic fineness that connects the “tenuis liber” to the “carmen deductum” as examples of lyric deserves an excursus, as does the anxiety antique authors experienced regarding the indefiniteness of their own genre classification system, which led them to develop metapoetic tropes as patches to genre theory. When Horace speaks “of our poems so finely spun” [tenui deducta poemata filo] (Epistles 2.1.225), or Ovid comments on how “poetry comes fine spun from the soul at peace” (carmina proveniunt animo deducta sereno) in the Tristia (1.1.39) and suggests in the Metamorphoses that his “carmen perpetuum” (infinite by implication) is also a carmen deductum, “bring down / spin finely my song in unbroken strains” [perpetuum deducite . . . carmen] (1.4), or the pseudo-Vergil remarks in his short poem “Culex” that “we have trifled, O Octavius, while a slender Muse marked the measure, and lo! like tiny spiders have fashioned our thin-spun task” [Lusimus, Octavi, gracili modulante Thalia / atque ut araneoli tenuem formavimus orsum] (1−4), they are all tipping their hats to the poetic invention of Callimachus, the Greek Alexandrian generic innovator and literary arbiter elegentiae to Augustan Rome. In the incipit to the fragmentary Aitia, Callimachus defends his brief epic’s unconventional, episodic structure by enjoining the reader not to judge poetry by “the Persian chain,” a measure of land area, but rather to “keep the Muse slender” (1.1.24). Genres scanter than epic and meters shorter than hexameter, he means to imply, may find gravitas in formal intricacy and innovation, in scale if not scope. To return to Apollo and Daphne, then, the connotations of “tenuis liber” infuse the myth with a complex metapoetic subtext. Through this one phrase, Petrarch inherits all the antique anxieties about form and combines them with those that must surely have assailed him at the moment of his own generic innovation of the lyric romance. So much depends on “l’arboscel che ’n rime orno et celebro” (148.8) [the slender tree that in my rhymes I beautify and celebrate]. In the Rime, Petrarch tropes obsessively against Apollo and Daphne in the hope of quelling both his own and his inherited anxieties. Are his rhymes fit for their subject? Are they decorous, generically appropriate, fine-spun? Poem 125 begins a sylvan series (125–29) that retraces the footsteps of

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Daphne’s flight through the woods from the perspective of a second poet-Apollo, likewise “forced” by Cupid, and humbled in the poetic forms he uses: Però ch’ Amor mi sforza et di saver mi spoglia, parlo in rime aspre et di dolcezza ignude; ma non sempre a la scorza ramo né ’n fior né ’n foglia mostra di for sua naturale vertude. (125.14–19) [Since love forces me and strips me of all skill, I speak in harsh rhymes naked of sweetness; but not always in the bark does a branch show from without its natural virtue in flower or in leaf.] By what I termed earlier the reciprocity of metamorphosis, the loverpoet becomes the tree. This analogic exchange, however, should not distract us from recognizing the metapoetic aspect of Daphne’s literary metamorphosis. Petrarch uses the language of the arboreal body to interrogate the indecorum of his poetry. The image is of a tree-author whose arm (“ramo”) composes poetic figures of speech (“fior”) upon a page (“foglia”). Love, however, has stripped the bark (“scorza”), which is to say the clothing of literary ornament, leaving his lyrics rough (“aspre”) and denuded of sweetness (“di dolcezza ignude”). Still he reasons, as Yeats later would, that there may be more enterprise in going naked. Absent its artifice, might not his poetry reveal its natural virtue? In other words, can poetry succeed without its formal elements? Is its power only in form? The index of anxiety he locates in the Daphne metaphor is evident in the answer of the poem’s coda: O poverella mia, come se’ rozza! credo che tel conoschi: rimanti in questi boschi. (125.79–81) [O poor little song, how inelegant you are! I think you know it: stay here in these woods.]

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The attractions of metaphor alone, of the transumptive mode that shows one thing in terms of another, falter in 125 as they do not in the earliest constructions of Laura as Daphne. Canzone 23, for example, ends by affirming only metaphors of transcendence: Canzon, i’ non fu’ mai quel nuvol d’oro che poi discese in preziosa pioggia Sì che’l foco di Giove in parte spense; ma fui ben fiamma ch’un bel guardo accense, et fui l’uccel che più per l’aere poggia alzando lei chene’ miei detti onoro. (23.162–66) [Song, I was never the cloud of gold that descended in a precious rain so that it partly quenched the fire of Jove; but I have certainly been a flame lit by a lovely glance, and I have been the bird that rises highest in the air, raising her whom in my words I honor.] As surely as the poet-lover believes in the power of metaphor to elevate emotionally, so he resists Ovid’s metamorphic essentialism. Explicitly rebutting the nova corpora of the Metamorphoses’ incipit, the poet finds virtue in his attachment to this one, this first incarnation of Laura, rather than entertain the teleological possibility that Laura’s beauty can exist essentially in new bodies. Né per nova figura il primo alloro seppi lassar, che pur la sua dolce ombra ogni men bel piacer del cor mi sgombra. (23.167–69) [Nor for any new shape (body) could I leave the first laurel, for still its sweet shade turns away from my heart any less beautiful pleasure.] In the early poems of the Rime, the anxieties of the tenuis liber are either repressed or refracted into other conceits, perhaps because Petrarch is not ready to unpack the history of this phrase or to shoulder the full hermeneutic burden of Laura’s bibliofication as a poetic problem until Poem 125. The alternatives of metamorphosis and metaphor

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as coping strategies for loss, as we have interpreted it through Apollo and Daphne, will force the poet-sufferer into a painful choice between having Laura only as an aesthetic construct or losing his desire for her, which is to say losing the trope of loss, which is to say repudiating elegy. To make so dire a choice, Petrarch will have to understand what the attraction of the tenuous “book” of Laura really is and what he as poet can be without it. Canzone 23 makes a tentative approach to owning this problem when, for the first time in the collection, Petrarch tries on the language of the tenuis liber, translating it into scorza (bark, skin, shell, cortex) and pairing it, as he will with greater confidence and purpose in 125, 180, and 278, with sforza (will, compunction, force). He begins by acknowledging that he has already been transformed into a rhetorical figure or exemplum, “canterò com’ . . . / . . . io son fatto a molta gente essempio; / ben che ’l mio duro scempio / sia scritto ­altrove . . .” (5, 9–10). He continues, E se qui la memoria non m’aita come suol fare, iscusilla i martiri et un penser che solo angosci dàlle, tal ch’ad ogni altro fa voltar le spalle e mi face obliar me stesso a forza, ch’ e’ ten di me quel d’entro, et io la scorza. (23.15–20) [And if here my memory does not aid me as it is wont to do, let my torments excuse it and one thought which alone gives it such anguish that it makes me turn my back on every other and makes me forget myself beyond resistance, for it holds what is within me, and I only the shell.] This is a passage extraordinarily crowded with mythopoetic suggestion, yet oblique in its exposition of myth. I cannot pause now, for example, to do more than note the topos of turning one’s back, which functions, as we shall see, as the fulcrum of Petrarch’s Orphic poetics. I will, however, point out the lineaments of the book image Petrarch has been assembling from “essempio” onward, which culminates in his admission that one anxious thought (of Laura, presumably) constitutes the sum total of “what is within” him, that is, the story of himself, and that he is merely the “scorza,” what is often translated as “shell”

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but that, given the book conceit, should be read as “cover.” However, while Ovid’s liber turns Laura into a metaliterary symbol, the word scorza makes her a full-blown theory of reading and interpreting. Medieval images of integument, cortex, chaff and fruit, shell and nut, bark and pith—the list is long—are all conventional formulas of allegoresis, in which words form attractive veneers to underlying truths. By translating liber as “scorza,” Petrarch moves Ovid’s trope from symbol to hermeneutic: the forming of the bark around Laura turns her into a poetic topic, metaphorizing her as it metamorphoses. But there is also a great danger to this conflation of metaphor with metamorphosis. The moment the bark forms and Laura becomes a subject of allegory, she loses the exclusivity of literal meaning, ceases to signify ­ singly, and her identity as woman is instantly fragmented into a kaleidoscope of notional Lauras that multiply beyond Petrarch’s power to describe and hence to possess. In Canzone 23, Petrarch has not yet applied the “scorza” to Laura and thus can speak with his naive confidence in metaphoric transcendence. By Poem 278, the enthusiasm that through metaphorics he may transcend the physical limits (“scorza”) to recovering Laura deflates to poetic impotence before a Laura who has transcended the mortal boundaries (“terrena scorza”) of the effable and outrun his infra-Apollonian capacity to follow. Ne l’età sua più bell et più fiorita, quando aver suoi Amor in noi più forza, lasciando in terra la terrena scorza è l’aura mia vital da me partita. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Deh, perché me del mio mortal non scorza l’ultimo dì . . . ? (278.1–5, 7) [In her most beautiful, most flourishing age, when Love is wont to have most power over us, leaving her earthly vesture to earth, my vital breeze has departed from me. . . . Ah, why does my last day not divest me of my mortal part . . . ?] No less important to Petrarch’s interpretation of Apollo and Laura is the word sforza, with which scorza is always rhymed. By way of the Secretum, I have spoken already of the role of violence in Ovidian

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poetics and its presence as a suppressed motive in the Rime and have suggested that it is most clearly refracted through Orpheus’s dismemberment. In Apollo and Daphne, a story of a rape narrowly averted, violence takes the form of a discourse of coercion, both polemical and interpretive, by which we as readers are chivvied into complicity despite what should be our better knowledge. Of course, the primary agent of indirect “sforza” is love itself: Cupid’s arrows do not so much injure Apollo and Daphne as compel them insidiously and involuntarily. The coerced in turn become the coercers. So Daphne, newly converted to celibacy, cajoles her father, Peneus, into contravening his own fervent desire for grandchildren—“you owe me grandsons” [debes mihi nata nepotes] (482)—and guaranteeing instead her sexual emancipation. illa velut crimen taedas exosa iugales pulchra verecundo suffuderat ora rubore inque patris blandis haerens cervice lacertis, “da mihi perpetua, genitor carissime,” dixit “virginitate frui! dedit hoc pater ante Dianae.” Ille quidem obsequitur. (Metamorphoses 1.483–88) [But she, hating the wedding torch as if it were a thing of evil, would blush rosy red over her fair face and, clinging around her father’s neck with coaxing arms, would say: “O father, dearest, grant me to enjoy perpetual virginity. Her father has already granted this to Diana.” He, indeed, yielded to her request.] Apollo’s advocacy is both more brazen and more subtle. Thomas Greene’s interpretation of Apollo’s role at the end of the story with regard to Petrarch typifies a rather common misreading that, I think, both Ovid and Petrarch would have recognized as a textual violation: “Ovid’s myth of Daphne (Metamorphoses 1.452 ff.) lies between extremes and tempers its pathos skillfully and typically with an understated sense of fitness. The nymph’s stubborn virginity is presented as a little deviant, but her plea for transformation is granted by the Peneus and Apollo accepts it, according her a kind of affectionate apotheosis as his adopted emblem to which the laurel in its turn assents with a formal inclination of its leafy top. The stress at the end is

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on accommodation.”46 If I am correct in taking this tale to be about, at least on one level, the ways poetry can and cannot alter the immanent world and the power that language and imagery exert over the imagination, we must exercise considerably more skepticism of poetry’s “accommodations” than Greene does and more sensitivity to it as a violator as well as expositor of meaning, especially in a text about violation. Here is how Ovid renders the scene: . . . oscula dat ligno: refugit tamen oscula lignum. cui deus “at quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, arbor eris certe” dixit “mea! semper habebunt te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .” Finierat Paean: factis modo laurea ramis adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen. (Metamorphoses 1.556–59, 566–67) [He pressed his lips upon the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses. And the god cried out to this: “Since thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt at least be my tree. . . .” Paean was done. The laurel waved her new made branches, and seemed to move her head-like top in full consent.] Notice that Ovid’s terminal equivocation is delivered in the optative voice. The laurel waves its branches and “seems to move” (visa est agitasse) its head in assent. To whom does it seem, though? Apollo is the only attendant witness and given his prior disposition toward rape is hardly likely to be objective in the face of demurral; nor is Daphne, as erstwhile victim, likely to be receptive. Ovid intentionally leaves the interpretation of the gestures ambiguous. The nymph’s branch waving is as—perhaps more—likely a sign of rejection than of acceptance. The sway of her head could denote either a nod or a shake. Thus Ovid allows the possibility to resonate that Daphne’s ­poetic accommodation, like all other behavior in this story, is suborned, that though Apollo fails to rape her body he succeeds semiotically in violating her will, co-opting her vocal assent when she can no longer speak.47 The violence in this story, then, lies not in the metamorphosis that preserves Daphne’s will but in the metaphor—a tree in the wind likened to a head nodding—which, by the arbitrary yet aesthetically appealing

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similitudes of poetry in the transumptive mode, reinscribes what is not as what is. Penitent of its own textual violence, the Rime equivocates between locating it in the act of metamorphosis and in the concealment of metaphor. In Canzone 23, for example, we witness Petrarch acknowledge his desire for Laura, mediated through Ovidian intertext in a passage that is unsure whether the greater crime is lust or the farfetched metaphor Petrarch uses to accommodate it. I’ segui’ tanto avanti il mio desire ch’un dì, cacciando sì com’ io solea, mi mossi, e quella fera bella et cruda in una fonte ignuda si stava, quando’l sol più forte ardea. Io perché d’altra vista non m’appago stetti a mirarla, ond’ ella ebbe vergogna et per farne vendetta o per celarse l’acqua ne viso co le man mi sparse. Vero dirò; forse e’ parrà menzogna: ch’ i’ senti’ trarmi de la propria imago et in un cervo solitario et vago di selva ratto mi trasformo, et ancor de’ miei can fuggo lo stormo. (23.147–60) [I followed so far my desire that one day, hunting as I was wont, I went forth, and that lovely cruel wild creature was in a spring naked when the sun burned most strongly. I, who am not appeased by any other sight, stood to gaze on her, whence she felt shame and, to take revenge or to hide herself, sprinkled water in my face with her hand. I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie, for I felt myself drawn from my own image and into a solitary stag wandering from wood to wood quickly I am transformed and still I flee the belling of my hounds.] Rhyming celarse (to conceal, to hide) with sparse (to scatter, to sprinkle), Petrarch chooses words that nominate the attributes of both metaphor and metamorphosis. Diana’s “sprinkled” water is, in Ovid, the substance that transforms Actaeon into a stag, just as it “hides” her

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by causing his vision to swim. In turn, Actaeon’s identity is “hidden” by metamorphosis from his hounds, who dismember him. Metaphor also hides things, although its rhetorical attraction lies in the deceit of concealing identities in order to reveal them more meaningfully. Indeed, Petrarch’s likening himself to Actaeon serves to conceal and distract our attention from the fact that like Apollo pursuing Daphne, but unlike Actaeon who happens upon Diana, Petrarch actually seeks Laura out and violates her privacy intentionally. Metaphor, in the form of metonymy, also creates meaning by “scattering” images, like the myriad lyrics themselves, to demonstrate the occult relationships of one thing with many seemingly random other things, a behavior that canzone 23 demonstrates in the fluid entropy of its multiple metamorphoses. Amid this ferment, the celarse/sparse couplet acts as a dividing line between narrative and metanarrative. The splash of the water also interrupts the narrative illusion in the reader’s eye for a Husserlian Augenblick in which Petrarch questions the poetic credibility (“I shall speak the truth, perhaps it will appear a lie”) of the act of metaphorizing, of being “drawn from my own image and into a solitary wandering stag.” Ultimately, though, the passage prefers to locate violence in metamorphosis and seems content to violate its textual source to effect an accommodation of Petrarch-the-offender to Petrarch-the-­victim. Thus the lover exits decorously, still fleeing “the belling of my hounds,” where the real Actaeon ends in carnage. We witness similar accommodations to the problem of desire and textual violation posed by Apollo’s gaze in later poems. Typically, like Apollo, the lover-poet fastens his dissecting vision on the edges of Laura’s body, the paraphernalia of her femininity—hair, hands, arms, eyes, feet—leaving the center a magnetic blank onto which the male reader may project erotic fantasies of possession. In Poem 347, as in Canzone 23, Petrarch is both morally and metapoetically disturbed by this fact and again seeks to shrive himself of desire through intertext. Et senti che ver te il mio core in terra tal fu qual ora in Cielo, et mai non volsi altro da te che’l sol de li occhi tuoi. ( 347.9–11)

210  romance form and formality [And you know that my heart was toward you on earth as it is toward you now in Heaven, and that I never wished anything from you but the sunlight in your eyes.]

Yet the phrase “sol de li occhi tuoi” invokes an Ovidian passage that identifies him with the less than eleemosynary Apollo: “He gazes at her eyes gleaming like stars, he gazes upon her lips, which but to gaze on does not satisfy. He marvels at her fingers, hands, and wrists, and her arms, bare to the shoulder; and what is hid he deems still lovelier” (Metamorphoses 1.498–502). By concealing the full context of his allusion, Petrarch impugns the veracity of his own witness. Just as he figures Laura’s body as a frame empty of sexual motive, so he voids her description in Ovid of sexuality, violating her both bodily and textually. For readers of the Rime, the consequence of Petrarch’s reading of Apollo and Daphne is that the recuperative power of poetry, its capacity to redeem objective loss subjectively, is asserted at the expense of the poets’ and our own moral suspicion that poetry should not recuperate loss. The alternative is to treat poetry as an affective tool that must by design fail in its accommodation of reality, yet in failure finds redemption in a poetics of insufficiency.

Orphic Turns and the Problem of Insufficiency Much of the poetic impact of books 10 and 11 of the Metamorphoses turns on a moment of turning, a trope (Gr. trepein = to turn) of tropes. Having charmed Hades out of his prize, Orpheus leads his dead wife toward the light; but on the threshold of success he stumbles: Hanc simul et legem Rhodopeius accipit heros, ne flectat retro sua lumina, donec Avernas exierit valles; aut inrita dona futura. Carpitus adclivis per muta silentia trames, arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca, nec procul afuerunt telluris margine summae: his, ne deficeret, metuens avidusque videndi flexit amans oculos, et protinus illa relapsa est,

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bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans nil nisi cedentes infelix arripit auras. iamque iterum moriens non est de coniuge quicquam questa suo (quid enim nisi se queretur amatam?) supremumque “vale,” quod iam vix auribus ille acciperet, dixit revolutaque rursus eodem est. (Metamorphoses 10.50–63) [Thus then the Thracian hero received his wife and with her this condition, that he should not turn his eyes backward until he had gone forth from the valley of Avernus, or else the gift would be in vain. They took the upsloping path through places of utter silence, a steep path, indistinct and clouded in pitchy darkness. And now they were nearing the margin of the upper earth, when he, afraid that she might fail him, eager for sight of her, turned back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths. He stretched out his arms, eager to catch her or to feel her clasp; but, unhappy one, he clasped nothing but the yielding air. And now, dying a second time, she made no complaint against her husband; for of what could she complain save that she was beloved? She spake one last “farewell” which scarcely reached her husband’s ears, and fell back again to the place whence she had come.] Why does he turn? We understand viscerally the forces of doubt that compel, perhaps, but intellectually we cannot condone the act. Until, that is, we recognize that this is a poet acting as a poet. Nothing is more negatively attractive and less artistic than aporia. Initially music wins Eurydice back, yet in the infernal silence of return only images can claim her definitively for new life. Instead, the poet’s artistic compulsion to observe brings on a second death. Or we may view the impulse to turn as feeding a cognate dilemma. Turning back is an act of forgetfulness of the god’s injunction and a failure of romantic memory whose inward images of the beloved cannot suffice. But as Nietzsche reminds us, “it is possible to live almost without memory, indeed to live happily, as the animals show us; but without forgetting, it is utterly impossible to live at all. Or to make my point clearer: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical awareness, which injures and finally destroys a living thing, whether a man, a people, or a culture.”48 This is the problem of memory that Petrarch

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discovers in his attic. Either way, there can be no recollection without forgetfulness. Thus, poetically, forgetting it is also a metaphor of remembering. These are lessons not lost on Petrarch, whose great labor of the poems in morte is, as we shall see, to recover the immortal Laura by unremembering the mortal. Given the poetic centrality of Apollo and Daphne to the Rime, Orpheus and Eurydice proves to be a story with considerable contrapuntal value. Apollo fails literally to win Daphne but succeeds poetically; Orpheus wins Eurydice back from Hades but fails to seize her poetically. Indeed, the end of his tale conveys the powerlessness of words before the Bacchants’ unshirted fury, “words then, but never before, unheeded” (Metamorphoses 11.40). In Ovid, the Bacchants’ butchering tools, like Orpheus’s useless words and Petrarch’s rhymes, fall “dispersa per agros” (Metamorphoses 11.35), suggesting the poet’s dismemberment. In Georgics 4.522, Vergil particularizes Orpheus’s dismemberment; his body, not the tools, suffer dispersal. Either way, both classical poets balance their narratives between remembering and dismembering without ever exploring their causal correlation. This task falls to Petrarch. Through a reading of the Orpheus myth in Boethius and Ovid, Petrarch discovers the generic structure of romance as a body of fragments reassembled, or to use Petrarch’s language, remembered through an iterative pattern of turning back. Before turning to a close reading of Orpheus and Eurydice as a poetic paradigm for the Rime sparse, I would like to address the theory of the poetics of the fragmented body and its relationship to a phenomenological consciousness in Petrarch’s narration. Humans, according to Georg Simmel, are aware of the limits of the spheres of social experience (forms) in which they transact their lives. An existential symptom of this awareness, however, is the realization that, like the scholar who knows his field well enough to feel anxiety at his incomplete knowledge of it, we are acutely conscious of our insufficiency, our fragmentary grasp of the wholeness of our social form. Indeed, Simmel argues, it is in the nature of culture and individual consciousness that we may recognize wholes, but experience only fragments: “Thus, the constantly felt fragmentariness of life seems to me to reveal a sense of the world in its lineaments beyond pure elegiacal contemplation. We are constantly traversing manifold planes, each of which presents the world totality according to a dif-

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ferent formula. Yet from each our life takes with it only a fragment at any given time.”49 This is Petrarch’s dilemma and subject of elegiacal contemplation: a desire for personal wholeness, or integration of the social forms and institutions that shape his spiritual and professional world (monastery, religion, poetry, authorship, audience), and his desire for emotional wholeness in possessing Laura’s body or even her complete image. But repairing the fragmentation of his experiential sphere, he comes to realize, is fundamentally impossible. For while it is theoretically possible to find wholeness in the subjective form of belief or the objective form of group membership, it is not possible to recover union with Laura, either literally or aesthetically (his memory is too fractured). Worse, as he realizes in Canzone 23, the desire for wholeness, even of the self, is impossible, for as Simmel explains, “We are all fragments not only of a social type . . . but also, as it were, fragments of the type which only we ourselves are.”50 The sociological problem of fragmentary form that Simmel posits can be brought closer still to actual, phenomenological consciousness in Petrarch’s poetry. To do so, however, I need to frame a distinction between a narrative art that seeks to render what-it-is-like impressions of Laura and a representational consciousness that describes what-it-was experiences of a moment. For a thing or action to have meaning, to be noticed to exist, it must be understood to be part of a whole. Often our experience of wholes in the world exceeds in spatial or temporal magnitude our ability to process them sensually in a single frame, such as a panorama of the Grand Canyon or the events of one’s wedding. To compensate, we may stitch wholes together by a logical ordering of sensory experiences of each part, much as we do when we walk around a geometric structure and perceive a series of squares in a certain number whose shape is determined by the changes of geometry as we move. From this pattern we assemble a composite signifying “cube” or “house.” For the assembly process to work, and for the whole to be comprehensible to others, we need a fixed point of reference to serve as a compass orienting human experience. This referent of wholeness is the human body. Extrapolating to Petrarch, the body serves as referent for his major metaphors: the house of the mind in the Familiari, the textual corpus or tenuis liber that is both Laura and the book of Rime sparse. Clearly in the Rime Petrarch is as interested in the stitchwork as he is in the

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finished confection, that is, in the poetics of his response to Laura’s absence as much as the phenomenon of her absence. The two concerns are never either fully integrated or subordinated. The equivocation between these two competing attractions in his poetry is in part the reason for the Rime’s being “sparse.” But only in part. The question remains why the sensory sequence in Petrarch’s memory persists in a state of scatteredness. One obvious answer to the problem posed by a phenomenological recovery of Laura is that a beloved is experientially different from a house or the Grand Canyon. As Merleau-Ponty points out vis-àvis the cube: “The object and my body, it will be alleged, certainly form a system, but what we have then is a nexus of objective correlations and not, as we have just said, a collection of lived-through correspondences. The unity of the object is thus conceived, and not experienced, as the correlative of our body’s unity.”51 The phenomenon of a beloved object, unlike the cube, is composed of subjective, impressionistic, what-it-is-like memories quite unlike the ordered what-it-is remembering of the representational consciousness that we use for describing or conveying information. That is to say, poetically a beloved is more like Proust’s madeleine than William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow. Petrarch’s poetic representations of Laura, then, can never successfully recover the wholeness or unity of his lost beloved. Laura is iteratively remembered as a fractured body precisely because her phenomenal identity cannot be re-membered by the representational, which is to say poetic, consciousness. Poetry for Petrarch, in other words, is mimetically insufficient. The point of tangency among the phenomenology of memory, a poetics of insufficiency, and Orpheus is the reflex of turning back. As a trope and a scheme, “turning back” generates temporal eddies or countercurrents in the Rime’s forward narrative flow. It portrays the act of memory as a resistance to linear time; it imagines an inversion of somatic, natural, and cosmic processes; it translates Christ’s apocalyptic return and triumph over death into Orphic typology; it signals a poetic recursivity pitting lyric against narrative temporalities;52 it embraces a romance avoidance of closure. From its first poem, the Rime follows a chronology that is demonstrably retrograde. Advancing by walking backwards, it surveys the new emotional territory it reaches only in retrospect. Nor can Petrarch imagine new vistas of emotional

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recovery in advance of his immediate pathos. In Poem 1, he directs our gaze backward to a “primo giovenile errore” ( 3); in Poem 3 we witness Laura’s first appearance, again with backfaring glances (“era il giorno . . . ,” 1), while in Poem 4 we are led to descry in the more distant offing the birth of Christ and a genesis that eventuates in Laura’s birth in the “picciol borgo” of a Provence Bethlehem. In Poem 9, the retrograde momentum formalizes into an astronomical trope in which hours literally re-turn. Quando ’l pianeta che distingue l’ore ad albergar col Tauro si ritorna, cade vertù da l’infiammate corna che veste il mondo di novel colore. (4.1–4) [When the planet that marks off the hours returns to dwell with the Bull, from his flaming horns falls virtue which clothes the world in fresh color.] Laura becomes the revolving star, the sun, triggering in Petrarch a sympathetic recursion of erotic thought and language that, despite its turns, never manages to move him forward in time to a moment of emotional and poetic plenitude: Così costei, ch’ è tra le donne un sole, in me movendo de’ begli occhi i rai cria d’amor penseri atti et parole: ma come ch’ella gli governi o volga, primavera per me pur non è mai. (4.10–14) [Thus she who among ladies is a sun, moving the rays of her lovely eyes, in me creates thoughts, acts, and words of love; but however she governs or turns them, spring for me still never comes.] The sonnet’s dominant conceit is a reverse-gendered pregnancy (“gravido fa di sé . . . ,” 8) in the poet inspired by desire but not gifted with the quickness of love’s fruition, that is, a desire without the promise of a spring birth. Brilliantly, the sonnet’s turn or volta, which surprises us by denying emotional satisfaction through poetry and by

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restraining the seasonal cycles of (pro)creativity, corresponds with the “volga” at line 13 through which Laura “turns” the poet’s language and memory. Anticipating Orpheus’s post-Eurydicean turn inward to madness, Petrarch uses “volta” and “volga” in Poem 6 to signal a poetic schizophrenia in which aspects of the lover-narrator’s mind turn against him while the representational consciousness turns back to watch in helpless retrospect. Here he imagines the poet as an Apollonian cavalier astride a stallion of desire. Sì traviato è ’l folle mi’ desio a seguitar costei che ’n fuga è volta et de’ lacci d’Amor leggiera et sciolta vola dinanzi al lento correr mio, che quanto richiamando più l’envio per la secura strada men m’ascolta, né mi vale spronarlo o dargli volta ch’Amor per sua natura il fa restio. (6.1–8) [So far astray is my mad desire, in pursuing her who has turned in flight and, light and free of the snares of Love, flies ahead of my slow running, that when, calling him back, I send him by the most safe path, then he least obeys me, nor does it help to spur him or turn him, for Love makes him restive by nature.] The lurching advances, matched almost evenly by indocile retreats, trace the poet’s vacillating commitment to love as natural force or moral category. In Poem 15 the same dislocative countermotions gesture their presence in the word volga but parse instead a tension between the body of the poem and the memories that animate it, between the necessity of the poem’s forward movement and an antipoetic desire to indulge in reverie without the burden of representation. Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo col corpo stanco ch’ a gran pena porto, et prendo allor de vostr’ aere conforto che ’l fa gir oltra, dicendo: “Oimè, lasso.” (15.1–4)

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[I turn back at each step with my weary body which with great effort I carry forward, and I take then some comfort from your sky, which enables my body to go onward, saying: “Alas, woe’s me.”]

Paradoxically, the “corpo,” at once the poet’s and the poem’s, proceeds forward on the nostalgic energy generated by turning back. Similarly, the clichéd lament of the lyric lover, “Oime, lasso,” propels the poem along well-worn generic grooves even though lasso (“alas” or “I tire”) announces the poet’s inertia, capitulation, silence. Thus hobbled by internecine energies, the poem staggers to a halt in stanza 2 when the action of turning back (“rivolgo”) gives way to inert reflection (“ripensando”): Poi ripensando al dolce ben ch’io lasso al camin lungo, et al mio viver corto, fermo le piante sbigottito et smorto, et gli occhi in terra lagrimando abbaso. (15.5–8) [Then, thinking back on the sweet good I leave behind, on the length of the road and the shortness of my life, I stand in the tracks dismayed and pale and lower my eyes weeping to the ground.] Stanza 2 is obtrusively metapoetical. In line 5, we find the poet contemplating the bittersweet “dolce ben” of his poetic bequest to posterity, a metafiction confirmed in line 6 by the “camin lungo, et al mio viver corto,” which translates the famous self-reflexive theme “Ars longa, vita brevis.” With the word ripensando, the poem assumes a posture of regret. But it is also an act of rethinking how retrospective thought functions as the motor of lyric art. Where Wordsworth would later contend simply that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” Petrarch discovers a memory that produces the opposite emotional state, a ferment that feeds poetic expression but also threatens to paralyze it. A confusion worse confounded, Petrarchan remembering moves to dismember even as it promises to heal, whence the pairing of membra with rimembra in stanzas 3 and 4. Talor m’assale in mezzo a’ tristi pianti un dubbio: come posson queste membra

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da lo spirito lor viver lontane? Ma rispondemi Amor: “Non ti rimembra che questo è privilegio degli amanti, sciolti da tutte qualitati umane?” (15.9–14) [At times in the midst of my sad laments a doubt assails me: How can these members live far from their spirit? But Love replies to me: “Do you not remember that this is a privilege of lovers, released from all human qualities?”] The fracturing of the lover-poet’s identity into constituent parts (corpo, spirito, membra) and the consequent loss of psychological and narrative coherence in the wake of the missing Laura are immedicable woes beyond the rescue of memory. There is no re-membering. There is only, as Amor says, remembering “questo privilegio degli amanti,” namely accepting romance dislocation as generically definitive of lyric, what Jaufre Rudel troped as “amor de lonh” and Petrarch “viver lontane.” We are asked again, in other words, to accept that lyric romance is defined by its incapacity to bring to harbor the desire it launches. These brief readings must suffice to illustrate the grosser semantic and theoretical features of “turning back” among the poems in vivo di Laura. Evidence that this theme owes anything to Orpheus must wait for Poem 187, when the ur-poet first enters, and for the mortal exit of Laura in 250, after which the correlation to Eurydice becomes condign and inevitable. Thus Eurydice’s mortal wound in the heel from a snake in the grass in Poem 323: Alfin vid’io per entro i fiori et l’erba pensosa ir sì leggiadra et bella Donna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . ma le parti supreme eran avolte d’una nebbia oscura. Punta poi nel tallon d’un picciol angue come fior colto langue lieta si dispartio . . . . (323.61–62, 67–71) [Finally I saw walking thoughtful amid the flowers and the grass a Lady so joyous and beautiful . . . but her highest parts were

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wrapped in a dark mist. Pierced then in the heel by a little snake, as a plucked flower languishes she departed happy . . . .]

and Orpheus’s invocation by name in Poem 332, Or avess’ ioun sì pietoso stile che Laura mia potesse torre a Morte come Euridice Orfeo sua senza rime . . . . ( 332.49–51) [Would I had so sorrowful a style that I could win my Laura back from Death as Orpheus won his Eurydice without rhymes . . . .] The subject of Orphism and Orphic thematics in the Rime sparse, however, has attracted scant critical consideration mostly because it is largely inexplicit.53 Robert Durling informs us that Petrarch knew the story primarily from Vergil, as well as from Ovid.54 In fact, the Rime’s Orphism is a composite of three Orpheuses, and primarily a contention between the Boethian and the Ovidian. In comparison to the religious and poetic issues raised by these two, Vergilian influence is slight and confined entirely to verbal echoes. Vergil’s scene of turning back, although graced by felicitous incidental imagery, suffers from melo­ dramatic blocking and unexcogitated motives that, together, jibe poorly with Petrarch’s aesthetics. Vergil’s Orpheus, for example, is possessed by an unexplained furor (“incautum dementia”) to look back, for which he is roundly chastised by a Eurydice too garrulous in death and too Xantippean in demeanor to evoke sympathy. But despite her verbose exit, Vergil manages the compelling image of weakening hands extended in vain hope (“invalidesque tibi tendens palmas,” 4.498) from an unreachable afterworld, whose erotic pathos Petrarch redirects in Poem 354: Deh, porgi, mano a l’affanato ingegno, Amor, et a lo stile stanco et frale per dir di quella ch’ e fatta immortale et cittadina del celeste regno.55 ( 354.1–4) [Ah, reach your hand to my weary mind, Love, and to my tired frail style, to speak of her who has become immortal and a citizen of the heavenly kingdom.]

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To Vergil, too, Petrarch owes the poet-lover’s vexed desire to speak (“multa voluntem dicere,” 501–2), which finds vexed expression in such dream poems as 336, in which Laura turns or returns (“tornami”) to his mind: “Tornami a mente . . . / e’n don le cheggio sua dolce favella” ( 336.1, 8) [She comes to mind . . . and I beg her for the gift of her sweet speech].56 Verbal echoes, however, have little to reveal of the significance of Orphic thematics to the Rime, and one could be excused, as many readers must, for ignoring Orpheus’s presence. In fact, only through the lens of the Secretum do we begin to perceive the Orphic specter behind Petrarch’s poetic turnings. Enjoining Petrarch to heed Ovidian remedies and quit all attachments to his beloved Laura, Augustinus warns against recidivism: “You must, as I said, make your soul ready, and teach it to renounce the object of its love, never once to turn back [nec in tergum verti], never to see that which it was wont to look for [nec assueta respicere]. This is the only sure road for the lover.”57 Reiterated shortly thereafter, the admonition becomes topical: “But you, O man, must keep on in your flight for life, till you have escaped everything that might drag the soul back to its old passions; for fear lest, when you return from the pit with Orpheus and look back [retroque respiciens], you lose your Eurydice once more.”58 Augustinus’s notional Eurydice is nothing less than the effulgence of reason, while the infernal Eurydice toward whom Orpheus casts back his errant eye represents a corporeal distraction from the mind’s ascent to the supersensual. Petrarch’s tropological rendering of the myth both in the Secretum and in the later poems of the Rime derives immediately from Boethius’s Orpheus of the Consolation of Philosophy and the influential medieval commentaries upon it.59 In book 3, Boethius describes the familiar Platonic movement of the soul upward from the sensual world and inward toward the light of remembered truths as an anabasis that is also an anamnesis.60 Thus in metrum 11, which serves as philosophical preface to the Orpheus tale of me­­trum 12, Boethius maps the path of memory as a salutary turning back or rather turning away from a shadowland of error: Quisquis profunda mente vestigat verum Cupitque nullis ille deviis falli,

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In se revolvat intimi lucem visus .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Dudum quod atra texit erroris nubes Lucebit ipso perspicacius Phoebo .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Quod si Platonis musa personat verum, Quod quisque discit immemor recordatur. ( 3.11.1–3, 7–8, 15–16) [Whoever with deep thought seeks out truth and wants not to go wrong down devious ways must on himself turn back the light of his inward vision. . . . What the black cloud of error lately covered will shine then clearer than Phoebus himself. . . . If Plato’s muse rings true, what each man learns, forgetful he recalls.] Preferring Platonic to Apollonian light, Boethius may now speak of Orphic lyric as a philosophic renunciation of the erotic: Ne, dum Tartara liquerit, Fas sit lumina flectere. Quis legem det amantibus? Maior lex amor est sibi. Heu, noctis prope terminos Orpheus Eurydicen suam Vidit perdidit, occidit. Vos haec fabula respicit Quicumque in superum diem Mentem ducere quæritis. Nam qui Tartareum in specus Victus lumina flexerit, Quidquid praecipuum trahit Perdit, dum videt inferos. ( 3.12.45–58) [While he Tartarus quits he shall not turn his gaze. Who can give lovers laws? Love is a greater law unto itself. Woe! By the very boundaries of Night Orpheus his Eurydice saw, lost, and killed. To you this tale refers, who seek to lead your mind into the upper day; for he who, overcome, should turn back his gaze towards the

222  romance form and formality Tartarean cave, whatever excellence he takes with him he loses when he looks on those below.]

This Boethian Orpheus is present in the motifs of illumination and ascent of Poems 277, 339, 357, 359, and 362, culminating in the Christian epiphany of 366, . . . Fonte di pietate et di giustizia il Sol che rasserena il secol pien d’errori oscuri et folti. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . . . . Re che’ nostri lacci à scolti et fatto ’l mondo libero et felice ( 366.42−44, 48−49) [The Fountain of pity and Sun of justice, who makes bright the world though it is full of dark and thick errors. . . . King who has loosed our bonds and made the world free and happy] which echoes the lines with which Boethius begins the Orpheus tale: Felix qui potuit boni Fontem visere lucidum, Felix qui potuit gravis Terrae solvere vincula ( 3.12.1−4) [Happy was he who could look upon / The clear fountain of the good: / Happy who could loose the bonds of heavy earth]. Petrarch’s poet-lover ends the Rime sparse, in other words, by becoming the Boethian Orpheus manqué. The local influence of Ovid’s Orpheus, as I have already indicated, is strongest upon the poems in vivo and those later poems in which erotic passion for Laura still claims guilty sway. Ideologically, the narrative of the poems in morte chronicles the poet-lover’s gradual apostasy from the Ovidian cult, his philosophic conversion to Boethian transcendental Orphism, and as his love for Laura gives ground to that for Christ, his religious devotion to the Christian cult of the missing body. The Ovidian Orpheus, then, exerts sway as a negative exemplar.

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Structurally and generically, however, Ovid superintends the entire sequence of the Rime without prejudice. The linked narremes of Ovid’s Orpheus sequence, for example, contribute the paradigm of a poetic unity of lyric fragments that resolves the elegiac problem of loss by reiterating it variously. Each of the stories of Orpheus’s narration of Metamorphoses 10–11 refigures the loss of an object of desire, transforming Eurydice into a text of loss.61 Beginning with Apollo-Hyacinthus, a version of Apollo-Daphne, Orpheus tells the same story of Eurydice over and over, like Petrarch of Laura, until he finds vicarious satisfaction in Pygmalion, the only artist to hypostasize his absent love.62 The narrative recursivity of Metamorphoses 10–11 is also a generic symptom of romance’s resistance to closure. Only Ovid appends to the tale a final scene of Orpheus and Eurydice’s reunion in the afterworld, transforming the mood of turning back generically from elegy to romance: Umbra subit terras, et quae loca viderat ante, cuncta recognoscit quaerensque per arva piorum invenit Eurydicen cupidisque amplectitur ulnis; hic modo coniunctis spatiantur passibus ambo, nunc praecedentem sequitur, nunc praevius anteit Eurydicenque suam iam tuto respicit Orpheus. (11.61–66) [The poet’s shade fled beneath the earth, and recognized all the places he had seen before; and, seeking through the blessed fields, found Eurydice and caught her in his eager arms. Here now side by side they walk; now Orpheus follows her as she precedes, now goes before her, now may in safety look back upon his Eurydice.] While the act of turning back yields satisfaction where once it occasioned loss, neither is it decisive. Both characters must, as if in observance of Dantean contrapasso, repeat the turning they had once performed in life by alternately moving ahead or falling behind, thus effectively preventing their physical synchronicity and postponing the end of their story in perpetuity. Looking clearly to Ovid’s romance revision of Orpheus, the driving obsession of the poems in morte is the poet’s reunion with Laura in heaven. The prayers for his own death, anagogic visions, and oneiric rehearsals of meeting through which this desire for reunion finds

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expression read as a romance crowned by a passion, accommodating the Ovidian to the Christian. In the final poem, the sphragis of the cycle, Petrarch invokes poetically yet morally repudiates Ovid’s Orphic heaven. O refrigerio al cieco ardor ch’avampa qui fra i mortali sciocchi: Vergine, que’ belli occhi che vider tristi la spietata stampa ne’ dolci membri del tuo caro figlio volgi al mio dubio stato. ( 366.20–25) [O relief from the blind ardor that flames here among foolish mortals: Virgin, turn those beautiful eyes that sorrowing saw the pitiless wounds in your dear Son’s sweet limbs to my perilous state.] Where the celestial Eurydice would have turned to see Orpheus’s “pitiless wounds” and her husband’s scattered “limbs” (membra), here Mary is asked to turn her gaze from Christ’s excruciated “membra” to the dubious salvation (“dubio stato”) of a poet too much like Orpheus in his affections to reach Christian heaven with any certainty. Yet however penitent, the poet’s posture throughout is incontrovertibly that of a lover who perceives a distinction only of degree, not of kind, between mortal and divine love. His final argument of the Rime is delivered to the Virgin Mary in the blandishments of amatory petition: Ché se poca mortal terra caduca amar con sì mirabil fede soglio, che devrò far di te, cosa gentile? ( 366.120–23) [For if I am wont to love with such marvelous faith a bit of deciduous mortal dust, how will I love you, a noble thing?] And in generic sympathy with Ovid’s romance postponement of closure, Petrarch ends the Rime sparse with the anticipation of an end yet to come: “Il dì s’apressa et non pote esser lunge” ( 366.131) [The day draws near and cannot be far].

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Petrarch’s Orphic models of poetic turning are perhaps more valuable for the obstacles they present to describing and resolving poetically his relationship to the dead Laura than for the thematic similarities they observe. Anagogically, the Orphic cult of the missing body differs in significant details from its Christian counterpart. Laura’s death sends her to a heaven more unlike than like Eurydice’s Hades, a world of light and bliss rather than shadow and gloom. The salvific motive and guiding imagery of Orpheus’s march upward, therefore, cannot easily be superimposed upon a Christian moral topography. In fact, for the dilemma of Orpheus-Eurydice to correlate to that of Petrarch-Laura, the roles and vectors of salvation must be reversed. Laura needs to play Orpheus to Petrarch’s Eurydice; she would ascend with him to light. Finally, unlike the come-one-comeall populism of Hades, the Christian afterworld discriminates between eschatological alternatives according to strict moral criteria. Where temerity and lover’s intemperance serve Orpheus well in a realm ruled by a god whose passions once drove him to abduct his own wife and who yearly feels the pain of her seasonal absence, in Petrarch the same attributes may be construed as sins disqualifying him from heaven.63 Petrarch cum Orpheus, then, finds himself in a catch-22: to be certain of matriculating into the correct afterworld, he must either sublimate or renounce the love that impels him. To navigate past these problems, Petrarch inverts the Orphic paradigm. He begins in Poem 268 by recognizing the dilemma of salvation in which cupidinal love places him. Initially, his Ovidian Muse Amor alerts him: “Pon freno al gran dolor che ti trasporta, / ché per soverchie voglie / si perde ’l Cielo ove ’l tuo core aspira” (268.67−69) [Rein in the great sorrow that transports you, for excessive desire will lose the Heaven where your heart aspires]. But while the counsel is sound, its source proves the greater discommodity. In Canzone 270, the lover-poet tests and finds wanting Amor’s power as poetic guide and Orphic savior: Amor, se vuo’ ch’i’ torni al giogo antico, come par che tu mostri, un’altra prova meravigliosa et nova per domar me convènti vincer pria.

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Il mio amato tesoro in terra trova, che m’è nascosto . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . et s’egli è ver che tua potenzia sia nel Ciel sì grande come si ragiona et ne l’abisso . . . . . . . . . ritogli a Morte quel ch’ ella n’ à tolto. (270.1–6, 9–11, 14) [Love, if you wish me to return to the old yoke, as you seem to show, in order to subdue me you will have to pass another test, marvelous and new. Find my beloved treasure in the earth where it is hidden from me . . . and if it is true that your power is as great in Heaven and in the Abyss as it is said to be . . . take back from Death what she has taken from us.] Having impugned the Ovidian cult, Petrarch repolarizes Orphic salvation to suit a Christian afterworld, although he remains poetically within the genre of erotic lyric. Sonnet 343 finds the poet praising Laura as Orpheus, whose life-saving aid from above arrives at the crucial moment of dawn, the boundary of darkness with light: Gran meraviglia ò com io viva ancora; né vivrei già, se chi . . . . . . non sì presta fusse al mio scampo là verso l’aurora. ( 343.5−6, 7−8) [ I greatly marvel that I am still alive; nor would I be, if she . . . were not so quick to help me there toward dawn.] As an adjective, verso carries both a temporal and a spatial connotation, suggesting both a turning at the time of dawn and a turning in the direction of dawn, with a tertiary pun on Laura’s name yielding “toward Laura.” Taking verso as a noun, however, Petrarch also wants us to hear “dawn verse,” which is to say an aubade or poem of lovers’ parting at daybreak. Indeed, the poem ends with LauraOrpheus’s turning back at the light of day that is also the light of heaven, “Poi che ’l dì chiaro par che la percota, / tornasi al Ciel”

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( 343.12−13) [When bright day seems to strike her she turns back to Heaven], leaving us at that uncertain generic crossroads of eroticism with epiphany. Simpler and more explicit in its role reversal is Sonnet 346: Ella, contenta aver cangiato albergo, si paragona pur coi più perfetti et parte ad or ad or si volge a tergo, mirando s’io la seguo, et par ch’ aspetti. ( 346.9–12) [She, glad to have changed her dwelling, is equal to the most perfect souls, and still from time to time she turns back, looking to see if I am following her, and seems to wait.] With the word cangiato, Petrarch inaugurates a process of metamorphosis among the actors and situations of the Orphic quest, moving them incrementally from one ethos to another. Thus in Sonnet 349, the lover begins to change “within and without” (dentro et di for mi vo cangiando) upon hearing the message of death’s imminence, shifting him from an Orphic to a Boethian or Ciceronian mode. O felice quel dì che del terreno carcere uscendo, lasci rotta et sparta questa mia grave et frale et mortal gonna et da sì folte tenebre mi parta, volando tanto su nel bel sereno ch’ i’ veggia il mio Signore et la mia donna! ( 349.9–14) [Oh happy that day when, going forth from my earthly prison, I may leave broken and scattered this heavy, frail, and mortal garment of mine, and may depart from such thick shadows, flying so far up in the beautiful clear sky that I may see my Lord and my lady!] A new Scipio, the poet rises to a celestial azimuth of moral clarity, discarding a body that in its dismemberment is recognizably Orphean, and with it the vestiges of Ovidian love.

5

m Playing for Time Generic Disunities and Ludic Dimensions in Romeo and Juliet

In the last chapter, I laid the groundwork for an early modern

Ovidian poetics, one that correlates narrative technique to generic purport. For Petrarch, the carmen perpetuum posed two related questions: (1) If an epic can be cobbled together from romance epyllions, can a romance be assembled from a sonnet sequence? (2) How does one create narrative continuity, an “unbroken song,” from disparate scraps? For Shakespeare, the generic issue raised by Ovid is not romance continuity but romance discontinuity, the disjunctions in time, place, and action native to Ovidian love plots that flout Aristotelian tragic rules. When romance and tragedy meet in a play like Romeo and Juliet, which poetics, which generic temporality should take precedence? The carmen perpetuum may also be understood as a temporal paradox: both the historical time frame of events and the poem rendering these events, inasmuch as it brackets the same span, are perpetuum, yet one is manifestly briefer than the other. Poetry, in other words, has the power both to distend and to constrict time. Like the Ovidian song, the great promise of Shakespearean romance is its perpetuity, the Princess’s “world-without-end bargain” in Love’s Labor’s Lost, or Montague’s golden monument to love’s perdurance. Given the romance resistance to closure, what “unities,” we may ask, comprehend romance? Just as Petrarch takes poetic edification from Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice, so in his great tragic romance Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare recurs to “Phaëthon” and “Narcissus and Echo.” 229

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To begin, let us assume for the sake of argument that Romeo and Juliet is not about star-crossed lovers or feuding families, but more profoundly about the generic insufficiency of time that afflicts everyone and everything to do with romance, author as well as characters. Poetically and emotionally, temporal insufficiency is essential to romance, a quality that brings it into an anxious symbiosis with tragedy, whose emotional effect depends on temporal finality. Romeo and Juliet succeeds as a romance because it confirms the besetting, archetypal anxiety of all lovers, that despite their promises they will not be able to transform the accident of a single meeting into the necessity of a life together, one moment into an eternity. Yet the play’s success as a tragedy depends upon preventing the lovers’ desired synchronicity from enduring in life, a generic countermovement to love’s dilation of the moment. The interference of romantic and tragic rhythms, the mutual dependence of temporal modes in tragic and romance plots, is perhaps the most important poetic issue at stake in Romeo and Juliet, and one to which Shakespeare was alive. In adapting his most proximate source, Arthur Brooke’s Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), Shakespeare telescopes the chronology of the story from roughly nine months to four days, Thursday through Sunday. Then, as if in a conscious attempt to fit too much into too little, to force a tragic outcome, the prologue hurries the events once more, recasting the question of story-time as a dramatic problem: The fearful passage of their death-marked love, And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which but their children’s end nought could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.1 (Prol. 9–14) Sudden angst and unjustified urgency is the mood the chorus seems to want to foist upon us. The fictional journey we are about to embark upon is a “fearful passage,” made all the more so by the scant two hours allotted its course. Is that enough time, we ask (mod-

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ern productions have yet to manage it), to see the story through to its end? The answer, of course, is “no.” Doubtless Shakespeare knew that two hours, like the lovers’ abbreviated four days, is inadequate and would force the cast to step up what Harley Granville-Barker calls the play’s “quickening temper,”2 even to the point of hurrying lines past an audience struggling to keep pace with the plot. Indeed, the chorus anticipates the likelihood of lines’ going unheard, an important motive that strangely has gone overlooked. To counter the “quickening temper” it incites, the chorus first begs the audience’s patience: “if you with patient ears attend.” Then, following through on the aural image of ears, it puns on the word here—“What here [“heare” Q2] shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend”—promising to recapture the missing gist of the story with acting (“our toil”) in supplement to dialogue. The prologue’s final couplet is the key to understanding what is going on temporally and spatially in the rest of the play. Missing and mending are not only the major tasks of the plot—lovers’ assignations missed, misunderstandings and feuds mended—but a strategy of dramatic composition, one that acknowledges the insufficiency of the two-hour playing time and seeks to mend it by stretching time and place into something that could be called a romance “unity.” At the risk of subsidizing too heavily the significance of the homonymic connection between here as location and hear as audition, I would like to suggest that this pun stands at the threshold to a poetics of romance mistiming and misplacement. In theater, hearing or being “here” establishes a character’s presence or absence. For the most part, Romeo and Juliet are not here and choose not to hear; for the bulk of the play they are, to the eyes of their families, missing, an absence that generates frequent calls of “where” and returns of “here.” What follows is an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, of watching and calling and missing, part Narcissus and Echo, part Pyramus and Thisbe in inspiration and all transacted against the chaotic, foreshortened time frame of the Phaëthon story. My aim, in this chapter, is threefold: first, to trace the Ovidian chronology of Romeo and Juliet in terms of the Phaëthon paradigm; next, to listen to the lovers “tear the cave where Echo lies,” as Juliet says, to hear the narcissistic wordplay that parses

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out the space in which tragic love abides; and finally, to understand Shakespearean romance as a game turned serious.

The Chronotope and Its Solar Models Julia Kristeva has remarked upon two symptoms of altered time in Romeo and Juliet. First is a “compression of time caused by the imminence of death.” The second is a dramatic asynchronicity in which the “rhythms of meetings, developments and mischances,” result from an “incompatibility between the amorous instant and temporal succession.”3 Bakhtin arrives at a similar conclusion for romance as a whole. He proposes the term chronotope, literally “time-place,” to refer to the spatio-temporal framework in which romance characters interact, a framework signaled by “a logic of random contingency, which is to say, chance simultaneity (meetings) and chance rupture (nonmeetings), that is a logic of random disjunctions in time.”4 Shakespeare’s Verona transacts its business in the rhythms and disjunctions of a romance chronotope and yet syncopates crucially into tragic timing. The tragic chronotope that Aristotle’s “unities” define is a livedin dimension of continuities and conjunctions in which human time and space interconnect with the universal. Poetics, in other words, has a phenomenological connection with the world as we experience it bodily. Trim with this proposition, Aristotle’s claim that “tragedy endeavours to keep so far as possible within a single circuit of the sun” (Poetics 1449b13–14) recognizes physics and cosmology as the parent science of drama. In the Timaeus, Plato’s account of God and the workings of the universe, the sun, moon, and planets are organa chronon, “instruments of time” (41e, 42d) in that time is measured by their motion ( 38c). But rather than posit them as pure cosmic abstractions, Plato chooses to anthropomorphize them phenomenologically through the myth of Phaëthon and his father, the sun-god Helios. Phaëthon’s errant ride through the constellations (22 c-e) measures both time and space. Time for Aristotle is not equivalent to motion, but together they form a unified continuum of causation (Physics 219a). Similarly on the stage, tragedy makes the audience aware that dramatic action is in Plato’s sense an instrument of time, or, in Aristotle’s sense, a measure of causal trajectory in space.

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Whereas the relationship of space to time remains abstract in Aristotle, Renaissance Aristotelians, taking their cue from Plato, literalized it with license. Castelvetro’s influential commentary on the Poetics, which supplanted the original in the minds of most critics, popularized the notion that “the termination [of a tragedy] which is obvious to the senses and is measured with the clock cannot endure more than one course of the sun over the earth.”5 He reasoned that there was a necessary correspondence between the internal time frame of the plot (Aristotle’s sun) and the external time frame of the play’s performance (the real sun): the audience had bodily needs. “The time required for the performance of a tragedy equals that which would be required if the tragic action actually occurred in the world, and an audience cannot remain in the theater without intolerable discomfort for longer than twelve hours.”6 So interpreted, the symbol of the sun as poetic clock was to haunt Renaissance dramaturgy. The sixteenth-century architect and set designer Sebastian Serlio describes a contrivance that moves an artificial sun along an arc coinciding with the play’s start and finish so that “at the end of the play . . . [it is] made to set with such skille that many spectators remain lost in wonder.”7 Jonson’s critical excursus on the “laws of time and place” in Volpone takes shape in the play as a Serlian sun that rises at the opening of the play.8 In Every Man and His Humour, meanwhile, he vapors on generally about English inattention to the unities, singling out Shakespeare’s Henry V for special reprobation.9 In defense of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson later argued the merits of Shakespearean time, which finds no necessary corollary in internal and external chronology: “Time is, of all the modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years is as easily conceived as a passage of hours.”10 The temporal anxiety of Romeo and Juliet’s prologue speaks to the pressure Shakespeare must surely have felt to conform to Castelvetro, just as Henry V ’s prologue excuses its infraction. And though he bends time in Romeo and Juliet, it is not out of solicitude to Aristotle, but in observance of a rival poetics: Ovid’s chaotic sun in his version of the Phaëthon story.11 In the Metamorphoses, the young Phaëthon is allowed by his father, Phoebus, to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky, marking one day. It soon careers out of control, wreaking havoc. Ovid’s myth opens to spatio-temporal order: Phoebus’s attendants, Day, Month, Year, Century, and the Hours, stand about his throne

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at equal distances (“spatiis equalibus”), but Phaëthon’s unruly transit soon disrupts that necessary distance both spatially and temporally. The sun passes scorchingly close to earth, causing the measured passage of hour and season to warp in slingshot orbit. Both Aristotle’s generic sun and Ovid’s cosmological version are present in Shakespeare’s concept of generic timing. In Romeo and Juliet, this hybrid solar motif measures dramatic time calibrated to the eccentric rhythm of romantic and tragic anxiety. In the aftermath of the swordplay of scene 1, Lady Montague asks Benvolio worriedly where Romeo is. Benvolio replies that he saw him “an hour before the worshipped sun / Peered forth the golden window of the east” (1.1.109–10). From that moment on, “the fearful passage of [the lovers’] death-marked love” promised in the prologue follows the path blazed originally by Phaëthon’s fearful transit. Each mention of time finds the lovers slightly out of sync: Romeo is first spotted an hour before the rising hour of dawn; then, greeted by Benvolio’s “Good morrow cousin” several hours later, he responds benighted, as if in his own continuum: Romeo Is the day so young? Benvolio But new struck nine. Ay me, sad hours seem long. Romeo Was that my father that went hence so fast? Benvolio It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours? Romeo Not having that, which having, makes them short. Benvolio In love? Romeo Out— Benvolio Of love? (1.1.151–58)

Of time, rather. The dilation Romeo experiences is seconded more succinctly by Juliet’s “in a minute, there are many days” ( 3.5.45). Slow time moving within an artificially fast frame is at once the motor force behind Romeo and Juliet’s experience of love and the most serious impediment to its realization. As the play progresses, its chronology becomes more anxious and more pronouncedly Ovidian, especially after the lovers meet and look ahead to the difficulty of future meetings across the barricades of parental opprobrium. As the chorus between acts emphasizes,

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Being held a foe, he may not have access To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear, And she as much in love, her means much less To meet her new-beloved any where: But passion lends them power, time means to meet. (1.5.152–56) The wall-divided love of Pyramus and Thisbe, which culminates famously in mistimed tragedy, finds close parallel in the difficult love of Romeo and Juliet, whose houses are divided by walls of familial antipathy—walls that Romeo o’erperches, however, whereas Pyramus could not scale his.12 Bakhtin’s “logic of random contingency,” of meetings and nonmeetings, incubates into the play’s defining obsession, emerging eventually as the fear that “one day, one hour, even one minute earlier or later have everywhere a decisive and fatal significance.”13 Meeting places the lovers at risk to fatal timing. Thus, when Romeo and Juliet contract to meet with the Nurse at nine on the morning of their marriage— Juliet

What a’clock tomorrow

Shall I send to thee? Romeo By the hour of nine. Juliet I will not fail, ’tis twenty year till then. (2.2.166–69)

—sunrise breaks over Friar Lawrence with an ominous charioteering metaphor of calamity narrowly averted: The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Check’ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light; And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels (2.3.1–4) The specter of Phaëthon is disastrously attendant upon the day’s nuptials. As Juliet marks time from nine till the Nurse’s return at twelve, the sun’s labored climb parallels her perception of agonizing slowness, the festina lente of anticipated reunion:

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The clock struck nine when I did send the Nurse; In a half an hour she promised to return .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Now is the sun upon the highmost hill Of this day’s journey, and from nine till twelve Is three hours long, yet she is not come. (2.5.1–2, 9–11) As Jonathan Bate aptly remarks, “From this point on, its [the sun’s] motion—and with it that of the play—can only be downward like Phaëthon’s.”14 Indeed, Friar Lawrence warns Romeo, “violent delights have violent ends” (2.6.9), a fate linked intimately with the problem of asynchronicity, as he says: “too swift arrives as tardy as too slow” (15). Taken in tandem, these last two phrases express the governing paradox of the play: how the generic movement of the plot, romance to tragedy, violent delight to violent end, correlates to the perceived flow of time, too slow (romance) and too swift (tragedy). Juliet herself seems to recognize this paradox at the moment she learns Romeo is a Montague. Appropriating the structure of the Friar’s rhetoric, she too augurs tragedy: “Too early seen unknown and known too late” (1.5.138). To Benvolio’s “Supper is done, and we shall come too late,” Romeo replies, I fear too early, for my mind misgives Some consequence yet hanging in the stars Shall bitterly begin his fearful date With this night’s revels, and expire the term Of a despised life closed in my breast, By some vile forfeit of untimely death. (1.5.105–11) The chiasmus of the too-early-and-too-late conceit expresses in miniature the temporal structure of the play as a whole.15 If marriage marks the high point of the romantic plot, one moment of coincidence, death occupies the crux of the tragic plot and renewed synchronicity. In between however, time is one beat out of step, to fatal effect—the “untimely death” Romeo predicts.

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That Phaëthon’s solar imagery frames Romeo and Juliet’s “two-hour traffic” is an argument that has been thoroughly rehearsed. The cosmic disruption of Phaëthon’s fall and death, after which “A day did passe without the sune” (Metamorphoses 2.419 [Golding trans.]), is, as Brian Gibbons has noted, mirrored in Shakespeare’s final lines, “The sun for sorrow will not show his head” (5.3.306).16 Bate has amply shown how Phaëthon heralds the onset of tragedy in the play and has pointed out the irony that when Juliet invokes him as an expedient to nocturnal loveplay (“Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds / . . . Such a waggoner / As Phaéton would whip you to the west,” 3.2.1−3), “she is willing on the tragedy, the moment of separation, Romeo’s exile, and ultimately the confusion and mistiming which bring the death of both lovers.”17 The sun metaphor is inextricably connected through Ovid’s Phaëthon to the movement from romance to tragedy, or, as Lysander sums up neatly in Midsummer Night’s Dream, “So quick, bright things come to confusion” (1.1.149). But there is more to say about the poetic reading Shakespeare makes of Ovid and the complex relationship between tragic and romantic time signatures in Romeo and Juliet. Patricia Parker has taught us to appreciate the paradox of romance’s inherent resistance to closure against the natural lyric imagery of beginning and end upon which romance depends, how it forces a compromise of color to form and time and leaves action in “a suspended realm of evening and twilight.”18 After the “two-in-one” (2.6.37) synchronicity of marriage at the midpoint of the play, time again staggers and becomes oppressive, separating the lovers and distinguishing the plot types. A temporal chiasmus occurs. Formerly time ran retrograde to love’s consummation; now it hurries the lovers against their will toward a determinate end. In the rhetoric of the latter scenes is a perceptible resistance to closure. When Capulet arranges Juliet’s second marriage to Paris, we sense in the old man’s disquietude a shift into a fast-forward, tragic chronotope that runs against his unconscious will: Capulet Acquaint her here of my son Paris’ love, And bid her—mark you me?—on Wednesday next— But soft, what day is this? Paris Monday, my lord.

238  romance form and formality Capulet Monday, ha, ha! Well, Wednesday is too soon, And ’Thursday let it be—a Thursday, tell her, She shall be married to this noble earl. Will you be ready? do you like this haste? ( 3.4.15–22)

That “the time is very short,” as Friar Lawrence declares significantly in the first line of act 4, manifests itself in the stuttering anacoluthons that interrupt Capulet’s thought and speech. The proximity of a definite date, of finite time, lends the language of the latter acts a frantic, importunate quality. Thus Juliet, having been informed of Paris’s successful suit, pleads with her mother for surcease on the grounds of impropriety: Delay this marriage for a month, a week, Or if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies. ( 3.5.199–201) Tybalt has died. Marriage is inappropriate, she is arguing, precisely because death impinges upon the event, or in a generic sense because the timing of tragedy, of finality, supersedes romance’s indefinite urgency. The Phaëthon story engages the question of romance continuity versus tragic closure on another front. Montague and Capulet end the play hand in hand. At once a travesty of their children’s marriage ceremony and an echo of the “pilgrim’s hands” clasped at the lovers’ first encounter, the final scene returns us full circle to the feud of the prologue, putting an end at last to “the continuance of their parent’s rage” (10). Peaceful closure may have replaced the continuance of strife, but it is bought with the sacrifice of a greater, flesh-and-blood continuity. Romeo and Juliet are only children. With their death the direct line of each family comes to a dead end: both fathers will die without a successor. Romeo and Juliet ends, then, with an image of derelict fatherhood mended in intent by peace but not restored to the natural cycle of generation. Besides its allegory of temporal chaos, Phaëthon is also a story of a father and son. A young boy learns he is son to the Sun-god and,

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to prove his legitimacy to the world, asks his father for the reins to the sun chariot. The myth then shifts into a parable of youthful desire left unbridled by parental control, a theme that hews close to Romeo and Juliet’s central premise. As Ricardo Quinones has explained, early modern writers treated Ovid’s Phaëthon as a story about time, fatherhood, and temporal succession: “The metaphor of ineffectual horsemanship is relevant, since time and the halter have been traditionally associated in art. They both imply control . . . associated with a fatherly, adult world.”19 The sun is a symbol of monarchy, of fatherhood to the state. Iconographically, Phaëthon’s course traces the decades of the monarch’s rule. At the end of the cycle, the reins of the state must be passed on to a successor, a new sun. Representing Phaëthon on canvas, Nicholas Poussin places Father Time next to Phoebus in “Phaëthon before Helios” to emphasize the connection between paternity and time. Shakespeare’s histories and lyrics return fondly and frequently to this commonplace, whose complexities can be reduced to the portable rhyme of sun and son.20 In Romeo and Juliet, the movement of up and down, beginning and end, sunrise and sunset traces the play’s parental argument. We first see Montague’s fatherly concern in 1.1 when he notes the irony of the rising of the sun as compared to his son’s setting retreat into darkness: But all so soon as the all-cheering sun Should in the farthest east begin to draw The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed, Away from light steals home my heavy son. (125–28) After a brief appearance in 3.1, his next and final entrance at 5.3 is accompanied by the same inversion of up and down, sunrise and sunset, as in act 1. The old man is guided to his son’s corpse by the Prince: “Come, Montague, for thou art early up / To see thy son and heir now early down” (208–10). In retrospect, the imagery of an inverted solar cycle stands out as a signal of the dysfunction inherent in Montague and Romeo’s relationship. Montague is a concerned parent, to be sure, but one delinquent in counsel and control. Like the Capulets, whose absenteeism the Nurse remarks upon ungenerously—

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. . . she [ Juliet] was weaned . . . . . . upon that day; .  .  .  .  .  .  . My Lord and you were then in Mantua

(1.3.25, 26, 29)

—Montague appears at the bookends of his son’s life, late enough to express regret but never early enough to provide guidance. In this light, Romeo’s comment “Was that my father that went hence so fast?” (1.1.153) is telling. In his address to the reader, the grumpily puritanical Arthur Brooke treats Romeus and Juliet as a cautionary fable of pubescent desire gone awry, in which all blame lies with the children: “This tragicall matter [is] written to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers, thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting authoritie and advise of parents and friendes.” Shakespeare, by contrast, redirects much of the blame onto remiss parenting, using Phaëthon as the ready vehicle of precedent. Fatherhood, like all else in this Ovidian chronotope, is either mistimed or absent. As if in retribution for their negligence, both fathers (Montague and then Capulet) make a final gesture at conciliation: they promise to erect golden statues of each child. Where Ovid commemorates Phaëthon’s death with a marble tomb inscribed with an epitaph, as does Brooke the lovers’ demise, Shakespeare marks their fall with the gaudiness and irony of competition over a pair of gold statues. The fathers’ misguided attempt to mend continuing strife, to conclude their families’ contention, instead breathes new life into it: O brother Montague, give me thy hand. . . . . . . . . . . . . Montague But I can give thee more, For I will raise a statue in pure gold, That whiles Verona by that name is known, There shall be no figure at such rate be set As that of true and faithful Juliet. Capulet As rich shall Romeo’s by his lady’s lie ( 5.3.296, 298–303) Capulet

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Mishearing in the Romance Chronotope The Phaëthon paradigm opens a chronotopic rift in Romeo and Juliet whose tragic consequences Shakespeare seeks to contain and mend with closing promises of romance renewal in despite of tragedy. From this perspective, the play’s ending appears as a concession to generic exigency. The problem of dramatic asynchronicity and its resolution, however, is not limited to the generic architecture of beginning and end and the figures of sunrise and sunset. The rift is tectonic, penetrating deep into the linguistic structures that underpin the play’s temporal scaffolding, the lines, words, and syllables that juggle meaning in dialogue. Staggered time disrupts logical sequences, impeding the characters’ fundamental ability to know things either at firsthand or by report, to hear messages and to see clues. Linguistic disjunction, though present in the opportunities for missed or misheard meaning from the prologue onward, reaches its incoherent crux in 3.2, the scene following Juliet’s “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds” soliloquy and the point in the play at which the flow of time is most drastically distended. Struggling to interpret the Nurse’s dire message, Juliet sees her doom reduced to a matter of “bare vowels” and “brief sounds.” In her frantic lament we again feel the stirring of short time within a fast frame whose effect is now linguistic and visual. Timing here distorts the significance of sounds and sights by abbreviating them. Juliet asks the simple question “Hath Romeo slain himself?” but demands a monosyllabic answer, ay or no, too short for a full account. Say thou but “ay,” And that bare vowel “I” shall poison more Than the darting eye of cockatrice. I am not I, if there be such an “ay,” Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answer “ay.” If he be slain, say “ay,” or if not, “no”: Brief sounds determine my weal or woe.21 ( 3.2.45–51) The tortured coupling of vowels each charged with a different denotation—I (self   ), ay ( yes), and eye (sight)—form a parcel of associa-

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tions too densely packed for any playgoer to unravel fully in the few moments in which it is delivered. But perhaps this is the effect Shakespeare wants to illustrate: another case of “What here / hear shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.” Juliet’s all too brief sounds demonstrate in the audience’s too brief interpretive time the hermeneutic insufficiency she herself is experiencing. This passage has provoked vexed criticism. Some have found its paronomasia merely tiresome.22 Calling it “shredding” words, or a “mini-glossolalia,” others have focused on Juliet’s psychology at this moment, concluding simply that her frenetic speech shows the strain of emotional overload.23 There is much more at stake here, though, than mere neurotic babble. For my part, I prefer to view the passage as a fugue of jumbled media whose inwrought motive counterpoints sights (eye) with sounds (I/ay), what is seen with what is articulated. Earlier Juliet, commenting to Romeo on the celerity of their engagement, inaugurates this pattern of disjunction in the memorable imagery of lightning “which doth cease to be / Ere one can say ‘It lightens’ ” (2.2.119–20). Lightning is a deceptive kind of illumination not merely because it is “too sudden” but because the thunder does not accompany the flash, the sound the sight. Later with the Nurse, the pace of the action is no longer too sudden but too slow; the lag between what is seen and heard, however, still obtains. At this moment in the play what the Nurse has seen does not synchronize with what she says, causing Juliet to infer mistakenly that Romeo is dead. Her answer does not conform to the required ay or no, but it does respond to Juliet’s theme of eye and I / ay, visual and verbal signals: I saw the wound, I saw it with mine eyes (God save the mark!) here on his manly breast: A piteous corse, a bloody piteous corse, Pale, pale as ashes, all bedaubed in blood, All in gore[,] ( 3.2.52–54) concluding, “I sounded at the sight.” What she means is “I swooned at the sight,” or, in Elizabethan English, “swounded.” But Shakespeare’s choice of the variant form sounded is not, I think, without signifi-

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cance. There is a tradition behind the wordplay that, if we diverge, should lead back again to Ovid, adding method to Juliet’s anguished homophony. At his most perverse, Shakespeare creates fruitful misunderstandings in the plot by shattering language, like a dropped vase, and then playing with the random shards. Individual letters, their sounds and shapes, become pieces in a pedantic game of misreading and mishearing exploited to humorous and at times cruel effect. He introduces us to the rules of the letter game in the early comedy Love’s Labor’s Lost, where Holofernes, master pedant and Ovidian devotee (“for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy . . . Ovidius Naso was the man,” 4.2.120–22), demonstrates: Armado. [To Holofernes] Monsieur, are you not lett’red? Moth. Yes, yes; he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head? Holo. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his Moth. learning. Holo. Quis, quis, thou consonant? Moth. The third of the five vowels, if You repeat them; or the fifth, if I. Holo. I will repeat them: a, e, I— Moth. The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, U . . . etc. ( 5.1.51–55)

The humor of the play turns largely on letters misread, letters both in the sense of consonants and vowels and in the sense of missives from lover to lover confused and misdirected. The same formula is at work in Twelfth Night when Malvolio intercepts a bogus billet-doux and infers from the letters at the top that it is addressed to him: “M, O, A, I; this simulation is not as the former: and yet, to crush this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my name” (2.5.151–54). Given the Shakespearian potential for misinterpretation, Romeo’s reaction to Capulet’s servant at being asked to read a letter as simple as a guest list is, for him, fraught with the knowledge that the sound and shape of letters can prove perilously alien to their denotation.

244  romance form and formality Servant Romeo Servant Romeo Servant Romeo

God gi’ god-den. I pray, sir, can you read? Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. Perhaps you have learned it without book; but I pray, can you read any thing you see? Ay, if I know the letters and the language. Ye say honestly, rest you merry. Stay, fellow, I can read. (1.2.56–62)

Their communication is delightfully crosswired. Romeo is stubbornly figurative in his concept of reading, the Servant stubbornly literal. For Romeo, “reading” is the interpreting of dangerously uncertain signs—his fortune, for example—while for the servant, language, whether spoken or written, is mechanical. Its sounds and shapes, he assumes, convey meaning unequivocally. Hence his equation between “can you read,” and “can you read anything you see.” Romeo’s literal response, “Ay, if I know the letters and the language,” an utterance that leads the Servant to take Romeo as a jocund illiterate, demonstrates the ultimate ambiguity of the literal. Juliet’s “I am not I, if there be such an ‘ay,’ ” like Romeo’s “Ay, if I know the letters,” is less a sign of verbal distress or confusion than an articulation of a deep-rooted ambiguity. “I am not I” expresses the lack of equation (I ≠ I) between sign and signifier, sight   /  sound and meaning, and by extension the radical doubt that lovers, like letters, can ever successfully couple. Consider Juliet’s retort to Romeo at the balcony: Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay”; And I will take thy word; yet if thou swear’st, Thou may’st prove false: at lovers’ perjuries They say Jove laughs.

(2.2.90–93)

Her linguistic cynicism, Ovidian at heart (she quotes the Ars amatoria [I.663], “Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum”),24 is justified: “ay” is both the assent that inaugurates the lovers’ bond and the sound uttered when it is broken. But it is more too than a sound of pain. “Ay” in Romeo and Juliet is simultaneously the basic syllable of grief and of

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bitter disillusionment with language, the brief sound of woe uttered in the face of an irrelative world where language fails to connect people in time and place. Ovid was the first to play the letter game of “Ay” with a similar design. In the Metamorphoses, AI AI is the sound of anguish uttered by Apollo at the loss of Hyacinthus, and the pain-inscribed name of the hero Ajax (AIAS), sounds transliterated into shapes on the leaves of the hyacinth: And therefore did he wryght His syghes uppon the leaves thereof: and so in colour bryght The flowre hath α ι writ thereon, which letters are of greef. (Metamorphoses 10.227–29 [Golding trans.]) The game quickens in English with the addition of the homonym eye to the “letters of greef.” Ovid’s Latin lacks this triple pun; its parts are divided among several tales. Nonetheless, in the Narcissus and Echo tale he makes the link between sights and sounds with the word imago that means both “image” and “sound,” allowing him to unify Echo’s calling with Narcissus’s looking in a single concept of mirroring. Translating the double entente of imago into English, however, Golding accomplishes what Ovid could not: Ay readie with attentive eare she harkens for some sounde, Whereto she might replie hir wordes, from which she is not   bounde. By chaunce the stripling being strayde from all his companie, Sayde: is there any bodie nie? straight Echo answerde: I. Amazde he castes is eye aside, and looketh rounde about (Metamorphoses 3.471–75 [Golding trans.]; my emphasis) Whence Shakespeare’s ay-I-eye. Jonathan Bate alerts us to the same Ovidian play in the letter scene of Twelfth Night. “As Malvolio interprets the meaning of the ‘I’ in the letter, Fabian remarks, ‘Ay, an you had any eye behind you might see more distraction at you heels than fortunes before you’ (2.5.132–34). The pun concentrates the double identity of Malvolio as Narcissus (the self-obsessed ‘I’) and Actaeon (the desiring ‘eye’). The dogs are

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watching him.”25 For Bate, Narcissus and Actaeon haunt Twelfth Night as examples of the dark potentialities of watching. That dark potential, however, is never realized to the profound degree it is in Romeo and ­Juliet. There, watching and calling go together as dual aspects of the same problem of hermeneutic insufficiency, what I have called “missing.” Both plays are constructed around Ovidian obstacles to communication and comprehension that cause the characters to “miss” each other, but in Romeo and Juliet, as in the tale of Narcissus, the main obstacle is the timing of language. The abbreviated ays and noes that Juliet demands of the Nurse mirror Echo’s fragmentary repartee, which can repeat only the last syllables of a sentence. In return, the Nurse’s dilatory storytelling both lengthens and delimits, obscuring by enlarging. Delay, of course, is precisely the quality for which Echo was punished by Juno—“This elfe would with hir tatling talke deteyne hir by the waye” (3.453)—who shortened her speech to “simple use.” But while she delays Echo-like, the Nurse also “sounds at the sight”: that is, she correlates Juliet’s brief sounds to her own myopic vision of events. Just as Juliet fixates upon what she hears, so the Nurse, Narcissus­-like, fixates upon what she sees. Both distort by limiting. The misunderstandings that plague Romeo and Juliet grow out of a quibble over letters and grow into an increasingly desperate discontinuity between intention and expression, the literal and the figurative, fact and message. Missing threatens ultimately to isolate the lovers from each other like Narcissus and Echo by disrupting the means by which they synchronize in time and place. Feste may corrupt words, Juliet chop logic, and Mercutio pun to his dying breath, but the game of language veers, under Shakespeare’s guidance, from ludic frivolity to mortal crisis. Disjunct language begins as a comic expedient, mere wordplay, but opens a Pandora’s box of echoes and homonymies that cannot be relegated to wordplay, that cause damage to human bonds which cannot be prevented, only mended. In Romeo and Juliet, the Narcissus and Echo myth acts as a model for a linguistic game of hideand-seek gone awry: watching that begets hiding that begets calling. Romeo, like Narcissus evading pursuit, is the hider; Juliet, like Echo, is the caller; and the families participate as attendant callers, watchers, and seekers. In the rest of the essay, I will explore the acoustic and visual elements of this game.

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Hide and Seek in Public and Private In his classic study of the sociology of games, Johan Huizinga identifies three salient charateristics of play, the third of which is its separateness in time and space: “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration. This is the third main characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. . . . Play begins, and then at a certain moment it is ‘over.’ . . . A closed space is marked out for it, either materially or ideally, hedged off from the everyday surroundings. Inside this space the play proceeds, inside it the rules obtain.”26 Delimiting play time is the express concern of Romeo and Juliet’s prologue. It accomplishes a specific task: to survey the limits of the peculiar ludic dimension that is drama and to make the audience aware of the spatio-temporal rules that govern it. We are compelled to share the angst of mistiming—missed words, missed meetings, missed meaning­—­personalizing the experience of romance by making us enter its chronotope. Missing is also a consequence of location. “Romance,” as Umberto Eco claims, “is a story of elsewhere.”27 Shakespeare is at pains to define romance elsewheres in the contained somewheres of his stage, opening spaces onstage that are just large enough for characters to conceal themselves or misdirect their words, yet small enough for them to spy and eavesdrop on each other. Effectively, Shakespeare opens a romance niche at the cusp between the public and the private, a space of uncertain signs rife with echoes and illusions. Take, for example, the handkerchief scene opening act 4 of Othello, in which the jealous husband occupies one corner of the stage in full view but just out of earshot of Michael Cassio and Desdemona’s conversation. Iago moves in between, adjusting distances to optimize Othello’s misperception so that he may “conster / Poor Cassio’s smiles, gestures and light behaviors / Quite in the wrong” (4.1.103–4). Internal stage directions initially shift Othello just out of range of hearing (Iago says, “Will you withdraw?” 95), then advance him close enough to misconstrue the conversation (“Iago beckons me; now he begins the story,” 131). That the success of the deception depends on Iago’s manipulation of peripheral space is clear from his prefatory remarks:

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Stand you awhile apart; Confine yourself but in a patient list. Whilst you were here, o’erwhelmed with your grief— A passion most unsuiting such a man— Cassio came hither. I shifted him away And laid good ’scuses upon your ecstasy; Bade him anon return, and here speak with me; The which he promised. Do but encave yourself And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns That dwell in every region of his face. (75–84) Iago’s may be a deadly game, but it is clearly still a game. He has, as Huizinga describes, marked out a separate, closed space and time— “Stand you awhile apart”—in which Othello can “confine” and “encave” himself, that is, hide and yet watch the mute interaction of the others. For Othello, the morbid attraction of voyeurism is the illusion of being privy to an intimate sphere while safely ensconced within the public space of a street. The game of hide-and-seek in Romeo and Juliet needs to define ludic space onstage, to travel the margins between public and private, and generically to shift from game to earnest, romance to tragedy. Romeo hides three times in the play, first as part of his lover’s game and then, when hiding turns to enforced banishment, the lusory version to the tragic, out of mortal jeopardy. Following Tybalt’s death, the Prince decrees new, condign rules to hide-and-seek: “Let ­ Romeo hence in haste, / Else, when he is found, that hour is his last” (3.1.185–86). Indeed, the next time Romeo is found is in the tomb; the game has ended. While the lovers live, and even in death, they try to enclose themselves in a world remote from public traffic, yet still within a community. As in Othello, many of Romeo and Juliet’s most important moments occur on the periphery of public space where the rules of Ovidian-style hideand-seek obtain. Shakespeare stakes out those boundaries vocally with calls of “where” and answers of “here” that act like sonar to establish a character’s presence or absence and draw the effective perimeters of hearing and mishearing. Earlier, I made the claim that the prologue introduces the potential for mishearing in the play with a pun on the words miss and here

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(hear), linking the act of hearing to fact of being present, comprehension to synchronicity in time and place. Now, if a character’s mishearing is a consequence of his not being “here,” then it stands to reason that when he mishears he is not present. But if he were not present he could not hear at all. To mishear, therefore, a character would have to be absent-in-presence, or present-in-absence, much as Othello is in the handkerchief scene. How does Shakespeare convey such in-­betweenness on the stage of Romeo and Juliet? Moreover, if the romance chronotope exists at the juncture between the private and the public, how does Shakespeare create a space that qualifies as both? In answering these questions, let us consider how he correlates space to hearing in the initial group scenes and compare them to later private scenes. Following the incivilities of 1.1, Prince Escales addresses the crowd that has gathered: Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, Profaners of this neighbour-stainèd steel— Will they not hear? (1.1.72–75) Already the potential for mishearing has been realized. Not that the Montagues and Capulets cannot hear, but that amid the crowd of citizens the Prince’s call is not selective enough for the offenders to know they are being spoken to. Unheard the first time, the Prince must cultivate an intimate voice for a public arena, one that singles out a group within the group, or, in actor’s parlance, he must learn to project. This first paradox of intimate and public voices I would like to hold in parenthesis while we introduce a second, the connection between hearing and being “here.” As soon as the Prince finishes, Montague asks, “Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach? Speak, nephew, were you by when it began?” Benvolio’s reply, “Here were the servants of your adversary, and yours, close fighting ere I did approach,” confirms his presence and answers the implicit question of his whereabouts. Romeo, fortunately, is not here as Lady Montague asks, “O where is Romeo? saw you him today? Right glad I am he was not at this fray.” After his entry half a scene later, Romeo will revisit her vocabulary—“O

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me! what fray was here? / Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all” (1.1.164–65)—strengthening the rich connection between sounds and sites, hear and here. Once the crowd has dispersed, the Montagues are left alone on stage to talk among themselves. Brilliantly, the scene records the movement from public speech to private speech, public hearing to intimate hearing, leaving us with an incipient sense of the vocal parameters of the stage.28 Capulet’s party, the next group scene, heightens the earlier tension between private and public by narrowing the stage from street to hall and making presence and absence an enforceable matter. A feeling of dangerous play, of boundaries transgressed, now pervades the atmosphere of the hall. First, the Montagues’ uninvited attendance compromises its privacy. Yet because it is a masked ball everyone is in a sense absent-in-presence. Anonymity is the presiding rule of this game, allowing guests to “hear all, all see” (1.2.30), as Capulet advertises to Paris, yet not to be seen or heard per se. Even the secondary action serves to flesh out the in-betweenness of the chronotope. In a remarkable touch, Shakespeare uses the behind-the-scenes banter of kitchen help to help define for the audience the semiprivate space of Capulet’s household and the acoustics that allow characters to linger on the periphery of hearing and presence. First Serv. Anthony and Potpan! [Enter two more Servingmen] Third Serv. You are looked for and called for, asked for and sought for in the great chamber. Fourth Serv. We cannot be here and there too. (1.5.9–13)

While the stage may be narrow, the scene, as we begin to learn from the actors’ calls, can be made to seem any size necessary simply by showing the range at which characters fail to hear each others’ voices. Of course, artificial acoustic boundaries are easily intruded upon; overhearing is a threat to privacy from anywhere on the stage, since all voices, no matter how soft, must carry into the audience. Tybalt, listening in on the Montagues, discovers Romeo by his voice—“This, by his voice, should be a Montague” (1.5.53)—and communicates his discovery in protected whispers to Capulet. In a chronotope where

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to be here is to be heard, the lovers learn how, in the servingman’s words, to “be here and there too,” to be always on the periphery of hearing and presence. On such a stage, privacy is a near-impossibility. In the second fight scene Benvolio acknowledges explicitly the desire to retreat from public space, urging Mercutio to take his quarrel with Tybalt elsewhere: We talk here in the public haunt of men: Either withdraw unto some private place, Or reason coldly of your grievances, Or else depart; here all eyes gaze on us. ( 3.1.43–46) Against this backdrop of paranoid surveillance, Juliet employs two vocative strategies designed to isolate Romeo and herself from the crowd and to communicate intimately despite intrusive listeners. At first she assumes an Ovidian voice, “tearing the cave where Echo lies,” whose brief iterations, like her namesake’s, fail to lure her love closer. When she does manage to summon Romeo into presence, however, it is with the falconer’s voice, a metaphor that evolves delicately during the course of the first balcony scene. Here she trains her lover to her timbre: Hist, Romeo, hist! O for a falc’ner’s voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again: Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud, Else I would tear the cave where Echo lies, And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine With repetition of my Romeo’s name. (2.2.158–63) Her predicament is similar in the private sphere to that of the Prince in the public. Whereas he must project to be heard by his desired audience, she must whisper her shouts and communicate a message to one person and one alone so as to combat the kind of overhearing and vocal sussing out that Tybalt practiced upon Romeo. In a chapter entitled “How to Lewre a Falcon litely manned” in The Book of Faulconrie (1575), George Turberville describes Juliet’s intended method: “goe further off and lewre hir . . . using the famil-

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iar voyce of the Falconers as they crie when they lewre.”29 Although the word hist is an unattested example, it belongs undoubtedly to fal­ conry’s proprietary vocabulary of calls.30 In the process of becoming the other’s bird (Romeo: I would I were thy bird; Juliet: Sweet, so would I [2.2.182]) the lovers are learning not merely to recognize each other’s voices but to use the method and vocabulary of private speech. Their vocal imprinting finds perfect expression in the metaphor of hawk training. When Romeo cries, “My niësse,” a Renaissance audience would have understood that a niësse is a nestling hawk still in its aerie and an animal at the ideal age to be captured and trained, just as the young lovers are training each other. Some would likely know, as well, that the first lesson in falconry is “to make your Hawke know your voyce,” and that such training requires retreat to a dark, secluded, “secrete place” exactly like Juliet’s garden.31 As is often the case, Shakespeare’s extended metaphor here bears a deep symmetry to the fine details of the subject being compared. Not merely are the young lovers like young hawks in training, they employ the same esoteric calls and occupy the same “secrete places”: the balcony as a niësse’s arboreal perch, which the Nurse has already prefigured (“I must . . . fetch a ladder, by the which your love / Must climb a bird’s nest,” 2.5.71–73), the gloaming seclusion of the garden. Their senses are finely tuned to a falcon’s world, finding private meaning as does the falcon in bird calls. For Romeo in the second balcony scene, the voice of the lark, the falcon’s most common prey, bids flight while Juliet’s nightingale bids a falconer’s return. Finally, both inhabit a domain whose limits are like the falcon’s. At once prisoners bound first by familial ties and then by mutual love like the falcon by his gyves, they are yet native to a boundless airy realm augmented in scope by heightened senses of night vision and hearing. James Calderwood’s intriguing suggestion that Romeo and Juliet’s linguistic style “has been a flight from noise toward a silence beyond speech” is intuitively correct.32 Their figural metamorphosis into birds, however, suggests a classical variation on that notion in which animal muteness constitutes a linguistic millstone. Before turning Philomela into a bird in Metamorphoses 6, Ovid mutes Philomena at the brutal hand of the impassioned Tereus, only to have her communicate her plight in the semiotic weave of a tapestry. Likewise Io finds a way, despite her bovine form, of hoofing out her story in crude figures in the

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dust; even Echo makes herself understood despite her handicap. All three heroines, like Juliet, suffer degrees of silence in the aftermath of immoderate passion. The strategy that Ovid bequeaths to Shakespeare, then, is that love requires not a “silence beyond speech” but a speech beyond silence. In the Narcissus tale, Ovid illustrates the idea of language as a spatio-temporal problem in the frustrated dialogue of nymph and ephebe: a call followed by an answer that, as an echo, is really not an answer but another call, and so on. Emotionally and physically, Narcissus and Echo never coincide. While Narcissus is absent in feeling, Echo is absent in body (she withers away), present everywhere in sound but nowhere in flesh. The paradox of presence-in-absence is one that Shakespeare signals in Romeo and Juliet with what I will call an ubi est topos.33 Both Romeo and Juliet are first introduced in the play on a question of their locale. Lady Montague asks, “O where is Romeo,” and Lady Capulet, “Nurse, where’s my daughter? call her forth to me.” Elsewhere, Benvolio and Mercutio call Romeo without success in scene 1. Romeo’s removal in time to the earliest hours of the morning matches his removal in place to the covert of the wood and later the garden, which in turn matches the locus amoenus Narcissus enters to separate himself from the other youths. Unlike Juliet’s eventual “Madam, I am here” (1.3.7), Romeo’s answer is “I am not here, / This is not Romeo, he’s some other where” (1.1.188–89). At each remove, Romeo’s separateness doubles an Ovidian romance paradigm while drawing Juliet away into a shared removedness. The vocative topos emphasizes not only the angst surrounding the lovers’ absence but their joint isolation, an isolation that becomes a unity in time and place in their own, private chronotope. The rest of the play’s action can be viewed as a series of intrusions upon the lovers’ intimate sphere. There are attempts to enter it (Paris), calls to lure one out (Mercutio, Benvolio), and claims to belong within (Lady Capulet, Nurse). Entry, however, is protected by a system of voice recognition. “Ay, me,” an interjection that gains in significance as the play continues, becomes the shibboleth for inclusion in act 1. Mimicking a conjurer summoning a spirit from the Mab-realm of lovesickness, Mercutio takes up where Benvolio’s calls to the hidden Romeo leave off:

254  romance form and formality Benvolio He ran this way and leapt this orchard wall. Call, good Mercutio. Mercutio Nay, I’ll conjure too. Romeo! humours! madman! passion! lover! Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh, Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied; Cry but “Ay, me!” (2.1.5–10)

Romeo resists Mercutio’s conjuration as a trespass on his privacy, the same reason Paris will resist Romeo’s supposed trespass in the tomb scene: Romeo Fly hence and leave me . . . . . . . . . . . . Stay not, be gone; live, and hereafter say, A madman’s mercy bid thee run away. Paris I do defy thy conjuration. . . . ( 5.3.60, 65–67)

Similarly, Juliet to the Friar when, upon awakening in the tomb, she asks, “where is my lord? / I do remember well where I should be; / And there I am. Where is my Romeo?” ( 5.3.148–50). He can do no better than to urge her to leave her dead husband, to which she delivers the blunt rebuke, “Go get thee hence, for I will not away” (5.3.160). In the romance chronotope, the third wheel or terzo incomodo as Harry Levin calls him, must remain the odd man out.34 Mercutio’s ineffectual “Ay, me” meets instant success when uttered the scene after by Juliet to the hidden Romeo: Juliet Romeo

Ay, me! She speaks.

(2.2.25)

Hers is truly the falconer’s voice that, upon pronouncement of the magic syllables, brings her bird from absence-in-presence into full presence, admitting him to the intimate sphere. He knows her voice.

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Indeed, intimacy is the only criterion for admission—intimate knowledge that becomes the point of contention among the principals of another troika: Lady Capulet, the Nurse, and Juliet. Following on the heels of Lady Capulet’s introductory ubi est, “Nurse, where’s my daughter?” a curious imbroglio develops between the delinquent mother and the prating Nurse over who may stay and who go. At issue is Juliet’s marriage to Paris, and secondarily membership in the cabal who are to negotiate this marriage. Poetically, however, the scene is about the jockeying between the two women for the right to enter the romance chronotope in which stories of marriage and intimacy are transacted. At first, Lady Capulet wants to exclude the Nurse, but then she equivocates: This is the matter. Nurse, give leave a while, We must talk in secret. Nurse, come back again, I have remembered me, thou s’ hear our counsel. Thou knowest my daughter’s of a pretty age. (1.3.7–12) Seizing upon Lady Capulet’s mention of Juliet’s age, the Nurse argues that the criterion for her presence is her superior knowledge of Juliet’s time of birth: Nurse Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour. Lady Capulet She’s not fourteen. Nurse I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth. (12–13)

In the ensuing debate, the purpose of the Nurse’s bawdy digression beginning “Susan and she . . . were of an age” (wholly absent in Brooke’s Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet) is to underscore her coincidence with Juliet, to chronicle her ubiquity at the crucial moments of Juliet’s development—birth, weaning, et cetera—vis-à-vis Lady Capulet’s absence (“My lord and you were then at Mantua,” 29) and thereby to prove her right to participate in Juliet’s chronotope. Ultimately, their joint protestations alienate rather than engage Juliet, whose respectful distance from her mother (“It [marriage] is an honour that I dream

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not of,” 67) and curt dismissal of the Nurse’s vulgarity (“And stint thou too . . . ,” 59) reject their bid for coincidence and reassert instead her own separateness. Thus the consequence of the vocative topos for both lovers is the same: isolation from the public traffic of the play and in their mutual isolation a shared presence-in-absence, a union in their own chronotope. Hide-and-seek in the Ovidian mode is tantamount to a game of exclusion from and admission to a private sphere in which recognition of voice or image is the ticket in. All the more complicated, then, is the predicament of Narcissus, who must recognize himself first before he can admit another into shared intimacy. As with Narcissus, the ultimate obstacle to Romeo and Juliet’s mutual inclusion is self-­recognition, while the danger is the illusion of recognition. Juliet, when she learns he has killed Tybalt, must overcome her suspicions that Romeo’s beautiful image disguises a mirror reality within: “Despisèd substance of divinest show! / Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st” ( 3.2.77–78). And the affected Romeo of the first act, whom Coleridge rightly blames for being narcissistically “in love only with his own idea,”35 does learn selflessness in love, such that he may say to his rival and mirror image, Paris, “I love thee better than myself  ” (5.3.65). Narcissus, at the moment of recognition, exclaims, “Iste ego sum” (I am he). The early Romeo and Juliet refuse self-identity: “I have lost myself . . . This is not Romeo”; “I am not I.” If Shakespeare’s wordplay justifies indulgent interpretation, “Ay, me,” the only call that successfully brings the couple together in space and time, represents their moment of self-knowledge, translating Narcissus’s “Iste ego sum” into a rough equivalent, “I, me”—a romance anagnorisis. “In speech,” writes John Hoskins in Directions for Speech and Style (ca. 1599), “there is no repetition without importance.”36 Repeated words, he suggests, amplify in psychological significance as they recur. In truth, however, it would be fairer to say that repetition is a mode of meaning for the spectator. Blinkered by proximity or participation, the characters in Romeo and Juliet find instances of repetition random and incoherent. For Romeo and Juliet as for Narcissus and Echo, the tragic experience is not edifying. For us, however, their story has meaning as a poetic unity in the Aristotelian sense, that is, a completeness defined by the limits of time and place imposed upon an action. It is meaningful because we watch at a remove from the action, further even and

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thus wider in scope than the watchers within the play, who yet manage to glean something from their witness. Two kinds of watching by two different audiences thus take place in Romeo and Juliet: the intimate and the critical. The first both invites and inhibits the second. Critical watching must never give way to action lest the watcher be drawn into the chronotope and lose sight of the action’s broader unity; for to enter the romance chronotope is to abandon the context of meaning. The closer the watchers in Romeo and Juliet come to involvement, the more they defeat each other’s purposes. In act 4, the Friar proposes to Juliet that while she sleeps out her little death in the tomb, he will join Romeo in watching her wake (4.1); in the opposing camp, Lord Capulet announces his intention to stay awake in order to help Paris with his contending suit (4.2). While the Friar tells Juliet, In the mean time, against thou shalt awake, Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift, And hither shall he come; and he and I Will watch thy waking, (4.1.113–16) Capulet tells his wife, I’ll not to bed tonight; let me alone; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I will walk myself To county Paris, to prepare up him Against tomorrow. (4.2.42, 44–46) The ceremony of watching is repeated immediately thereafter by Capulet, who, unaware that his wakefulness matches the Friar’s, seeks unwittingly to undo the other’s work with watching of his own: Nurse Go, you cot-quean, go Get you to bed; faith, you’ll be sick to-morrow For this night’s watching. Capulet No, not a whit: what, I have watched ere now All night for a lesser cause, and ne’er been sick.

258  romance form and formality Lady Capulet Ay, you have been a mouse-hunt in your time; But I will watch you from such watching now. (4.4.6–12)

A watched pot never boils, so the saying goes, and by the same logic watched lovers can never elope, have sex, and kill themselves. The underlying assumption is that just as watching invites action it inhibits action, which is the essence of Lady Capulet’s admonition to her overactive husband, “I will watch you from such watching.” Far from preventing tragedy, however, the Friar’s vigilance, which is at once active and disengaged, compounds it. He is neither distant enough to watch well nor near enough to act well: he arrives too late to watch with Romeo Juliet’s revival and prevent his premature suicide, and he leaves too soon thereafter to prevent Juliet’s return coup. The job botched, Friar Lawrence tries desperately to hide the evidence by disposing of Juliet “among a sisterhood of nuns” before the Watch comes to watch his watching. Ultimately, the Friar’s negligence at watching implicates him in the crime of not acting. In the final scene, the various games of hide-and-seek, calling, and watching culminate in an indictment not merely of the Friar but of the feuding families for the time they have let pass without acting, for their indulgence in meaningless child’s play that has served only to forestall real solutions, for their inability to draft a language strong enough to bridge the gulf between them. In relief stands the example of Juliet and Romeo, who overcome their temporal and linguistic disjunction through decisive action. Now, with Friar Lawrence’s trial, Shakespeare recapitulates the sequence of mistimed events that result in tragedy, outlining for the characters and the audience once again the defining events of a romance chronotope and the problem of mistiming and misplacement that characterizes it. Friar Lawrence begins his defense with an admission of guilt by omission—“I am the greatest, able to do least, / Yet most suspected, as the time and place / Doth make against me of this direful murder” (5.3.223–25)—and ends, “and if ought in this / Miscarried by my fault, let my old life / Be sacrificed some hour before his time” (266–70; italics mine). The Friar’s alibi finds him at the right place but always a moment too late (“But when I came [to the Capulet’s vault], some minute ere the time / Of her awakening, here lay / The noble Paris and true Romeo dead,”

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5.3.257–58), while the servant Balthasar’s mentions only place (“I brought my master news of Juliet’s death, / And then in post he came from Mantua / To this same place,” 272–74), departing right after. Effectively, both witnesses exculpate themselves, “mend” their complicity, by arguing that because of mistiming they were and yet were not there, an argument that summarizes the fundamental tragic paradox of presence in absence that unites the motifs of watching and hiding, calling and echoing.

Tragedy, indeed all poetic expression, arises out of absence and in

opposition to a presence.37 There must be an unknown, a missing element that destabilizes the plot productively, that frustrates meaning, while at the same time providing an authoritative presence against which the characters struggle in their attempt to mend it. The time it takes for this cycle to be completed determines the genre of the work. In epic, with its vast scope and multiple characters, the completion of this cycle or chronotope is long: Homer, as Northrop Frye reminds us, called it periplomenon eniauton and Vergil labentibus annis.38 In romance, where the plot depends upon the encounters of a single couple, the chronotope is short. Ovidian time concentrates the move from absence to presence into a series of actions and verbal exchanges between two people, or, as Bakhtin says, meetings and nonmeetings. Meaning appears abrupt in such an abbreviated time frame. It is not insignificant therefore, that Shakespeare accords a two-hour time span to a romance, rather than, say, a history—a time span that by most accounts is wholly insufficient for the play to be performed. Two hours is not a mistake but the acknowledgment of a chronotope that is inherently insufficient for its subject, which must truncate and distort its account for a quick burn, for who could bear a middle-aged Romeo and Juliet?

6

m Legends of the Fall Epic Flights and Indecorous Descents in Paradise Lost

“Decorum,” proclaims Milton in Of Education, “is the grand

masterpiece to observe.”1 Strange, considering the outspoken heterodoxy of his politics, theology, metrical theory, and social and domestic mores, that he should choose a watchword so inimical to his temperament.2 But while his standards of decorum may be idiosyncratic, the concept was conventional. A concern for decorum, for codes of address and modes of dress, represents for Norbert Elias a latter stage in the Renaissance replacement of the habitus for the body. Where the desire for flesh-and-blood corporeality and the human form, can be redirected to a desire for formality, the body has been subsumed into a history of manners.3 In Augustan Rome, Ovid ironized precisely these mannered codes, looking instead inward to the body as the paradigm of form. His indecorum was both social and poetic. Cicero and Horace generally defined the term to translate the Greek to prepon, “what is appropriate,” and applied it as a ratio of discrimination in three instances: social behavior vis-à-vis status, virtue as defined by the mos maiorum, and level of poetic diction (low, middle, high) as measured rhetorically by subject matter, meter, and audience, or formally by genre—hence comedy and bucolic (humilis); love elegy and georgic (mediocris); and epic and tragedy (gravis).4 To these sociological and classical definitions we must add Augustine’s corollary: literature must observe Christian decorum, that is, it must design itself exclusively to teaching and illuminating the gospel. As Erich Auerbach observes, “The Christian orator’s subject is always Christian revelation, and 261

262  romance form and formality

this can never be base or in-between.”5 In none of these regards, even the Christian, does Paradise Lost uphold an unwavering standard of decorum. Whether by necessity or by whim, Milton breaks every rule and, as if in obedience to his great theme, transforms each infraction into a legend of a fall that is also an occasion for poetic grace. The presence of Ovid, poet of carnal love, at the center of Paradise Lost is perhaps the most telling example of such a Miltonic indecorum. As Thomas Newton, the poem’s prominent eighteenth-century editor, attests, Milton drew frequent criticism for improperly mixing pagan and sacred myths. Newton proposes a defense, however, that while only occasionally true offers valuable insight into Milton’s poetic thinking. Pagan myths are ancillary to Christian theology in Paradise Lost, he argues; they relate merely through allusion, or, in Newton’s words, “by way of similitude.”6 Two responses come immediately to mind. First, some heathen myths, particularly those of the Metamorphoses, are alluded to not by overt similitude but by tacit, covert insinuation, as in Eve’s narcissistic reverie of book 4. There a non-Christian exemplum intrudes upon the biblical scene of self-knowledge, compromising Augustinian decorum, to be sure, but contributing new psychological motives and crosscurrents to the Fall. Second, one can impugn the need for “similitudes” altogether, assuming that the Bible has a wholly adequate mythos of its own. Harold Bloom’s response that “Milton’s allusiveness has a distinct design, which is to enhance both the quality and the extent of his inventiveness,” is undoubtedly right.7 More important still, allusion is the native idiom of epic, and classical myth (not Judeo-Christian) its native subject matter. The inveteracy of classical poetic custom is too powerful to deny. Milton’s desire to prove Paradise Lost an epic, an anxiety evident in the reader’s note on heroic verse convention prefacing the second edition as much as in the incipit to book 7, proves an irresistible impetus to conform. To establish the generic decorum of the Bible according to a poetic culturally alien to it, Milton is obliged to infringe Christian decorum. Doubtless he is aware of this choice. Like Adam who falls “undeceived” in full knowledge of his sin, so Milton allows his poem to lapse, anticipating the reward of his reader’s grace. In exploring the connection of Milton’s poetic lapses with mythic falls in Ovid, I am attracted to two incidents in Paradise Lost. The first is the poet’s adventure ultra crepidam in the invocation to book 1, the

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claim to soar “with no middle flight . . . / Above th’Aonian Mount” in pursuit of “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (1.14–16).8 Of course, Milton is translating the same phrase in Ariosto, an epic gesture belonging to the convention of recusatio. But for all its self-awareness, it is a gesture undiminished in seriousness. The note of overweening pride in this line has often, and too easily, been explained away as an assertion of the superiority of the subject rather than the quality of the poet. To this the passage itself gives the lie. “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme” stipulates a sublimity of poetic technique beyond, if not instead of, matter. To confirm the true tenor of the boast one need only look to the Nativity Ode, where Milton exhorts himself to “joyn thy voice unto the Angel Quire / From out his secret Altar touch’t with hallow’d fire” (27−28),9 styling himself a second Isaiah. The poet’s ascent through the regions of Earth toward heaven by increments of experience, intellection, and finally religious afflatus is a complex figure of anabasis laid out in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, culminating, as in the Nativity Ode, in near-apotheosis: “Till old experience do attain / To something like Prophetic strain” (173−74).10 The second instance of indecorum is social and serves, more clearly than the first, as prologue to a fall. Book 9: Adam and Eve, still probationers of immortality, begin another suburban day of gardening, meals, and sex. She, in a gesture whose significance deserves more comment than it has hitherto received, speaks first: “And Eve first to her Husband thus began” (9.204). Innocuous as it may seem, her articulate initiative constitutes a breach of biblical precept: “A woman must be a learner, listening quietly with due submission. . . . For Adam was created first and Eve afterwards” (1 Tim. 2.11–14). The consequences are dire, in seeming disproportion to the crime. Yet speaking first initiates in her a sequence of independent thought and deed in despite of marital hierarchy, inviting sin. Besides the consequence of sin, the significance of speech order invites an invidious comparison to the predicament of Echo. As I have argued in the previous chapter, Narcissus and Echo furnished the Renaissance with a poetic template for asynchronous love whose symptom is the disastrous failure of language to join the lovers in time and place. Disunion has a further consequence. In the absence of the love object, amorous language redounds upon itself; it becomes a self-wooing lyric, sublime in its solipsism. In adapting the Narcissus and Echo paradigm, Milton

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transforms a moment of social indecorum into a complex poetics of vocal disjunction illustrating the fall of language in the wake of sin. Ultimately, the incidents of indecorum in both book 1 and book 4 serve as entry points into the catalog of calculated impropriety that Milton’s “grand masterpiece” observes.

Icarian Poetics and Daedalian Science Milton’s Muse, her function and her “meaning” in the poem, are nebulous. Although the “Celestial Patroness” who “deigns / Her nightly visitation unimplored,” dictating verse to the slumbering poet, is invoked in books 1, 3, and 7, she is not named until the last. And then, to our surprise, she is revealed to be not Calliope, the muse of epic, but Urania, the patroness of astronomy, “the meaning not the name” (7.5), as Milton hastens to excuse. She is appropriate only to issues of “the world’s creation,” as Spenser notes.11 Notably the only Renaissance precedent for Urania as epic Muse comes in Sandys’ translation of the Metamorphoses, which he prefaces with a dedication to Elizabeth by Urania, who justifies her province as Muse to the work at hand in that it treats of “The Aire, Immortal Soules, the Skyes, / The Angels in their Hyrarchies.”12 Her aid, that is, will help the Christian poet fly higher than his pagan predecessors. Urania’s agency, however, is distinctly poetic rather than scientific. Indeed, she has as much to do with the substance of astronomical science as the means of obtaining it, which for Milton involves the inward explorations of poetry. A century and a half of scientific research into the heavens, beginning with Copernicus and encompassing the discoveries of Kepler and Galileo, had taught Milton that astronomy was the ultimate expression of indecorum. Just as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had drawn and exploded the boundaries of terrestrial geography, so astronomers had transgressed upon the divine mystery. Since the Middle Ages, Christians had found limits upon decorum in biblical admonition. Romans 11.20 is explicit: “Noli altum sapere” (Do not seek to know what is on high). But knowing the limits of knowledge requires transgressing them. Milton, along with other cognoscenti, knew that in rendering the Latin “Noli altum sapere,” Jerome had simply mis-

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translated the Greek “Me hypselophronei” (Don’t be haughty). For Christopher Marlowe, no subject is more attractive than the inevitability of the original sin, the transgression of knowledge, one in which his audiences enthusiastically, if vicariously, participated. In Faustus, the limits of words—contractual, incantatory—are coextensive with the limits of space and time. In Tamburlaine, whose hero conquers half the world, the human mind is, by natural design, at odds with any construction of limits, spatial or sapiential: Nature that framed us of four elements, Warring within our breast for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world: And measure every planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, Until we reach the ripest fruit of all (2.7.18–27) Milton’s walls around the garden wherein lies this “ripest fruit” are as equivocal in their injunction as they are ineffective in its enforcement. A verbal edifice, Milton’s wall expresses the unavoidable indecorum of poetry of the divine: to write about sin is to know its limits; to know limits is to have transgressed them. Yet as much as Milton is aware of this paradox, he seeks solace in a distinction between science and poetry. Over the pursuit of all higher knowledge in Paradise Lost hangs the equivocal Pauline injunction “Scientia inflat” (1 Cor. 8:1) [knowledge inspires/puffs up], a productive double entente that Milton translates into a double-edged image of divine poetry versus empirical science.13 Both uplift the mind to the empyrean, both plumb the mysteries of forbidden knowledge, but one is “puffed up” by method, empty; the other, no less perilous, is sound. Hedged about by dangers, poetry is Milton’s true science of the heavens, a presumption epitomized by Urania’s presence at the beginning of the poem. I quote the passage again, as I intend to exert some torque upon it:

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I thence Invoke thy [Urania’s] aid to my advent’rous Song, That with no middle Flight intends to soar Above th’Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. There are three actors in this invocation: the “I” is a poet, who seems to be having a hard time controlling his Song. This second actor has a mind of its own—it intends to soar—whence the poet enlists the aid of the third actor, Urania, who at least here serves as a transfigured paraclete. Her job is unclear. Is it to tether the self-willed song, to send it further aloft, or, as I suspect, to ensure epistemological decorum, so that the song will fly at the appropriate level without crossing divine boundaries of the knowable? The problem of decorum this question raises for Paradise Lost, one of which Milton was conscious and in aid of which he enlisted Ovidian paradigms, is that while the poem sets inviolable limits to human science, to the active investigation of divine and heavenly architecture, it grants license to, indeed encourages, poetic trespass. To enlighten the reader to the consequences of what he should not know, Milton must break the protocols that a story of forbidden knowledge obliges him to set. The younger Milton encouraged his fellow Cambridgians to gnostic flights of heavenly science in the third Prolusion: “Do not hesitate, my hearers, to fly even up to the skies. . . . Nay, let not your mind suffer itself to be hemmed in and bounded by the same limits as the earth, but let it wander also outside the boundaries of the world.”14 Then, of course, he was talking about the upper limits of the middle region governed by the Olympian crew. The older Milton goes still higher in Paradise Lost, but here it seems clear he is aware of the inherent impropriety of such a prospect. After the temerity of his debut in book 1, the second invocation in book 3 finds him more circumspect: Hail Holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first born, Or th’Eternal Coeternal beam, May I express thee unblam’d? ( 3.1–3, my italics)

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Then, in book 7, he goes further to acknowledge not merely the potential but the fact of indecorum: Up led by thee [Urania] Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed, An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air. (7.12–14) And in framing the consequences of transgression, he enlists one of the several Ovidian legends of a fall: Return me now to my Native Element: Lest from this flying Steed unrein’d (as once Bellerophon, though from a lower Clime) Dismounted on the’Aleian Field I fall Erroneous there to wander and forlorn. (7.16–20) In Poeticus Mystagogus (1647), Alexander Ross gives a contemporary interpretation of this and similar legends: “The Poets, by the fictions of Bellerophon riding in the air, upon a winged horse, or Phryxeus riding on a Ram over the Sea, of Daedalus in the air, of Phaeton riding in the Chariot of Phoebus . . . did encourage men to virtuous actions and to sublime and heavenly cogitations.”15 As fictions in the hands of poets, Bellerophon, Phaëthon, and Daedalus are goads to virtuous thought. As euhemerized versions of real people, Ross argues, they were astronomers misled by their scientific speculations and thus falling figuratively in sin: “Astronomers . . . [who] search too much into the secret of predestination are like Bellerophon; they climb so high till at last they are overthrown in their imaginations.”16 George Sandys, Ovid’s translator and Milton’s coeval, transmits much the same story: “Lucian will have Dedalus an excellent Astrologian; who instructed his sonne Icarus in that art: when hee, not content with a competent knowledge, but searching too high into those heavenly mysteries, and so swerving from the truth, was said to have fallen from aloft into a sea of errors.”17 Milton, like Ross, seems to be drawing us into an understanding of the paradox of “Scientia inflat” through

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the example of Daedalus. The first transgression belongs to the scientists. Astronomers fall deceived. Poets transgress, as does Adam, in full knowledge of their fall, but with the purpose of elucidating the process of sin and so preventing it in others. Curiously, the same Ovidian symbols and concatenations occur in Francis Bacon’s proscientific Advancement of Learning (1623) and New Organon (1620) but tend toward the opposite conclusion concerning the relative heresies of poetry and science. In parallel passages, the two tracts argue the dangers of knowledge that “puffs up”: “Knowledge is of those things which are to be accepted of with great limitation and caution: that the aspiring to overmuch knowledge was the original temptation and sin whereupon ensued the fall of man: that knowledge hath in it somewhat of the serpent and therefore where it entereth into a man it makes him swell: Scientia inflat.”18 Pursuing the conceit from its origins in Genesis to its epitome in classical myth, ­ Bacon moves directly to the story of Daedalus and Icarus: “And hence it is true that it hath proceeded, that divers great learned men have been heretical, whilst they have sought to fly up to the secrets of the Deity by the waxen wings of the senses.”19 We are surprised to learn, however, that Bacon’s Daedalean adventurers are not natural scientists, astronomers and the like, but the purveyors of moral knowledge: “We warn men not to err in the opposite direction as they avoid this evil; which will certainly happen if they believe that any part of the inquiry into nature is forbidden by an interdict. . . . The method and mode of temptation in fact was the ambitious and demanding desire for moral knowledge.”20 If he had read Bacon (as he may well have done), Milton might have recognized himself as one of those learned men who “err in the opposite direction.” He would surely have taken issue with the Elizabethan philosopher’s idea that the pursuit of moral knowledge, an endeavor squarely in the purlieu of sermonists and ­poets, is the real inflated science. Horace speaks prophetically to the poet who flies too high in Ode 4.2: “Whoever strives, Iulus, to rival Pindar, relies on wings fastened with wax by Daedalean craft, and is doomed to give his name to some crystal sea.”21 Milton was surely mindful of Horace’s admonition. His epic boast announces an Icarian project—to educate his audience to the danger of sin, which they can apprehend only by the experience of a fall, that is, by the failure to apprehend consequences expressed

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in words. Confusion worse confounded, it is a project that to succeed even in the aftermath of failure—that is, in the reader’s retrospect upon his own inability to learn—must indulge in “Daedalean craft,” that is, purvey knowledge that recapitulates the transgression leading to the fall. If not sinful, Milton is at least indecorous. Punctilious readers of Paradise Lost will no doubt be surprised to hear that Daedalus is a likely frame for Milton’s epistemological paradox, considering he is never mentioned by name. In anticipation of such, I have endeavored to show by example of Ross and Bacon a conventional pattern of allusion from the biblical to the Ovidian and to implicate in it a shared habit of mind or point of attention. But even this is not wholly necessary. Allusion in Milton commonly signifies an oblique or hidden reference that ranges incognito through the warp of the poem, coupling like to unlike in an esoteric dance of subtext.22 Allusions of this sort proliferate in Milton, and their hiddenness is all the more appropriate when obtrusiveness would make a clean breast of indecorum. Ovid’s Narcissus lurking in Eve’s dream, to which I have already adverted, is such a one. Daedalus is another. Icarus we remember from the Metamorphoses as the youth fitted with a pair of wax and feather wings who flew too high to the sun, scorning his father’s injunction to fly the middle course and shun the upper and lower. In the biblical mythos the Sun is the symbol of God the Father, and thus Icarus may be read as rising into the illicit vision of the divine. He is also the symbol of the rebellious child. We detect his allusive presence in the disobedient Adam and Eve, who “fancy that they feel / Divinity within them breeding wings / Wherewith to scorn the Earth” (9.1009–11), or in Satan’s “who aspires must down as low / As high he soar’d” (9.169–70), or even in Milton’s vatic persona, who anticipates Icarus’s watery end in his own poetic descent, fearing that his own infirmity may “damp my intended wing / Deprest” (9.45–46).23 This last in particular reinforces the Icarian infraction of the middle way as a rule of poetic decorum. Daedalus is an ambiguous character whose aspects, both good and ill, are reflected in many of the actors in Paradise Lost. Celebrated architect and inventor (“ingenio fabrae celebrimus,” Metamorphoses 8.159), he is equally skilled in deception, in leading others into labyrinths of error (“ducit in errorem ambage viarum,” 8.160). In this aspect he is a type of Satan who “amazes” Eve and lies in a “Labyrinth of

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many a round self roll’d” (9.183); as builder, rival to the “great Architect,” Daedalus is allied in transgression with Mulciber ( Vulcan), architect of Pandaemonium, and with the builders of Babel. As inventor he is again a type of Satan, crafter of the engines of devilry in book 6, stepfather to the heuretic skills of Seth’s sons and Cain’s daughters, “Inventors rare, / Unmindful of thir Maker” (11.610–11). Most prominent, though, as practitioner of unknown arts (“ignotus artes,” 8.188) and innovator of the laws of nature (“naturamque novat,” 8.189), he is the astronomer reincarnated in Milton’s Galileo, who investigates things “the great Architect / Did wisely conceal” (8.73 ff.) and contrives “To save appearances.” Yet Daedalus is also a type of the poet: a maker, guide to higher secrets, leader into (and out of  ) labyrinths of rhetorical error, inventor of different wings. The affinity between Daedalus and Milton is never greater than when, in the Ovidian tale, the father binds the wings on his son, crying as he works because he knows that the lesson of the middle course—of decorum—can be learned only from the experience of falling. In Paradise Lost, the relationship of Daedalus to Icarus is that of the poet to his audience. We watch aghast as Eve recounts her dream of an intellectual ascent on the wings of a Daedalean guide: Forthwith up to the Clouds With him I flew, and underneath beheld The Earth outstretcht immense, a prospect wide And various; wondr’ing at my flight and change To this high exaltation; suddenly My Guide was gone, and I, methought, sank down ( 5.86–91) It is only fitting that Eve, who wakes to an Ovidian vision of herself in book 4, should now experience an Ovidian moment of self­recognition in sleep. Like numerous heroines of the Metamorphoses who watch in wonder or horror at their avian transformations, so Eve experiences the long moment of her illusory metamorphosis, her “flight and change.” To her consternation, however, hers is not a myth of apotheosis, as are some, but a legend of a fall. She is Icarus to Satan’s Daedalus, who like him abandons his charge at the crucial moment. The heuristic question in all this is whether Eve can learn

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from this mimesis of falling or whether she will prove an Icarus in fact. Of course, she does not learn, nor does Adam extrapolate from Raphael’s account of Satan’s fall to his own jeopardy, and we are left with a disturbing question of our own. Can we learn from Milton’s words? Also, if Daedalus is a model for the insufficiency of science, is he also a model for the poet’s linguistic insufficiency? Wittgenstein prefaced the Tractatus with a limitary doctrine of language that stands as a caveat to all authors: “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” In his story “That Day in Eden,” Mark Twain brings the same problem to bear on the situation of Paradise. Trying to describe pain to Eve, Satan finds the concept ineffable in default of her experience. He expresses the quandary as a linguistic aporia: “Things which are outside of our orbit—our own particular world—things which by our constitution and equipment we are unable to see, or feel, or otherwise experience—cannot be made comprehensible to us in words.”24 For Twain, this aporia carries with it serious moral ramifications: if Adam and Eve cannot know pain and death, they cannot construe sin in any meaningful way and are therefore not responsible for committing it. Samuel Johnson addresses the problem from the perspective of the reader: “Another inconvenience of Milton’s design is that it requires the description of what cannot be described. . . . The man and woman [in Paradise Lost] who act and suffer, are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged.”25 Daniel Bouchard restates the theme structurally, arguing that Milton’s poem “undermines the possibility of text as a didactic instrument.”26 Indeed, Milton himself anticipates this paradox in Raphael’s caution to Adam on the impossibility of giving an account of the Creation: “What words or tongue of Seraph can suffice / Or heart of Man suffice to comprehend?” (7.112–14). Remarkable, then, that Milton deigns to attempt what the eloquent angel could not.27 Taken together, these objections point to a crisis of poetic sufficiency in Paradise Lost. It is a testament to the power of the poem that it can abide such an indictment untoppled and even support an equally vehement rebuttal. Like other critics, Stanley Fish sees the poet’s main purpose as educating the reader “to an awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man.”28 But unlike Twain, who finds the problem of first sin incomprehensible because inexpressible,

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and Johnson, who argues that this inexpressibility triggers a disconnect in the reader, Fish maintains powerfully that Milton’s argument is affective rather than subjective. Milton’s words carry the same experiential power to educate that actions do; indeed, Milton’s poetry intentionally (and there perhaps is the rub) obscures his readers’ powers of ratiocination by enmeshing them in a labyrinth of metaphor, allusion, and polysemy, forcing them astray. The momentum of consensus in the last quarter of the century has inclined (although not unanimously)29 toward Fish’s affectivism, which, as a poetic theory, conveniently vindicates Milton’s prejudice against the scientific and the empirical in favor of the inspirational. In effect, he makes an end run around the paradox that I have located in the myth of Daedalus and Icarus—that empiricism inflates our sense of understanding but cannot truly educate except by the experience of failure, that it is useless and dangerous knowledge—by proposing poetry as a viable heuristic science in its stead. On measure, however, his view of the poem’s infallibility robs the Fall of the irony of insufficiency that so fully suffuses Milton’s Ovidian models of fallenness. The poem need not resolve the paradox it proposes. In spite of Fish, I prefer to see Daedalus as a spectral figure of aporia hovering over the poem, a symbol of gnostic irony, an open challenge to mimesis.

Tropes of Fallen Language If Milton intends to observe decorum as his grand masterpiece in Paradise Lost, his subject places significant obstacles in the way. First among these, as we have seen, is the dilemma of representing a story of intellectual trespass upon the divine without iterating the crime. Milton accommodates this problem of divine “science” by distinguishing among methods and kinds of knowing. As I have argued, he also accommodates the impossibility of a solution by interpolating figures of aporia and paradox into the narrative. The second obstacle is linguistic. How can Milton render a story of aboriginal innocence in a postlapsarian idiom? How, given a language that is itself fallen, can a poet maintain a propriety of expression to a subject that is linguistically unrecoverable?

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At first glance, these questions seem to have little bearing upon the rhetoric of the early books. There Satan holds the scene, and his hypocrisy is perfectly condign and recognizable to us, who share the same habits of speech. Needless to say, Satan behaves appropriately to his character, voicing opinions dissonant with Milton’s own. He also observes a subtler stylistic decorum in which the speaker adopts a tone apposite not to character or subject but to the emotional effect he desires to achieve. Thus, preparing to seduce Eve, the Tempter Now part puts on, and as to passion mov’d, Fluctuates disturb’d, yet comely, and in act Rais’d, as of some great matter to begin. As when of old some Orator renown’d In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence Flourish’d, since mute, to some great cause addres’t, Stood in himself collected, while each part, Motion, each act won audience ere the tongue, Sometimes in highth began. . . . (9.667–75) It is interesting to note that Milton deems Satan’s tactics, though reprehensible in motive, wholly appropriate in method. He mentions with approval Athenian and Roman orators, and with remorse the loss of such eloquence “since mute” in the modern age. Again, when Satan meets Uriel upon the Orb of the Sun, vigilant of the enemy’s approach but unarmed against verbal deception, the fallen angel casts decorum about him like a cloak, speaking encomium of God’s creation, Man. Unwittingly Uriel responds to the level of address, the travesty of magniloquence that is yet appropriate in its excess to the divine character: Fair Angel, thy desire which tends to know The works of God, thereby to glorify The great Work-Master, leads to no excess That reaches blame, but rather merits praise The more it seems excess. . . . (9694–98)

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One cannot help but think that a fallen angel—Satan, for example— who was versed in fallen rhetoric, and for whom intention, subject, and style formed a mutable equation, would not have been so easily deceived. But this is angelic language, quite apart from the one Adam and Eve speak and that, in its second avatar, Milton writes. These initial observations on Milton’s stylistic decorum give place to a more intransigent issue of linguistic anachronism in Paradise Lost. At Adam’s fall, Sin, as she prophesies in book 10, will forever alter the complexion of thoughts and words: “Till in Man residing through the Race, / His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect” (10.607–8). Laboring under the polyglot curse of Babel (12.53–58), the fractured language of the fallen world has nothing of the transparency of ­Adam’s archetypal tongue to which all creation responds, like the “Birds in orderly array or wing” that “Come summoned over Eden to receive / Thir names” (6.74, 75–76).30 Arnold Stein has usefully traced the semantic evolution of individual words before and after sin. The “error” of “With mazie error under pendant shades” (4.239), for example, changes from its original meaning of “order in irregularity” and “rightness in wandering” to the antiphrastic “wrong wandering,” as in “wand’ring mazes lost.”31 To Stein’s list we can add our former example of “sapience” reinflected to irony. Milton’s penchant for Latinisms, English words used according to their archaic Latin denotations, can be attributed to his conscious attempt to formulate an epic ur-language whose alienness to contemporary usage attunes the reader to the degradation of language through sin while simultaneously rehabilitating it. The argument for Milton’s awareness of linguistic decorum begins here. For me, however, it evolves more fully in the metaphors and allusions he fashions to describe and transform the problem within the poem’s fabric. Paradise Lost is thick with poetic interdictions, all of which, despite token resistance, Milton gladly tramples. We have seen him breach the limits of knowledge and repair fallen language by reinventing his own. The same poetic rehabilitation faces him now in his use of metaphors, for as John Hollander justly observes, “It is only the poetry of fallen man that will need to employ tropes and fables, similes, echoes, and allusions in order to represent Truth.”32 On my way to a discussion of allusions via similes and metaphors, I would like to begin by observing a trope (or, technically speaking, a scheme) that, like the

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other figures, recognizes and then outflanks an injunction. The name of the scheme is paralipsis, and it describes the advantage a poet takes by mentioning a forbidden topic in order to broach it, breaking the interdict but saving the appearance of decorum. Invariably, Ovid is Milton’s nefas, but a model he cannot help but imitate. Thus, in a rhetoric of resistance, Milton invites a comparison of the flowery field from which Proserpina was abducted by Pluto down to hell with the field in Paradise just before Satan sets foot upon it: Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpina gath’ring flow’rs Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis Was gather’d. (4.268–71) One forgives Milton immediately. The paralipsis accomplishes so much in the straitened compass of a few lines. Proserpina tacitly petitions sisterhood with Eve, both in a sense drawn down to an underworld by chthonic raptors. The flowers of their shared locus amoenus euphemize the sexual event that colors their descent: Proserpina’s deflowering and Eve’s concupiscence. It is a verbal echo realized to the full in book 9 when Adam bemoans Eve’s fallen state: “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, / Defac’t, deflow’r’d, and now to Death devote?” (9.900–901). But I am interested most in Milton’s rhetorical imitation of the scene in Metamorphoses 5 from which he takes the story. In Ovid, the description of Proserpina’s rape is accomplished by a varied group of paralipses: Haud procul Hennaeis lacus est a moenibus altae, nomine Pergus, aquae: non illo plura Caystros carmina cycnorum labentibus audit in undis. (Metamorphoses 5.385–87) [Not far from Henna’s walls there is a deep pool of water, Pergus by name. Not Cayster on its gliding waters hears more songs of swans than does this pool.] “Not Cayster,” like “Not that fair field,” locates the story poetically in a negative command. Both issue a poetic injunction that will be

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broken or circumvented immediately. Pluto snatches up Proserpina on his way to the underworld, scattering the flowers she has collected, but manages in fact to move her from one pool to another, just as Milton moves Eve from field to field. Ovid’s sly reference to the Vergilian “swan song” ironizes her movement toward death. The nymph Cyane stops the chariot at her pool, laying down rules of decorum with the example of her own plight. Again, the figure of paralipsis dominates: non potes invitae Cereris gener esse: roganda, non rapienda fuit. quodsi conponere magnis parva mihi fas est, et me dilexit Anapis; exorata tamen, nec, ut haec, exterrita nupsi. (Metamorphoses 5.414–18) [No further shall you go! Thou canst not be the son-in-law against her will. The maiden should have been wooed, not ravished. But, if it is proper for me to compare small things with great (quodsi componere magnis parva mihi fas est), I also have been wooed, by Anapis, and I wedded him, too, yielding to prayer, however, not to fear like this maiden.] The nymph’s courageous defense of what is right and proper has the power to deflect but none to prevent. Like the elliptical rhetoric that circumnavigates prohibition, so too Dis avoids Cyane and her authority: . . . in gurgitis ima contortum valido sceptrum regale lacerto condidit; icta viam tellus in Tartara fecit et pronos currus medio cratere recepit. (Metamorphoses 5.421–23) [He whirled his royal sceptre with strong right arm and smote the pool to its bottom. The smitten earth opened up a road to Tartarus and received the down-plunging chariot in the cavernous depths.] Appropriately, the collapse of propriety is matched by a legend of a fall. I must confess, however, an ulterior motive in citing this passage. Paralipsis is not the only scheme of decorous resistance that Milton has

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gleaned from Ovid. Another makes the same gesture but enjoys a more frequent and noteworthy audience in Paradise Lost. The question “if it is proper for me to compare small things with great” is a formula of licensed indecorum dear to Milton that solicits the answer, “No, it is not proper . . . but I will do it anyway.” He uses it no fewer than five times in Paradise Lost alone. Of course, although Ovid is its most frequent Latin exponent, he did not originate this topos.33 In the historians Herodotus and Thucydides it appears merely as a scheme of magnification (auxesis) in which smaller elements are compared to larger ones of the same class: a plateau to a plain, a skirmish to a battle.34 In poetry, the comparison is always transgressive of class and order, closer in type to the adynaton or world out-of-kilter, as in Homer’s famous simile of soldiers to bees.35 Particularly in Ovid, it invokes the notion of fas (si fas est), what is permissible within context. In Cicero, comparing great things with small raises explicit questions of stylistic decorum to which Milton was undoubtedly sensitive.36 For Vergil, who stringently avoided comparing great with small in epic, it was an issue of linguistic and generic limits. In Eclogue 1, the shepherd Tityrus tries abortively to explain the “god” he has encountered in the big city: Urbem, quam dicunt Romam, Meliboee, putavi stultus ego huic nostrae similem, quo saepe solemus pastores ovium teneros depellere fetus. sic canibus catulos similis, sic matribus haedos noram, sic parvis componere magna solebam. (Eclogues 1.19–23) [The city which they call Rome, Meliboeus, I foolish one! thought was like this of ours, whither we shepherds are wont to drive the tender younglings of our own flocks. Thus I knew puppies were like dogs, and kids like their dams; thus I used to compare great things with small.] But there his explanation breaks off, and, as John Coolidge astutely interprets, he cannot continue because “he could only do so in terms appropriate to his own and Meliboeus’s rustic character.”37 Tityrus’s language proves inadequate because its level of expression is bounded by the decorum humilis (eclogue) in which he speaks, whereas none such constrains epic. Extending this reasoning to Paradise Lost, Coolidge

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concludes that Milton uses the great-by-small topos to prove its generic superiority to pagan epic, “to place his own epic in the Vergilian progression, or rather beyond it.”38 However, taking the example of likening Michael’s combat with Satan to the collision of two planets, the gesture of setting forth “Great things by small” (6.311) points to a problem not of what can be expressed in epic but of what can be expressed in mundane language. We are handicapped in our faculty to imagine, Milton keeps reminding us, and he in his capacity to articulate, events of a magnitude in time and space before the beginning of human history. Even a super­ nova in the heavens is insufficient analogy to the archangels’ premundane clash. For Vergil, great-by-small is a topos of generic limits. It is that, too, for Milton, but more radically it is also an attempt to convey the absolute limits of language in an as yet unredeemed world, an exclusively Christian theme without classical models. In treating Ovid’s example alongside Vergil’s, then, I would like to trace the pattern of paraliptic evasion that great-by-small initiates in Paradise Lost, a sidestepping of the rules of decorum that, as in Ovid, provokes a catastrophic fall but that in Milton doubles as a poetic catastrophe—a fall as a figure of poetic inexpressibility. Not all occasions of great-by-small are announced by the signal formula. Those that aren’t tax our abilities to appreciate the effect of indecorum all the more. Thus Satan’s entry into Eden, the event inaugurating the fatal cycle of sin culminating in the loss of Paradise, arrives unobtrusively, couched in language belonging to eclogue, comedy, and middle-class experience: As when a prowling Wolf Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where Shepherds pen thir Flocks at eve In hurdl’d Cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the Field: Or as a Thief bent to unhoard the cash Of some rich Burgher, whose substantial doors Cross-barr’d and bolted fast, fear no assault, In the window climbs, or o’er the tiles: So clomb this first grand Thief into God’s Fold. (4.183–92)

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Cycling through a progression of increasingly mean, bucolic, bourgeois images, the total picture is subtly but profoundly inappropriate to the gravity of its subject. Nor is it redeemed from inappropriateness by the implied anagoge of “Christ’s flock” or “God’s fold.” The analogy of God to a rich burgher and Adam and Eve to his hoard of cash borders on travesty. The scene is certainly no indictment of Satan’s trespass in terms of the history-making crime it is. But assuming this passage is not inadvertent, what effect does Milton want to achieve by it? In the absence of an answer, we are left with a self-­abnegating metaphor of poetic poverty in the face of supernatural enormity, which provides, perhaps, a makeshift answer. The emotional letdown we feel is the experience of fallen imagination and diminished word power signaled by great-by-small. That such may indeed be Milton’s desired effect gains cogency by repetition. A similar metaphoric deflation occurs in the likening of the bridge over Chaos to Xerxes’ bridge across the Hellespont. So Xerxes, the Liberty of Greece to yoke, From Susa his Memnonian Palace high Came to the Sea, and over Hellespont Bridging his way, Europe with Asia join’d, And scourg’d with many a stroke the indignant waves. (10.306–11) We expect the momentous arrival of Sin and Death on Earth to be marked by something commensurate in mortal scale. Yet Xerxes’ tantrum against the waves is a pathetic, puerile image of failure that does little justice to the grand capitulation of Sin and Death to a heroic Christ at the Apocalypse. Here again we are manipulated into a metaphoric cul-de-sac that, while apt in the terms of its comparison, is poetically incapable of capturing the scale of the moment. Some midcentury critics like Leavis and Waldock, when faced by the incongruity of some of Milton’s metaphors, damned them tout court. Others, both earlier and more recent, have sought to rescue them to a greater harmony by denying that any incongruity harms Milton’s poetry. Among the former, Thomas De Quincey is the most eloquent spokesman: “Each image, from reciprocal contradiction, brightens and vivifies the other. The two images act, and react,

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by strong repulsion and antagonism. . . . Out of this one principle of subtle and lurking antagonism, may be explained everything which has been denounced under the idea of pedantry in Milton.”39 But for a poem in which Christian decorum is paramount, not all metaphors can be justified by De Quincey’s principle of antagonism. Nor should we try to rescue them. My aim is to illustrate not the failure of Milton’s language in Paradise Lost but rather its success in representing linguistic failure as a consequence of the Fall. Nowhere is that inexpressibility more compelling than in the first instance of great-by-small (2.932–35), which sets up Satan’s encounter with that great aporia Chaos in the following sentence. The unfathomable physics of Satan’s fall shares a canny congruence to an unfathomable poetics. Both face a “vast vacuity” that gives way to a plunge of ineffable profundity: Flutt’ring his pennons vain plumb down he drops Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling. . . . (2.932–35) Can we imagine or state in words a fall without end? By withholding, Milton makes us yearn for a redeemed, empowered language that can halt the linguistic fall, that, unlike Cyane’s weak words overmatched by Pluto’s more powerful descent, can uphold stylistic decorum. In Paradise Regained, Milton delivers just such a metaphor but does so in a way we hardly expect. Ovid tells the story of Hercules’ (Alcides’) fight with the giant Antaeus with a remarkable comparison of great to small: the enormous Antaeus as he hurtles down in defeat to the Euboean Sea is likened to the fall of tiny hailstones (Metamorphoses 9.220–22). Milton transforms the incongruity into something far more ambiguous: But Satan, smitten with amazement fell As when Earth’s Son Antaeus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Jove’s Alcides and oft foiled still rose Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple join’d Throttled at length in the Air, expir’d and fell;

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So after many a foil the Tempter proud, Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall. (4.562–71) As the fight progresses and Antaeus (Satan) receives “new strength” from his mother Earth, we are led to believe that he will win. In Ovid he does not win. But in Milton he both wins and loses simultaneously, as we learn from the brilliantly parabolic last line: he “Fell whence he stood to see his Victor fall.” Christ’s fall spells Satan’s fall. The analogy cannot work in the classical way; it does not admit such a paradox; it would seem to fail. But unlike Milton’s previous, consciously inept images that point to poetic failure, this one is redeemed by the triumph of Christian paradox. Christ’s grace to man, the gift of his fall, redeems the power of language and metaphor. Not until the very end of Paradise Lost do we begin to hear these effects of Christ’s grace. In the valedictory scene closing book 12, Adam accepts his attempt to circumvent God’s prohibition as sin and vows to abide by what amounts to a new decorum: Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best And love with fear the only God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence. . . . (12.561–64) The new social decorum affects stylistic decorum. The incongruity of great to small becomes the rhetorical paradigm for Christ’s subverting the axiologies of social and linguistic value: . . . by small Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simple meek; that suffering for Truth’s sake Is fortitude to highest victory. (12.566–70) In De doctrina christiana, Augustine proposes a new Christian stylistic decorum to supersede the classical. Christ’s incarnation and passion,

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he argues, confound the classical principles separating low things from high, the humble from the sublime. His fall and rise are paralleled by his rhetoric that blends the humblest style, the humblest images, with the most elevated matter. So too must Christian rhetoric rise by falling.40 In Milton’s great-by-small topos, then, we see played out the clash of two systems of decorum, the classical and the Christian, corresponding to a poetics of fallen and redeemed language. His infractions of decorum recapitulate poetically the inverted logic of Christ’s theodicy.

Echoic Indecorum I turn now from one representation of linguistic fallenness to another, from metaphoric to allusive topoi. At the beginning of this chapter I noted the pivotal nonevent of book 9, “And Eve first to her Husband thus began” (9.204), that initiates a chain of events resulting in the Fall. The immediate consequence of her indecorum is the couple’s separation: they “divide labors” and practice “short absence” from each other. In terms of the structure of discourse, they disjoin voice from voice, initiating what might be called an “answerable style” of asynchronous thought and speech, a foretaste of Sin’s fallen language that distorts “thoughts . . . , looks, words, actions.” Their predicament, like that of Romeo and Juliet in the previous chapter, is that of Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo. Eve and Echo share one crucial quality: both are women compelled to speak after. To be fair though, there was always a lag between Adam’s primacy and Eve’s alterity, a sequence that Christian doctrine transforms into a decorum of authority and speech: “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (4.299). Eve’s status as a verbal Nachkömmling is central to the motive of her error: in eating the fruit first she realizes a desire long held to reorder the protocol in which she holds a post hoc status, to countermand her purely reactive will. One might argue that the reason Eve’s account of her own creation in book 4 comes before Adam’s is that the impropriety of narrative sequence rehearses her speaking before Adam in book 9.41 But while Echo’s sin of speaking out of turn is Eve’s, curiously, the echoic consequences of Eve’s verbal indiscretion, the transformed language “alter’d style . . . / Speech

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intermitted” (9.1132–33), are Adam’s. Echo, we realize, is the model of fallen language for both. In reading the rhetoric of echo in Paradise Lost, let me begin by stating the obvious: the phenomenon of echo is the aition of the character in Ovid. The Latin word or words that Ovid uses and that resonate connotatively in Milton are imago and umbra. Imago signifies a reflection either visual or aural, serving the predicaments of Narcissus and Echo equally. Umbra is a shadow or in rarer usage a vocal shadow. It also means a “shade” or “ghost,” an image of death as a reflection of life. Ovid uses it to describe Narcissus’s reflection that causes him ultimately to become a shade in Tartarus. Milton’s echoes have a complex semantic and moral function. Syllables, words, phrases, images recur insistently over the course of the poem, reflected across the echoic barrier of sin that occurs at 9.781–82. But like Ovid’s umbra, Milton’s echoes after the Fall are tainted by the shade of their fallenness. Language, like its speakers, undergoes a turning point in book 9 and like an echo begins to degrade in moral inflection, meaning, tone, decorum. The portrait of the fallen Adam “estrang’d in look and alter’d style / Speech intermitted” serves as a useful index of types of echo both visual and aural in book 9. “Estrang’d in look” captures ­Adam’s narcissistic solitude, his inwardness and self-reflection. Missing is that oneness he shared with Eve before the Fall and that Eve articulates in her first address, “O Sole in whom my thoughts find all repose” (5.28). In book 9, Adam echoes her “Sole” in “Sole Eve, Associate sole, to me beyond / Compare above all living Creatures deare” (9.227–28). But already the second repetition “Associate sole,” deferring in meaning from unity to singularity, admits a hint of the solitude he will experience when estranged and dissociated from her. “Estrang’d in look” is most closely the experience of Narcissus, who looks at himself, or the shadow of himself, as existentially separate. Like Narcissus’s solitude, Adam’s is marked by an inability to communicate; his thoughtfulness is a mute reply to Eve’s thoughtlessness, an antiecho, a retreat into silence that is yet an echo. These contradictions rise to the surface in a beautifully turned oxymoron: “Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length / First to himself he inward silence broke” (9.894–95, my italics). Of course, inward silence cannot be broken. Thoughts don’t have sound. But Milton seems to

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want to make Adam’s thoughts mime the conventions of dramatic apostrophe. Verisimilitude aside, in Adam’s address to the empty woods we hear what he thinks as if it were spoken aloud: “How can I live without thee, how forgo Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join’d To live again in these wild Woods forlorn?” (9. 908–10) C. S. Lewis was the first to comment upon the peculiar mention of his surroundings.42 Woods are, of course, a place of echoes, as Adam soon discovers when he and Eve enter “the thickest Wood” with its “echoing Walks between” (9.1100, 1107). The reason for Milton’s mimesis of spoken rhetoric here is that in answer we are meant to hear another echo, Narcissus’s lovelorn question to his own woods: “O ye woods, did anyone ever love more cruelly than I?” (Metamor­phoses 5.422). Milton’s answer is a resounding “Yes!” Soliciting intertext, Adam’s love, we are meant to realize, is an infinitely graver paradox than his model’s. But Milton continues. These are the same woods that Adam again addresses in book 10: O Woods, O Fountains, Hillocks, Dales, Bow’rs, With other echo late I taught your shades To answer, and resound for other Song. (10.860–63) In this passage, the poet confronts his reader with a manifold of echoes that chart the progress of fallen language across the text. The first echo takes us back to the apostrophe to the woods just before Adam’s fall and the question of whether he can live without Eve’s companionship. Now, having chosen to share Eve’s fate, he laments the loveless solitude he feels in her presence. The second echo is a playful pendant to the first. The word shades, Ovid’s “other echo” umbra, darkens Adam’s choice with the reminder that death is the consequence of his choice to sin. The final echo signals an “alter’d style.” The “other Song” returns us to the “Matin Song” Adam sings to Eve to open book 5. Then the couple lived in married harmony. The echo reminds the reader of the change of sentiment measured by the change

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of genre and decorum in the song. What was first an epithalamium or marriage song has become an elegy of mourning. Where once the couple spoke to each other in the lyric mode of love elegy, now their mode has changed to musicless invective: out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best Befits thee with him leagu’d, thyself as false And hateful. (10.867–69)43 The most insidious effect of Eve’s echoic crime, however, is its disruption of Milton’s rhythms and euphonies, the “Heroic Verse without Rime” upon which he pins the poem’s epic-defining decorum. The first hint of the “lame Meter” that Milton so vehemently decries in his foreword comes just before the Fall in Adam’s premonition of trouble: “Yet oft his heart, divine of something ill, / Misgave him, hee the falt’ring measure felt” (9.845–46). The poet’s “falt’ring measure” is Adam’s heart skipping a beat. But Milton’s compulsive double meanings point us irresistibly to an anxiety over prosodic measure. By stages, Milton’s strong line begins to stutter. Adam’s first utterance to Eve after having partaken of the fruit, betrays an alliteration bordering on internal rhyme: O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear To that false Worm, of whomsoever taught To counterfeit Man’s voice. (9.1067–69) The long “e” in Eve migrates first to “evil,” then, picking up the “r” in “hour” and the “v” from “evil,” resounds in the echoic direction “give ear,” which flattens in the following line to “whomsoever.” John Hollander remarks upon “the new fallen phenomenology of Eve’s name” that “no longer echoes ‘even,’ ‘eve,’ ‘evening,’ but now as henceforth, ‘evil.’ ”44 Adam’s conclusion that like Echo to Narcissus the serpent has “counterfeited Man’s voice” extends to Eve too. In paraphrasing Satan’s arguments to Adam, she becomes the echo of Satan’s voice. Adam’s “evil hour,” however, is itself a textual echo that establishes a link to the one egregious moment of indecorum. As Milton narrates

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the instant of Eve’s crime, his poetry recoils, forgetting for a moment its epic decorum: So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she plucked, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat . . . gave signs of woe. (9.780–83) Echo as a figure of repetition is as disastrous for Eve as it is for Milton. In one moment of poetic lapse in synchrony with Eve’s sin, he rhymes. The presence of rhyme here, however, needs some defense. Eat and seat are certainly eye-rhymes and are likely ear-rhymes. While one might argue that Milton intended the preterite eat to sound like et, ate, or, as in Middle English, somewhere in between, a similar couplet in L’Allegro, “With stories told of many a feat / How faery Mab the junkets eat” (101–2), in which eat is again preterite, allows us to extrapolate a homophony with reasonable certitude. In Paradise Lost, the homophone is crucial. For one couplet, Echo has become Milton’s Muse of fallen language.

Generic Descent and Its Ovidian Models Rarely is Paradise Lost explicit about poetic theory. Genre, however, is one topic Milton addresses both directly and parenthetically. From before the beginning, the question of the poem’s status as epic (or heroic) lurks anxiously at the margins of the argument, and not without good cause. In answer to what we can only assume to have been pointed criticism of the poem’s epic merit in its first edition, the second edition of 1674 girds itself with formidable critical armor in the shape of two poetic apologies, Samuel Barrow’s in Latin and Andrew Marvell’s in English, and the author’s own defense of the heroic propriety of blank verse. Both Barrow and Marvell enter on the same cue—epic magnitude: Qui legis Amissam Paradisum, grandia magni Carmina Miltoni, quid nisi cuncta legis?

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Res cunctas, et cunctarum primordia rerum, Et fata, et fines continet iste liber. (1–4) [Reader of Paradise Lost, the epic poem of the great Milton, what if you don’t read everything? That book contains all things and the beginnings of all things, and fates and limits.] Barrow’s Latin makes several allusive and categorical gestures. In a general sense, he seeks to define Paradise Lost as an encyclopedic epic: it treats of “all things” (res cunctas). But this is not an indiscriminate hodge-podge of things. “Primordia rerum” (beginnings of things) is a specific reference to Lucretius, and to a lesser degree Ovid, the only two Romans to have written epics of creation.45 Milton contains their theme, but he also contains Vergil and Aristotle. “Et fata” (fates) announces Vergil’s signature province, while “fines” (limits) recalls Aristotle’s epic doctrine of unities and narrative boundaries (beginning, middle, end). Magnitude and variety of subject were a topic of epic controversy in the Renaissance, one that the Italians, using the example of Ovid, were careful to juxtapose—some favorably, others not—to the Aristotelian unity of subject. Cinzio numbered among the supporters: “In his Metamorphoses, Ovid has shown what is fitting for the ingenious poet to do, for abandoning Aristotle’s laws of art with admirable mastery, he commenced the work at the beginning of the world and treated in marvelous sequence a great variety of matters.”46 For detractors, the issue of magnitude was twofold. First, multiple main characters and contexts distracted narrative and thematic focus. This is arguably the case of Paradise Lost, which can be divided into major narremes: a Sataniad, an Adamiad, and an Eviad, all following their own, albeit intersecting, narrative trajectories. Second, epics of magnitude, by virtue of the breadth to which they cast their net, necessarily relax the principles of inclusion according to which epic matter can be judged. It is to this concern that Marvell addresses himself in his prefatory poem: When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold, In slender Book his vast Design unfold, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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. . . the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent. But he ends reassured of Milton’s epic decorum: “Thou hast not miss’d one thought that could be fit / And all that was improper dost omit.” Nonclassicists will pass over the beginning of Marvell’s poem with an expression of mild perplexity, perhaps, at his description of Paradise Lost as a “slender Book.” At several hundred pages, depending of course upon the edition, slender it is not; it is too long, in fact, for readers like Samuel Johnson. But Marvell is asking us to read “slender” with the classicist’s ear to the epic convention of major and minor genres beginning with the famous distinction in Callimachus. In the invocation to the Aitia, the Alexandrian poet defends the magnitude of his epic not on length but on artistic economy: “The Telchines, who are ignorant and no friends of the Muse, grumble at my poetry, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem of many thousands of lines on kings or heroes, but like a child I roll forth a short tale. . . . Begone you baneful race of Jealousy! Hereafter judge poetry by (the canons) of art, and not by the Persian chain [a land measure of area]. . . . Keep the Muse slender [leptalein]” (Aitia 1.1–5, 16–18, 24). Like Callimachus, Marvell is arguing for a “slender” magnitude in Milton born of a sense of artistic decorum. A different question of decorum occupies much of the rest of the apology. Is Holy Scripture an appropriate matter for a pagan generic form? . . . The Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song. Or would Milton’s version confuse Scripture? Marvell fears Milton’s success “Lest he perplex’d the things he would explain.” Finally, would it facilitate another indecorum of literary form, making creation convenable to drama? Or if a Work so infinite he spann’d, Jealous I was that some less skilful hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Might hence presume the whole Creation’s day To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play. All three questions anticipate and seek to dispel serious doubts contemporary critics would have entertained regarding Paradise Lost. Tasso, author of the Christian epic Gerusalemma Liberata, draws a fine distinction between the venial and the heretical in religious epics. “The theme of an epic, therefore, should be taken from the chronicles of true religion but not of such great authority as to be unalterable,” that is to say, framed upon biblical stories that “are not so holy as to contain an article of faith within them and thus do allow some things to be added, some removed, and other changed without the sin of impudence or irreligion.”47 Paradise Lost unquestionably infringes Tasso’s standards. As for Marvell’s bugbear of a theatrical version of the Fall, Milton, in the Trinity manuscript, outlines just such a play very near in scene and sequence to Paradise Lost in its final form. Of Milton’s defense of blank verse as the true epic meter I have already spoken. There is a more trenchant charge, however, against which Milton mounts resistance in the invocation to book 7. There he combats the threat of an implied slippage into tragedy, or worse to romance. Announcing “I now must change / Those notes to Tragic” (9.6), he hollowly denies a generic shift: “Sad task, yet argument / Not less but more Heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles” (9.13–15). Milton is well aware that such a statement braves convention. Despite a fuller concept of the de casibus model of tragedy realized after The Mirour for Magistrates, the authority of Chaucer’s Monk who defined tragedy as a story “Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is yfallen out of heigh degree” remained relevant to the seventeenth century, as did his conclusion that the falls of Satan and Adam were tragic epitomes. Still, tragedy, while not epic, occupies the same level of decorum (gravis). Not so romance, for which Milton reserves his staunchest and most indignant response: Hitherto the only Argument Heroic deem’d, chief maistry to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabl’d knights In Battles feign’d . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Or tilting Furniture, emblazoned Shields, Impreses quaint, Caparisons and Steeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mee of these Nor skill’d nor studious, higher Argument Remains, sufficient of itself to raise That name. (9.28–31, 34–35, 41–44) Milton’s poetic terminology hinders us somewhat. By heroic he of course means “epic.” However, the term had been coined by Italian poet-critics keen to justify the presence of popular chivalric romance elements in their work by the bellicose elements of classical epic. Epic, they reasoned, was about war; so too much of romance. As Tasso argues, “Thus from the similarity of the actions imitated and of the means and manner of imitation, we conclude that what we call epic and what we call romance belong to the same genre of poetry,” namely the heroic.48 In the above passage, Milton is pointedly responding to the romantic epics of Ariosto and Tasso. Indeed, Milton’s invocation to book 9 should be read as a clear poetic counterstance to the following argument in Tasso: “The great poet (who is called divine for no other reason than that as he resembles the supreme Artificer in his workings, he comes to participate in his divinity) can form a poem in which, as in a little world one may read here of armies assembling, here of battles on land or sea, here of jousts, here descriptions of hunger and thirst, here tempests, fires, prodigies, there of celestial and infernal councils, there seditions, there discord, wanderings, adventures, enchantments, deeds of cruelty, daring, courting, generosity, there the fortunes of love, now happy, now sad, now pitiful.”49 Tasso’s epic jousts, enchantments, and courtly adventures are, in Miltonic reckoning, meretricious and unworthy of the sublime style. The irony of Milton’s genre theory, however, is that while he may object to the mingling of martial and fantastic elements of romance with religious epic, he has no qualms about the defining subject of romance—love. At the core of his epic lies Adam’s choice, at once tragic, at once romantic, but in no sense epic, to choose to fall for the love of his wife. As Adam says, “How forgo / Thy sweet Converse and Love?” (9.908–9). The central crisis of Milton’s epic yields to Ovid-

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ian love madness. Adam’s choice is Medea’s, whose passion for Jason in Metamorphoses 7 vainly wrestles against her moral sense: “Some strange power draws me on against my will. Desire persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse” (7.19–21). And Adam, . . . he scrupl’d not to eat Against his better knowledge, not deceiv’d But fondly overcome with Female charm. (9.997–99) In the last few decades, Milton scholars have cast their attention increasingly upon the presence of genera mixta in Paradise Lost, producing several collaborative and individual works on the subject. With allowances given for differences in modern and Renaissance vocabulary or genre (or species or kind, as it were), Barbara Lewalski has identified more than fifty genres and subgenres in the poem, all serving a variety of didactic and intertextual ends.50 But what strikes me as egregiously absent from her reckoning of generic cohabitation in Paradise Lost is the subject of stylistic decorum. Lewalski admits that she does not find any demonstrable “anxiety” in the Bloomian sense in Milton’s engagement with the literary tradition of epic.51 Indeed, without an appreciation of the pressure to conform socially, stylistically, religiously, to prescribed and, one must admit, ill-defined textual protocols imported from conflicting and equally authoritative sources in antique and patristic rhetoric, the anxiety over form is imperceptible. I have spent the last few pages bringing to the surface precisely these generic anxieties grounded in decorum. Given voice in Marvell, Barrow, and Milton himself, they amount to what Freud would have called a reaction formation thrown up around the integrity of the poem as epic. It seems to me obvious, moreover, that Milton’s relationship to his literary tradition is conflicted by a simultaneous desire to accept and reject, pitting poetic inclinations against religious convictions. Paradise Lost’s dominant poetic posture is recusatio, the topos of rejecting (and thereby accepting) poetic predecessors, announced early in “things unattempted yet.” Again, his architecture of classical allusion is a study in metaphoric antiphrasis, a gesture to dismiss similitude that in practice admits. Milton’s most compelling anxiety is

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his juxtaposition of two contending scriptures, a Holy Scripture and an amorous scripture, biblical epic and Ovidian romance, the story of Christ’s charitable love toward mankind shown in his passion, which exerts a powerful pull upon the reader’s religious convictions, and Adam’s mortal, concupiscible passion for Eve, which, despite its theological inferiority, exerts no less a pull upon our emotions and sense of romantic heroism. Indeed, these antitheses would pull the poem apart were it not rescued by one final dichotomy: the Ciceronian stylistic decorum that discriminates between sublime matters and humble modes of expression and the Augustinian inclusive decorum that invites participation in a new Christian dispensation of decora mixta. Paradise Lost is an epic whose problematic subject is the Fall. But it is also a poem about descents that accomplish a very different generic task. Descents are purposeful, controlled, designed to a further goal. “Facilis descensus Averno,” writes Vergil; poetically it is less easy. Odysseus, like Aeneas, accomplishes a descent to the underworld, and in Milton the topos is enacted by Orpheus, with whom Milton finds vatic affinity: Through utter and through middle darkness borne With other notes to th’Orphean Lyre I sing of Chaos and Eternal Night, Taught by the heav’nly Muse to venture down The dark descent, and up to reascend. ( 3.15–20) Milton, like Orpheus, like Christ, descends to reascend.52 But Paradise Lost never reascends to the pinnacle of epic height at which it begins. In fact, as Earl Miner has noticed, it practices what one might loosely call a limited generic descent, what he terms a “descent in attitude”: “The two greatest poetic narratives of the seventeenth century, Paradise Lost and Fables, share in their different ways a descent in attitude within the heroic as the works near their ends. From that point in book 9 when Adam and Eve are first said to separate their hands, they become more like ourselves, although never quite so. More accurately, Adam dwindles and Eve emerges as first a tragic, then a comic heroine in the Eviad of the last four books.”53 It is significant that the event Miner chooses as the beginning of a generic descent is the occasion of

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the poem’s signal social indecorum. Earlier, I linked this social lapse with linguistic fallenness, incorporated emblematically into the poem by the (rhetorical) figure of Echo. The descent in attitude Miner perceives in Milton is, I think, another aspect of his great project of illustrating versions of the Fall. The experience of epic sublimity must, to connect to our experience in a fallen world, descend at least one step toward romance, and in so doing forever alter both.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the notes and bibliography: ET

English translation

EETS

Early English Text Society

LCL

Loeb Classical Library

PL

Patrologia Latina (Migne ed.)

295

Notes

Polemical Preface 1. Marx, Grundrisse, 6. 2. Man, for Marx, exists only as a form of the collective; he is “nicht nur ein geselliges Tier, sondern ein Tier, das nur in der Gesellschaft sich vereinzeln kann” (ibid.). 3. With bitter relevance, Syme’s classic Roman Revolution (1939), written during the dark years of the war against fascism and national socialism, observes the Faustian bargain of Augustan rule: the choice between liberty and stable government. 4. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance,” 17−18. 5. Patterson, Negotiating the Past, ix−x. 6. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 9. 7. Huizinga, Men and Ideas, 41, 49. 8. T. Greene, Light in Troy, 45−47. 9. Radford, Progress of Romance, 9. 10. Simmel, On Individuality, 3.

Introduction In the chapter epigraph and throughout the book, translations of the Metamorphoses are from Miller and Goold’s ed. 1. Ovid De vetula 2.495−97 (Pseudo-Ovidius De vetula [Klopsch ed.]). 2. Pseudo-Ovidius De vetula (Klopsch ed.), 281. 3. Pseudo-Plato Axiochus 371c–d (Hershbell ed.). 4. Marrou, History of Education, 100–102. 5. Bynum, “Why All the Fuss?” 1. 6. Corrigan, Social Forms/Human Capacities, 186.

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298  Notes to Pages 5–17 7. In Barthes’s work, see in general Mythologies, or, for specific mention of the problem of the body, Pleasure of the Text, 16–17. In Bynum’s work, see especially Resurrection of the Body and Metamorphosis and Identity. 8. Yeats, On the Boiler, 27. 9. Fraser, Language of Adam, 194. 10. “Daß man, um jenes politische Problem in der Erfahrung zu lösen, durch das ästhetische den Weg nehmen muß.” Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education, 8. 11. Huizinga, Men and Ideas, 32. 12. “Hier liegt in der Tat eine Art Wechselwirkung vor: die körperliche Erscheinung läßt vermöge ihrer künstlerischen Vereinlichkeit im Beschauer die Vorstellung eine Seele anklingen und diese wirkt zurück und gibt der Erscheinung gesteigerte Einheit, Halt, gegenseitige Rechtfertigung der Züge.” Simmel, Zur Philosophie der Kunst, 102–3. 13. Cook and Herzman, Medieval World View, 32–33. 14. Cannon, Grounds of English Literature, 5. 15. Burnyeat, “Map of Metaphysics Z” (1994). The relevant discussion occurs in Metaphysics Z 3, esp. 1029a30. 16. Heng, Empire of Magic, 3. 17. Jameson, Marxism and Form, 4–5. 18. Cicero Pro Caecina 1 (in The Speeches: Pro lege Manilia; Pro Caecina; Pro Cluentio; Pro Rabirio perduellionis [Hodge ed.]). 19. Here and throughout the book, translations from the Ars amatoria are from The Art of Love and Other Poems (Mozley and Goold ed.). 20. Statius Silvae 1.3.108–9. 21. Aristotle Politics 7.12–15. 22. Servius In Vergilii carmina commentarii, intro. 62−68 (Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii [Thilo and Hagen ed.]), vol. 1. 23. Aristotle Physics 2.3.27–29. 24. B. N. MS. Lat. 16089, f. 146r, quoted and translated in J. Allen, Ethical Poetic,118. 25. See the discussion of Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, 5 ff. 26. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Durling ed.). 27. Ovid Ars amatoria 3.341. Ovid uses the word cultus in this stylistic sense of Tibullus in the Ars amatoria 1.15, 28, and 3.9, 66. Martial employs the term similarly in his Epigrams 1.25.1 ff., while Quintilian recommends the ornate style with the word in Institutio oratoria 8.3.61. 28. Comus 111−12, in Works of John Milton (Patterson and Rodgers ed.). 29. Tempora is the plural of L. tempus, meaning both “time” and “temple of the head.” Although etymologically unrelated to L. templum, “temple of worship,” there was undoubtedly some connotative overlap, resulting in the

Notes to Pages 18–30  299 late Latin tempula, whence the English anatomical “temple.” Ovid’s “ad mea tempora” thus could mean also something like “to my way of thinking” or “to my mind,” with a homophonic pun on religious temples. 30. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, esp. 318; Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 84–258; Parker, Inescapable Romance. 31. Aristotle Poetics 1451a (ET Aristotle’s Poetics [Halliwell ed.]). Aristotle offers the example of timing with an hourglass as an inferior solution to the time constraints of presenting numerous plays during a contest. 32. Cicero Orator 21.70–71 (in Brutus; Orator [Hendrickson and Hubbell ed.]). 33. Hanning, “Courtly Contexts,” 36. 34. Here and throughout the book, translations of the Amores are from Heroides; Amores (Showerman and Goold ed.). 35. See Peter Green’s note to his translation of Ovid’s Erotic Poems, 337.

chapter 1.  Hunting for Civilization 1. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 109. 2. Ibid., 110. 3. Thucydides Peloponnesian War 1.3.4–6. Compare Plato Laws 686b. 4. Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas, 1:7. 5. Ovid Ars amatoria 1.45–46, 89. Hunting in the Metamorphoses features centrally in Lycaon, Daphne, Callisto, Cadmus, Actaeon, Pentheus, Arethusa, Cephalus and Procris, Minotaur, Meleager, Nessus and Hercules, Adonis, Atalanta, and Lapiths and Centaurs. 6. Guigemar, Equitan, Bisclavret, and Eliduc are outright hunt narratives, while Laustic and Chaitivel betray prominent, if more oblique, elements of the love hunt. 7. Elias, Civilizing Process, 47–182, 187–256. 8. Roquefort, Poésies de Marie de France, 1:21; Foulet, “Marie de France,” 626. 9. “Sa nature peot hum guenchir mais nuls n’en put del tut eissir.” Marie Les fables 79.39–40 (Brucker ed.). 10. Pausanias Description of Greece 8.2.1, 8.38.1. Plato too discusses the cult of Lycaon in Republic 565D. A good conspectus of the myth can be found in Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths, and a thorough analysis in Piccaluga, Lykaon. 11. The pun appears in an identical context in Tibullus Elegies 1.10.1–2: “Quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses? Quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit!” 12. Augustine De civitate Dei 18.17 (The City of God against the Pagans [Bettenson ed.]).

300  Notes to Pages 30–37 13. John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii (Ghisalberti ed.), 197. 14. Sarah Spence has ventured to suggest that the white hind (bise) in Guigemar encrypts its doubleness in the imperfect rhyme of O.F. bise with L. bis. Clever but precarious, her argument holds a fortiori for Bisclavret. Spence, Texts and the Self, 128–30. 15. R. Bloch, Anonymous Marie de France, 159. 16. Bailey, “Bisclavret in Marie de France,” 77–82. 17. English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, 52. Compare John of Garland, “si lupus est feritate lupina / Nam lupus esse potes lupi,” in Integumenta Ovidii (Ghisalberti ed.), 42 18. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 7.3.9–10 (Rackham ed.). 19. See Canning, “Introduction,” 356. 20. It is important to note that Arthur and Gorlagon owes a debt to Lycaon. A central motive of the werewolf Gorlagon’s tale is to trick Arthur into eating meat, breaking his vow of abstinence, a clear displacement of the taboo cannibalism of Ovid’s Lycaon. The thirteenth-century anonymous lay Melion shares in the ruse of carnivory. 21. Elias, Civilizing Process, 67−68. 22. Bergson’s Kantian meditation on the closed society as one espousing the virtues of social cohesion in Two Sources of Morality inspires Popper’s idio­ syncratic epistemology of totalitarianism in Open Society. 23. “Es ist eine Krankheit zugleich, die den Menschen zerstören kann, dieser erste Ausbruch von Kraft und Willen zur Selbst-Bestimmung; und viel krankhafter sind die ersten wunderlichen und wilden Versuche des Geistes, sich mit eigener Faust nunmehr die Welt zurechtzurücken.” This passage appears in earlier and later versions of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches and Nachgelassene Fragmente, 2:16 and 11:665. 24. “Scimus enim in Aluernia, episcopatu Claramoncensi, Poncium de Capitolio, nobilem uirum, pridem exhereditasse Reimbaldum de Puiecto, militem strenuissimum et in armis exercitam, Hic uagus factus et profagus super terram, dum solus more ferino deuia lustraret et saltus, un nocte, nimio timore turbatus, cum mentis alienacione in lupum uersus.” Gervase of Tilbury Otia imperialia 3.120. 25. Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 1. 26. Geoffroy of Vinsauf Poetria nova 120. 27. R. Bloch, Medieval French Literature, 224. 28. Rothschild, “Rapprochement,” 82. 29. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 101. Compare the later notion of felony in Akehurst’s extremely useful translation and edition Etablissements de Saint Louis.

Notes to Pages 37–46  301 0. Plucknett, Edward I, 48. 3 31. As quoted in Rothschild, “Rapprochement,” 86. 32. “Tandem a quodam fabro lignario grauiter attemptatus, ictu securis alterum pede perdidit; sicque specia resumpta hominem induit, nunc in propatulo confessus sibi placitam pedis iacturum, eo quod illo amputato miseriam illam et maliciam cum dampnatione perdiderit. Asserunt enim qui talia dixerunt michi membrorum truncacione ab huiusmodi infortunio homines tales liberari.” Gervase of Tilbury Otia imperialia 3.120. 33. See, for example, Girart de Rousillon, in which Charles Martel vows to cut off the noses of all the knights he takes in battle. 34. “Let us define piracy, manstealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name as hunting [thira] with violence.” Plato Sophist 222c, 222e (ET in Collected Dialogues [Hamilton ed.]). 35. See M. Bloch, Feudal Society, 1:163. 36. Compare Amores 1.8.47–48, “Penelope iuvenum vires temptabat in arcu; / qui latus argueret, corneus arcus erat,” where Ovid proposes Penelope’s prodigious inchastity. 37. As Gregson Davis has noted in The Death of Procris, the boar hunt is a ritual test of Adonis’s virtus that fails spectacularly. 38. See Hays, Limping Hero. 39. In Theocritus, Greek Bucolic Poets, lines 26–31. On the Nachleben of this passage in medieval and Renaissance literature, see Hatto, “Venus and Adonis,” 353–61, and Thiébaux, “Mouth of the Boar,” 281–99. 40. Troilus and Criseyde 5.1240–31 (Windeatt ed.). Quotations of Il Filostrato are from the same text, 7.24. 41. Fleming, Classical Imitation, 214. 42. Charles-Edward dates the four branches of the Mabinogi to the period 1050–1120 in “Date of the Four Branches,” 263–98. Saunders Lewis, however, has argued for twelfth-century Anglo-Norman influence, dating the tales at 1170–90 in a series of essays collected in Gruffydd, Meistri’r Canrifoedd, 1–33. More recently, and with suspicious confidence, Andrew Breeze has identified the author as a woman, Gwenllian (1098–1136), in Medieval Welsh Literature, 5, 75–77. 43. Patrick Ford characterizes Rhiannon as uniquely “assertive and dominant, often domineering. . . . She will accomplish her ends despite the ineptness of her intended mate.” Mabinogi (Ford ed.), 38. 4 4. Ibid., 36–37. 45. The exchange of winnings is an ancient custom. Ptolemaic Greek papyri refer to the exchange of parts of the animal as a tribute to the king and one required by oath. Préaux, L’economie royale, 197.

302  Notes to Pages 46–58 6. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 4 47. Cohen, “Decapitation,” 187. 48. See Pickens, “Thematic Structure,” 328–41. 49. Guigemar says, “La bise . . . me maudist” (321–22), while the Hind pronounces, “tue [Guigemar’s] destinee” (108). 50. As the subjective pain of love, see Ovid Remedia amoris 311, “tua sub nostra pectore cura,” echoing Vergil Aeneid 4.68, “vivit sub pectore volnus.” As the object of love, see Vergil Eclogues 10, 22. 51. Tobler and Lommatzsch, in Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, date the incidence of “cure” meaning “ärtzliche Behandlung” to 1172–74. Rothwell, Stone, and Reid’s Anglo-Norman Dictionary gives the example “si il est yver metez itele cure de si a ce ke la plaie merde,’’ 135. See also “cure” in Hunt, Anglo-Norman Medicine, vol. 2. 52. It is useful to note that shooting a female deer, especially one with a fawn, was considered an offense to decorum. Thus John of Salisbury: “Illis mestum indicit femina capta, silentium” (Policraticus 1.4.391c; ET Frivolities of Courtiers [Pike ed.]). 53. Eadmer’s Vita Anselmi (ET Life of St Anselm [Southern ed.]) speaks of vengeance, “ultio Divina in proximo eum [regem] pro persecutione Anselmi oppressura esset ferebatur” (122), while the Anglo-Saxon chronicler Florence of Worcester adds, “Nec mirum, ut populi rumor affirmat, hanc proculdubio magnam Dei virtutem esse et vindicatam” (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D Version, § 1100). 54. Compare the ecstatic “thigh” wound of the nun Marie cured by St. Dominic in Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 57. 55. “ ‘Ha Deus,’ fait il [Tristan] ‘quel destinée / C’ai je sofert en tel amor!’ ” “La Folie de Berne” 54–55, in Les deux poèmes (Lecoy ed.). 56. Blakeslee, Love’s Masks, 100. 57. Guinevere: “des femmes n’avez talent! / Vallez avez bien afeitez. / Ensemble od eus vus deduiez” (Lanval 280–82, in Marie de France, Lais). A similar charge is leveled against Enéas in Le roman d’Eneas 8565–621 (Eneas: Roman du XIIe siècle [Salverda de Grave ed.]). On the translation of peri as “sodomite,” see Pickens, “Thematic Structure,” 331. 58. Béroul Le roman de Tristan 716−19 (Muret ed.). 59. See Ovid Metamorphoses 2.464 ff. 6 0. Sarah Spence proposes the caritas/invidia dichotomy, arguing that “all of the tales [in the Lais] it can be argued, are about envy and problems that stem from it. Each tries to articulate as well a solution to the vice which involves the caritas/invidia pair.” Texts and the Self, 127. 61. Volsunga Saga, 22. 62. See Holten, “Metamorphosis and Language,” 205.

Notes to Pages 59–65  303 chapter 2.  Economies of Romance 1. I am referring here to what Simmel calls “objective culture,” a diffuse but recurrent concept that is most clearly limned in Donald Levine’s interpretive introduction to Georg Simmel on Individuality, xvi. 2. To be fair, in such works as The Philosophy of Money, Simmel does attempt to take into consideration the division of labor and economic issues and sees himself in dialogue with Marx. He is, however, no materialist. 3. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 20–23. 4. Karl Uitti ascribes the birth of medieval romance, i.e., romance that is not translated or adapted from classical sources, to Chrétien de Troyes, with whose first work, Erec et Enide, “a new era opens in the history of European story telling. . . . This poem reinvents the genre we call narrative romance; in some important respects it also initiates the vernacular novel” (Chrétien de Troyes Revisited, 36). 5. L. White, “Expansion of Technology,” 151–53. While many developments in agricultural technology predate the twelfth century, they were not universally known or used. The twelfth century, then, should be understood as a period of adoption, implementation, and refinement driven by broader trade. 6. R. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 168. On monetary confidence and value, see M. Bloch, Land and Work, 186–229. 7. On medieval inflation, see Fischer, Great Wave, 11–35. 8. Marx, Capital, 1:102. 9. Aristotle Politics 1337b31–35 (Rackham ed.). 10. Cicero De officiis 3.1 (Miller ed.). 11. See Van Hamel, “Cligès et Tristan,” 465–89; see also Micha, “Tristan et Cligès,” 1–10. On Cliges’s particular narrative self-reflexivity, see Freeman, “Cliges,” 89–90. 12. The first two mentions occur in the context of Chrétien’s famous translatio studii et imperii of the prologue: “por pris et por los conquerre / Ala de Grece en Engleterre” (15–16) and “Qu’an Grece ot de chevalerie / Le premier los et de clergie” (29–30). 13. All quotations from Cligès are from Micha’s ed. 14. “Fait attendre trop longtemps au lecteur le vrai commencement de l’action.” Paris, Mélanges de littérature française, 309. 15. Haidu, Aesthetic Distance, 48. 16. Girard, “Love and Hate,” 253. 17. Plato Laws 11.921e (Bury ed.). 18. Homer Iliad 6.350–51 (Lattimore ed.). Simon Goldhill notes that kleos comes from kluo = to hear. Therefore fame depends on the report of others,

304  Notes to Pages 66–70 and ultimately upon the poet (Poet’s Voice, 69). Charles Segal discusses kleos in Homer in “Kleos and Its Ironies.” 19. Homer Iliad 6.441–42, 445–46 (Lattimore ed.). 20. Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum 1, vv. 150–64. 21. Robertson, “Idea of Fame,” 414–33. 22. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, in Romans de Chrétien de Troyes (Roques ed.). 23. Kay, “Chansons de Geste,” 49–76. 24. Wace Le roman de Brut 2.10769–71 (Arnold ed.). Behind this passage lies Geoffrey of Monmouth’s originary topos of arms and industry that Cador expresses in Historia regum Brittaniae 8.41–49. It is worth noting that in the Brut, Gauvain, the renowned lover-courtier, is speaking in character; he ventriloquizes not conventional epic values of love and honor but a new romance ideology. Brut 2.10511–21 finds the author navigating similar ground, although here, while martial industry earns love, the reverse proposition is not clearly implied. 25. Giraldus, Giraldi Cambrensis opera (Brewer et al. ed.), 8:300–301, is the source of the rumor, while Gervase of Canterbury confirms the foundation of the relationship in love (Historical Works [Stubbs ed.], 1:149). W. L. Warren, however, maintains a degree of skepticism on this interpretation in his Henry II, 42. 26. See Kennedy, “Geoffroi de Charny,” 221–42. 27. Geoffroi de Charny, Book of Chivalry (Kaeuper and Kennedy ed.), 94. 28. Ibid., 113. 29. Ibid., 168. Geoffroi is following here the description of the knighting ceremony in L’ordene de chevalerie 150–266, in “Le roman des eles,” by Raoul de Houdenc and “L’ordene de chevalerie” (Busby ed.). 30. We find him in bed four times in the romance: 462 ff., 1207 ff., 4612 ff., and 5546 ff. 31. Lancelot is wounded, and there can be little doubt that Bademagu has Lancelot’s best interests in mind. Yet the greater portion of honor is always to be had in duress. 32. Chrétien de Troyes Le Chevalier de la Charrette 3449–50 (Foulet et al. ed.). Given the discrete modes of chivalric agency employed by Lancelot and Gauvain in Lancelot, it is interesting to compare the approval Chrétien invests in the los/repos distinction in the latter scene with the shame it holds for Gauvain later when his chivalry is praised amiss: “Seignor, de neant m’alosez; / Del dire huimés vos reposez,” concluding, “Ceste enors me valte une honte” (5341–42, 5344). 33. Significantly, Lancelot rejects this repos and demands satisfaction the following day. But the fact that Bademagu should propose such a provocative

Notes to Pages 71–82  305 option to Lancelot is an indication of Chrétien’s willingness to have a bit of fun with Lancelot’s reputation for leisure, justified or not. 34. Chrétien de Troyes, Le roman de Perceval (Roach ed.). 35. On Chrétien’s textual borrowings from the romans antiques, particularly the Roman d’Enéas and Roman de Thèbes, see Dressler, Der Einfluß; G. Otto, “Der Einfluß”; Micha, “Enéas et Cligès.” More recent study has focused on the narrative significance of this borrowing, as does BlumenfeldKosinski, “Old French Narrative Genres,” 143–59. 36. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Chrétien de Troyes,” 398–405. 37. Fragment 234, in Edmonds, Fragments of Attic Comedy, 486. 38. Horace Odes 3.26.1–2 (Rudd ed.): “Vixi puellis nuper idoneus / et militaui non sine gloria.” 39. See Hollis, “Ars Amatoria,” 89. 40. “Cil qui fist d’Erec et d’Enide, / Et les commandemanz d’Ovide / Et l’art d’amors an romans mist, / . . . / Un novel conte rancomance” (1−4, 8). 41. Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, v. 4296 (Lecoy ed.). 42. Guyer, “Influence of Ovid,” 121. 43. See Hunt, “Aristotle, Dialectic,” 110. 4 4. “Quae venit ex tuto, minus est accepta voluptas: ut sis liberior Thaide, finge metus. . . . Admiscenda tamen venus est secura timori.” Ovid Ars amatoria 3.603–4, 609. 45. Van Hamel, “Cligès et Tristan.” 46. The linguistic, thematic, and narrative traits that Guillaume d’Angleterre holds in common with Chrétien’s romances argue powerfully for his authorship and against the tepid and textually unsupported assumptions of another “Chrétien” that hold popular sway. 47. Tony Hunt makes the most controversial and convincing case for the prologue as a conventional captatio benevolentiae in the Ciceronian tradition, arguing that it uses the parable of sowing as a convenient scriptural latticework for a material appeal (“Prologue,” 359–79). Peter Haidu also perceives a strain of materialism in Chrétien’s disquisition on charity in Aesthetic Distance, 116. 48. Cicero divides the exordium into two species: introduction and insinuation. The latter is “an address which by dissimulation and indirection unobtrusively steals into the mind of the auditor.” De inventione 1.15.20 (Hubbell ed.). 49. The first line is a gloss of 2 Cor. 9:6: “Sparse sowing, sparse reaping.” 50. The translation of “gaste forêt” as “wasteland” is potentially misleading. The land is waste not in the sense that it is inherently infertile but in the sense that as a forest it has yet to be assarted and converted into arable land. “Gaste forêt” most closely translates the medieval Latin brolium, the term

306  Notes to Pages 82–88 twelfth-­century Cistercians used in their cartularies to designate uncleared land destined for reclamation. On the reclamation of wasteland, see Duby, Rural Economy, 88. 51. For the financial and agricultural connotations of the passage in medieval exegesis, see Lapide, Commentarii in IV Evangelia, 1:375 ff. 52. Partonopeu de Blois (Gildea ed.), 1:4. 53. For an authoritative discussion of the etymology of preu as “profit,” “abundance,” and “utility,” see Paris, “Periodiques 1,” 420. 54. Phil. 4:15–20, for example. 55. Albertus Magnus Super ethica lib. 5 tr. 2 c. 6; Thomas Aquinas Ethicorum lib. 5 lect. 6 (ET Commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics [Litzinger ed.]), and Summa theologiae 2.2. q. 61 a. 2. For an exhaustive discussion of theories of price, see Baldwin, Medieval Theories. It should be noted that Chrétien would not have had access to the Ethics, as the earliest Latin translations (Robert Grosseteste and William of Moerbeke) date from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, he would have been familiar with similar notions of profit in Augustine, Hugh St. Victor, and above all Ovid (infra.), and reciprocal exchange in Cicero’s discussion of beneficentia in De officiis. 56. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 5.4.9. 57. See, for example, Aristotle Politics 1, passim. 58. Augustine De civitate Dei 11.16 (ET The City of Gods against the Pagans [Bettenson ed.]). 59. Augustine Ennarationes in Psalmos 70.17, PL 36:886–87; Hugh St. Victor Didascalion 2.23; Thomas Aquinas Summa theologiae 2.2. q. 77 a. 4. 6 0. See Andreas Capellanus’s description of amor purus: “Hic autem in mentis contemplatione cordisque consistit affectu . . . extremo praetermisso solatio; nam illud pure amare volentibus exercere non licet” (Andreae capellani regii Francorum De amore libri tres [Trojel ed.], 182). 61. Chrétien de Troyes, Les chansons courtoises de Chrétien de Troyes (Zai ed.). 62. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain) (Lecoy ed.). 63. Roncaglia, “Carestia,” 130. In classical Latin, the term was caritas, where it was linked semantically both to fames and to inopia. Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply, 18. 64. Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter, 10. 65. Cicero De doma sua 11 (in The Speeches: Pro Archia poeta; Post reditum in senatu; Post reditum ad quirites; De doma sua; De haruspicum responsis; Pro Plancio [Watts ed.]). 66. Galbert of Bruges, Murder of Charles the Good (Ross ed.), 87. Charles also took steps to control the price of wine as well, ordering “a fourth of a measure of wine to be sold for six pennies and not more dearly [et non carius] so that the

Notes to Pages 89–103  307 merchants would stop hoarding [ab abundantia] and buying up wine and would exchange their wares, in view of the urgency of the famine” (88–89). 67. Vance, Mervelous Signal, 113. 68. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés (Micha ed.). 69. Duby, Les Dimanches des Bouvines, 122–24. 70. Fleming, “Centuple Structure,” 87. 71. Hesiod Works and Days 349–50. 72. Cicero Brutus 4.16 (in Brutus; Orator [Hendrickson and Hubbell ed.]). 73. Ovid Epistulae ex Ponto 1.5.29 ff. (in Tristia; Ex Ponto [Wheeler and Goold ed.]). 74. John of Salisbury, writing at the same time as Chrétien, defines the clerical perspective in the prologue to the Policraticus. 75. D. W. Robertson Jr. has argued, for example, that in Cligès Chrétien imitates Ovid’s authorial boast of immortal renown through poetry from the end of the Metamorphoses. “Idea of Fame,” 414–33. 76. Le Goff, Time, Work, 80. 77. The anonymous cleric who authored the eleventh-century Ecbasis cuiusdam captivi per tropologiam vows in his invocation to correct his erstwhile sloth with the present work of fiction: “Quamquam sit serum meditabor scindere saccum / Ut iuga torporis pellant rudimenta laboris, / Incipiens versus, quos rarus denegat usus” (9−11 [Zeydel ed.]). 78. Le Goff, Time, Work, 81. 79. Alfonso, Las Siete Partidas, part. II, tit. XXI, law XX (Burns ed.). 80. “Quelques observations d’ordre historico-sociologique sur les rapports entre la chanson de geste et le roman courtois” (21). 81. Roberto Lopez postulates a commercial revolution in the twelfth century with a basis in the agrarian microeconomy of the manor in Commercial Revolution, 56–60.

chapter 3.  States of Union 1. Cassirer, Myth of the State, 87. Cassirer’s opinion of medieval culture here is somewhat puzzling given his Kantian take on human social organization. Thus, in his Essay on Man, he observes, “Man is no longer considered as a simple substance which exists in itself and is to be known by itself. His unity is conceived as a functional unity. Such a unity does not presuppose a homogeneity of the various elements of which it consists. Not merely does it admit of, it even requires, a multiplicity and multiformity of constituent parts. For this is a dialectical unity, a coexistence of contraries. . . . If there is an equipoise in

308  Notes to Pages 104–110 human culture, it can only be described as a dynamic, not a static equilibrium; it is the result of a struggle between opposing forces” (222). 2. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 3. 3. Ibid. 4. Kant, Immanuel Kant: Schriften, 145−46. See Max Weber’s chapter on “Patrimonialismus” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 679. 5. Plato Republic 592 (Cornford ed.). 6. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 66. 7. “Dieser Antagonismus der Kräfte ist das grosse Instrument der Kultur.” Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 40. 8. Weber, Economy and Society, 41–42. 9. Cf. Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 4. 10. Gower, English Works of John Gower. 11. Politics 1.A329b, in Aristotle, Aristoteles Latinus (Michaud-Quantin ed.), vol. 29, pt. 1. 12. “Sic scire gubernationem domus pertinet ad omnes cives. sed spectat specialiter ad Reges et principes. quia sicut regnum vel civitas presupponunt esse domum. sic regimen regni et civitatis presupponit notitiam regiminis domus: et persone proprie. nunquam enim quis debitus rector regni vel civitatis efficitur. nisi se et suam familiam sciat debite gubernare.” Giles of Rome De regimine principum 3:2.1.3 (Courdaveaux ed.). Compare Petrarch’s contention that a prince should act as a father to his subjects and that their relationship is based on a model of familial love in Rerum senilium 14.1 (ET Letters of Old Age [Bernardo ed.]), a patriarchal model that for later thinkers like Immanuel Kant conduces definitively to despotism: “Eine väterliche Regierung (imperium paternale), wo also die Untertanen als unmündige Kinder, die nicht unterscheiden können, was ihnen wahrhaftig nützlich oder schädlich ist . . . ist der größte denkbare Despotismus.” “Über den Gemeinspruch,” in Immanuel Kant: Schriften, 145–46. 13. Oresme Le Livre de Yconomique d’Aristote 807–8. 14. Buridan Quaestiones Joannis buridani super decem libros ethicorum 2b(ii) (ET Questions on Book 10 [McGrade et al. ed.]), reading Aristotle Politics 1254–56. 15. See in this regard Aelred of Rievaulx’s citation of 1 Tim. 5.8 in Speculum charitatis 3.26 (ET Mirror of Charity [Connor and Dumont ed.]). 16. “Dominium est habitudo nature racionalis secundum quam denominatur suo prefici servienti.” Wyclif De dominio divino 1.1 (Poole ed.), 4. 17. Wyclif On Civil Lordship 1g, in McGrade, Kilcullen, and Kempshall, Medieval Philosophical Texts, 620. 18. Ibid. 19. Aristotle Politics 1297b24.

Notes to Pages 111–116  309 0. See Fortenbaugh, “Aristotle on Slaves,” 138–39. 2 21. Dionysius Roman Antiquities 2.25. For a more complete discussion, see Herrmann, Le rôle judicaire. 22. Alfonso, Las Siete Partidas, 4.10.7 (Burns ed.), p. 928, esp. note 1. 23. Wyclif On Civil Lordship 2.7.4, in McGrade, Kilcullen, and Kempshall, Medieval Philosophical Texts, 632. 24. The popular fourteenth-century idea of “common profit,” by which legitimate governments can be distinguished from the aberrant ones that rule for the benefit of the rulers, is a definitive Aristotelian tenet relating originally to household governance. Aristotle Politics 1278b40 ff. 25. Usk was executed in 1388 on the authority of the Merciless Parliament. On Clanvowe’s political and literary exploits, see Patterson, “Court Politics,” 10. 26. Both in De re publica; De legibus [Keyes ed.]. 27. In 1389, Richard II issued an edict on life indenture that severely eroded and mercantilized the ties of feudal fealty. On the changes in English vasselage in overview, see Tuck, Richard II; for their bearing upon Chaucer and court poetry, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer ch. 1, esp. 1–2, and Patterson, “Court Politics,” 10. 28. “Vieni a veder la tua Roma che piagne, / Vedova e sola, e di e notte chiama: / Cesare mio, perchè non m’accompagne?” Dante Purgatorio 6.112–14 (Hollander ed.); and Petrarch to Charles IV in a letter dated February 24, 1351: “Finge nunc animo almam te Romae urbis effigiem videre. Cogita matronam evo gravem, sparsa canitie, amictu lacero, pallore miserabili, sed infracto animo et excelso pristine non immemorem maiestatis it tecum loqui.” Petrarch, Petrarca’s Briefwechsel (Burdach and Piur ed.), 4. Finally, Ernst Kantorowicz quotes a fourteenth-century commentator on Justinian to the effect that “there is a contracted moral and political marriage between the prince and the respublica.” Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State,” 78. 29. Starkey, “Age of the Household,” 225–90. 30. Smith, Arts of Possession. 31. Smith concludes his introduction with an analysis of Narcissus’s “quod cupio mecum est: inopem me copia fecit.” Arts of Possession, xviii. 32. Galinsky, Augustan Culture, 215. 33. Boccaccio De casibus illustrium virorum 7.1.6–9. For a detailed study of the legislation and its social consequences, see Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 287–90, and Edwards, Politics of Immorality, 34–62. Ariosto Orlando Furioso 26.1. 34. Beginning in 18 BCE and ending in 9 CE, these included the Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, the Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, and the Lex Papia Poppaea.

310  Notes to Pages 116–124 35. Tacitus Annals 3.24 (in Tacitus, vol. 3, Histories 4−5; Annals 1−3 [Hutton and Jackson ed.]). 36. Suetonius Divus Augustus 34.1, 69.1. 37. Plutarch Cato Major 16.1–2, in Plutarch’s Lives (Perrin ed.). 38. Dionysius, Roman Antiquities 20.13.3 (Cary and Spelman ed.). 39. Macrobius Saturnalia 2.5. 40. Suetonius Divus Augustus 69. 41. Brunetto Latini Il Fiore 36. 42. Ovid Fasti 4.305–44 (Ovid’s Fasti [Frazer ed.]). Macrobius alludes to the Julia-as-Claudia defense in Saturnalia 2.5.3. One of the earliest and most influential linkages between Augustus’s dissipation and Ovid’s banishment is the fourth-century Liber de caesaribus of Sextus Aurelius Victor, which follows its list of Augustan adultery with the comment: “Cumque esset luxuriae serviens, erat tamen eiusdem vitii severissimus ultor, more hominum, qui in ulciscendis vitiis, quibus ipsi vehementer indulgent, acres sunt. Nam poetam Ovidium, qui et Naso, pro eo, quod tres libellos amatoriae artis conscripsit, exilio damnavit” (1.24). 43. The poetic license to politicize explicitly against Augustus was a gray area. We know that Cassius Severus’s censorious pamphlets were publicly torched and that the man was exiled. On the topic of freedom of poetic expression, see Feeney, “Si licet et fas est.” 4 4. “Maiestas est amplitudo ac dignitas civitatis.” Cicero De oratore 2.39.164 (in Brutus; Orator [Hendrickson and Hubbell ed.]). 45. Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum 89–94, in Hanna, Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves. 46. Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” 467. Kittredge’s adherents and those more loosely aligned with his favorable opinion of the Franklin and his social theories include Lewis, Allegory of Love, 127; Chaucer, Chaucer’s Poetry (Donaldson ed.), 1087–90; Howard (with some minor qualifications), “Conclusion of the Marriage Group,” 223–32; G. White, “Franklin’s Tale,” 454–62; Mann, “Chaucerian Themes,” 133–53; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 144–60; Jacobs, “Marriage Contract,” 132–43; Fyler, “Love and Degree,” 321–37; Raybin, “Wommen of Kynde,” 65–86. 47. For ironic readings, see Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 466–72; Gaylord, “Promises,” 331–65; Wood, “Of Time and Tide,” 688–711; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 196–207; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 235–75; Shoaf, “Franklin’s Tale,” 274–90. 48. Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men,’ ” 44. 49. Gower Confessio amantis 7.1991−97 (Peck ed.). 50. The nobility of virtue was a medieval commonplace variously attested in antiquity but particularly in Odysseus’s plea for Achilles’ arms in Metamor-

Notes to Pages 124–133  311 phoses 13.140–41 and in Juvenal’s eighth satire, particularly 8.20, “Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus.” The latter turns up in the Carmina Burana 2.11 (Hilka and Schumann ed.) and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose 4.317–19 (Langlois ed.). All quotations from the Canterbury Tales are from Riverside Chaucer (Benson ed.). 51. John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power (Monahan ed.), 8. 52. On the distinction between vertical and horizontal modes of societal organization, see Strohm, Social Chaucer, ch. 1. 53. See Faral, Recherches sur les sources, 148. 54. “Pryvely” suggests that their marriage is clandestine, and thus contrary to Innocent III’s injunction to publish a public banns in Cum inhibito (1215). On this, see Lucas and Lucas, “Presentation of Marriage,” 501, and Kelly, “Clandestine Marriage,” esp. 445. 55. John Fyler, citing F. N. Robinson’s gloss on the line, would have us read “shame of degree” as “out of regard for his rank and position,” thus taking the shame out of “shame,” in “Love and Degree,” 322. I find this change of meaning unnecessary and tendentious: in taking “shame” to mean shame, I side with the commonsensical reading of Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 420. 56. See Parson’s Tale 10.922, 926–27; 1 Cor. 11.2; Eph. 5.23–24; 1 Tim. 2.11–14. 57. Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” in Sämmtliche Werke, 6:7. 58. “Esse potentia. Sed nulla potentia longa est. Vox enim ad eum facta est ‘Tibi dicitur, Nabuchodnosor rex: Regnum transfertur a te,’ et mutatus est in bovem.” Glosae super Cantica Canticorum 2.27D (PL 206:152). 59. Andreas Capellanus, Andreae Capellani regii Francorum De amore libri tres (Troejel ed.), 28, and Art of Courtly Love (Parry ed.), 38. 6 0. Andreae Capellani regii Francorum De amore libri tres (Trojel ed.), 25, and Art of Love (Parry ed.), 38. 61. Chaucer introduces this hermeneutic rule (ironically) in the General Prologue 1.742, repeating it in the Manciple’s Tale 9.208–10. 62. Gower, after praising largesse, warns: “A king behoveth ek to fle / The vice of Prodegalite, / That he mesure in his expence / So kepe.” Confessio amantis 7.2025–28. On copia, see Smith, Arts of Possession, ch. 3. 63. Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love 3 (Parry ed.), 191. 64. Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 243. 65. Bryan and Dempster, Sources and Analogues, 377 ff., recommend the Filocolo as the Franklin’s Tale’s primary Boccaccian source, although Decameron 10.5 is also relevant. See also Miller, Chaucer Sources, 121–35; Boccaccio, Chaucer’s Boccaccio (Havely ed.), 154–61; Burger, “Cosa Impossibile,” 165–78.

312  Notes to Pages 133–145 6. Fish, Surprised by Sin, 1. 6 67. “Singuli namque tenentur amantes in amoris exercendo solatia cunctis inter se mutuis voluntatibus obedire.” Andreas Capellanus, De amore libres tres 2.4, as quoted in Lucas and Lucas, “Presentation of Marriage,” 504. See also their argument on the nonsensicality of mutual obedience and patience. 68. Mann, “Chaucerian Themes,” 139. 69. See Haller, “Knight’s Tale,” 67–84. 70. Chaucer, Complete Works (Skeat ed.), v. 388, p. 466, citing Cato Distichs 38. See the discussion of Hazleton, “Chaucer and Cato,” 367–68. 71. In Horstmann and Furnivall, Minor Poems of the Vernon MS, pt. 2, 574. 72. Walter of Châtillon, Poem 4.29.4, in Die Gedichte Walters von Chatillon (Strecker ed.). He again paraphrases the amor/maiestas trope in 6.13.4. 73. Rosemarie McGerr, speaking generally of closure in “Medieval Concepts,” 169–70. 74. Andreas Capellanus, Art of Courtly Love (Parry ed.), 106–7. 75. Elias of Thriplow Serium senectutis 11.3 (Hillas ed.). 76. The Theban example of the failure of shared rule between Eteocles and Polyneices was a medieval commonplace familiar from Statius. Elias’s invention is to apply the same logic to the Trinity. It is worth noting also that Elias’s notion of possession is very similar to a common legal dictum from Justinian, “It is impossible for two people each to own or possess the entirety of something.” Digest of Justinian 13.6.5.15 (Mommsen et al. ed.), vol. 1. 77. Heng, Empire of Magic, 84. 78. The controversy over universals entered medieval philosophy much earlier through Boethius’s Commentary on Isagoge, and blossomed into nominalism in the twelfth-century philosophy of Roscellinus and Abelard. Duns Scotus’s notion of unity and plurality is perhaps best epitomized in his analogy of the world as a tree in Praeparatio philosophica, in Capitalia opera Joannis Duns Scoti, 1:297 (Deodati ed.). 79. Cicero De re publica 1.45.69 (in De re publica; De legibus [Keyes ed.]). On the Aristotelian roots of the regimen mixtum in medieval political theory, see Tierney, Religion, Law, 87–92. 80. Chance, Mythographic Chaucer, 192. 81. The “love” that is paired in line 1625 with “lordshipe” and is the coercive governing instrument of Cupid is cupidinal or concupiscible love, an instrument of Epicurean bondage, whereas “charitee” is love as an expression of liberty, fellowship, free association. 82. Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 375. It is useful to note that Lydgate’s Reson and sensuallyte, paraphrasing part of the thoroughly Ovidian didactic

Notes to Pages 145–156  313 poem Les esches amoureux, argues against the necessary subordination of one to the other. The marriage it figures is one of equality, not dominion. 83. Robertson makes this reading variously, but most succinctly in Literature of Medieval England, 492. 84. Boccaccio Teseida 2.15, in Chaucer’s Boccaccio (Havely ed.), 107. 85. I draw here on Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in Location of Culture. 86. Augustine De civitate Dei 18.9 (City of God against the Pagans [Bettenson ed.]). 87. Plutarch Theseus 27 in Plutarch’s Lives. 88. The account of Gervase of Canterbury in Deeds of the Kings (in Douglas, English Historical Documents), gains credence from William of Tyre, who witnessed her and her Amazon entourage on the way to Jerusalem (History of Deeds [Babcock and Krey ed.). A similar Amazonian impersonation is ascribed to Isabella of Anjou by Ordericus Vitalis in his Ecclesiastical History of England (Forester ed.). On Eleanor’s behavior on the Second Crusade and its historiographical reception, see Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine. 89. Eleanor’s outfit in William of Tyre’s History of Deeds matches in color and detail that of Benoît’s Penthesilea and her comity in Benoît de St. Maure Le roman de Troie 23429–84. 90. Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, 240. 91. Ibid. 92. Plato Timaeus 24a (in Collected Dialogues [Hamilton ed.]). Aristotle, himself no democrat, describes prejudicially the way one establishes a democracy or increases the role of the common people in rule in coercive terms of a forced mixing of bodies to form a homogenous political identity in the Politics 1319b and again in the Athenian Constitution 21.1–4. 93. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 67. 94. As cited in ibid., 66. 95. 1 Cor. 7:6. 96. Horace Ars poetica 1.12–13 (in Satire, Epistles, and the Art of Poetry [Fairclough ed.]). 97. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 28. 98. Arnulf ’s commentary on Metamorphoses 1, in Arnulf of Orléans, Arnolfo d’Orléans (Ghisalberti ed.), 201. 99. Glosae super Cantica Canticorum 4, in PL 206:249, quoted in Bynum, “Metamorphosis,” 995. 100. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 91. 101. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 19. 102. On Hippolyta’s silence, cf. Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 119.

314  Notes to Pages 157–166 103. “Eummiklon eidos kappholion brephos . . . tauton memikhthai kai brotou diple physei.” Snell Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, 680. 104. On Chaucer’s knowledge of Statius, see Wise, Influence of Statius, 46–54, 78–115; Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, ch. 4; Sanok, “Criseyde, Cassandre,” 41–71. 105. As David Wallace remarks, “The sign of the Minotaur . . . cannot but ‘drawen memorie’ the story of Ariadne.” Chaucerian Polity, 114. 106. Lee Patterson is the first to comment on the duplicity of the Ovidian Theseus and the Minotaur pennon as expressing “doubleness in a single figure.” Chaucer, 241–42. 107. Here and throughout the book, translations of the Heroides are from Heroides; Amores (Showerman and Goold ed.). 108. Martianus Marriage of Philology 1.1, 3 (Stahl ed.). This concept of love as a synthetic cosmic force can be traced from Plato’s Symposium (especially the speeches of Eryximachus 186b–187d and Aristophanes’ myth of the hermaphrodite 189d–92d, Timaeus 32c, and Gorgias 508a) to Ovidian amatory cosmology, the Neoplatonism of Martianus and Macrobius (Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 11.2.18), and the poetry of Claudius Claudianus (Carmina minora 25.31–55). 109. Ovid treats Mars as miles amoris both in Amores 1.9.29–30 and in Ars amatoria 2.233–50. 110. Stretter, “Rewriting Perfect Friendship,” 237–38. 111. Thus Ovid: “Pirithous would not have felt so acutely the friendship of Theseus had he not journeyed in life to the infernal waters” (Tristia 1.5.19–20, in Tristia; Ex Ponto [Wheeler and Goold ed.]); “They say the god of Tartarus grieved because loyal Theseus accompanied his friend to the lower world” (Tristia 1.9.31–32); “Theseus accompanied Pirithous to the Stygian waves” (Epistulae ex Ponto 2.3.43, in Tristia; Ex Ponto [Wheeler and Goold ed.]). 112. Bersuire, “L’Ovidius Moralizatus” (Ghisalberti ed.), 127. 113. On Greek matriheritance, see Simon Goldhill’s reading of the Eumenides in Reading Greek Tragedy, ch. 2. On the shifts in matrilineality, cognatic social order, and politics of gender, see Zeitlin, Playing the Other, 86 ff., and Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin, Before Sexuality. On the medieval shift from cognatic to agnatic kinship, see Duby, Knight, the Lady, 92–93; R. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 70–82. 114. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, 92–120. Bachofen’s Victorian patina has been burnished influentially by duBois, Centaurs and Amazons, which narrows and tightens Bachofen’s paradigms. 115. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion, 161–62. 116. “Nam cum amicus tui consors sit animi, cuius spiritui tuum coniungas et applices, et ita misceas ut unum fieri velis ex duobus.” Aelred of Rievaulx

Notes to Pages 167–170  315 De spiritali amicitia 10, 12 (ET Of Spiritual Friendship [Laker ed.]). The former is a gloss of Ambrose De officiis ministrorum 133, in a passage that reads (and decontextualizes) Cicero De amicitia 9.32. 117. See, for example, Aelred of Rievaulx, who argues that God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s rib to create a “helpmate” signifies a shared corporal substance between friends (De amicitia spiritualia 1.57). 118. In De senectute; De amicitia; De divinatione (Falconer ed.). 119. Non-Christian classical and late antique writers preserved the critical importance of Cicero’s definition of friendship as almost two-in-one. Minucius Felix, an early Christian but one whose attention to Latin ethics balances his religious convictions, begins his Octavius with a tribute to his love for his friend that observes the limits of Cicero’s definition of consensio. Notice, in the following, the optative, “you would think . . .”: “ut pote cum et ipse tanto nostri semper amore flagraverit, ut et in ludicris et seriis pari mecum voluntate concineret eadem velle vel nolle: crederes unam mentem in duobus fuisse divisam.” 120. Aristotle Rhetoric 1389b (The Art of Rhetoric [Henry and Freese ed.]). The characters of Arcite and Palamoun are framed on the topos of rash youth first defined by Aristotle in Rhetoric 1389a–b. It is altogether possible that Chaucer and Boccaccio knew the Rhetoric, since Moerbeke had translated it in the second half of the thirteenth century, and since, with ninety-four extant manuscripts, it was readily available; see specifically Aristoteles Latinus, Pars posterior (Lacombe ed.), 1348; for a general history, see Brandes, History of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 42–45. More likely, they knew the lineaments of the topos from derivative sources, among them Cicero’s De amicitia, which betrays secondhand familiarity with the Aristotelian tradition in the Rhetoric in its similar portrait of youthful friendship (10.34) and misprision of a dictum on friendship among the old ascribed to Bias (16.59) but quoted in full at Rhetoric 1389b. 121. Beltz, Memorials, xxviii. 122. This proverb is discrete from similar counterparts in Cicero (quoting Ennius), “Nulla sancta societas / Nec fides regni est, id latius patet. Nam quicquid eius modi est, in quo non possint plures excellere, in eo fit plerumque tanta contentio, ut difficillimum sit servare sanctam societatem” (De officiis 1.7.26), and Lucan, “Nulla fides regni sociis, omnisque potestas / ­Inpatiens consortis erit” (De bello civili 1.92–93 [Lucan: The Civil War, Duff ed.]), in relating the situation of politics to love. Augustine, in his advice to the Christian emperor, does relate politics to love, albeit to the love of God: “Sed felices eos [Christian emperors] dicimus . . . si plus amant illud regnum, ubi non timent habere consortes” (De civitate Dei 5.24 [The City of God against the Pagans, Bettenson ed.]).

316  Notes to Pages 173–183 123. Compare Knyghthode and Bataile (1458), the first English translation of Vegetius’s De re militari, wherein after a proemial encomium to “unitas” among “Clergys and Knyghthode /And Comynaltee” through the might of Henry VI, the author begins with a trope of war as marital union: “Mankyndes lyfe is mylitatioun, / And she, thi wife, is named Militaunce” (lines 25–27, 96–97). 124. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 41–42. 125. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 112. 126. “Kazhetsya, shto samoye ponyatie tselostnosti kultury v nashy dni i v otnoshenii soderzhaniya, i v otnoshenii tseleii diskreditirovano pochti katastroficheski. Uvy, dazhe na otdalennye podkhozhdy k takovo roda tselostnosti nemedlenno lozhitsya gustaya tyen totalitarnosti.” Kuklin, “O kanonakh i kanunakh,” 5. 127. Horace Ars poetica 47–48, 75, 176–78, 242–43.

chapter 4.  Missing Bodies and Changed Forms 1. Derrida, “Law of Genre,” 202. 2. Frye, Secular Scripture, 15. 3. The notion that the Rime sparse is a new subgenre of romance originated in the late nineteenth century with Cochin, La chronologie du Canzoniere, and Mascetta, Il Canzoniere di Francesco Petrarca. 4. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 172. 5. Luck, Latin Love Elegy, 74. 6. Petrarch uses the phrase “vario stile” throughout the Rime sparse, but most notably in Sonnet 1, line 5, and his all-important double sestina 332, which serves as a history of the Rime’s stylistic metamorphosis of elegy. 7. Roche, Petrarch, 1. 8. Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, xxiv. See also Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, 1–24. 9. Richard de Bury Philobiblon 1 (ET Love of Books [Thomas ed.]). 10. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch, 77. 11. See John Freccero, “Fig Tree,” 34–40. 12. On re-membering in Petrarch, see the discussion of Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 212, and Vickers, “Diana Described,” 271. On the poetics of fragmentation, see Mazzota, “Canzoniere,” 274. 13. On the Metamorphoses as a new genre, see Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 334, 345. 14. Quintilian Institutio oratoria 4.1.77.

Notes to Pages 183–194  317 15. On the structural correspondence of the Rime sparse to the Christian calendar, see Roche, Petrarch, 32–69. 16. Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics, 250 ff. 17. See Plato Timaeus 69c–e; Empedocles fr. 103; Lucretius De rerum natura 5.103; Ovid Epistulae ex ponto 3.6.25–26. For an overview of the house-asmind topos, see Ohly, “Haus Metapher,” 905–1063. For Richard de Bury, the mind as home of the book hardly needs justification: “But the written truth of books, not transient but permanent, plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of various spherules of the eyes, passing through the vestibule of perception [vestibula sensus communis] and the courts of imagination [imaginationis atria] enters the chamber of the intellect, taking its place on the couch of memory [cubili memoriae], where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind [congenerit veritatem]” (Philobiblon 21). 18. Petrarch Familiari 1.1, ET Letters on Familiar Matters (Bernardo ed.), 1:3−4. 19. ET Letters on Familiar Matters (Bernardo ed.). 20. Richard de Bury Philobiblon 8. 21. Barkan, Gods Made Flesh, 4. 22. On the connections among violence, the body, and poetics in Ovid, see Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body. 23. Ausonius Epistulae 10.29, in Ausonius (Evelyn-White ed.). 24. Horace Sermones 4.53–65. On this passage as editorial practice, see Freudenberg, Walking Muse, 146–49. 25. Boccaccio Genealogie deorum gentilium librii 1.10b. I have used the translation of Charles Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, 10–11, for all but the last line, which I have rendered myself. 26. Boccaccio Genealogie deorum gentilium librii 1:10d, in Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry, 13. 27. The pinnacle of Petrarch’s desire for national and cultural coherence is Poem 128, “Italia mia.” 28. Petrarch, Secretum (Carrara ed.), 214. 29. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper trans.), 163. 30. Ibid., 138. Petrarch cites Ovid Remedia amoris 462. 31. Petrarch, Secretum (Bufano ed.), 196. 32. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper trans.), 133. 33. Freccero, “Fig Tree,” 27 ff.; Durling, “Petrarch’s ‘Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro.’ ” 34. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper trans.), 125. 35. Other passages, some from the De doctrina christiana, are likewise anterior. But this one, aside from its topical relevance, benefits from the verbal

318  Notes to Pages 196–213 echo of an unusual scheme: the image as exerting captivating “charm” (inlecebras oculorum [Augustine]; creature captus illecibris [Petrarch-Augustine]). 36. On Augustine’s notion of forms as a subgroup of ideas, and generative paradigms of the divine intelligence, see De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus liber unus 46.2, in Augustine, Sancti Aurelii Augustini hipponensis episcopi Opera omnia (Migne ed.), 6:30. The treatment is substantively derived from Cicero Topica 7 and Orator 2.9 (a text, incidentally, that Petrarch rediscovered and knew intimately), although the difference, as Erwin Panofsky notes in Idea, 193 n. 7, is that Augustine adds “divina to Cicero’s intellegentia.” 37. Spitzer, “Problem of Renaissance Latin Poetry,” 130. 38. “Nec me tam corpus noveris amasse quam animam” and “illius non magis corpus amasse quam animam.” Petrarch, Secretum (Bufano ed.), 180, 188. 39. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper trans.), 126. 40. Noting his ability to cite Ovid—in this case Remedia amoris 579–80— yet not understand him, Augustinus faults Petrarch for having “lost your powers of memory.” Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper trans.), 132. 41. Ovid Amores 1.10.13–14. 42. Two such metamorphoses from body to artistic form or symbol occur in Ovid, the other being Pan and Syrinx. Metamorphoses 1.701–12. 43. See, inter alia, Hardie, “Ovid into Laura,” 254–70; Dotti, “Petrarca,” 9–23; Cottino-Jones, “Myth of Apollo,” 152–76; Hainsworth, “Myth of Daphne,” 28–44; Maddox, Petrarch’s Laurels; T. Greene, Light in Troy; Roche, Petrarch; Barkan, Gods Made Flesh. 4 4. Ovid’s metapoetic image here invites comparison to Catullus 1, in which the physical qualities of a slender (lepidum) papyrus scroll suggest the aesthetic qualities of neoteric poetry in the Callimachean mould. 45. On “tenuis liber” as trope, see Theodorakopoulos, “Closure and Transformation.” 46. T. Greene, Light in Troy, 129. 47. The laurel’s odd ventriloquism of Apollo’s voice in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, “first to sen the holy laurer quake, / Er that Apollo spak out of the tree” (3.542–43), may reflect a similar image of vocal coercion. 48. Nietzsche, “History in the Service and Disservice of Life,” in Unmodern Observations, 90. 49. “So erst scheint mir das immer empfundene ‘Bruchstückhafte’ des Lebens einen weltanschauungsmäßigen Sinn jenseits der bloß elegischen Kontemplation zu offenbaren. Wir kursieren fortwärhend durch sehr mannigfache Ebenen, deren jede prinzipiell die Welttotalität nach einer besonderen Formel darstellt, von deren jeder aber unser Leben nur jeweils ein Bruchstück mitnimmt.” Simmel, Lebensanschauung, 37.

Notes to Pages 213–233  319 50. “Wir alle sind Fragmente, nicht nur eines sozialen Typus . . . sondern auch gleichsam des Typus der nur wir selbst sind.” Ibid., 79. 51. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 204. 52. See R. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, ch. 1. 53. The only sustained investigations of Orpheus and Orphic presence in the Rime are Migraine-George, “Spectacular Desires,” 226–46, and Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body. 54. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Durling ed.), 29 n. 526. 55. See also Poem 257, “Amor porse . . . quella onorata man che second’ amo” (3–4). 56. Similar schemes may be found in 250, 302, 330, 341, 342, 356, 359, and 362. 57. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Secret (Draper ed.), 144. 58. Ibid., 148. 59. Medieval commentaries on Boethius’s Orpheus, particulary those of the Remigian tradition, tend to interpret Orpheus’s failure as the triumph of earthly sensualism over the desire for knowledge of divine truths. See, for example, Scotus’s gloss on 3.12, “felix qui potuit boni fontem visere lucidum,” in Erigena, Saecvli noni avctores in Boetii Consolationem Philosophiae Commentaris (Silk ed.), 217. 6 0. Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the soul’s “remembering” of the forms that it had once perceived but forgets in each incarnation, is laid out severally in the Meno (81–86), the Phaedo (72–76), and the Phaedrus (249b–d). 61. Hardie, “Ovid into Laura,” 266–67. 62. Cf. Simone Martini’s portrait of Laura made at the bequest of Petrarch, Poem 78. 63. Orpheus alludes to this affinity in his address to Pluto and Proserpine: “if the story of that old-time ravishment is not false, you, too, were joined by love” (Metamorphoses 10.26–28).

chapter 5.  Playing for Time 1. Romeo and Juliet (Evans ed.). All subsequent quotations from the play will be from this edition. 2. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 305. 3. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 213. 4. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 92. 5. Gilbert, “Poetics of Aristotle,” 353. 6. Castelvetro Poetica d’Aristotele 3.5b (ET Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry).

320  Notes to Pages 233–252 7. Serlio Architettura bk. 2. 8. “Good morning to the day . . . / Hail the world’s soul and mind more glad than is / The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun / Peep through the horns of the celestial ram” (1.1.1, 3–5). 9. See the prologue to the 1616 edition of Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. 10. Johnson Johnson on Shakespeare 9.259–60. 11. Panofsky argues the importance of Phaëthon’s chariot to Renaissance iconography, citing the work of Nicholas Poussin, in Studies in Iconology, 93. 12. Romeo is clearly contending with Pyramus and Thisbe’s predicament when he claims, “With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls, / For stony limits cannot hold love out” (2.2.66–67). 13. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 94. 14. Bate, Ovid and Shakespeare, 177. 15. Another instance is Juliet’s “Who is’t that calls? It is my lady mother. / Is she not down so late or up so early?” (3.5.65–66). 16. Introduction to Romeo and Juliet (Gibbons ed.), 58. 17. Bate, Ovid and Shakespeare, 177. See Gray, “Some Renaissance Notions,” 64. 18. Parker, Inescapable Romance, 12. 19. Quinones, Renaissance Discovery of Time, 231. 20. Richard II 2.1.31–36 and the deposition scene’s “Down, down I come like glistering Phaëthon . . .” (3.3). In Shakespeare’s lyrics, see especially sonnet 7, and the “golden pilgrimage” from sun to son. 21. The Q2, as Michael Goldman reminds us, substitutes “I” for “ay” in lines 45, 48, and 49; see Goldman, Shakespeare, n. 36. 22. Dr. Johnson’s comment on Shakespeare’s penchant for the pun, that it is “the fatal Cleopatra for which [Shakespeare] lost the world and was content to lose it,” has attracted more credence for its wit than its substance deserves. Blakemore Evans expresses Johnsonian prejudice to this passage in his edition of Romeo and Juliet, note on 3.2.45. 23. Sandler, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, 26; Kristeva, Tales of Love, 215. 24. The cliché derives ultimately from Callimachus Aitia 1.2. 25. Bate, Ovid and Shakespeare, 147. 26. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 9, 19. Cf. Caillois, Man, Play and Games, 7. 27. Eco, Postscript, 74. 28. James Calderwood sees a similar spatial distinction in the scene between public and private, commenting upon “the two divided spheres of the opening scene, the public quarrel in the streets and Romeo’s private dotage on Rosaline.” Shakespearean Metadrama, 118. 29. Turberville, Booke of Faulconrie, 107.

Notes to Pages 252–267  321 0. Turberville cites “wo, ho, ho,” “hey lo,” and “hey, gar, gar” as various 3 commands. 31. Turberville, Booke of Faulconrie, 143. 32. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama, 107. 33. What I designate here as ubi est is a species of the argumentum ad loco. 34. See Levin, Shakespeare. 35. Coleridge, Lectures and Notes, 323. 36. Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, 12. 37. See Bloom, “Poetic Crossing,” 495. 38. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 318.

chapter 6.  Legends of the Fall 1. Works of John Milton (Patterson and Rodgers ed.), 4:286. 2. The impolitic Milton espoused a republic in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonweath (1660), a pamphlet reissued one month before Charles II returned to England as monarch. Christopher Hill memorably characterizes Milton as a “radical Protestant heretic” in Milton and the English Revolution, 3. On his domestic theories, see The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. 3. See Elias, Civilizing Process, 47–182, 187–256. 4. See Cicero De officiis 1.27 ff. The mos maiorum were Roman traditional values that included such concepts as honestas, industria, labor, and pietas. 5. Augustine De doctrina christiana 4.17–19; Auerbach, Literary Language, 35. 6. Milton, Paradise Lost (Newton ed.), note to 11.8. 7. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 126. 8. Here and subsequently in this chapter, Paradise Lost is quoted from the Hughes edition. 9. Works of John Milton, vol. 1. 10. For the claim that Milton is as divinely inspired as the biblical prophets, see Kerrigan, Prophetic Milton, and Guillory, Poetic Authority. 11. Teares of the Muses, line 499, in Spenser, Complete Works. 12. Ovid and Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, 7. 13. The complete sentence is “Scientia inflat, caritas aedificat.” On science as forbidden knowledge in the Renaissance, see Harrison, “Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge,” 265–90. 14. Works of John Milton, 12:171. 15. Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, 45. 16. Ibid., 45.

322  Notes to Pages 267–285 17. Ovid and Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, 385. 18. Bacon Advancement of Learning 1.1.2. 19. Ibid. 1.1.3. 20. Bacon New Organon 1.12. 21. Horace Odes and Epodes 4.2.1–4. 22. On the meaning of the term allusion, see Bloom, Map of Misreading, 126–27. 23. Compare Metamorphoses 8.205, “unda gravet pennas.” 24. Twain, Complete Essays, 669. 25. Thorpe, Milton Criticism, 81, 80. 26. Bouchard, Milton, 67. 27. Harding, Club of Hercules, 67. 28. Fish, Surprised by Sin, 1. 29. See, for example, Kerrigan, Sacred Complex, esp. 98–99; see also Rumrich, “Uninventing Milton” and Milton Unbound. 30. Compare Dante’s account of the disappearance of Adamite language in the Paradiso: “La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta / inanzi che all’ovra inconsummabile / fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta” (26.124–26). 31. Stein, Answerable Style, 66–67. 32. Hollander, Figure of Echo, 48. 33. In addition to Metamorphoses 5.417–17, see also Amores 2.17.14 and Tristia 1.3.25 and 1.6.28. 34. Herodotus Histories 2.10; Thucydides Peloponnesian War 4.36.3. For other examples, see A. Otto, Die Sprichwörter, entry under “magnus.” 35. Iliad 2.87–89. For the history of the adynaton, see Curtius, European Literature, 94–98. 36. Cicero Orator 4.14. 37. Coolidge, “Great Things and Small,” 7. 38. Ibid., 18. 39. De Quincey “Milton,” in De Quincey’s Works, 6:321. 40. See Auerbach, Mimesis, 131–32, and Literary Language, 65–66. 41. Nyquist’s rationale for this order is somewhat different: it demonstrates rather a “logic of supplementarity,” which is to say that had Eve come second in the narrative order of creation she might have assumed the authority of a revised, edited draft of the original. Nyquist, “Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,” 119. 42. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, 67. 43. Compare, for example, the invective pronounced upon Polynices by Oedipus: “And thou—begone—abhorred of me and unfathered, vilest of the vile” (Oedipus at Colonus 1383), or Ovid’s splenetic Ibis. 4 4. Hollander, Figure of Echo, 48.

Notes to Pages 287–292  323 45. Prodded, one might add Licinius Mucianus’s astrology to the list of Latin creation epics. Their Greek precedent is, of course, Hesiod. 46. Giraldi Cinthio, On Romances (Snuggs ed.), 20. 47. Tasso, “Discourses on the Art of Poetry,” in Rhu, Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory, 105. 48. Ibid., 122. 49. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Cavalchini and Samuel ed.), 76. 50. Lewalski, Paradise Lost. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. See the chapter “Descent to Light,” in D. Allen, Harmonious Vision, 122–42. 53. Miner, “Some Issues of Literary ‘Species,’ ” 41.

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Index

agriculture, 12, 60–63, 81–84, 88– 89, 97–100, 102 Alexis (Greek poet), 71–72 Althusser, Louis, 9, 25, 26, 27 Amazon(s) Eleanor of Aquitaine as, 150 homosociality among, 144 hybridity of, 146–47, 148 matriheritance among, 148, 165 political unity, 144, 156 war with, 149 Ancrene Riwle, 33 Andreas Capellanus, De amore, 64, 129, 130, 133 Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 118, 150 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas Ariosto, Lodovico, 116, 263, 290 Aristotle, x, xii, xiii, xvii Metaphysics, 9 Nichomachean Ethics, 33–34, 85 Physics, 15 Poetics, xiii, 17, 18, 232–34, 287 Politics, 61–62, 107–10, 112, 124, 142 Rhetoric, 168 Arnulf of Orleans, 153 Auerbach, Erich, 261–62, 321n.5

Augustine, xii, xvii, 30, 85, 104, 141, 165, 182, 190, 193, 195–97, 261–62, 292 Confessions, 182, 194–97 De civitate Dei, 30, 85, 104–5, 141, 148–49, 165, 316n.122 De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus liber unus, 318n.36 De doctrina christiana, 190, 261, 281–82 Ennarationes in Psalmos, 306n.59 Augustus Caesar cult of, xi maiestas of, 118, 121, 310n.42 marital legislation, 115–17, 152 rule of, 9, 104 Ausonius, 188 Bachofen, J. J., 165 Bacon, Francis Advancement of Learning, 268 New Organon, 268 Bakhtin, Mikhail, xiv, 18, 232, 235, 259 Barkan, Leonard, 174, 187 Barrow, Samuel, 286–87, 291 Barthes, Roland, 5 Bartholomew of Bruges, 15

349

350  Index Bate, Jonathan, 236–37, 245–46 Bernardus Silvestris, 143 Béroul, 51–52 Bible, 182, 262 Genesis, 100, 184, 215, 268 Leviticus, 152 Luke, 81 Mark, 111 Matthew, 82, 91–92 Paul, 82–83, 100, 109, 163, 166, 265, 305n.49, 311n.56, 313n.95 Timothy, 109 Bloch, R. Howard, 33, 36 Bloom, Harold, 262, 291 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, 71 Boccaccio, 116 De casibus virorum illustrium, 117 Decameron, 143 Filocolo, 132–33 Filostrato, 43–44 Genealogia deorum, 189 Teseida, 147, 158 body collective body, ix, xi, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 30–31, 93, 104–5, 114, 123, 144, 154 defined, 8 and form, xiv, 6–9, 14, 142, 153, 185–86, 194–96, 261 literary corpus, xi, xiii, 2, 16, 34, 180–84, 186–89, 202–3, 210, 212, 216–17 material body, ix, 2–3, 5, 9–10, 13, 27, 31, 33, 35, 44, 57, 81, 117, 186, 188, 191–92, 206, 209–10, 212, 227 missing body, 3, 5–7, 21, 198, 213, 222, 225, 253 and phenomenology, 213–14

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 120, 131, 145, 153–55, 190, 212, 220–22 Brunetto Latini, 117 Buridan, Jean, 108 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 5 Calderwood, James, 252 Callimachus, 14, 201, 288 Cannon, Christopher, 8 carestia, 81, 86, 88–89 caritas, 3, 54, 81, 83, 86, 88–89, 131, 190, 306n.63, 321n.13 carmen perpetuum, ix, 17, 143, 173, 176, 188, 229 Cassirer, Ernst, 103–4, 307n.1 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 233 Cato, 134 Cecrops, 149, 165 Chance, Jane, 143 Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales: Clerk’s Tale, 111–12; Franklin’s Tale, 13, 105, 115, 121–40; General Prologue, 105, 113, 123–24, 128, 138, 141–43; Knight’s Tale, 13, 104–5, 132; 140–77; Manciple’s Tale, 113–14; Parson’s Tale, 141; Retraction, 141; Wife of Bath’s Tale, 112, 115, 118, 121–22, 124, 132, 136, 165, 173 Envoy to Bukton, 139 Envoy to Richard, 114 The Former Age, 120–21 Gentilesse, 137 Parliament of Fowls, 118, 124 Troilus and Criseyde, 11, 43–44, 118 Chrétien de Troyes Cligès, 62–80, 82, 89–90

Index  351

Erec et Enide, 65–67, 70 Guillaume d’Angleterre, 81 Le Chevalier au lion ( Yvain), 64–65, 67, 74, 88, 102 Le Chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot), 26, 70, 91, 100, 304n.31 lyrics, 86–88, 97 Perceval (Le Roman del graal), 80, 82, 89, 91–93, 102, 305n.46 Cicero and captatio benevolentiae, 81 on caritas, 88 on cultivation, 12, 97–98 De amicitia, 106, 162, 164, 166–70 on decorum, 19, 261, 277, 292 and epistolary genre, 183 on leisure, 62 on politics, 112–13, 120, 124, 142, 145 and Scipionic transcendence, 227 Cinzio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), xiii, 287 Cistercians, 60–61, 305n.50 Clement V (pope), 189 Cola di Rienzi, 189 Coolidge, John, 277–78 copia, 87–88, 131 cultural history, x–xi, xv–xvii, 7, 9–10 culture Augustus and, 115, 117, 152 and collectivity, x–xi, 104, 212 courtly/chivalric culture, 9, 35, 64–65, 69, 71 and culturology, xiv, 175 and cultus, 2, 4, 5, 11 hybridity of, 142, 148, 152, 160, 175



and leisure / work, 11–13, 61, 82, 100 and literature, ix, xii, xiv–xvi, 18, 28, 97, 138 and memory, 211 and myth, xvi, 10, 25, 44 and value, x, 59–60, 62, 81, 84–85 cultus, xi, xiii, xvii, 2, 4, 11–13, 17, 26, 165, 298n.27 cura, 43, 49, 302nn.50–51 Curschmann, Heinrich, 88 De Quincey, Thomas, 279–80 decorum Augustine and, 261–62, 281–82, 292 Cicero and, 19, 261, 277, 292 defined, 17–19, 261 form and, 20 Horace and, 152–53, 261 Ovid and, x, 20, 125, 187 poetic, x, 7, 15, 17–21, 152, 187–88, 199–200, 202, 261–93 religious, 264–66, 280, 281–82 social, x, 7, 17–19, 21, 27, 32, 34, 46, 89, 125, 147, 153, 187, 261, 263–64, 293 Derrida, Jacques, 179 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 111, 116 Duby, Georges, 90, 305n.50 Duns Scotus, 142, 312n.78 Eagleton, Terry, 153 Eco, Umberto, 247 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 68–69, 150 Elias, Norbert, ix, xiv, 8, 27, 261 Elias of Thriplow, Serium senectutis, 140

352  Index family-state metaphor, 106–21 Fish, Stanley, 21, 133, 271–72 Fisher King, 7, 26, 45, 81–82, 93–94, 96 Fleming, John, 44, 92 form Aristotle and, 9, 15 and the body, xi, xiv, 5–9, 14, 34, 152–53, 157, 159, 179–227 definition of, 8–9 forma, ix, 1–2, 9, 13–16, 19, 157 and formality, x–xi, 17–20, 27–28, 31–33, 35, 261–93 generic, ix–x, xii–xiii, 14–16, 19–20, 28, 179–227 history and, xvi–xvii and metamorphosis, x–xi, xiii, xvii, 5, 30–31 social form, x–xi, 7–8, 10, 31, 59, 105–6, 140, 165 and unity, ix–x, xiv, 5, 16, 104–5, 140, 142–43, 152, 157, 161 Foucault, Michel, 155 Fowler, Alastair, 180 Fraser, Russell, 6 Frye, Northrop, 259 Fulgentius, 150–51 Galbert of Bruges, 88 Galinsky, Karl, 115 genre, ix–x, xii, 5–6, 28, 59, 62, 105, 183, 188, 200, 226, 303n.4 and Amores, 20 and decorum, 261–93 and Metamorphoses, xii, 14, 16, 19, 183 theory of, xiii, xvii, 14–17, 179–80, 186, 195, 201 time and, 17–18, 229–59 transmissional genrification, 15

Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 36 Geoffroi de Charny, 69–70 Gervase of Tilbury, 35, 38, 304n.25 Girard, René, 64 Golding, Arthur, Metamorphoses, 237, 245 Gower, John, 110, 112, 114, 124, 129–31, 137 Confessio amantis, 107–8, 123–24 Granville-Barker, Harley, 231 Greene, Thomas, xvi, 16, 206–7 Guittone d’Arezzo, 180 habitus, 8, 27, 34–35, 261 Haidu, Peter, 64 Hanning, Robert, 19 Harriss, Gerald, 104 Heng, Geraldine, 10, 142 Henry II, 37, 53, 69, 71, 80, 150 Homer, xvii, 6, 17, 26, 65–66, 71, 115, 188, 259, 277 Horace, 33, 72, 155–56, 188–89 Ars poetica (Ad pisones), 106, 152, 175 Carmina (Odes), 4, 268 and decorum, 152, 261 Epistles, 201 and hybridity, 145, 152, 158, 167 Hoskins, John, 256 Hugo IV (of Cyprus and Jerusalem), 189 Huizinga, Johan, xvi, 7, 247–48 hybridity, 7, 13–14, 16, 105, 140–76, 179, 183 insufficiency, 210, 214, 230–31, 242, 246, 259, 271–72 Jameson, Frederic, 10 Jauss, Hans Robert, xv

Index  353 Jean II, 69–70 Jean de Meun, 72 Jerome, 194, 264 John of Garland, 30 John of Paris, 124 John of Salisbury, 41, 302n.52, 307n.74 Johnson, Samuel, 233, 271–72, 288 Jonson, Ben, 233 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, 8, 13, 104–5, 128–29 Kittredge, George Lyman, 122, 135 Knyghthode and Bataile, 316n.123 Köhler, Erich, 102 Kristeva, Julia, 232 Kuklin, Anatoly, 175 La Chanson de Roland, 65–66 labor, 12, 59–60, 62, 72, 74, 81, 84, 86, 90–91, 97–102 Las Siete Partidas. See law, Las Siete Partidas law, 35–38, 108, 114–15, 125, 128, 141, 150, 153, 221, 233, 287 biblical, 159 of Canut, 37 Digest of Justinian, 115, 312n.76 Frederic Maitland on, 37 Las Siete Partidas, 101 Lex Iulia de adulteriis, 116–18 of Romulus, 111 of Sais, 152 Laws of Canut, The. See law, of Canut Le Goff, Jacques, 100 Leicester, H. Marshall, 132 leisure and chivalry, 63, 65, 69–70, 74, 304n.33

and culture, 11–13 and economy, 60–62, 81, 102 and love, 64 and poetry, 99, 101–2, 188 and politics, 74 Lewalski, Barbara, 291 los/repos, 63–65, 70–72, 75–77, 80 Lucan, 26, 315n.122 Mabinogi, 45 Macrobius, 14, 115 Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 314n.108 Saturnalia, 117, 310n.42 maiestas-maistrie, 13, 103, 105–6, 116, 118–19, 121–41, 144–47, 151, 156, 160–62, 170 Maitland, Frederic, 37 Mann, Jill, 133 Map, Walter, 121 Marie de France and Celtic motifs, 28, 41, 44–45 and courtly tension, 11, 27 Fables, 28, 33 and gender, 11 Lais: Bisclavret, 7, 27–38; Chaitivel, 26; Eliduc, 27, 47, 53–58; Guigemar, 7, 26–27, 39–53 and myth, 25, 27 Marlowe, Christopher Faustus, 265 Tamburlaine, 265 Martianus Capella, Marriage of Mercury and Philology, 143, 150, 161 Marvell, Andrew, 286–88, 291 Marx, Karl and form, xiv, 9–10 on history vs. mythology, x–xi

354  Index Marx, Karl (continued ) labor theory of value, 59–60, 81 and possession, 115 and price, 61 Matthew, 91–92, 95 memory and Nietzsche, 211 and Ovid, 17 and Petrarchan remembering, 184, 186–87, 190–91, 211, 212–14, 216–18, 220 and Platonic anamnesis, 220, 319n.60 and Richard de Bury, 317n.17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 214 metamorphosis corporal, 1, 3–4, 9, 153, 172 and flux, x–xi, xiii and genre (literary form), 14, 179, 183, 185–87 and the hunt, 26, 30, 38, 44–45, 48 and hybridity, 153 and metaphor, 154, 198–200, 203, 205, 208–9 poetico-cultural, xii–xiii, 4, 143–44 reciprocal, 191–92, 202 and speech, 252–53 theory of, xiii, 11, 143, 153, 191, 198 and violence, 191, 207, 209, 227 Middleton, Anne, 122–23 Milton, John, x, 7, 21, 133 Comus, 6, 17 Il Penseroso, 263 L’Allegro, 263, 286 Nativity Ode, 263 Of Education, 261 Paradise Lost, xii, 6, 261–93

Paradise Regained, 280 Prolusions, 266 Miner, Earl, 292–93 Minotaur, 7, 13, 143–44, 148, 151, 156–60, 162–63, 169, 174–75 Monte Andrea, 180 Montrose, Louis, xiv–vii mos maiorum, 65, 261 defined, 321n.4 neoteroi, 13–14 Nicholas of Oresme, 108 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, xvii, 35, 211 Ockham. See William of Ockham otium. See leisure Ovid and Augustus, 9 and Cinzio, 287 corpus/forma, ix, x, 2, 4, 9, 14, 16–17, 19, 157, 179 and cultus, xi, xiii, xvii, 1–4, 11– 13, 16–17, 21, 26, 298n.27 on decorum, x, 19–20, 125, 187 and history of civilization, xi, xiii, xvii, 4–5, 9–11, 25–28 on hybridity, 16, 105, 143–45, 153, 157, 160–62, 165, 170, 173–74, 179, 183 and irony, xi, xiii, xvii, 2, 4, 47 and leisure, 12–13, 62, 65, 99, 101 and Lex Iulia de adulteriis, 116–18 life of, 2, 117, 310n.42 on love, 3, 13, 18, 20, 26, 40, 45, 47, 62, 64–65, 72, 79–80, 117, 119, 125–26, 128–29, 161, 164, 167, 170, 193, 196–97, 229, 253, 263, 291

Index  355

and Lucretius, 4 maiestas et amor, 13, 103, 105, 121, 125–27, 129–30, 132–33, 136, 144–47, 151, 156, 160–62, 170 in Middle Ages, xiv, 1, 4, 14, 30, 98 perpetuum carmen, ix, 17, 143, 173, 176, 188, 201, 229 poetics of, xiv, 18–21, 183 and politics, xi, xiv, 7, 9, 120 and Quintilian, 183 in Renaissance, xiv, 98 and romance, x, xii–xiii, 6, 8–10, 18 Ovid, works of Amores, 19–20, 65, 72, 101, 117, 161, 197 Ars amatoria, 12, 26, 40, 43, 48, 80, 117, 149, 170, 240 De vetula (Pseudo-Ovid), 1–3 Epistulae ex ponto, 84, 98–99 Metamorphoses, ix–xii, xvii, 2–4, 7, 9, 11, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 26, 28, 30, 47, 52, 118, 171, 179, 182, 183, 188, 262, 264, 270; Actaeon, 41–42, 143, 188, 208–9, 245–46, 299n.5; Adonis, 26, 43, 51, 301n.37; Apollo, 171, 183, 191–92, 196, 198–202, 204–7, 209–10, 212, 216, 221, 223, 245, 318n.47; Arachne, 187–88; Cadmus, 106, 120, 171–74, 299n.5; Cupid, 20, 148–49, 161, 166, 199, 201–2, 206; Daedalus, 267–72; Daphne, 183, 191–92, 196, 198–204, 206–7, 209–10, 212, 223, 299n.5; Diana, 41–42, 144, 206, 208–9; Echo, 21, 229, 231, 245–46,



251, 253, 256, 263, 282–83, 285–86, 293; Europa, 106, 120–21, 125, 143–44, 156, 161, 163, 171, 187; Eurydice, 198, 211–12, 218–20, 223–25; Hyacinthus, 223, 245; Icarus, 267–72; Io, 252; Jupiter, 31, 52, 118, 120–21, 144, 146, 156, 161–62, 187; Lycaon, 28–31, 118, 299n.5; Medea, 291; Narcissus, 18, 21, 45, 47–48, 59, 72, 87–88, 229, 231, 245–46, 253, 256, 263, 269, 282–85; Orpheus, 183, 188, 198, 206, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218–26, 229, 292; Pasiphaë, 143, 160; Phaëthon, 18, 229, 231–41; Philomela, 252; Pirithous, 164, 166–68; Pyramus and Thisbe, 18, 231, 235; Proserpina, 164, 275–76; Venus, 26, 42–43, 173, 175 Remedia amoris, 27, 40, 47–48, 87, 190–91, 197, 302n.50 Tristia, 101, 180, 201

Parker, Patricia, 237 Partonopeu de Blois, 82 Patterson, Lee, xv Paul, 81–83, 100, 109, 152, 163, 166, 265 peasants (as animals), 35, 91 Peter Aureolus, 142 Petrarch, x, xiii, 7, 16, 114, 179–227 De viris illustribus, 117 Familiari, 182–88, 190, 197, 213 Rime sparse ( Fragmenta), xii, 16, 7, 179–229 passim, 316nn.3, 6 Secretum, 182, 184, 190–94, 196–97, 205, 220

356  Index Philippe de Flandres, 69, 81 Pierre Bersuire, 164 Plato, xii, 9, 17, 26, 38, 113, 150, 153, 184, 193, 195, 220–21, 233 Laws, 65 Republic, 104, 193 Timaeus, 151, 232 Plutarch, 116, 149 Poussin, Nicholas, 239 price, 60–61, 83, 85–86, 88, 90, 306n.55 Pseudo-Ovid, De vetula, 1–3 Pseudo-Theocritus, The Dead Adonis, 43 Quinones, Ricardo, 239 Radford, Jean, xvi remembering. See memory rhetorical figures and concepts auxesis, 277–80, 282 captatio benevolentiae, 81, 83, 189, 305n.47 impossibilia, 123, 128, 134, 136 occultatio, 146, 148, 156, 170 paralipsis, 148, 275–76 qualitas carminis, 14, 16 quem quæretis, 6 recusatio, 263, 291 ubi est, 159, 253, 255, 321n.33 variatio, 180, 316n.6 Richard II, 107, 113, 309n.27 Richard de Bury, 181, 186–87, 317n.17 Richard FitzRalph, 109 Robertson, D. W., Jr., 66, 122, 145–46 Roman de Thebes, 71 romance and decorum, 34, 187 definitions, ix, xii, xvi, 10, 18, 59, 179, 232, 247



and epic, 5, 21, 26, 28, 134, 142, 145, 159–60, 165, 179, 183, 186, 223, 229, 290, 293 and generic form, x, xii–xiii, 6–7, 15–16, 28, 143, 179–80, 183–84, 201, 212, 218, 223–24, 237, 290 and leisure, 13, 62–80 passim, 101–2 medieval romance, 11, 26–27, 45–46, 61, 115, 180 non-classical influences, 44 Ovidian romance, x, xiii, 6, 8, 10, 105, 224, 253, 292 poetics of, xvii, 18, 28, 114, 117, 179–80, 214, 231–32, 237 and society, 5, 10, 27–28, 53, 59–61, 64–65, 69, 85, 91, 102, 114, 142 and time/place, 229–32, 236–37, 247, 249, 254–55, 257–59 tragedy, 229–59 passim, 289 Ross, Alexander, Poeticus Mystagogus, 267 Rothschild, Judith, 37 Sandys, George, 264, 267 Schiller, Friedrich, xiv, 7, 105, 153, 156 Serlio, Sebastian, 233 Servius, 14 Shakespeare, William, x, 7, 18 Henry V, 18, 233 Love’s Labor’s Lost, 229, 243 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 18, 237 Othello, 247–48, 249 Romeo and Juliet, xii, 7, 18 Twelfth Night, 243, 245–46, 229–59 Venus and Adonis, 43

Index  357 Simmel, Georg and the body, 8 and culture, 59 and history, xvii and social form, xiv, 8, 212–13 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 11, 45 Smith, D. Vance, 114–15 Statius, 12, 26, 71, 133, 145, 147, 149–50, 153, 156–60, 162, 174, 176 Stein, Arnold, 274 Suetonius, 115–17 Syme, Ronald, xiv Tasso, Torquato, xiii, 289–90 Thomas Aquinas hylomorphism, 9 theory of just price, 61, 85, 86 Thomas the Cistercian, 129, 154 Thucydides, 26, 277 time Aristotle and, 17–18, 232–34, 256, 287 Bakhtin and, 232, 235, 259 chronotope, 229–32, 236–37, 247, 249, 254–55, 257–59 and Echo, 282–85 and genre, 17–18, 229–59 and Narcissus, 229, 231, 246, 253, 256, 263, 282–85 and Phaëthon, 229, 231–38



synchronicity, 223, 230, 232, 236–37, 241–42, 246, 249, 263, 282, 286–87 Turberville, George, The Book of Faulconrie, 251 Twain, Mark, “That Day in Eden,” 271

Vergil, xi–xiii, xvii, 17, 20–21, 26, 49, 71, 116, 157, 181–82, 219–20, 259, 276, 278, 287 Aeneid, 14, 21, 41, 49, 51, 292 Culex (pseudo-Vergil), 201 Eclogues, 200–201, 219, 277 Georgics, 12–13, 212 visual poetics, 184 Volsunga Saga, 57 Wallace, David, 104–5, 142 Walter of Châtillon, 137 Weber, Max, 27, 104, 107 White, Hayden, xvii William of Ockham, 103, 142 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 271 wounds, 7, 26–27, 32, 39–53 passim, 56–57, 93–94, 96, 218, 224, 242, 302n.54 Wyclif, John, 109, 111 Yeats, William Butler, 6, 202

g r e g o ry h e y wo rt h is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.