Early Modern Intertextuality (Early Modern Literature in History) 3030689077, 9783030689070

Citation preview

Early Modern Intertextuality

Sarah Carter

Early Modern Literature in History

Series Editors Cedric C. Brown, Department of English, University of Reading, Reading, UK Andrew Hadfield, School of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Within the period 1520–1740, this large, very well-established series with notable international representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. This series is approaching a hundred titles on a variety of subjects including early modern women’s writing; domestic politics; drama, performance and playhouses; rhetoric; religious conversion; translation; travel and colonial writing; popular culture; the law; authorship; diplomacy; the court; material culture; childhood; piracy; and the environment.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14199

Sarah Carter

Early Modern Intertextuality

Sarah Carter English, Communications and Philosophy Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, UK

ISSN 2634-5919 ISSN 2634-5927 (electronic) Early Modern Literature in History ISBN 978-3-030-68907-0 ISBN 978-3-030-68908-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my family

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 is reproduced with kind permission by Wiley; first published as “Early Modern Intertextuality: Classical Myth, Narrative Systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Literature Compass 13:2 (2016). Part of the material comprising Chapter 4 is reproduced with kind permission by McGill-Queen’s University Press, as appearing in my “Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the epyllia” in Ovid and Masculinity in the Renaissance ed. Goran Stanivukovic and John Garrison (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

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Contents

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Early Modern Intertextuality: Post-structuralism, Narrative Systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Allegory, Structuralism, and Intertextuality: Sir Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients

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Folklore as a Narrative System: Old Wives, Seasonal Cycles, and Culture Wars

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Parody and Intertextuality: The Ovidian Epyllia

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Intertextuality and Satire: Ben Jonson’s Poetaster

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Text, Intertext, Hypertext?

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Early Modern Intertextuality: Post-structuralism, Narrative Systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract This introductory chapter sets out the monograph’s argument: that the theory of intertextuality is extremely valuable in analysing texts of the early modern period due to the focus and prioritisation of the creative imitation of classical and contemporary texts. How meaning is created and conveyed through intertextual reference is foregrounded. The introduction suggests that intertextuality has become somewhat reduced in theoretical terms to be used to convey simplistic identification of sources and advocates a return to the poststructuralist theoretical understanding. The chapter engages with some recent critics, outlines the theory, identifies similar concepts in classical literary theory, introduces various elements of early modern writing receptive to an intertextual analysis, and provides a case study, analysing A Midsummer Night’s Dream through an intertextual lens. Keywords Intertextuality · Dream · Textuality · Theseus · Titania · Bottom

An earlier form of this chapter has been previously published as “Early Modern Intertextuality: Classical Myth, Narrative Systems, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Literature Compass 13.2 (2016): 47–57. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7_1

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In criticism of early modern British texts concepts such as the plurality of discourse, the mutually informing relationship between cultural ideologies and texts, the pervasive use of classical models and mythology, and the instability of texts, are taken as established. These concepts are anticipated by the originally semiotic theory of intertextuality, though such theorists of intertextuality rarely, if at all, consider early modern texts as their examples. As concepts of intertextuality have developed, more relatively recent work has emerged with a less structuralist and ‘theorised’ understanding of intertextuality, as an almost catch-all term for source, influence, or referent. In this introductory chapter (and the critical work as a whole), I want to introduce and explore the importance of intertextuality in the early modern period, particularly in the context of engagement with classical literature and the extensive refiguring of elements from available narrative systems including mythology, folklore, and contemporary continental writing, and go beyond a ‘soft’ interpretation of intertextuality as source-hunting.1 I suggest that the theory of intertextuality can be applied to early modern literature in a variety of specific ways that surpass the identification of classical reference and the early modern “culture of quotation”2 : in the exploration of mythology as a system of meaning; in the allegorical works of ‘explication’; in the manipulation and imitation of narrative models and forms; and in satire and parody. The chapter argues that these central aspects of early modern creative writing constitute a valid application of intertextual theory as understood in part as that developed through structuralism and post-structuralism, and an intertextual approach can provide both an analytical method and illuminating readings. It will outline an understanding of intertextuality, note how the theory is illustrated in classical textual theory inherited in the early modern period, and offer an applied case study reading specific elements of a selected early modern text, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595). Initially, though, we should consider how an intertextual approach can be claimed to be especially relevant in contemporary literary studies. Peter Barry recently identified the contemporary critical position as ‘beyond’ theory, strongly arguing for a refocus on the literary text that also moves beyond historic approaches of close reading. This “textual reading”, which “is distinct from both close reading and theorised reading, but … draws elements from both”, posits intertextuality as a central component, one of the interrelated “five poles” of textual reading.3 Indeed, two other

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poles, “co-textuality” and “multitextuality” could also arguably be aspects of intertextuality in that they are concerned with authorial intertexts. Barry’s focus on context as part of textual reading, which places “the text in contact with its relevant documentary and cultural materials, and reads across them all”, complies with David Scott Kastan’s review of contemporary early modern studies that also looks beyond theory to refocus on historical context, progressing from its deployment by critics of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, both of which Kastan charges with being overly influenced by their theoretical position at the expense of historical rigour.4 Though Kastan does not consider intertextuality specifically, his emphasis on the ‘text’, with its structuralist roots, situates intertextuality as an integral part of a contextually-informed reading: “Text” … replaced the common sense words, “book” or “work,” with the structuralist term that exploited its etymology from the Latin for “web” or “woven” to suggest its existence, in Barthes’s phrase, as a “triumphant plural,” always complexly implicated in the multiple linguistic and discursive contexts that it intersects and is intersected by. … Theory’s suggestive claim, however, cannot be demonstrated at the level of theory. Only historically does the claim become compelling and reveal the way in which the very idea of a text’s integrity and autonomy depends upon an impossible idealization of the processes of composition and publication … evidence that historical scholarship can at least partially recover and restore to view.5

As such, Kastan is, to an extent, reclaiming the concept of the plurality of text from post-structuralist theory. Similarly, though Barry is careful to demarcate his ‘finite’ understanding of intertextuality from Julia Kristeva’s conception as an infinite network of signification as, “A definition so broad places the phenomenon almost beyond human ken – no conceivable reading technique could cope with an intertextuality thus defined”, he also asserts that intertextuality “throws light upon a whole co-textual cluster of texts”, and, assuming these texts have their own intertexts, the infinite, or at least expansive and open-ended, nature of intertextual theory is thereby acknowledged and implicitly verified.6 Both Barry and Kastan, while distancing themselves from theory, also acknowledge the necessity of considering it as part of a contextually and historically informed reading, and as such, I suggest that the roots of intertextuality in semiotic theory are a vital starting point in the deployment of it as a tool for reading early modern texts.

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Initially, Kristeva and Roland Barthes, following Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of subversive dialogic novels, did not restrict the theory to written texts, but used it “to designate the way in which a culture is structured as a complex network of codes with heterogeneous and dispersed forms of textual realisation”.7 Kristeva found in Bakhtin a “dynamic dimension to structuralism” in the concept of a literary word as an “intersection of textual surface rather than a point (a fixed meaning)”.8 Kristeva later states that: every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality) … its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered.9

The concept of intertextuality as simply referring to influence and source overlooks its derivation from semiotics and the semiotic theory of the circulation of signs in culture. As in the previous citation, Kristeva later uses the term “transposition” again to articulate this concept: The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources,” we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative positionality.10

In Kristeva’s conception, intertextuality is not citation but the recognition of a sign, or set of signs, from one culture (or literary text) in another text. The subject, or written work, “is composed of discourses, is a signifying system, a text, understood in a dynamic sense”.11 This is crucial in our understanding that ‘text’ does not necessarily mean a written work of literature. As Graham Allen summarises: Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature … Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the

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independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.12

Barthes continues the conception of text as a methodological field, which “fissures the sign” and holds no intrinsic “truth”.13 In addition, he stresses that the sign refers to the system, rather than to ‘reality’. Barthes also introduced the importance of the reader in intertextuality, which culminated in his assertion of “The Death of the Author” (1968): a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader … a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.14

Kastan demonstrates how this seemingly purely theoretical poststructuralist concept can be reclaimed by his contextual focus, by stating that: The notorious phrase becomes intelligible rather than merely provocative in the recovery of the actual discourses that circulate around and through the text as well as the historically specific conditions of its writing and circulation, both of which must inevitably compromise and disperse any simple notion of authorial intention.15

Such a reading complies with an assertion of the value of using intertextuality to read early modern texts. Theories that can, in retrospect, be reclaimed as intertextuality can be found wherever there is discourse about text. Plato identified the theory of imitation, in that the poet always copies an earlier act of creation from reality or from other literary representations, the interdependence of this in all arts, the “passionate” poet and reader, and the notion of texts as subliminal purveyors of ideology.16 In addition, Bakhtin finds in the multiple discourses of the Socratic dialogues heteroglossia and dialogism, the very concepts that Kristeva defines and elaborates as intertextuality. Aristotle’s theory of imitation differs from Plato’s in that he sees literary creativity as based on imitation of existing styles, repetitions of known stories and advocates the use of models and conventions in tragic and comic writing. Horace, some three hundred years later, also refers to conventional theories of style, familiar storylines, and beliefs about

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dialects spoken by certain “types” and advises following models of characters.17 Like Horace and Aristotle, Quintilian, in his Institutio Oratoria of the first century AD, advises overt intertextuality in the imitation of established writers, and recommends appropriating only the admirable qualities from many models. Like Cicero of the previous century, while discussing the earlier stages of humanist scholarship, Quintilian emphasises that stylistic imitation is not only a means of creating one’s own discourse but is a consciously intertextual practice which relies heavily on reading. He advocates paraphrase rather than direct translation, and writes, “its duty … is to rival and vie with the original in the expression of the same thoughts”.18 Here we can see the roots of the Renaissance humanist education that practised multiple translation (i.e. from Latin to English, then from the English translation back into Latin in order to assess accuracy) and creative imitation of prime models of rhetoric, tropes or poetic passages. In turn, these serve as the roots for the tradition of imitation; by 1603 Samuel Daniel refers to what he terms “emulation” as “the strongest pulse that beats in high minds”.19 It is also evident that sixteenth-century European literature is important in the history of intertextuality as writers actively engaged dynamically with the textual past. As Jonathan Bate writes: both the practice of humanist imitation and Renaissance hermeneutics more generally draw strength from a belief in the readability of the world: myths, classical texts, nature itself are books in which moral truths may be read.20

Early modern writers read classical texts in a plurality of forms: original Latin, direct translation, collections of mythic fables, mythological encyclopaedias, histories. The contemporary understanding of allegory offers some tantalising phrasing here as the decoding of moral truths to be read in texts. Sir Francis Bacon, in his De Sapientia Veterum (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”) (1609), states that his aim is to remove the “veil of fiction” and reveal “the thing signified”, the “Authors intent and meaning … purposely shadowed”.21 The displacement of meaning in allegorical writing (a typical earlier approach to interpreting classical mythology) is likened here to the deferment of meaning in structuralism. The inheritance of signs from another culture, with meaning deferred; something standing in for something else (as in metaphorical constructs), is essentially intertextual in the structuralist understanding. This is the starting

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point, as is Bacon’s text, for the discussion in the second chapter on intertextuality, structuralism, and allegory. However, the possibility of tracing concepts of intertextual theory to classical literary theorists rather suggests that intertextuality reproduces theories long in existence, and thereby that it is not doing anything particularly original or meaningful. I suggest that though certain humanist conceptualisations regarding creative writing can be traced to such classical literary theory, writing in the early modern period expands upon the rather bloodless identifications and recommendations of Quintilian etc. regarding imitation and source, and, indeed, progresses beyond allegorical ‘readings’. Early modern creative writers both were demonstrably concerned with the figurative and expansive potentiality of writing and their texts reveal the cultural circulation of recurring intertextual elements. As the aforementioned proposed focus on both classical mythology and domestic folkloric narratives implies, and as had been highlighted by some recent critics, the amorphous boundaries between what was and is considered ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture result in the potential fertile combination of different narrative systems.22 Adam Fox argues against the common demarcation between oral and literate culture retrospectively imposed: England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … was a society in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in a myriad ways … There was no necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation; the one did not have to destroy or undermine the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in different forms.23

This assertion that oral and literate texts interacted “in a myriad ways” is an implicit indication of the practice of intertextuality in early modern writers’ combination of narrative elements from a variety of narrative systems or traditions, as explicitly considered below regarding A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in the third chapter on folkloric intertexts. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White suggest, new combinations in a semiotic system create the potential to shift “the very terms of the system itself , by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it”.24

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Additionally, Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal focus on the circulation of social “energy” and the concept of a cultural subconscious can be read as an articulation of intertextuality which stresses that “there is very little pure invention in culture” and refers to “textual traces”, using the language of intertextual theory to describe how “the protective isolation of those texts gives way to a sense of their interaction with other texts and hence of the permeability of their boundaries”.25 This understanding attempts to offer “insight into the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered” and sees the early modern theatre especially as exemplifying the product of collective or social endeavour: “This is particularly clear with Shakespeare, who does not conceal his indebtedness to literary sources, but it is also true for less obviously collaborative authors, all of whom depend upon collective genres, narrative patterns, and linguistic conventions”.26 The slightly intangible theory of intertextuality can be grounded through Greenblatt’s acknowledgement of the importance of historical context, thus providing a link to Kastan’s emphasis on historical rigour, “these refigurations … are signs of the inescapability of a historical process, a structured negotiation and exchange, already evident in the initial moments of empowerment”27 : both stress the intertextual nature of early modern creative writing. I have mentioned some of the more pervasive and expansive intertextual practices of early modern writing, but also evident are more concrete examples of intertextual practice, in allegory, satire, and parody, all forms evidently popular across all genres in the period, and all investigated in the forthcoming chapters of this work. Following the suggestions by both Barry and Kastan regarding the importance of historical context and the awareness of earlier theoretical concepts, this approach to intertextual theory should perhaps be described as a specifically ‘materialist’ intertextuality in order to locate the textual interplay and pervasive resonance in contemporary culture, rather than in, for example, the psychoanalytic response of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and of Kristeva’s semiotic theory. However, the concept of social “energy” and a cultural subconscious also offers a metaphor for the repeatedly resurfacing intertexts located in early modern writing; the challenge is unpicking these in a way which provides meaningful analysis of a given text.

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Case Study: A Midsummer Night ’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a particularly intertextual example of early modern creative writing and its classical, mythological, and native folkloric intertexts have been explored by critics, though usually not using that specific term.28 Here we find a combination of Neoplatonic philosophy (via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass ); Ovidian metamorphosis, character, and narrative; English folklore, in certain fairies (e.g. Robin Goodfellow / Puck) and in echoes of the traditional cultural practices of Maying and Midsummer celebration; Biblical paraphrasing; Medieval French Romance (Huon of Bordeaux); theological practices (Greenblatt points out the “consecration” of the marriage beds29 ); and metatheatrical deployment of parodic imitation in the Mechanicals’ comic tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe”. This combination of ‘high’ and ‘low’ discourses and texts offers a rich starting point for intertextual analysis which goes beyond the identification of intertexts as ‘sources’ and instead looks to actively interrogate and analyse how their utilisation in the text, in combination with other intertexts, serves to produce meaning. A straightforward exercise in applying intertextual theory to an early modern text is in focusing, initially, on character names. A single word suggests a single referent, but it actually offers an “intersection of textual surface” and Shakespeare’s ‘fairies’ are accurately described as “intertextual composites”, in source, function, and name.30 For example, Titania’s name is a feminised version of the classical ‘Titan’, taken from the Metamorphoses where it is used patronymically to indicate the genealogy of various goddesses as descendants of the Titans.31 Initially, one superficial effect of this intertextual choice (where the sign refers to an alternative ‘system’) is that it suggests a greater power than a folkloric fairy queen, and therefore Titania’s ultimate humiliation is all the more for that.32 Simultaneously, Mary Ellen Lamb argues that this blurring of ‘high’ (classical) and ‘low’ (popular) culture “suggests an equivalence in their social value” and raises the domestic fairies to the status of aristocrats, a move evidenced in their “courtly manners even in domestic quarrels”, though this does somewhat ignore the fairy characters’ continued subversive ambivalence, a trait realised in both English fairies and the classical gods.33 Furthermore, Ovid’s most frequent use of the name is to Diana, or to her celestial incarnation as the moon, and this link is emphasised by frequent textual allusion in the play to the moon and the deployment of lunar imagery. This leads to a consideration of the representation of Diana

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as the “triple goddess” (of the heavens, earth, and hell) and thereby to both Titania’s divine heritage and universal significance, as well perhaps to facets of domestic witch lore and her capriciousness. This composite draws together common (subconscious?) cultural anxieties regarding the supposed danger of the supernatural, or at least the unsettling apparent indifference to human suffering, as well as entrenched gender stereotypes. Accordingly, Shakespeare’s choice of Theseus also refers beyond the text of the play to alternative narrative systems. As well as his multiple defeats of the Amazons, as described in Plutarch, Theseus’s classical past includes the rape and abandonment of various female characters, for example, Ariadne, Perigouna, and the Amazon Antiope, and this mythical history complies with the thematic undercurrent of male control pervasive throughout the play. Such associations again go beyond the single point of reference of a name. As identified by M.E. Lamb, “The manner of Theseus’s desertion of Ariadne is recalled by Lysander’s desertion of Hermia”.34 The subjugation of Hippolyta, as representative of the race of martial women, in marriage recalls this phallocentric dominance implied by ‘Theseus’: as he says to her, he “won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16–17), and the phallic sword and feminised ‘wound’ is a repeated motif throughout.35 As A. B. Taylor points out, Shakespeare’s marriage play … ironically opens in the wake of a full-scale war between the sexes in which women, the legendary Amazons, have been beaten by the men of the Athenian army … forced to submit to the ‘natural’ order.36

David Ormerod elaborates the context: For an Elizabethan audience, Theseus was a figure with specific overtones and associations. Plutarch describes him as the founder of Athens … His gravity and dignity and, above all, his rationality, thus receive great stress. Similarly, he is an image of a correct sexual hierarchy with reference to his conquest of Hippolyta and his assertion of the dominance of the male principle in amorous relationships.37

In terms of a cultural subconscious, then, the signifier of ‘Theseus’ conveys a pervasive reactionary phallocentric dominance but also an anxiety concerning challenges to this.

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‘Theseus’, however, conveys a further mythological intertext in his mythic defeat of the Minotaur, the episode which leads to the relationship with and abandonment of Ariadne. Critics read this intertext as being comically recast and ‘mistranslated’ in Bottom’s ass’s head.38 Read allegorically, the Minotaur conveyed “a compressed image of love’s passion reduced to bestiality” or the monstrous product of bestial-like lust, and this, along with the animal imagery throughout a play concerned, among other things, with the rationality and irrationality of love and lust, supports and strengthens this reading with classical and allegorical intertexts.39 Similarly, as both Ormerod and Lamb argue, the wood in which the lovers lose themselves so easily is comparable to the mythical labyrinth, itself read contemporarily as representing moral confusion, or the difficulty of extricating oneself from an immoral lifestyle.40 The repression of bestial lust, or other immoral pleasures, is also implied via the conflation of intertexts here. The mythological Theseus also killed the Cretan bull, establishing a heroic connection of the name to monstrous bovines. As we have the bull replaced by the ass, arguably there is an aim here to recast and re-enact the heroic with the comic. The ass has long been a symbol of foolishness and boorishness: in classical tradition Silenus rides an ass and in European popular culture asses are proverbially gullible; both in contrast to the ancient sacred status of bulls. As Lamb writes, “The substitution of Bottom for a minotaur represents the transmutation of the elements of tragedy into comedy”.41 We have here a move from one signifying system to another: from the conventions of tragedy to those of comedy. Bottom’s name also conveys, as well as his profession, his lowly status, which is crucial in his role as the consort of the fairy queen / goddess, as recounted in various folktales concerning the abduction of mortal men. The unification of the divine and “mortal grossness” (3.1.142) in the ambiguous pairing of Bottom and Titania is an intertextual joke, the typical Ovidian depiction of male deity disguised as an animal both inverted and domesticated; the Neoplatonic communion of divine and mortal mocked in Titania’s blindness and Bottom’s monstrosity. This latter narrative system also refers to the intertext in the most concrete sense, in the novel The Golden Asse, the story of a man transformed into an ass until his spiritual understanding develops sufficiently to be returned to human form. Indeed, the knowing intertextual substitution of Bottom for the Minotaur offers further multilayered readings of the text. Bottom’s potentially

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sexual encounter with Titania recalls, via intertextual stepping stones, the Roman matron of Apuleius’ text who wants to copulate with the ass (much to his horror), and the mythical union of Pasiphae and the bull which results in the creation of the Minotaur. Furthermore, as pointed out by A. D. Nuttall, Apuleius explicitly draws a comparison between these two events: Here Adlington [the 1566 translator of The Golden Asse] says, simply “as Pasiphae had with a Bull”, eliding the note of comic incongruity, essential to the Shakespearian version, which is present in the Latin, instar asinariae Pasiphaae “like some asinine Pasiphae”.42

The incongruity here is emphasised by Shakespeare, as Bottom seems largely oblivious to Titania’s desires or desirability. Bottom’s unscathed emergence from his potentially scandalous experience leads us back to the labyrinthine metaphor introduced by Theseus’s presence and the temporary monster. It is established that ‘Bottom’ refers to a skein of thread, but it is this “household item” that: played a crucial role in delivering Theseus from the labyrinth. In fact, Caxton’s translation of the Aeneid uses the exact phrase “a botom of threde” in the description of Theseus’s adventure with the Minotaur.43

This leads Lamb to conclude that Bottom is “both the monster of this labyrinth and the thread leading the way out of it”.44 Bottom’s explication of his ‘dream’ encourages this reading of his enlightened return from the forest. In the Neoplatonic Golden Asse, the ass is finally returned to human shape by Isis, to whom asses were sacred, because of his enlightened state. The Christian tradition of the ass as a symbol of humility complies here: allegorically, humility and enlightenment lead the way out of the sinful labyrinth and away from the bestial monsters within. In the most evident sense then, the play is a dynamic composite, “built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature”, and such intertextual narrative models include the narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe, also from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4.55–168).45 The parodic “Pyramus and Thisbe” performed by the “Mechanicals”, as well as the intertextual references to Ovid and, perhaps, Romeo and Juliet (1595), works by also referring to the contemporary understanding of drama, and ‘playing’.46 The title of the play-within-the-play, “The

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Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe” (1.2.9–10) mocks the dated paradoxical and extended titles of older and contemporary tragic-comic plays (plays which Sir Philip Sidney terms “mungrell Tragy-Comedie”), such as Thomas Preston’s Cambyses: A Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth (c. 1570).47 Parody works only if the ‘reader’ is aware of the intertext; in this case the preceding dramatic tradition. Similarly, Bottom’s bombastic approach to acting, as well as his query, “What is Pyramus? A lover or a tyrant?” (1.2.17) is comic because it refers to an intertextual knowledge of performance, as well as to a simplified, epithetical or stereotypical approach to stock characters. Furthermore, this metatheatrical representation, both in its planning and performance, focuses upon the suspension of disbelief crucial in theatrical entertainment. The issue of representation and symbolism is negated, as the dual audience are informed in both preface and in the action that the wall is indeed, a wall: “This man with lime and roughcast doth present / Wall” (5.1.120–31) and that Starveling represents “Moonshine”: “This man, with lantern, dog, and bush of thorn, / Presenteth Moonshine” (5.1.134–35); “All that I have to say is to tell you that the lantern is the moon, I the man i’th’ moon, this thorn bush my thorn bush, and this dog my dog” (5.1.247–49). Here the separate elements are literal: the man is a man, the dog is a dog, the thorn bush is just that, but the composite is representational, it stands in for something else. The representation of the wall becomes a proper noun, ‘Wall’, in distancing it from a non-dramatic, non-representative, literal wall. Therefore, the concept of things standing in for, or signifying, something else is highlighted here in an anxiety over representation and verisimilitude. Here, the actors “seem to believe that the translation from one medium to another might be only too successful, with the consequence that they feel obliged to dismantle the very illusion they are intent upon fabricating”.48 The word ‘Wall’ signifies the presence of an alternative signifying system; an intertext (i.e. the Mechanicals’ version of “Pyramus and Thisbe”; a dramatic representation of reality), in a scene which relies for its comedy on a further intertextual awareness of acting tradition and dramatic representation. We can potentially draw parallels here with the previous mention of allegory, in the symbolic (or supposed symbolic) standing in for an alternative meaning. In both these cases, however, the representational aspect is negated by the characters drawing attention to its very status as representational. The

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players are also anxious that their representation of a lion should not be taken as reality, therefore Bottom advises: Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck, and he himself must speak through, saying thus … “If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing. I am a man, as other men are” – and there, indeed, let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner. (3.1.32–40)

Bottom comically destroys the implicit barrier between drama and reality again in addressing the audience while in character, “No, in truth, sir, … ‘Deceiving me’ is Thisbe’s cue. She is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see, it will fall pat as I told you” (5.1.181–84). This conceptual gap between reality and imagination is a thematic concern of the whole play, as demonstrated by Theseus’s dismissal of imagination (“I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys”, 5.1.2–3), Bottom’s enlightened deployment of Corinthians I in relation to dreams, and Puck’s Epilogue concerning, as does much of the play, “shadows”, dreams, magic, and imagination. Parodic imitation is itself intertextual: the parody here only works because an audience would have a fore-knowledge of some aspect of the intertexts: the narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe (or if not specifically, then of narratives of doomed lovers), of tragi-comedy, and of the mythology that is referenced through malapropism throughout. Similarly, we could posit the pairing of Titania and Bottom as a parody of the rapacious god and female mortal, which relies on knowledge of the original trope in order to be considered parodic. David Lucking explores a further layer here, of translation, and suggests that Shakespeare parodies Arthur Golding’s seminal 1567 translation of Metamorphoses, knowing that “to translate is to metamorphose”, especially when the translator is also moralising (i.e. via allegory).49 This exploitation of the variety of early modern definitions of “translate” offers some interesting crosscomparison with several aspects previously discussed, for example, the movement between signifying systems in allegory and Bottom’s famous “translation” in metamorphosis (“Thou are translated”, 3.1.105), both of which comprise a movement between alternative signifying systems. In addition, Kristeva’s preference for the term “transposition”, “because it specifies … the passage from one signifying system to another”,50 is invoked here, highlighting such movement as explicitly intertextual.

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Intertextuality is demonstrably more than textual allusion. A text does not function as a closed system, and early modern writers are likewise committed to an open discourse; they believed in the readability of the world and the textual and cultural past is presented implicitly and explicitly in a generally discursive structure and the deployment of cultural codes. This is demonstrated in a multitude of ways, in humanist creative imitation, in the cultural circulation of figures, tropes, and genres from various narrative systems (e.g. mythological referents, classical forms and genres, domestic folklore) as well as in generic convention and culturallybound production of parody, satire and allegory. Evidently crucial in all these aspects is the importance of writers being readers; reading, interpreting, imitating and emulating, and nowhere is this evidenced more clearly than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where intertexts establish significance reaching far beyond the surface of the text, harnessing, potentially, what Greenblatt calls cultural subconscious or social energy. I argue that the preceding analysis has provided a framework that highlights the importance of the comparative narrative systems in the construction and meaning of the play. I suggest that, returning to Barry’s concept of “textual reading”, that the combination of contextual awareness and the theoretical framework of a ‘materialist’ intertextuality constitute a valid and fertile approach to reading early modern texts.

Notes 1. It has been noted recently that source study seems notably unperturbed by theoretical concepts of intertextuality. See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “What Is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe,” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 16. 2. James P. Bednarz, “Shakespeare and the Early Modern Culture of Quotation,” in Shakespeare and Quotation, ed. Julie Maxwell and Kate Rumbold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 31–45 (31). 3. Peter Barry, “Re-thinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today,” Literature Compass 7 (2010): 999; 1000. 4. Barry, “Re-thinking Textuality,” 1005. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (London: Routledge, 1999), 12–13. 5. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, 25. 6. Barry, “Re-thinking Textuality,” 1002; 1003. In addition, Barry also raises the potential of hypertexts as illustrative of “textual reading”, suggesting that Kristevan intertextuality is the “metaphorical”, or theoretical, articulation of hypertextuality (1007). The creation of hypertexts as digital models to illustrate intertextuality is an intriguing concept and a future

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

point perhaps where digital texts and intertextual theory can combine (see Chapter 6). John Frow, “Intertextuality and Ontology,” in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 47. Toril Moi, “Introduction,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 36. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 60. Kristeva, Revolution, 59–60. Michael Worton and Judith Still, “Introduction,” in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Worton and Still (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 16. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 1, my emphasis. Roland Barthes, “Theory of the Text: Text, Discourse, Ideology” (1973), in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 31. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), in Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. P. Rice and P. Waugh (London: Arnold, 1981), 118. Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory, 25. See Republic, Part III “Education: The First Stage” for concepts of literature as a transmitter of ideology, and Part X “Theory of Art” for theories of imitation and representation. “If in your play you happen to be representing the illustrious Achilles, let him be energetic, passionate, ruthless, and implacable; let him say that laws are not meant for him, and think that everything must yield to the force of arms. See to it that Medea is fierce and indomitable, Ino tearful, Ixion faithless, Io a wanderer, and Orestes sorrowful.” “Horace, On the Art of Poetry,” in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. and ed. T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 1965), 83. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Vol. IV , trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), X.v.5, 115. See X.v.5–7 for discussion of paraphrase. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme. A panegyrike congratulatorie delivered to the Kings most excellent Maiestie at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire (London: 1603), Sig. H3r. These concepts will be expanded upon in Chapter 4, on parody. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 11. Sir Francis Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum (London: 1609), trans. Arthur Gorges as The Wisedome of the Ancients (London: 1619), Sig. a6r; Sig. a7r.

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22. See also, for example, Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Tim Harris, “The Problem of Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London,” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 43–58; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312. 23. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. This will be a starting point for the exploration of folkloric intertexts in Chapter 3. 24. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics, 58. 25. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 13; 7; 95. 26. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 4; 5. 27. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 6. 28. See, for example, Sister M. Generosa, “Apuleius and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Analogue or Source, Which?,” Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 198–204; K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors (London: Routledge, 1959); Walter F. Staton, “Ovidian Elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Huntingdon Library Quarterly 26 (1963): 165–78; James A. S. McPeek, “The Psyche Myth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 69–79; David Ormerod, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 39–52; M. E. Lamb, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 2 (1979): 478–91; Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Peter Holland, “Theseus’ Shadows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 139– 51; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312; A. D. Nuttall, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth,” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 49–59; A. B. Taylor, “Ovid’s Myths and the Unsmooth Course of Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49–65; Sarah Carter, “From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic Registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” EMLS 12.1 (2006): 2.1–31; Steven J. Doloff, “Bottom’s Greek Audience: 1 Corinthians 1.21–25 and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

Dream,” The Explicator 65 (2007): 200–1; David Lucking, “Translation and Metamorphosis in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Essays in Criticism 61 (2011): 137–54. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 11. Moi, “Introduction,” 36; Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96. See Metamorphoses 1. 395–6; 3. 173; 6. 346–7; 7. 207–8; 14. 14–15, 382. Similarly, Puck’s actions throughout the text figure him as a version of Cupid, as well as his clear native folkloric referents. Lamb, “Taken by the fairies,” 307. Lamb, “Myth of Theseus,” 482. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Shakespeare (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 805–63. Further references in parentheses. An excellent reading of the feminised wound is found in Taylor, “Ovid’s myths and the unsmooth course of love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Taylor, “Ovid’s myths,” 49. Ormerod, “Monster in the Labyrinth,” 40. See Ormerod, Lamb, Holland, and Nuttall. Ormerod, “Monster in the Labyrinth,” 40. Ormerod cites, among myriad examples, Metamorphoses translator George Sandys, “In 1632 George Sandys, as one might expect, doggedly underwrites the moral significance of Minos’ labyrinth as we encounter it in the emblem writers: ‘Nor possible to get out of that intricate / Labyrinth of Vice, without the counsel and wisdom of Dedalus ’…” (“Monster in the Labyrinth,” 41–42). Also see Lamb “Myth of Theseus,” 479. Lamb, “Myth of Theseus,” 486. Nuttall, “Comedy as Apotrope,” 56. Lamb, “Myth of Theseus,” 480. Lamb, “Myth of Theseus,” 481. Allen, Intertextuality, 1. George Pettie overtly aligns the narratives of Pyramus and Thisbe and Romeo and Juliet in A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure Contayning Many Pretie Hystories (1576), 100. See also Janice Valls-Russell, “Erotic Perspectives: When Pyramus and Thisbe Meet Hero and Leander in Romeo and Juliet,” in Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture, ed. Agn`es Lafont (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 76–90. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (London: 1595), 37. Lucking, “Translation and Metamorphosis,” 140. Lucking, “Translation and Metamorphosis,” 148. Kristeva, Revolution, 60.

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Bibliography Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000. Apuleius. The Golden Asse. Translated by William Adlington. London: 1566. Aristotle. “On the Art of Poetry.” In Classical Literary Criticism, translated and edited by T. S. Dorsch, 29–75. London: Penguin, 1965. Bacon, Sir Francis. De Sapientia Veterum. London: 1609. Translated by Arthur Gorges as The Wisedome of the Ancients. London: 1619. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barry, Peter. “Re-thinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today.” Literature Compass 7 (2010): 999–1008. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author” (1968). In Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Rice and P. Waugh, 114–18. London: Arnold, 1981. Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text: Text, Discourse, Ideology” (1973). In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, edited by Robert Young, 31– 47. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Daniel, Samuel. A Defence of Rhyme. A panegyrike congratulatorie delivered to the Kings most excellent Maiestie at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire. London: 1603. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Frow, John. “Intertextuality and Ontology.” In Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still, 45–55. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Horace. “On the Art of Poetry.” In Classical Literary Criticism, translated and edited by T. S. Dorsch, 79–95. London: Penguin, 1965. Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare After Theory. London: Routledge, 1999. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lamb, M. E. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 2 (1979): 478–91. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312. Lucking, David. “Translation and Metamorphosis in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Essays in Criticism 61 (2011): 137–54. Maguire, Laurie, and Emma Smith. “What Is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe.” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 15–31.

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Moi, Toril. “Introduction.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 34–61. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986. Nuttall, A. D. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Comedy as Apotrope of Myth.” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 49–59. Ormerod, David. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth.” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 39–52. Plato. The Republic. Edited and translated by Desmond Lee. London: Penguin, 1987. Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria, Vol. IV . Translated by H. E. Butler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt in The Norton Shakespeare, 805–63. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Maxwell, Julie, and Kate Rumbold, ed. Shakespeare and Quotation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry. London: 1595. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Taylor, A. B. “Ovid’s Myths and the Unsmooth Course of Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In Shakespeare and the Classics, edited by Charles Martindale, 49–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Worton, Michael, and Judith Still, ed. Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 2

Allegory, Structuralism, and Intertextuality: Sir Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients

Abstract Many early modern writers approached classical mythology as containing encoded moral meaning via the use of symbolism or allegory. When read alongside structuralist theories of language, focusing on the arbitrary relationship between signs and signifiers and the relational aspects of those signs, we can re-read early modern allegory as exemplifying a structuralist model. Sir Francis Bacon, in his De Sapientia Veterum (‘The Wisdom of the Ancients’) (1609), states that his aim in explicating the moral ‘messages’ is to remove the “veil of fiction” and reveal “the thing signified”. The inheritance of signs from another culture and the deferment of meaning is essentially intertextual in the structuralist understanding, and this chapter analyses Bacon’s text through a post-structuralist and intertextual reading. Keywords Allegory · Intertextuality · Bacon · Sapientia Veterum · Structuralism

The understanding and deployment of allegory in the early modern period offer an interesting starting point for asserting the importance of intertextual theory. Sir Francis Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum (1609) (translated by Arthur Gorges as The Wisdom of the Ancients in 1619) rehearses and compounds a reception of classical and pre-classical, or © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7_2

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“ancient”, texts which was somewhat old-fashioned by the early seventeenth century.1 The search for moral meaning in classical ‘pagan’ mythology via the use of symbolism or allegory to be read by a discerning audience was an established approach throughout the sixteenth century, and one which negotiated and neutralised the pre-Christian texts in the face of any residual suspicion from European religious powers. Bacon offers an allegorical reading of thirty-one mythological narratives, some of which he had started compiling earlier and some of which he returned to and refined in the future, together with a lengthy Preface which debates the veracity and usefulness of such an approach.2 When read alongside structuralist theories of language, focusing on the arbitrary relationship between signs and signifiers and the relational aspects of those signs, we can re-read early modern allegory as exemplifying a structuralist model, an approach instigated by Bacon’s tantalising phrasing concerning “signs” and the “signified” as well as the structural anthropologists’ approach to mythology and belief systems. This chapter explores concepts and articulations of allegory in the period, focusing on Bacon’s sometimes impenetrable allegoresis of mythological narrative, and will argue that Bacon’s approach both superficially demonstrates a structuralist approach to narrative but simultaneously also the limitations of such a theoretical model. Such limitations are eased by understanding the process as indicative of an intertextual application. The chapter will explore the value of approaching such texts in this way, and further extrapolate how this understanding is developed and enhanced through a post-structuralist and intertextual reading of early modern texts. When early modern commentators on poetry and language describe allegory they do so by focusing on what they characterise as its “doubleness”, the defining characteristic being that allegory is an “inversion, where it is one in woordes, and an other in sentence and meaning”; “whereby one thing is spoken, and another thing signified”; “wherein there is couched something that is different from the litteral sense”.3 George Puttenham defines allegory as “when we speak one thing and think another, and that our words and our meanings meet not”.4 Puttenham strikingly also then exploits the attendant negative connotations of such a duality: deception, guile, and dissembling. He asks, “what else is … your allegory but a duplicity of meaning or dissimulation under covert and dark intendments [?]”,5 and later terms it “Allegoria, or the figure of false semblant ”.6 Like other commentators Puttenham also aligns

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allegory with metaphor, suggesting an allegory is “a long and perpetuall metaphor” and discusses the potentially negative attributes of all figurative language.7 That said, Puttenham cheerfully negates such seemingly negative statements concerning figurative language (“be they also in sort abuses or rather trespasses in speech, because they pass the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the ear and also the mind, drawing it from plainness and simplicity to a certain doubleness, where by our talk is the more guileful and abasing”) by balancing them with claims such as: “The use of this figure is so large, and his virtue of so great efficacy, as it is supposed no man can pleasantly utter and persuade without it”.8 This leaves the reader of The Art of English Poesy with the impression that though figurative language (e.g. metaphor), and figurative writing (e.g. allegory), though Puttenham makes no distinction between the two, is on some micro-level duplicitous, it is also very useful for the writer, being both effective upon and pleasant for the listener or reader. Edmund Spenser, arguably the period’s most successful and expansive allegorical writer, also acknowledges the potential exploitation of allegory and circumvents any misunderstandings in his usage in his “Letter to Raleigh” of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser writes that “knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed … I have thought good as well for auoyding of gealous opinions and misconstructions … to discover unto you the general intention and meaning” of the text.9 He goes on to assert that the allegorical approach, presenting “good discipline” “cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devices”, is actually a further demonstration of moral intention, as it exemplifies the need to look beyond the superficial.10 Spenser is evidently overly concerned that his work is not misconstrued (see, for example, the paratextual material of The Shepheardes Calendar, 1579), but given this anxiety and his religious and moral intention in The Faerie Queene it seems unlikely that allegory was considered duplicitous in any meaningful way. Indeed, appealing to the highest authority, Spenser’s contemporary Sir John Harington asks, “did not our Saviour Himself speak in parables? … But in the rest it is manifest that He that was all holiness, all wisdom, all truth used parables, and even such as discreet poets use, where a good and honest and wholesome allegory is hidden in a pleasant and pretty fiction”.11 Modern critics of allegory also stress the “protean” and “encoding” aspects of the genre, with Clara Mucci stressing the “tendency of allegory to expose polysemy in language”.12 In line with early modern commentators, and “just about everyone who writes on

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the topic”, the “disjunctive or dualistic” nature of allegory is stressed.13 Additionally, Rosamund Tuve stresses the metaphorical nature of allegory, writing “By definition a continued metaphor, allegoria exhibits the normal relation of concretion to abstraction found in metaphor”.14 The moral tradition also, in part, suggests that the allegorical nature of classical mythology arises from the necessity for doubleness as a way of circulating knowledge and cultural codes in a way that ensured endurance, as well as seeing allegory as (potentially) “good and honest and wholesome”. Jean Seznec exhaustively traces the survival of classical myth up to the Renaissance, and, taking his cue from established humanist categories identifies the “moral tradition” as one of the ways such narratives endured and were explained: the pagan gods were refigured as “the expression in fable of moral and philosophical ideas … the gods are allegories”.15 Harington evidences an early modern understanding of this process: The ancient poets have indeed wrapped, as it were, in their writings divers and sundry meanings, which they call the senses or mysteries thereof. First of all for the literal sense … they set down in manner of an history the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memory. Then, in the same fiction, … they place the moral sense, profitable for the active life of man, approving virtuous actions and condemning the contrary. Many times also, under the selfsame words, they comprehend [include] some true understanding of natural philosophy, or sometimes of politic government, and now and then of divinity; and these same senses that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the allegory, which Plutarch defined to be when one thing is told and by that another is understood.16

The twelfth century, “when allegory became the universal vehicle of all pious expression”, saw a massive increase in such mythological exegesis that continued for centuries.17 Indeed, the most widely circulated translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the period is Arthur Golding’s 1567 edition, complete with moralised additions. As Golding writes in his Epistle, “If poets then with leesings [lies] and with fables shadowed so / The certeine truth, what letteth [prevents] us to pluck those visors fro / Their doings, and bring ageine the darkened truth to lyght, / That all men may behold thereof the cleerness shining bryght?”18 Golding’s figurative language here, of the truth being masked (in a visor or mask), and being brought to light from the shadows for all men to appreciate is conventional, and the metaphors resurface repeatedly in the wider discussion of the veracity of allegoresis.

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That established, the ‘doubleness’ of allegory, in its practice of saying one thing whilst conveying another meaning, is not without its critics in the early modern period who focus instead on the potential for abuse and the need for, for want of a better word, accuracy and proof in interpretation. Thomas Nashe states that “There is nothing that if a man list [wishes] he may not wrest or pervert” in extrapolating meaning from a text.19 Sir Philip Sidney implicitly concurs in Sonnet 28 of Astrophil and Stella: “You that with allegory’s curious frame / Of others’ children changelings use to make, / With me those pains, for God’s sake, do not take”.20 The veracity of allegorising mythology is an established debate in the period, one in which Bacon engages in his preface to De Sapientia Veterum (discussed below). Famously, Rabelais is bluntly dismissive of mythological exegesis in the Prologue to Gargantua (1534), asking, do you faithfully believe that Homer, in writing his Iliad and Odyssey, ever had in mind the allegories squeezed out of him by Plutarch, Heraclides, Ponticus, Eustathius, and Phornutus, and which Politian afterwards stole from them in his turn? If you do, you are not within a hand’s or a foot’s length of my opinion. For I believe them to have been as little dreamed of by Homer as the Gospel mysteries were by Ovid in his Metamorphoses .21

As pointed out by Joshua McClennen, Bacon does not claim “that Homer and Hesiod wrote with an allegorical purpose; instead, he maintains that they were merely telling stories in which their ancestors had already enshrined their ideas”.22 So the wisdom of the ancients is, in this conception, that of cultures which pre-date classical authors, an intellectual sleight of hand which Bacon uses in order to simultaneously dismiss the preceding century’s focus on the classical civilisations but also to participate in such humanist exercises. As indicated previously, the contemporary understanding of allegory also offers some tantalising phrasing in terms of how early modern writers perceived their own cultural project. Bacon, in De Sapientia Veterum, states that his aim is to remove the “veil of fiction” and reveal “the thing signified”, the “Authors intent and meaning … purposely shadowed”.23 Similarly, Puttenham refers, when defining metaphor, to figurative language’s “wresting of a single word from his own right signification to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or conveniency”, and John Minsheu describes allegory in 1617 as “a figure whereby one thing is spoken, and another thing signified”.24 Indeed, on a most basic

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level an allegorical reading of a text offers a model for a structuralist understanding: a text is composed of signs which indicate a move to an alternative signifying system in order to generate meaning. Maureen Quilligan cites Frederic Jameson as describing “the whole structuralist enterprise as being fundamentally allegorical”25 : According to Jameson, the “very structure” of the Derridaen sign “is allegorical in that it is a perpetual movement from one ‘level’ of the signified to another from which it is expulsed in its turn to infinite regression,” while the projects of the Tel Quel group resemble “a return to the allencompassing arbitrariness of the patristic and medieval system of the four levels of interpretation”.26

This alliance of structuralism and allegory also rests on the understanding of language being polysemous, another characteristic that Quilligan identifies as she describes Roland Barthes’ reading of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z (1970) as akin to allegoresis, “legitimized by the fundamental idea of plurality”.27 As outlined in the preceding chapter, the displacement of meaning in allegorical writing is analogous to the deferment of meaning in structuralism. The inheritance of signifiers from another pre-Christian and pre-classical culture, with meaning deferred, something standing in for something else, is essentially a structuralist understanding, as well as indicating a clear intertextuality. A straightforward example of this process can be seen in how Bacon categorises and titles his allegoresis in the table of contents. In the table, the name of the mythological character is given, usually followed by what Bacon considers to be their allegorical function, for example, “Cassandra, or Divination”; “Narcissus, or Self-love”; “Metis, or Counsell” (a handful of these are qualified in Gorges’s translation by the inclusion of a qualifying determiner of “the” or “a”, for example “Memnon, or a Youth too forward”, but not in Bacon’s Latin). The implication here, of this direct pairing of signifier to signified, is that Cassandra’s narrative, for example, is not about divination, but the character is directly synonymous with or analogous to divination. Such moralised shorthand is typical of the mythographers and of the consumption of mythological narrative in the sixteenth century in particular. An interesting ambiguity here is in the translation from Bacon’s Latin by Gorges. Bacon’s Latin word as analogous to Cassandra is “parresia”, which has a more complicated definition than that of “divination”, with roots in Greek classical rhetoric and

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philosophy as meaning candour, outspokenness, or frankness, sometimes with the attendant potential danger of freely telling the truth.28 While these terms are themselves relatively synonymous, and the previous point regarding the relation of signifier to signified still stands, this note does introduce some doubt regarding the neat, linear equation of signifier to signified when dealing with texts in translation. Gorges’s choice of “Divination” seems rather eclectic, as no divine or prophetic activity is implied in the Latin. Bacon’s comments on names in the Preface are also telling. He asks, “to what judgement can the conformitie and signification of Names seem obscure? Seeing Metis the wife of Jupiter doth plainly signify councell, Typhon, insurrection; Pan, universality; Nemesis, revenge, and the like”.29 Particularly in relation to Pan and Nemesis, we have a complex question here in relation to etymology which is not consistent in its implications. The name of the goddess Nemesis may well have come to be interchangeable with her governing sphere as a personified abstraction, but to read “Pan” as irrefutably referring to the Greek-rooted prefix for “all or every” is more dubious, and undoubtedly a etymological tangle exploited by Bacon.30 Bacon’s assertions concerning the allegory inherent in some of the mythological names of his study are part of his wider aim in the preface to participate in the ongoing contemporary discussion concerning the value of allegorical mythological exegesis. Bacon’s defences of mythography are standard, covering the aforementioned ‘proof’ of mythological names heavy with significance and the common argument that the myths are so ridiculous in places that they must have a deeper meaning, and he also references (as do many of his predecessors and contemporaries) the comparison of hieroglyphics, fables, and parables with mythological narrative.31 Reflecting Bacon’s re-hashing or reciting of the standard arguments regarding why ancient mythological narrative must have a more profound meaning is the presence of the same arguments in Harington, writing at least a decade earlier: that the men of greatest learning and highest wit in the ancient times did of purpose conceal these deep mysteries of learning and, as it were, cover them with the veil of fables and verse, for sundry causes. One cause was that they might not be rashly abused by profane wits, in whom science is corrupted lie good wine in a bad vessel. Another cause why they wrote in verse was conservation of the memory of their precepts, … they are

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oftener recited and better remembered in verse than in prose. Another, and a principal cause of all, is … to feed divers tastes: for the weaker capacities will feed themselves with the pleasantness of the history and sweetness of the verse; some that have stronger stomachs will, as it were, take a further taste of the moral sense; a third sort, more high-conceited [of greater intellectual power] than they, will digest the allegory.32

The suggestion that concurrent allegories exist in mythological narrative can be exemplified by Bacon’s complex and original interpretation of the myth of Proserpina, which rather than being read as an aetiological myth of the change in seasons or the regeneration of nature focuses on it being an allegory of “Spirit”, meaning all creative energy. Unsurprisingly, given the volume that follows, Bacon’s conclusions are that the practice has real value and is a valid approach, using the conventional metaphors of removing the “veil of fiction” and exploring the shadows, and rehearsing the same arguments as why ‘the ancients’ would hide philosophical truths in such a way as his contemporaries. Regarding allegorical fiction in general, Bacon acknowledges that the practice is open to abuse, writing “Neither am I ignorant how fickle and inconstant a thing fiction is, as being subject to be drawen and wrested any way … yet so as never meant by the first Authors”.33 As raised previously by some of Bacon’s contemporaries, there is a concern here that mythographers or allegorical interpreters could potentially suggest meanings which are not ‘really’ there, in structuralist terms they could mismatch signifiers and what is signified. The authority of the reader of, in this case, the classical mythologies, is paramount. Ultimately, Bacon’s defence of allegory uses the same touchstone as Harington: [I] have seene and noted the generall levity and indulgence of mens wits about Allegories. And yet for all this I relinquish not my opinion. For first it may not be, that the folly and loosenesse of a few should altogether detract from the respect due to the Parables: for that were a conceit which might savour of prophanenesse and presumption: for Religion it selfe doth sometimes delight in such vailes and shadowes: so that who so exempts them, seems in a manner to interdict all commerce between things divine and humane.34

This passage raises several relevant elements of critical discussion of allegory, such as it can be exploited by the superficial and base but it cannot

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be a base form because it is used in theological writing, as well as the common metaphor of fiction veiling deeper moral or religious meaning, in a form more accessible to readers/listeners (though not too accessible). Bacon’s rather dismissive and short reading of the narratives of Scylla and Icarus (together equated to “the Middle-way”) describes the parable as “easie and vulgar” in its accessibility.35 Bacon’s claims here are, confusingly, directly at odds with what he propounds in some of his other texts, and various critics have attempted to argue his ‘real’ intentions in De Sapientia Veterum.36 As Anthony Grafton elaborates, in previous work, Bacon argued that the “humanists had failed to see that the world had changed … They had confused the ‘antiquity’ of the Greeks and Romans – the fact that their texts had existed for a long time – with the authority that human beings gain as they age”.37 Barbara Carman Garner confirms: “there is a marked change in Bacon’s attitude to myths between the Advancement of Learning [1605] and the De Sapientia Veterum (1609) a change from the position that most fables were originally without allegorical content, and that philosophical and scientific meanings were later read back into them, to a decisive assertion that many myths do truly contain hidden truths”.38 Timothy H. Paterson terms this contradictory attitude “strange and paradoxical”.39 Bacon’s stress that new discoveries needed to be obtained through observation of nature and, indeed, his focus on the value of “science” lends an interesting bias in his interpretations of certain mythology in De Sapientia which goes some way to explaining Bacon’s apparently contradictory views on mythology (despite these interpretations rarely being original). For example, Daedalus is “a Mechanique”, and yet is judged in the contemporary moral tradition, and the Sphinx is “Science” in its testing of the knowledge of mankind (and punishing ignorance). Indeed, Charles W. Lemmi divides the allegoresis into two sections, the first being “Symbols of Scientific Speculation”.40 Ultimately, Paterson charges Bacon with being “radically insincere” and concludes that De Sapientia is “a deliberate and self-conscious attempt to present Bacon’s own thoughts in the guise of a feigned recovery of a lost ancient wisdom”.41 Perhaps less harshly, but correspondingly, Lisa Jardine suggests an opportunistic rather than wilfully insincere approach by Bacon in order to persuade readers of the validity of his philosophical science, whereas Gordon Teskey suggests Bacon is fully aware of the “vertiginous irony” that is central to his shifting position.42 In terms of a structuralist approach, the linear

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arrangement of X = Y is disrupted if we suggest Bacon lacks the sincerity of other mythographers. Myths were seen and presented by mythographers as a structuralist system of signifiers to be read to reveal a moral ‘truth’. A major issue with this approach is highlighted by Seznec, who writes that the “weakness of this system of interpretation is obvious: to look for ideas in old images which are no longer understood is to falsify the character of the primitive myths”, and that the mythographers’ subjectivity in interpretation was also problematic.43 As Seznec continues, the “pagan myths did, in fact, serve as a vehicle for the philosophical thought of the Renaissance”.44 The veracity of this approach is, however, not the focus of this study, though it does further exemplify the process of converting one signifying system to another. Following Seznec’s assertions, we can clearly see that Bacon’s interpretations of the mythological narratives he selects are reflective both of his cultural and historical position and his own concepts of natural philosophy. They are, as widely catalogued by Lemmi, heavily derived from Natalis Comes’ (Natale Conti) Mythologiae (1551) and other sources, yet simultaneously manipulated and selected by Bacon to serve his own interests.45 As Teskey writes, the “interpretations he offers are so judiciously topical, or so brilliantly counterintuitive, or so forceful as propaganda for his revolutionary views of science that he seems almost Nietzschean in his exertions of the will-to-power over the matter of history”, an approach that Jardine argues is one focused rather on popular dissemination: “Under the guise of interpretations of a series of traditional myths he presents some of the most abstruse and unconventional of his philosophical, political, and ethical views in a form palatable to a popular audience”.46 These include the most frequently commented upon narratives of Prometheus as the hero of new sciences and Daedalus as an engineer, and, as Lemmi points out, the essay on Proserpina mentioned above exemplifies Bacon’s own theory of spirits.47 Also evident is how extremely of his time Bacon is when discussing what he sees as political allegories. Cassandra is said to “intimate the unprofitable liberty of untimely admonitions and counselles” (further distancing Bacon’s conclusions from Gorges’ intimation of divination); Typhon is “a Rebell”; Fame represents a (gendered) embodiment of rumour, “seditious reports” and “infamous libels” against legitimate leaders or princes; and the story of Endymion refers to “the nature and disposition of Princes: for they being full of

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doubts and prone to jealousie, doe not easily acquaint men of prying and curious eyes, and as it were of vigilant and wakeful dispositions”.48 The allegoresis of Typhon raises some further interesting recurrent aspects of Bacon’s project. Following a standard retelling of the myth from Hesiod, Bacon claims this “fable seems to point at the variable fortune of Princes, and the rebellious insurrection of Traytors in a State”, Juno’s engendering of Typhon as exemplifying the result of attempting to work alone, and the danger of “absolute power”.49 Bacon reads the images of Typhon, in reading the “monstrous deformity” his body as indicative of his allegorical significance: his hundred heads signifie their deuided powers; his fiery mouthes their inflamed intents; his serpentine circles their pestilent malice in besieging; his yron hands, their merciless slaughters; his Eagles talents, their greedy rapynes; his plumed body, their continuall rumors …50

This fragmented, complex, and incoherent monstrosity is reminiscent of Spenser’s description of Duessa in The Faery Queene, with her fox’s tail, one bear’s paw and one eagle’s claw as feet (I.VIII.48), and there is perhaps further work to be done on the use of allegorical monstrosity here. The tactic of reading physical characteristics as allegorical is also deployed in relation to Pan (“Nature”), but in a particularly arbitrary vein. Lemmi records this reading as deriving from a variety of sources, particularly Macrobius, but with many elaborations and deviations.51 For instance, Bacon claims that Pan’s horns, being “broad at the roote and sharpe at the ends” signify scientific taxonomy and the fact that they point towards heaven indicates that, “universall Ideas doe in some sort pertaine to things divine”.52 Pan’s hairy body represents “the beames or operations of creatures: for beames are as it were the haires and bristles of Nature, and every creature is either more or lesse beamie” and his goats’ feet “by reason of the upward tending motion of terrestriall bodies towards the ayr and heauen: For the goat is a clyming creature, that loues to bee hanging about the rocks and steep mountains”.53 Bacon himself declares this to be a “wittie allegory”.54 Bacon’s combination of inherited mythological exegesis and selfinterested reworking of such into his allegorical readings means that, as Heidi D. Studer suggests, often Bacon “changes the order, and even the substance of the exposition which he himself has chosen. This is one feature of his style that entices, or challenges, the reader to engage in

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philosophic thinking”.55 This may be the case, but also of interest is that this method means that Bacon is constantly manipulating narrative elements to suit himself, taking established elements of a signifying system in order to argue that they signify something further than claims found elsewhere. As indicated, such allegorical readings of mythological narrative function in an analogous way to the tenets of structuralist thought. Allegoresis relies on the concept of a system of narrative, and that direct symbolism can be detected and unravelled between a sign and what it signifies. Indeed, this conception of mythological narrative was addressed in some detail by various structuralist critics. Julia Kristeva writes in “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1973) that, “What semiotics has discovered in studying ‘ideologies’ (myths, rituals, moral codes, arts, etc.) as signsystems is that the law governing, or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e. that it is articulated like a language”.56 This is expanded upon in Revolution in Poetic Language, where Kristeva considers the work of social anthropologists and calls myth “symbolism in action”.57 She states: “From Mauss to Levi-Strauss, social anthropology continually reconfirms this equivalence between the symbolic and the social when it considers society’s various means of self-regulation … as languages”; “Mythic narratives … fall within the province of the signifying system … Levi-Strauss showed that myth semanticizes kinship and social relations by using elements of material continuity as a semantic cover”.58 That is, the symbolic, language-like nature of mythology, as revealed by a structuralist approach, is what underpins cultural and social practice. As Claude Lévi-Strauss himself writes, “Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling”.59 Terence Hawkes consequentially comments thoroughly on LéviStrauss’ Structural Anthropology (1972) in his summative work on Structuralism.60 The concept of myth as being a language, understood by those who can decode its individual elements, is arguably one that the mythographers of the Renaissance would have recognised. As LéviStrauss argues, “The ‘meaning’ of mythology cannot reside in the isolated elements which constitute the myth, but must inhere in the way in which those elements are combined, and must take account of the potential for transformation that such a combination involves”: the isolated elements must be understood in relation to the larger structures of which they

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are part, the essence of structuralism and a structuralist conceptualisation of language.61 Hawkes neatly allies this work with that of critics who take a formalist approach to narrative, such as Vladimir Propp and A. J. Greimas. Mythological narratives can be reduced to internationally recognisable elementary types and functions, like the folktales Propp categorises and taxonomises in Morphology of the Folktale, thereby combining in an ultimately finite way and conveying a meaning understood via an understanding of the sign system.62 We can draw this analogy and comparison further in suggesting that Bacon’s manipulation and re-combination of allegorical elements in order to promote his own overarching allegorical reading, as described above, also exemplifies this structuralist model. As Quilligan suggests, “it is possible to write and to read allegory intelligently only in those cultural contexts which grant to language a significance beyond that belonging to a merely arbitrary system of signs”.63 However, this movement between sign systems (i.e. between that of mythological narrative and their alleged allegorical ‘meaning’) is, of course, ultimately intertextual, and as continually stated, intertextuality is an ultimately infinite process. Seznec’s previously mentioned study provides as indication of the inescapably intertextual nature of mythography and allegoresis, as does Bacon’s habitual borrowing and expansion of Comes’ text (itself also not ‘original’). As Graham Allen writes, “Structuralists retain a belief in criticism’s ability to locate, describe and thus stabilize a text’s significance, even if that significance concerns an intertextual relation between a text and other texts”, as opposed to a post-structuralist approach that negates such stability.64 In this formulation, an intertextual understanding is firmly in the post-structuralist camp of infinite signification. Bacon’s readings are intertextual, not only because all writing is, but because even the seemingly straightforward process of allegoresis relies upon a multitude of other texts in order to generate meaning, and that meaning is seemingly infinite. For example, we can claim that Bacon’s reading is heavily indebted to Comes, who himself is heavily indebted to his predecessors, such as Giraldi, Cartari and Boccacio, but with certain recalibration in order to promote Bacon’s own philosophical views. As Jardine writes: Myth interpretation was basically eclectic, and aimed at being encyclopaedic, collecting together all available sources which might cast light on the myth. Comes and Boccaccio contrast alternative interpretations of

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Pan’s physical characteristics and insignia, drawn from a variety of sources, without suggesting that any one of these is more likely than the others.65

In addition, Bacon quotes Vergil, the Bible, Tacitus, Cicero, Catullus, Iphicrates, Lucretius, Ovid, Seneca, and Heraclitus, and “seldom gives his references”.66 Furthermore, the Gorges’ translation (the version which most modern readers arguably encounter the text) is slippery in places as evidenced above. Bacon himself writes that it should not “trouble” an allegorist “to bring in a new Allegory: for it could be no otherwise, seeing as they were the inventions of men, which lived in divers ages, and had also divers ends: some being auncient, others neotericall: some having an eye to things naturall, others to morall”, an opinion echoed (and often quoted) a few decades later by George Sandys, who writes “why may not this fable receive a double construction? Those being the best that admit of most senses”.67 This suggests that narratives are understood as being capable of conveying multiple allegories simultaneously, and a singular, fixed meaning (X = Y) is negated: allegoric writing is clearly perceived as being open. Allegories, in the early modern allegorists’ understanding, actually constitute a post-structuralist exemplar of endless signification in the varied plurality of meaning it proved possible to extract from them. As Thomas Maresca writes, “signification in allegory is unstable, perhaps intermittent, perhaps multi-modal and overlapping, most certainly multivalent”.68 As demonstrated in the case studies discussed, allegorical mythography can be read through a structuralist lens. However, there are also various ambiguities and issues in such an exercise which suggest that a structuralist approach (as in the cataloguing of folktales) is too confining, reductive, and inadequate. The limitations of folkloric taxonomy will be discussed further in the following chapter, alongside introducing further intertextual narrative models exploited, combined, and utilised by early modern imaginative writers who move beyond the appreciation of “ancient” fictions as purely instructive, metaphoric, and didactic. Nonetheless, allegory is, as Bacon’s De Sapientia Veterum demonstrates, ultimately an intertextual exercise which exploits an inherited discourse of discovery and illumination to potentially manipulate narrative elements as deftly as any poet dramatist.

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Notes 1. Nevertheless, the text “would go through at least sixty editions of varying sorts by the end of the seventeenth century: fourteen Latin, twenty-one English, eleven Italian, eleven French, two Dutch and one German”; Rhodri Lewis, “Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth,” Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 364. 2. It is thought that interpretations of five myths were written by Bacon before 1605, and also that he developed his reading of “Cupid” in an unfinished treatise c.1612–20. Bacon expanded the work of De Sapientia Veterum much further in De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), which includes modified versions of “Pan”, “Perseus”, “Dionysius”, and develops the preface. See Lewis, “Francis Bacon”. 3. Thomas Cooper, Eliotes Dictionarie, 1559; John Minsheu, The Guide into the Tongues, 1617; Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, 1658. All cited in Joshua McClennen, “On the Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance,” Contributions on Modern Philology 6 (1947): 3. 4. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (London: 1589), in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 159. 5. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 144. 6. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 159. 7. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 160. Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique (1560), claims, “An Allegorie Is None Other Thing, but a Metaphore Used Throughout a Whole Sentence, or Oration.” Fols. 98v. Cited by Mark L. Caldwell, “Allegory: The Renaissance Mode,” ELH 44 (1977): 584. 8. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 143–44; 159. 9. Edmund Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh,” The Faery Queene (1590/96) (London: Penguin, 2003), 15–18 (15). 10. Spenser, “Letter to Raleigh”, 16. He writes that critics “should be satisfied with the use of these dayes seeing all things accounted by their shows”, 16. 11. Sir John Harington, “A Brief Apology of Poetry” (1591), in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 269. 12. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 1; 3; Clara Mucci, “Allegory” A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 215. Mucci continues to offer the etymology of the term, which derives from the Greek allos (“other”) and agoreno “(“to speak openly”), (“to speak in the agora or marketplace”) – to ‘say’ something ‘other’, i.e. something different than what is said literally”.

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13. Samuel R. Levin, “Allegorical Language,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 23. 14. Rosamund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 105–6. 15. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 4. The two other traditions or constructs ensuring survival are the Historical Tradition or Euhemeristic view, suggesting myths are remnants of historical facts, and the “Physical Tradition”, which absorbs the mythological into the astronomical. 16. Harington, “Brief Apology,” 266. 17. Seznec, Survival, 90. 18. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 , ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000). “Epistle”, lines 537–40. 19. Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1598), 154–55. Cited by Elizabeth Story Donno ed. Elizabethan Minor Epics (London: Routledge, 1963), 5. 20. Sir Philip Sidney, “Sonnet 28,” Astrophil and Stella, in Renaissance Literature, ed. John C. Hunter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), lines 1–3. 21. François Rabelais, The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1955), 38–39. 22. McClennen, “Meaning and Function,” 18. Sir Francis Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum (London: 1609), trans. Arthur Gorges as The Wisedome of the Ancients (London: 1619), Preface, Sig. a9r. 23. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, Sig. a6v; Sig. a7r. 24. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 154–55; John Minsheu, The Guide into the Tongues (London: 1617), emphasis added. 25. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 239. 26. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 239. Cites Frederic Jameson, The PrisonHouse of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 180. 27. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 237. 28. “Parresia” (or, more often, “parrhesia”): Collins Dictionary, n. “boldness or frankness of speech”; Oxforddictionaries.com, n. Candour, frankness; outspokenness or boldness of speech … Origin late 16th century. From post classical Latin … in classical Latin as a Greek word. See also, especially regarding the potential dangers of parrhesia, Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia (six lectures given at the University of California at Berkley, October to November, 1983). Howard

2

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

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B. White translates the word simply as “Outspokenness” in “Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients,” Interpretation 2 (1970): 111. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, Sig. a8r. OED, “pan-” combining form sense 1; 2. Charlotte Coffin points out that “This etymology, though it comes from Homer, is actually mistaken … Pan is probably derived from the Latin root ‘Pa-’, and such is interpreted as ‘herdsman’.” Coffin, “The Gods’ Lasciviousness, or How to Deal With It? The Plight of Early Modern Mythographers,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 81 (2012): 13, fn. 80. Note that in the period ‘fable’ and ‘myth’ are interchangeable, as can be seen from Gorges’s translation. See Lewis, “Francis Bacon,” 362. Harington, “Brief Apology,” 267–68. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, Sig. a6r. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, Sig. a7v-a7r. Note the division in different facets of Christianity regarding reading scripture as allegorical. McClennen, for example, cites William Tyndale: “Beware of allegories; for there is not a more handsome or apt thing to beguile withal than an allegory; nor a more subtle and pestilent thing in the world to persuade a false matter, than an allegory”; “the Scripture hath but one sence which is ye literall sence”. McClennen, “Meaning and Function,” 23–24. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 145. See, for example, McClennen, “Meaning and Function”; Barbara Carman Garner, “Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes and the Mythological Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 264–91; T. G. A. Nelson, “Sir John Harington and the Renaissance Debate over Allegory,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 359–79; Timothy H. Paterson, “Bacon’s Myth of Orpheus: Power as a Goal of Science in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients,” Interpretation 16 (1989): 427–44; Heidi D. Studer, “Francis Bacon on the Political Dangers of Scientific Progress,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 2 (1998): 219–34; Lewis, “Francis Bacon”. In addition, Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 193; Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 174–75; Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 90–92. Anthony Grafton, “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 205. Garner, “Francis Bacon,” 264–65. T. G. A. Nelson writes, “Compare Advancement of Learning (1605), II.iv.4 where Bacon sits, with his usual dignity and humorous pose, on a rather narrow fence, with De Augmentis Scientiarum (1622), II.xiii, where examples of allegorical readings are given much more prominence. Doubts about spurious allegories are, however, still expressed: ‘Uturum vero fabulis veteribus poetarum

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

subsit aliquis sensus mysticus, dubitationem nonnullum habet ’ (There is a good deal of doubt as to whether any mystical sense really does underlie the fables of the ancient poets)”. Nelson, “Sir John Harington,” 362 n. 11. Paterson, “Bacon’s Myth,” 429. Charles W. Lemmi, Classical Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1933). Paterson, “Bacon’s Myth,” 429; 432–33. Jardine, Francis Bacon, 193; Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 92. Seznec, Survival, 85–86. Seznec, Survival, 87. Lemmi, Classical Deities, passim. See also Garner: “The reader familiar with Comes is immediately struck by the fact that Bacon patterns his accounts in both form and content on those in the Mythologia. His genealogical material, and threefold division of myths are familiar.” Garner, “Francis Bacon,” 280. The word Lewis uses is “plundered”, “Francis Bacon,” 370. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 92; Jardine, Francis Bacon, 180. Lemmi, Classical Deities, 75–83. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 2; 50; 46–47. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 5–6. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 7. Lemmi, Classical Deities, 62–65. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 25–26. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 26; 27–28. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, 27. Studer, “Francis Bacon,” 220–21. Kristeva, “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1973), in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 25. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 77. Kristeva, Revolution, 72; 92. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (1972), 210. Cited by Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Routledge, 1977), 29. See Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 210. Cited by Hawkes, Structuralism, 30. See Chapter 3 for further discussion on the categorisation of folktales, tale ‘types’ and the failure of this approach. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 156. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 97. Jardine, Francis Bacon, 182.

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66. See White, “Bacon’s Wisdom,” 113–14; Lewis, “Francis Bacon,” 370. 67. Bacon, De Sapientia Veterum, Sig. a8r-a9v. George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632), 100. 68. Thomas Maresca, “Personification Vs. Allegory,” in Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Kevin L. Cope (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 30.

Bibliography Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000. Bacon, Sir Francis. De Sapientia Veterum (1609). Translated by Arthur Gorges as The Wisedome of the Ancients. London: 1619. Caldwell, Mark L. “Allegory: The Renaissance Mode.” ELH 44 (1977): 580– 600. Carman Garner, Barbara. “Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes and the Mythological Tradition.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 264– 91. Coffin, Charlotte. “The Gods’ Lasciviousness, or How to Deal With It? The Plight of Early Modern Mythographers.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 81 (2012): 1–14. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964. Grafton, Anthony. “The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, edited by Jill Kraye, 203–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Harington, Sir John. “A Brief Apology of Poetry” (1591). In Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, 260–73. London: Penguin, 2004. Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Routledge, 1977. Jardine, Lisa. Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Kristeva, Julia. “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1973). In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 24–33. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lemmi, Charles W. Classical Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1933. Levin, Samuel R. “Allegorical Language.” In Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, edited by Morton W. Bloomfield, 23–38. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

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Lewis, Rhodri. “Francis Bacon, Allegory and the Uses of Myth.” Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 360–89. Maresca, Thomas. “Personification Vs. Allegory.” In Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, edited by Kevin L. Cope, 21–40. New York: AMS Press, 1993. McClennen, Joshua. “On the Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance.” Contributions on Modern Philology 6 (1947): 1–38. Mucci, Clara. “Allegory.” In A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, edited by Michael Hattaway, 214–24. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Nelson, T. G. A. “Sir John Harington and the Renaissance Debate Over Allegory.” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 359–79. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 . Edited by John Frederick Nims. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000. Paterson, Timothy H. “Bacon’s Myth of Orpheus: Power as a Goal of Science in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients.” Interpretation 16 (1989): 427–44. Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy (1589). In Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, 55–203. London: Penguin, 2004. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Rabelais, François. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by J. M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1955. Sandys, George. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures. Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632. Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Translated by Barbara F. Sessions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Sidney, Sir Philip. “Sonnet 28.” In Astrophil and Stella. In Renaissance Literature, edited by John C. Hunter, 542–73. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Story Donno, Elizabeth, ed. Elizabethan Minor Epics. London: Routledge, 1963. Studer, Heidi D. “Francis Bacon on the Political Dangers of Scientific Progress.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 2 (1998): 219–34. Spenser, Edmund. “Letter to Raleigh.” In The Faery Queene (1590/96). London: Penguin, 2003. Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Tuve, Rosamund. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. White, Howard B. “Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients.” Interpretation 2 (1970): 107–29.

CHAPTER 3

Folklore as a Narrative System: Old Wives, Seasonal Cycles, and Culture Wars

Abstract This chapter explores the importance of folkloric intertexts in what are considered to be more sophisticated, written narratives. The analysis focuses on Peele’s Old Wife’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, as both have a focus on tales, ‘old wives’, and lost children. Similar patterns also manifest in the seemingly culturally removed Comus by John Milton, arguably to his own political ends. The intertextual relationship between these texts illustrates fundamental indicators of the perception of folktale, ‘text’, and performance in the period, as well as exemplifying the utilisation of such tales for diverse cultural ends. The chapter discusses folktales as explicitly intertextual, considers the attempt to catalogue folktale types into a tangible system (as influenced by structuralism), and highlights their status as shared cultural property. Keywords Intertextuality · Folktale · Peele · Winter’s Tale · Comus

This chapter explores the importance of intertextuality in a particular area of early modern texts’ narrative creation, that of the use of folktale and folk-motif. This is an area vulnerable to a more straightforward focus on the investigation of source and narrative pattern, but also one with potential to illustrate the benefit of an intertextual approach via interrogative analysis of the linguistic, discursive, and historic contexts which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7_3

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intersect a given text. Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale (1595) and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1611), with their titular focus on tales and tellers, emphases on ‘old wives’ and lost children are, it is argued, apt examples of such texts. Similar patterns, of lost and recovered children and malignant magicians lurking in the uncivilised forest, also manifest in the seemingly culturally removed Comus (A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle) (1634) by John Milton. The intertextual relationship between these texts, I suggest, illustrates fundamental indicators of the perception of folktale, ‘text’, and performance in the period, as well as exemplifying the utilisation of such tales for diverse cultural ends. Folklore and folktales offer an apt illustration of intertextuality as it is understood in the present work. The network of narratives, both national and international, with relatively clear signifiers and patterns offers a tempting mass of text to organise into a perceptible system (as was attempted by structuralist folklore cataloguers, discussed below). Relayed orally for centuries, these narratives transmit various cultural beliefs and approaches, “performing, reproducing, and reinventing those investments for multiple and changing audiences”.1 Such cultural property is illustrative of intertextuality as it is composed of: utterances whose possible sources are illusionary points of origin, or whose origins are either infinitely regressive or at least multiple, so that they cannot be identified as belonging solely to a particular author or even to a particular historical moment … the various authorial and cultural voices that inhabit these texts … undermine the illusory sense of closure and stability sometimes attributed to them.2

As such, the discursive signifying systems found in folklore offer a rich seam of narratives and culturally familiar signifiers for early modern creative writers and are readily combined with other intertexts in creating ever-expanding textual networks. For example, A Winter’s Tale, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) before it, combines classical mythology and domestic folkloric narratives and motifs. As recent critics focusing on folk culture have stressed, the lack of demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in the period conveys the potential for a rich combination of narrative systems which goes beyond techniques of imitation and models.3 As Adam Fox identifies, arguing against the common separation of oral and literate culture:

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England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … was a society in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in a myriad ways … There was no necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation; the one did not have to destroy or undermine the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in different forms.4

As Fox records, Sir Thomas Browne observes in the 1640s “there is scarce any tradition or popular error but stands also delivered by some good author”; the statement proves Fox’s assertions but also indicates the snobbery concerning the contrast between “popular error” and a “good author”.5 Such a contrast is especially of concern in Comus, as discussed below. This assertion of interplay between and circulation of the subject matter of oral and literate texts, what Mary Ellen Lamb calls “complex forms of cross-identification”, is essentially considering the practice of intertextuality manifest in early modern writers’ combining of narratives from various traditions or systems.6 The tendency to conflate classical mythology and domestic folklore leads to some interesting schema with dryads, goblins, fairies, and classical deities jostling for space. An intriguing point of agreement however, is in the status of folklore, be it classical or early modern British. Graham Anderson notes how: An additional tone of contempt is present in such expressions as graon or titthon mythoi, ‘old women’s tales’ or ‘nurses tales’ respectively; in Latin some variant of aniles fabulae, again ‘old women’s tales’ – our ‘old wives’ tales’ – is the regular term … With similar disapproval Plato mentions tales which children have heard since being nursed by their nurses or their mothers’ milk.7

Lamb, in an article which both identifies the impossibility of social separation and the abjection of popular culture, particularly focuses on ‘old wives’ tales’ as “objects of contempt”8 and how the opposition of a literate male culture and an oral female one is essential in the humanist cultural maturation process applied to young men (i.e. the move from nurses to schoolrooms, from childish folktales to classical texts). As Lamb identifies, such opposition and denial “ignores the dense interrelationships

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between printed texts and oral tales demonstrated so well by scholars such as Fox, Chartier, and Warner”.9 The opposition also functions within critical readings of ‘source’ study which implicitly posit the ‘source’ as inferior to the discussed output. Lori Humphrey Newcomb explores this as specifically gendered in relation to Shakespeare’s romance ‘sources’, writing that “‘Source’ metaphorically positions Shakespeare’s plays as superior to their allegedly immature or feminine prose counterparts, elevating Shakespearean virtu”.10 This is analogous to the aforementioned approach to and binary distinction between oral ‘feminine’ culture and literate ‘masculine’ culture, and to the positioning of folktales as inferior sources mined by written texts. This potentially gendered struggle for narrative authorship and ownership can be seen in all the texts discussed in this chapter, which will assert the necessity of reading folkloric intertexts as cohabiting in the intellectual and cultural space of imaginative early modern written literature, not merely as starting points in a linear process. Therefore despite the objections of some contemporary commentators, evidently one of the narrative systems most clearly available to early modern writers is the wealth of folklore and folktales indigenous to the British Isles. The sheer amount of references to such narratives evidences the cultural circulation of folktales. Such narratives clearly influence early modern creative writing, both in terms of structure and content, and, as described above, function in tandem with classical mythology and literature (other countries’ folklore) as the dominant intertexts of such creative writing. Reading early modern texts with an awareness of the transposition between different texts or different systems creates meaning and significance. Catherine Belsey claims that critics of early modern drama have overlooked the influence of folktales, and that certain formulaic narrative familiarities (e.g. the ‘three brothers’ set up, or the ‘lost princess’) enhances audience engagement. Belsey highlights the importance of the audience here by introducing the ‘soft’ interpretation of intertextuality being argued against: “Source-hunting tends to privilege what was going on in the author’s mind at the expense of the play’s appeal to an audience”.11 This perceptive statement can also be linked to the concept of a cultural subconscious, which facilitates intertextual analysis of texts in terms of wider claims concerning meaning and focus, as well as to the importance of the reader (or audience), as stressed in intertextual theory. Charlotte Artese also emphasises the role of the audience in a democratic process of producing meaning, reading the play as:

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an interaction between the playwright and his envisioned audience, a negotiation that occurs because the folktales belong to both of them … If the play’s source is common rather than specialized knowledge, if it circulates orally as well as in print and manuscript, if it transcends geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries – that is to say, if it is a folktale – the playwright is free to believe that anyone and maybe everyone in the audience might recognize it whether literate or illiterate, urban or provincial, native-born or foreign, rich or poor. The author can construct a play to engage with the audience’s anticipation of specific events, to fulfil or defy or flirt with their expectations.12

Furthermore, as Belsey identifies in relation to As You Like It: Within the folktale frame of the plot, the play creates a space in which a range of intertextual allusions “blend and clash”, as Roland Barthes puts it. Like all writing, “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” … intertextual references blend and clash to produce meaning in this new context.13

It is this “blending” and “clashing” which is of interest here: How do early modern writers use folklore and folktales to produce meaning in a new context? How do those folkloric intertexts function and interact with intertexts from other systems or cultures to produce meaning? The conflation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, as described by Fox in imagining early modern authors consciously or subconsciously revisiting the folktales of their youth (Reginald Scot in particular recalls being reared on “old wives tales” of Robin Goodfellow and others, and freely conflates domestic and classical figures),14 offers a wealth of possibility in intertextual analysis. This moves away from the mere identification of the aforementioned intertexts as ‘sources’, rather analysing the interplay and ramifications of their deployment in the text and as manifested in performance. An initially tantalising element here is in the structuralist work of folkloric scholars that attempts to represent the ‘system’ of folklore as a tangible and traceable collection of patterns; a system in the most literal sense. The classification of folktales into a type-system was a movement driven by a structuralist understanding (of systems and of every text being part of a larger system), and an attempt to collect and classify all known versions of tale ‘types’. This was attempted through breaking tales down into component plot elements and labelling any deviations, a method that

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evidently works better with relatively formulaic folktales than other forms of narrative.15 As Shlomith Rimmon-Kenon describes: The theoretical possibility of abstracting story-form probably corresponds to the intuitive skill of users in processing stories: being able to retell them, to recognise variants of the same story, to identify the same story in another medium, and so on. It is this intuition that has led almost every narratologist following in Vladmir Propp’s footsteps to formulate a claim that an immanent story structure, sometimes called ‘narrativity’, may be isolated at least for the sake of description.16

However, though this approach, like intertextuality, relies on an understanding of the interplay between narratives and the potential to look at cultural expressions as systems, it ultimately is both unsuccessful and antithetical to an intertextual approach to folklore in early modern writing. Furthermore, the vastness of the system and the sheer number of deviations on each tale ‘type’ indicates that such cataloguing is actually not as possible as the proponents initially though. The system is, to an extent, almost an attempt to create a physical or written model of intertextuality (though obviously this was not the aim) which has proved to be impossible. As Belsey writes, “In the last century, structuralists reduced folk tales to a handful of components, and then reduced all stories to folk tales. In the process, they lost their sense of the distinctions not only among the tales themselves, but among and within the works that rewrite them”.17 Shakespeare’s use, or rewriting, of folktales can be identified in various plays. Indeed, Artese claims that folktales are “part of the mental furniture of Shakespeare’s characters” and, notably using the language of intertextuality, describes a “network of references”.18 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the most studied in this respect; as mentioned above its combination of classical and folkloric material offers an wealth of analysis, and some sinister readings, under a superficially genial text (e.g. the decision to rename the ambiguous folkloric hero Robin Goodfellow as the devilish ‘Pook’). Other examples include the driving plot of King Lear (1606), which is based on a folktale (the love test and the ‘as much as meat needs salt’ response) and derived from a Celtic legend with possibly the same roots. In addition, various elements within the text refer to folk culture. As K. M. Briggs summarises, it is:

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full of snatches of folk song, references to fairy story and legend, to the Mad Tom tradition, the foul fiend Flibberty Gibbet, the walking fire, the nightmare, [and] has darker things to deal with than fairy-lore. There is one reference to elf-knotted locks, but the gentler fairies are out of place in this wild, primeval world.19

The understanding that this is a human drama played out against the relatively simplistic and ritualistic expectations of the folktale contributes to the analysis of what such folkloric elements do. The creative adaptation of stock narrative is central to early modern thought and creativity, and here Cordelia’s deviation from the script, as it were, brings into question a multitude of contemporary concerns including the instability of language, competing cultural narratives (in the particularly intertextual nature of Edgar’s performative and Lear’s actual madness), the importance of a unified kingdom, and the horror of human insignificance. Likewise, folktales can be read as signifying greater ramifications: in Much Ado About Nothing (1600) Benedick quotes “Mr Fox”, an English version of the Bluebeard tale, which acts as an insinuation of the potential harm husbands (i.e. Claudio) can do their wives. Some texts bring together and combine a number of folktales with similar foci, for example various tales regarding value and commodification in The Merchant of Venice or the ‘wager-cycle’ in Cymbeline, for thematic force and emphasis. Artese’s work provides some illuminating readings of Shakespeare’s potential use of folktales (in, for example, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor), though as a whole these are mainly from a folkloric scholarly perspective, and are sometimes at the expense of all other elements. For example, the focus is firmly on plot, as opposed to language, figurative references, motifs, thematic nuances, and intertexts, which results in rather static and reductive explorations. Furthermore, the claim that a significant number of Shakespearean texts are directly based on folktales is both over-stretched and reliant on the folktale type catalogue system discussed previously.20 The degree of abstraction and simplification in this process, while seemingly providing a working model of intertextual links, rather steamrollers intertextual and contextual nuances and conceptualisations of amorphous, infinitely expansive networks. As Artese herself writes, “tale type abstracts … similarities into a summary”.21 For example, Artese claims that Titus Andronicus is a combination of tale types “The Maiden Without Hands” and “The Revenge of the Castrated Man” (who in this argument is,

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strangely, Aaron), and while she acknowledges the degree of “displacement” and “dispersal” of roles and functions, the argument is highly tenuous and insular.22 The Winter’s Tale is one Shakespearean play that conflates and combines classical and native folkloric narrative systems to arguably create a text with fundamental and elemental resonance. This is a text concerned with cycles: of the seasons, of Christian patterns of redemption and sacrifice, of renewal and death. As such, there are underpinning textual connections with mythology, theology (the sacrificed and resurrected figure of Christian and pre-Christian narrative; Leontes’ infanticidal actions aligning him with Herod), folktales, and cultural depictions of natural events. For example, the child that is lost (Perdita) is a combination of folkloric motifs (the lost child and the hidden princess), a classical reference to Persephone, and, in relation to the latter, an emblem of natural rejuvenation. The title of the play clearly positions the folkloric intertext. As identified by Lamb, the phrase ‘winter’s tale’ is explicitly linked to ‘old wives tale’ in the earliest example in the OED (from c.1555).23 There is also an implicit indication of the importance of telling tales and of the place of ‘old wives’. It is the ‘old wives’, Paulina and Hermione, who bring about the resolution of the play and the redemption of Leontes. Paulina’s role as a midwife also indicates her position in a particularly female sphere. Furthermore, it is Mamillius’ declaration that, “a sad tale’s best for winter” which introduces the concept of telling tales and the oral tradition, and, notably, the character is a child still very much attached to the domestic world of women (his mother and her serving women), a world where tales are told.24 Indeed, his name indicates an ongoing attachment to the breast (mammary). Mamillius’ role in this text indicates the “cultural fear of female influence evoked by oral tales enjoyed in childhood”.25 As Lamb writes, identifying with the oral tradition is “fraught with ambivalence”: the childhood dependency on women signified by old wives’ tales challenged the hard-won masculinity achieved in the schoolroom … old wives’ tales become material for abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva as that often despised but necessary ‘thing’ that must be rejected, but which is too much a part of the self for rejection to be possible.26

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Mamillius, it seems, is too young for the schoolroom, and his association with Hermione is compounded by his death following her imprisonment and disgrace. However, the oral tradition of folktales that Mamillius introduces in his “sad tale” has ramifications throughout the rest of the play. Upon finding Perdita, the Old Shepherd fancifully claims that she is a fairy changeling and that the money with her is fairy gold: “So, let’s see – it was told me I should be rich by the fairies – this is some changeling” (3.3.119–20). Lamb suggests that this is a strategy of evading a possibly illegitimate child’s problematic status (“Sure, some scape … I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door work” [3.3.74–77]), but it also means that the Old Shepherd can take the money with a, albeit self-perpetuated, clear conscience.27 The play also metatheatrically refers to its own unlikely and fantastical events as being comparable to an “old tale”. All three of these references occur in the final two scenes of the play, and two within thirty-five lines of dialogue between the same characters. The Second Gentleman, relating the fantastic off-stage events, describes Leontes and Perdita’s reunion as “so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (5.2.29– 30); Antigonus’ fate is presented as “Like an old tale still” (5.2.63) in response by the Third Gentleman; and Hermione’s resurrection is articulated by Paulina in the following scene as “Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.141–42). As Lamb points out, these are all adult characters identifying with the “early narrative tradition”,28 as if the only reference point or common understanding of such unlikely events (Antigonus’ death, while less fantastical and certainly less full of wonder than the other examples is still, arguably, both unlikely and viscerally primitive) is the touchstone of childhood folktales. Similarly, after the contestation over control of the play’s narrative between Leontes and Hermione / Paulina in the opening acts, the feminised ‘old wives’ tale’ has become the model through which all characters construct the story. The Winter’s Tale’s intertextual relationship to folklore, folktales, and the oral tradition also indicates a further interesting intertext in George Peele’s The Old Wife’s Tale (1595). As Philip Edwards suggests, the resemblances are striking. Peele’s play … twice mentions ‘winter’s tale’ in its induction … Other resemblances between the plays include the prominence of references to the passage of the seasons, the appearance of a

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figure representing Time in the middle of the play, and the theme of resurrection. Much more important than these, however … [are] the sudden shifts of focus in presenting what is proclaimed to be a very unlikely story, and especially the movement between narration and performance.29

Peele’s text comprises a tale told by a character in a framing narrative, and at several points in The Winter’s Tale events are relayed to the audience via one character presenting an explicatory narrative, for example, the account of the shipwreck, of the bear’s attack, the passing of time, and, most strangely, the description of the reunion of Perdita with her parents. Tales within tales seem to preoccupy both texts and Peele’s in particular is a chaotic combination of many folkloric narratives. This includes (but is not limited to): the ancient folktale of the Grateful Dead, the Head in the Well, sets of three (three pages, three rescuers), metatheatrical references to tales and telling (“Look you, gammer, of the giant and the king’s daughter”),30 Snow White, and Jack the Giant Killer. The text also abounds with riddles, ritualistic repetition and stock formulae (kindness rewarded materially, lost sisters being rescued, lovers reunited). Fittingly, The Old Wife’s Tale is told “to pass away the time” (61), as “a merry winter’s tale would drive away the time trimly” (76–77), and the teller is an old, hospitable woman (Madge) sharing her domestic space with three lost young (male) pages. Such a solution to pass the time is thought to be the cultural origins of the activity. So we have a stereotypical tale teller, and an audience who remember the stories of their not-so-distant youth (one of the pages demands a story such as “when I was a little one” [83]). This stereotypical scene is compounded by Madge’s introduction: “Once upon a time, there was a king, or a lord, or a duke that had a fair daughter, and the fairest that ever she was, as white as snow, and as red as blood; and once upon a time, his daughter was stolen away” (104–7). The repetition here of “once upon a time” is traditional and ritualistic, setting up the conditions and expectations for this type of tale. What is interesting, in terms of Peele’s wider project, are the conflations here of the traditional start, with the confusion (“a king, or a lord, or a duke”), with a description specific to the Snow White narrative variants (repeated at lines 148, 620, and 692), but a narrative summation which is not part of that tale.31 The confusion of the father’s rank indicates that specificities are immaterial. These are interchangeable signifiers; it doesn’t matter what the specific rank is because stories such as these rely on typicality. The misidentification of the kidnapping of a

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daughter “as white as snow”, etc. similarly relies on audience recognition of the type of narrative being told here, as does the hyperbolic claim of “the fairest that ever she was”. Like The Winter’s Tale, The Old Wife’s Tale also contains classical referents: Sacrapant has a classical heritage (“In Thessaly was I born and brought up; / My mother Meroe hight, a famous witch, / and by her cunning I of her did learn / To change and alter shapes of mortal men”. [328–31]) and this, together with the cursed “bear of the wood” Erestus, brings to mind classical, Ovidian, metamorphosis, while simultaneously the cyclic, daily occurrence of the transformation of Erestus into an “ugly bear … when the sun doth settle in the west” (183–84) recalls the folktales of the selkies, swan maidens, or the origins of the Swan Lake story in Russian folktales. The threat of the bear, as gruesomely related in Shakespeare’s text regarding Antigonus’s fate, can be read as symbolically being connected with winter, and as part of the diptych structure of the text informing the cyclical theme. Erestus’ enchantment, on the other hand, is rather less evidently symbolic, though the play’s inclusion of pastoral harvest men (s.d. 515) does indicate a comparative interest in seasonal change and popular folk culture. Edwards claims that the play is, “a bagful of folk-tales, individually and collectively beyond the bounds of credibility. The blithe way in which Peele has airily piled folk-tale on top of folk-tale quadruples the absurdity of the story”.32 This absurdity supports a reading of the text which prioritises the parodic, satirical, and farcical tone (as opposed to one of “delicate, dream-like insubstantiality and fairy-tale-like enchantment”33 ) and the target for this satire is the popularity of contemporary romantic dramas, which themselves are formulaic composites of popular romantic and folktale narratives. Peele’s text is deliberately and relentlessly intertextual, and we can suppose a contemporary audience would find pleasure in recognising elements of known narratives, as well as in the chaotic conflation and confusion of the same. While Shakespeare’s text clearly manages the coherence between narratives from contrasting, and sometimes jarring, systems with more sophistication, it is tempting to see Peele’s play forming part of The Winter’s Tale’s intertextual milieu. The events of The Winter’s Tale are as fantastic as those of the preceding play, both texts are concerned with the telling of tales, and the deviation or adherence to formulaic narrative structure provides space to generate meaning.

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The effect of the narration of events in The Winter’s Tale as tales in themselves, as focused upon by Edwards, adds to the fantastic tone typical of Shakespeare’s Romances, and draws attention to the role of tales and tale-telling throughout the text. As such, the fundamental issues raised by such intertexts, such as mortality, seasonal cycles, redemption, sacrifice and resurrection, are highlighted through implicit audience recognition of narrative motifs. Lamb claims that the effect of the intertextual references to folktales highlights their cultural endurance and performance: “The uses of old wives’ tales in these works by a canonical author suggests the continuing power of this experience, rendered all the more powerful by the cultural pressures to forget it” and raises the concept of the “afterlife of abandoned symbols”.34 The pressure to forget the narratives learnt in childhood in favour of ideologically prioritised classical learning is resisted through this cultural retention and the ongoing lack of demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ discourses in the period. The particularly feminised sphere of tale-telling is also given increased authority in Shakespeare’s text as the female voices wrestle control of the narrative conclusion from the misguided patriarchal violence of Leontes. Peele’s wider project, in contrast, perhaps takes these narratives less seriously; the confusion of tales in his play is intentionally chaotic, parodic, and arguably intended to draw attention to a perceived lack of importance of such narrative systems (and, implicitly, their stereotypically elderly, female tellers), rather than promote their status as fundamental to contemporary culture and concerns. Folktales and folk culture are also roundly rejected via their presence and intertextual relationship to, in particular, The Old Wife’s Tale, in Milton’s much later story of lost siblings and forest magicians, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (Comus ). This is via another intertext, The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypol , which was acted by the Children of St. Paul’s before 1600, and which contains some identical plot elements. Critical assessment of Milton’s masque has focused variously on its allegory, its status as a masque, and its philosophical and theological import, but also on the masque’s context. The latter focuses on two aspects: firstly, the potential to read the masque as a response to the recent scandal involving the Earl of Bridgewater’s extended family, and secondly, in relation to Milton’s Puritanism and parliamentarian ideals.35 Comus’ intertextual referents include Peele’s Sacrapant, as the lost and separated siblings of Comus recall those of The Old Wife’s Tale. The attendant spirit could also be compared to Jack, the attending spirit to

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Eumenides. Don Cameron Allen also identifies Peele’s version of the Child Roland legend, Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of Sabrina, and works by Ariosto, Trissino, and Tasso as intertexts (without using that term).36 The folktale and, importantly, folk-culture, elements of Comus manifest in various ways. The threatening forest setting, the presence of magic, the motif of things lost and found, the three tasks set the brothers in order to recover their sister, the set of three siblings: all are potential indicators of folkloric intertexts. The celebratory conclusion is also marked by a performance of “country dancers” (s.d.). More specifically, Comus’ description of the rural nocturnal setting includes imagining “pert fairies and dapper elves” (118) dancing as the ocean moves under lunar influence like a “wavering morris” dance (116) and his recollection of observing the two brothers as “I took it for a fairy vision / Of some gay creatures of the element / That in the colours of the rainbow live” (298–300). Comus’ habitual and positive reference to folklore and folk culture in his descriptive language is countered by the Lady’s fearful avoidance of the “riot, and ill managed merriment”, that she sees as part of folk celebration, as exhibited by “the jocund flute, or gamesome pipe … the rudeness, and swilled insolence / Of such late wassailers” (172–79) and her brother’s negative associations and opposition of folkloric creatures to virtue: Some say no evil thing that walks by night In fog, in fire, by lake, or Moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost, That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o’er true virginity. (432–37)

The “fire” referred to here is the will o’ the wisp that hangs over marshes, the latter location also indicated by “Moorish fen”. Blue is “the colour of plagues and things hurtful”37 and the ghost who refuses to remain buried here, unlike the benign and helpful ghost Jack of The Old Wife’s Tale, is to be feared. Such a folkloric subtext is combined with classical reference (as in Peele and Shakespeare’s texts) which furthers the thematic drive of the text: Comus is the son of Circe and Bacchus and similarly turns people into animal-headed revellers “To roll in pleasure in a sensual sty” (77).38 The “haemony” is arguably derived from ‘moly’, the magical herb given

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to Odysseus by Hermes to protect him from Circe’s magic. Brown describes Circe as “the most common of all Renaissance figures for seductive intemperance” and identifies that Comus’ name “is the usual Latin transliteration of k¯ omos, the Greek word for revelry”.39 The Lady’s chastity protects her from this chaotic, revelling, bestial horde, and the lengthy debate between the Lady and Comus about the relative value and strength of virtue is the apex of the masque’s thematic drive. The triumph of virtue over vice, common in masques, is articulated via “commonplaces familiar to any educated person in Milton’s time”.40 Also familiar to many persons of the time would have been the aforementioned scandal concerning the sister-in-law of the Earl of Bridgewater, whose promotion to Lord President of the Welsh Marches the masque was originally written to celebrate. The trial and execution of the Earl of Castlehaven for facilitating rape (of his wife Anne Stanley, Frances Egerton’s sister, and his step-daughter) and sodomy in 1631 provides a disturbing pretext for elements of the masque. Rosemary Karmelich Mundhenk emphasises the specificity of the generation of the text and claims “the deliverance of the entire family from the embarrassment of the recent scandal” was an overt secondary cause for celebration.41 As Mundhenk suggests: Milton’s heralding of the ascendancy of disciplined virtue over godless passion may be seen as an attempt to lay the scandal of Castlehaven’s sexual perversions and assuage the suffering of the … family. The masque’s “didactic” themes of chastity and incontinence, reason and passion, order and disorder were particularly suitable to the celebration of a family who had recently endured the Castlehaven scandal.42

As such, the sexual threat of Comus to the Lady (played by fifteen-yearold Lady Alice) can be read as akin to the sexual threat Lord Castlehaven enacted against Lady Alice’s aunt and cousin and is paradoxically and implicitly aligned with both folk culture and Caroline court culture. The masque is itself a form based on folk culture, with roots in mumming.43 As Cheryl Rogers Resetarits writes, “The masque grew slowly from an amalgam of various medieval traditions: mummer’s pageants, folk games, morris dancers, the liturgical cycles and mysteries, ‘triumphs’, ballets, etc.”44 While Resetarits sees Milton’s masque as rejuvenating a slightly unfashionable genre with charming fairy tale elements, I suggest that the masque had developed sufficiently beyond its roots

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in folk culture to be, according to Milton’s intellectual positioning, set in opposition to this origin in ‘low’ culture and to reject it. Further, as the plaything of royal courts and tool for flattery and excess, Milton’s appropriation of the masque form is less in line with its origins and more in keeping with his politics. In terms of the text’s immediate context, David Bevington and Peter Holbrook describe Comus as “a reformed masque reflecting Puritan religious and political sensibilities”.45 J. Andrew Hubbell, Michael Wilding and Barbara K. Lewalski agree, noting how the masque aligns Comus with the royal court, and, implicitly, Catholicism, with the Lady demonstrating the self-control and virtuous piety promoted by Puritans.46 For example, Comus’ potentially phallic charming rod can also be compared to the monarchical sceptre, and his magical ‘glass’ to the ball.47 Furthermore, and identifying Milton’s layering of signifier upon signifier, Hubbell writes that “Comus administers the sacrament with his enchanted glass [which is] an obvious parody of the communion cup”.48 The significance of such divisions in an arguably radical reinterpretation of an art form usually deployed to showcase absolutist power and privilege to folkloric intertexts is that these are also allied with Comus. As Wilding identifies, referring to Comus’ figurative language cited above: The morris dancing and ‘merry wakes’ (a ‘wake’ was originally the vigil or feast of a patron saint) were the focus of religious, social, and political controversy. Denounced by Puritan clergy as pagan and papist survivals, the traditional sports and poastimes were promoted by James I in his Declaration of Sports in 1618. Charles I reasserted the Declaration in 1633.49

Comus’ celebration of folk-culture traditions, such as the morris and “merry wakes and pastimes” (121), associates him with Stuart policy, “appealing to all that was unregenerate, undisciplined, and popish in men”.50 Indeed, the Lady’s response to hearing the revelling in the woods is full of images of wanton, drunk dancing, Pan (“In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan”, 176), riot and civil disobedience (172), and phallic imagery (“the gamesome pipe”, 174). As Lewalski expands: Puritans denounced both court festivities and country sports on religious grounds: they regarded masques, maypoles and morrises as palpable occasions of sin and the Sunday sports as profanations of the Sabbath. Also, many saw connections between Queen Henrietta’s court entertainments,

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with their sophisticated pastoralism and Neoplatonism, and her Roman Catholicism.51

This amalgamation of licentious and, it is argued, effeminising, courtly behaviour, suspiciously papist sensibilities, and riotous and immoral public holidays and customs also surfaces in Comus in relation to the development of court entertainment. Enid Welsford notes the history of wearing masks in court entertainments as beginning in the midfourteenth century, in the reign of Edward III, with the introduction of both face masks and whole animal-head masks.52 Comus’ animal-headed retinue, of beastly and sensual individuals, is thereby further confirmed as an allegory for the immoral Cavalier court. Lewalski terms the antagonism between the Puritan denunciation of wayward folk culture and the royal promotion of such as “culture wars”, stressing that Charles’ reissue of his father’s Book of Sports in 1633 was partly in direct response to extreme Puritan condemnations of such ‘sports’ in print.53 We can place Milton’s approach to folklore and folk culture within this literary and artistic struggle for supremacy and visibility. As described earlier in the chapter, folktales are often derided as material only fit for preschool children and peasant class old women, and oral culture comparably denigrated in comparison with the written word. By aligning the allegedly corrupt, sinful and papist court with folklore and folk custom, Milton is reiterating the division between legitimate and inferior texts by stressing a hierarchical relationship between the intertexts he combines. While it could be argued that the performers of the masque (the young Egertons, aged nine, eleven, and fifteen) bring a youthful focus on fairy tales in a positive sense into play in Comus , as breeched aristocratic boys and a girl old enough to be married, it is also possible that their roles in the masque act to reject such childish (royalist, papist?) things in preference of higher, more mature intellectual and spiritual concerns. Various critical readings of Comus outline the masque’s implicit triumph and celebration of the poet figure both within the text and in relation to the contexts outlined above. The figure of the poet, possibly in contrast to the poetry of seduction produced by courtly cavalier poets, is one of ultimate control and virtuous improvement. Milton’s bold refocusing of the masque as a tool for the promotion of spiritual improvement and salvation as demonstrated by the moderate aristocratic family actively

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breaks off both the genre’s roots in folk culture and its elevation into courtly pastime and pleasure. The masque: enacts the poet’s educative role as it locates virtue in, and teaches virtue to, a worthy noble family, and then to a wider reading audience. It puts on display the sound education and virtue of the young Egertons, implying that the moral health of the nation depends upon the formation of such young aristocrats, not upon the suspect court reformation promoted by the Queen.54

The utilisation of the nymph Sabrina also anchors spiritual virtue and triumph in a particularly nationalist setting. This could be read as an attempt to establish a national focus apart from the domestic folklore and folktale implicitly rejected, one more in line with the wider aims of both the text and Milton. Sabrina is a symbol of both English and Welsh patriotism: as the daughter of Locrine, the myth of Britain as the new Troy is invoked; as the self-sacrificing tragic virgin, her divinity established. Furthermore, Sabrina herself is described by the Attendant Spirit as a benevolent healer of those afflicted by folkloric spirits. She helps “all urchin blasts, and ill-luck signs / That the shrewd meddling elf delights to make, / Which she with precious vialed liquors heals” (845– 47). The “urchin blasts” are wounds or illnesses caused by goblins, whilst the “meddling elf” could be general and plural, or a specific reference to Comus. Sabrina frees the Lady, demonstrating again the triumph of virtue over Comus’ revelry; of classical learning over folk culture. Thereby Milton’s lost Lady, like her intertextual echoes, Shakespeare’s Perdita and Peele’s Delia, is saved both literally and spiritually. Milton’s rejection of the folkloric intertexts recasts this narrative of the lost daughter as less of an archetypal narrative function, potentially connected to seasonal renewal, and instead as a purely spiritual and literate process. But his rejection does not undermine the validity of approaching a text via its intertexts, indeed, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand the folkloric elements of Comus in order to perceive how and why that text distances its aims from them. Milton’s use of the intertexts supports the assertion that texts are produced by discursive systems as illustrated in the analysis of The Winter’s Tale and The Old Wife’s Tale: meaning is generated by the interplay and interdependence of intertextual elements. In this case, those folkloric intertexts rest on shared cultural memory and property. Resolutely intertextual themselves, their familiarity and place in the

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formation of cultural narrative and meaning offers rich exemplar in assessment of their intertextual function, and, ultimately, of their perceived place in the historical and cultural milieu.

Notes 1. Valerie Wayne, discussing Romance narratives: “Romancing the Wager: Cymbeline’s Intertexts,” in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (London: Routledge, 2009), 163–87 (163). 2. Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 9–10 (cited in part by Wayne, “Romancing the Wager,” 164). 3. See, for example, Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1981); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Tim Harris, “The Problem of Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London,” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 43–58; Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312. 4. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. 5. Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), cited by Fox, Oral and Literate, 10, my emphasis. 6. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000), 277. 7. Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2000), 2–3. See Plato Leges 887D; cf. Respublica 377B. Reginald Scot accordingly includes classical mythology in his category of ‘old wives’ tales’: devoid of any merit or purpose beyond frightening children. 8. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Old Wives Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection,” Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 28. 9. Lamb, “Old Wives,” 29: “it would have been in their withdrawal from this intimate space of childhood to learn Latin from a schoolmaster that boys most directly encountered powerful binaries structuring early modern gender as inflected by social status: nurses vs. Schoolmasters, androgynous childhood vs. Masculine youth, vernacular vs. Latin, old wives tales vs. Classical myths.” 29. 10. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “The Source of Romance, the Generation of Story, and the Pattern of Pericles Tales,” in Staging Early Modern

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (London: Routledge, 2009), 21–46 (22). Catherine Belsey, Why Shakespeare? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x. Charlotte Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources (Newark: University of Delaware, 2015), 1–2. Belsey, Why Shakespeare?, 36. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: 1584), 194. See also Belsey: “The fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream derive characteristics from Spenser and Lyly, from medieval narrative and Chaucer. And in their construction, the sophisticated Latin poetry of Ovid meets vernacular fireside tales to compose a fairy land … In 1594 Thomas Nashe affirmed the figures of pagan mythology were no more than English spirits under Greek names … the classical satyrs, pans, fauns, tritons, centaurs and nymphs mingle apparently at random with native figures from the oral tradition. In the popular chapbook, Richard Johnson’s fairy queen assists at the birth of Tom Thumb, accompanied by ‘her attendants, the elves and dryads’.” Why Shakespeare?, 95. See the work of Arne-Thompson and Vladimir Propp. Amusingly, Anderson cites Thomas Nashe on the “fatuous pedantry and triviality of fairytale research”: “O, tis a precious apothegmatical Pedant, who will find matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first invention of Fy, fa fum, I smell the bloud of an Englishman”, and writes: “I presume to carry that pedantry a stage further by citing a similar sentiment a millennium and a half earlier by Quintilian: ‘Nam qui omnes etiam indignas lectione scidas excutit, anilibus quoque fabulis accommodare operam potest ’ (‘For the person who investigates every single page, even if it is not worth reading – such a person is capable of giving his time and trouble to the investigation of old wives’ tales’)” (1.8.19). Anderson, Fairytale, 172. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenon, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), 7. Belsey, Why Shakespeare?, xi. Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, 1. K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck (London: Routledge, 1959), 52. The strangest manifestation here is that the alleged source for Measure for Measure has been named by folklorists after the play (ATU985**). See Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, 144. Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, 14. Artese, Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources, 51–78. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives Tales,” in Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, ed. Lamb and Valerie Wayne (London: Routledge, 2009), 123–42 (126–27). Lamb

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

stresses the dismissive references to this imagined scene, as Lady Macbeth compares Macbeth’s “flaws and starts” to those of “a woman’s story at a winter’s fire / Authorized by her grandam” (3.4.60–63). Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), 2.1.33. Further references in parentheses. Lamb, “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors,” 128. Lamb, “Old Wives,” 38. Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies,” 284. Lamb, “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors,” 128. Philip Edwards, “‘Seeing Is Believing’: Action and Narration in The Old Wives Tale and The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 79. Peele, The Old Wife’s Tale, ed. Charles Whitworth (London: New Mermaids, 1996), 81. Further references in parentheses. Peele, Old Wife, “Ay, the fairest for white and the purest for red, as the blood of the deer or the driven snow” (148); “Fair maiden, white and red” (620); “a lady as white as snow and as red as blood?” (692). See also 118–22 for narrative conflation and confusion. Edwards, “‘Seeing Is Believing’,” 83. Whitworth, “Introduction,” xxiii. Lamb, “Old Wives,” 39–40. See, for example, Rosemary Karmelich Mundhenk, “Dark Scandal and the Sun-Clad Power of Chastity: The Historical Milieu of Milton’s Comus ,” Studies in English Literature 1600–1900 15 (1975): 141–52; Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); J. Andrew Hubbell, “Comus : Milton’s Re-formation of the Masque,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruit McColgan (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 193–205; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. Bevington and Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 296–320. Don Cameron Allen, “Comus as a Failure in Aristic Compromise,” ELH 16 (1949): 112–13. Enid Welsford also claims Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue as key, in Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry and the Revels (1927) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 314–15. OED, n./adj. 7a. This also recalls Bottom’s sylvan transformation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Comus’ reference to his victims’ “brutish form of wolf, or

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39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

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bear, / Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat” (70–71) paraphrases Oberon’s imagined animal candidates for Titania’s enchanted affections. Cedric C. Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 38. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, John Milton: A Reader’s Guide to His Poetry (London: Thames & Hudson, 1964), 78. Rosemary Karmelich Mundhenk, “Dark Scandal and the Sun-Clad Power of Chastity: The Historical Milieu of Milton’s Comus ,” Studies in English Literature 1600–1900 15 (1975): 143. Mundhenk, “Dark Scandal,” 143. See Welsford, The Court Masque; and Cheryl Rogers Resetarits, “The Fairy-Tale Elements of Milton’s Comus ” Fabula 47 (2006): 79–89. Resetarits, “Fairy-tale Elements,” 79. Bevington and Holbrook, Politics, 15. See Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); J. Andrew Hubbell, “Comus: Milton’s Re-formation of the Masque,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruit McColgan (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 193–205; Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing,” in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 296–320. Wilding, in Dragon’s Teeth, possibly a little tenuously, and generously, compares the rod to a Maypole. See Hubbell regarding the ball and sceptre, Comus, 196. Hubbell, Comus, 197. Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth, 40. Christopher Hill, cited by Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth, 41. Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus ,” 297. Lewalski goes on to elaborate on Queen Henrietta’s worrying Catholic influence, citing her private masses, the religious rituals present in various masques, and the conversion of many of her noblewomen. Welsford, Court Masque, 42. Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus ,” throughout, and 302. The leading example is William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1632), which condemns, amongst other things, stage plays, masques, masque dancing, maypoles, rural festivals, and stained glass windows. Lewalski, “Milton’s Comus ,” 307.

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Bibliography Adams, Charles S. “The Tales in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale.” Midwest Folklore 13 (1962): 13–20. Anderson, Graham. Fairytale in the Ancient World. London: Routledge, 2000. Ardolino, Frank. “The Protestant Context of George Peele’s ‘Pleasant Conceited’ OWT .” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 18 (2005): 146–65. Artese, Charlotte. Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015. Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Bevington, David, ed. George Peele. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Bevington, David, and Peter Holbrook, ed. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Birge Vitz, Evelyn. Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Bradbrook, M. C. “Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale: A Play of Enchantment.” English Studies 43 (1962): 323–30. Briggs, K. M. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge, 1959. Brown, Cedric C. John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Cameron Allen, Don. “Comus as a Failure in Artistic Compromise.” ELH 16 (1949): 104–19. Cope, Jackson I. “Peele’s Old Wives Tale: Folk Stuff in Ritual Form.” ELH 49 (1982): 326–38. Cox, John D. “Homely Matter and Multiple Plots in Peele’s Old Wives Tale.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 20 (1978): 330–46. Edwards, Philip. “‘Seeing Is Believing’: Action and Narration in The Old Wives Tale and The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann, 79–93. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Fletcher, Angus. The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus. London: Cornell University Press, 1971. Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel. London: Routledge, 1981. Harris, Tim. “The Problem of Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London.” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 43–58. Harvey, Elizabeth D. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts. London: Routledge, 1992. Hubbell, J. Andrew. “Comus: Milton’s Re-formation of the Masque.” In Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, edited by Charles

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W. Durham and Kristin Pruit McColgan, 193–205. London: Associated University Presses, 1994. Karmelich Mundhenk, Rosemary. “Dark Scandal and the Sun-Clad Power of Chastity: The Historical Milieu of Milton’s Comus.” Studies in English Literature 1600–1900 15 (1975): 141–52. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practises and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Old Wives’ Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection.” Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 28–43. Lamb, Mary Ellen, and Valerie Wayne, ed. Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 2009. Lewalski, Barbara K. “Milton’s Comus and the Politics of Masquing.” In The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, edited by David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, 296–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Marx, Joan C. “‘Soft, Who Have We Here?’: The Dramatic Technique of The Old Wives Tale.” Renaissance Drama 12 (1981): 117–43. Milton, John. Comus (A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle). London: 1634. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. John Milton: A Reader’s Guide to His Poetry. London: Thames & Hudson, 1964. Peele, George. The Old Wife’s Tale. Edited by Charles Whitworth. London: New Mermaids, 1996. Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Rimmon-Kenon, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983. Rogers Resetarits, Cheryl. “The Fairy-Tale Elements of Milton’s Comus.” Fabula 47 (2006): 79–89. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. London: 1584. Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009. Stallybrass, Peter, and White, Allon. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Swann, Marjorie. “The Politics of Fairy Lore in Early Modern English Literature.” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 449–73. Viguers, Susan T. “The Hearth and the Cell: Art in The Old Wives Tale.” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 209–21. Welsford, Enid. The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry & the Revels (1927). New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. White Latham, Minor. The Elizabethan Fairies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Wilding, Michael. Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

CHAPTER 4

Parody and Intertextuality: The Ovidian Epyllia

Abstract Parody only functions successfully if the parodic text’s audience is aware of what is being parodied. Thus, the intertextual relationship is paramount, as is the audience’s role in the creation of meaning (as argued in post-structuralist and intertextual theory, especially by Barthes). This is explored in this chapter via the analysis of the epyllia (erotic, comic, narrative poems on mythological subjects). It covers the theoretical understanding of parody and the close relationship between parody and intertextuality. Analysis of various epyllia demonstrates how an intertextual approach is crucial to understanding the production and consumption of these texts, and how the genre itself works as a system of meaning which is endlessly self-referential and parodic, as well as heavily invested in rejecting previous Petrarchan literary conventions. Keywords Intertextuality · Parody · Epyllia · Adonis · Glaucus · Salmacis

Part of this chapter has been previously published as “Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia,” in Ovid and Masculinity in the Renaissance, ed. Goran Stanivukovic and John Garrison (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7_4

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The Ovidian epyllia are intensely intertextual, containing transpositions of Ovid’s narratives, wider mythology, and, crucially, persistent references to and echoes of comparable texts within the genre. The genre’s common tropes rest on the ethos of creative imitation to the extent where this constitutes a multi-dimensional and multi-textual practice; they are simultaneously creative imitations of Ovid and of each other. Parody is also intertextual because it presupposes knowledge of existing texts, genres, and discourses in order to generate the desired, usually humorous, effect. This chapter will argue that the epyllia as a genre exemplify both the dynamic relationship of intertextuality and parody, and that intertextuality and parody are crucial to understanding the Ovidian epyllia. It will assert that the epyllia are highly intertextual parodies of classical mythological narratives, Petrarchan literary conventions, and gender expectations, and will focus on Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1592), Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), and Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602). Parody is, by definition, intertextual because the genre relies for its effect on allusions made to previous texts, concepts, genres, etc. A reference to another, albeit often closely related, signifying system is presented with an awareness of the difference in meaning that this generates. Thereby, familiar signifiers point simultaneously to the subject of the parody, the equivalent texts (and their own intertexts), and to competing discourses understood as superior or preferable. Often this is achieved through hyperbole, overt ridicule, and ironic tone, all to humorous effect. Julia Kristeva, considering Mikhail Bakhtin’s categories of words in narrative in her wider development of the theory of intertextuality, refers to parody as a category of ambivalent words, “the result of a joining of two sign-systems” as “the writer can use another’s word, giving it a new meaning whilst retaining the meaning it already had”.1 In parody specifically, Kristeva asserts that the secondary signification is “opposed to that of another’s word”,2 a concept that will be returned to shortly. Scholars of parody are at pains to assert that parody is more than one of a multitude of forms of intertextuality and that it crucially precedes the theory of intertextuality by some millennia.3 As Margaret A. Rose states, “Many others since have taken up the term intertextuality and applied it back to parody without commenting on the fact that it was largely from the analysis of parody works that the concept had been derived in the first place”.4 We can suggest, however, that all parody is intertextual but

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that clearly not all intertextuality is parodic. There are some thoughtprovoking definitions to consider here in relation to this specific focus on epyllia. Aristotle describes a parodia as a narrative poem “in the metre and vocabulary of epic poems, but treating a light, satirical, or mock heroic subject”.5 Later Greek and Roman writers, continues Simon Dentith, also “use the term and its grammatical cognates to refer to a more widespread practice of quotation, not necessarily humorous, in which writers and speakers introduce allusions to previous texts. Indeed, this is a more frequent use of the term”.6 Such origins and definitions both foreground the potentially parodic status of the epyllia and the intertextual nature of parody. Elements to stress in the definition of parody include the distinction of parody from satire or travesty, which Dentith explains as: “the textual transformation which it [parody] performs is done in a playful rather than a satirical manner”.7 Linda Hutcheon furthers this understanding of parody’s playful nature by pointing out that the “textual or discursive nature of parody (as opposed to satire) is clear from the odos part of the word, meaning song”.8 Accordingly, Rose argues that the prime feature of parody “is the establishment in the parody of comic discrepancy or incongruity between the original work and its ‘imitation’ and transformation”.9 Rose traces the relationship between Kristeva’s formation of intertextual theory from her work on the Russian formalists’ and Bakhtin’s analyses of polyphonic, comic, parodic texts, but via Kristeva’s inclusion of Kafka as such identifies that, ironically, such theory “has come to be used to ignore the parodic and comic character of those texts”.10 Indeed, Kristeva dismisses parody in relation to the carnivalesque as the latter is “no more comic than tragic; it is both at once … it is serious ”.11 The positioning of the parodic text to its inspiring text(s) is also important. As cited previously, Kristeva suggests that in parody the secondary signification is “opposed to that of another’s word”, and accordingly Hutcheon obliges with the etymology of the term further: The prefix para has two meanings, only one of which is usually mentioned – that of ‘counter’ or ‘against’. Thus parody becomes an opposition or contrast between texts. This is presumably the formal starting point for the definition’s customary pragmatic component of ridicule: one text is set against another with the intent of mocking or making it ludicrous. The OED calls parody:

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A composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and phrase in an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous, especially by applying them to ludicrously inappropriate subjects; an imitation of a work more or less closely modelled on the original, but so turned as to produce a ridiculous effect.12

Opposition between signifying systems sets up a neat adversarial arrangement, but this does not comply with the playful and comic nature of parody stressed by various critics. As Hutcheon continues, “para in Greek can also mean ‘beside’, and therefore there is a suggestion of an accord or intimacy instead of a contrast”.13 This “accord” and aforementioned “discursive” nature of parody is exemplified in the Ovidian epyllia. Evidently, discussions of parody both explicitly and implicitly rest on its intertextual nature. Dentith identifies that parodic “discursive interactions are characterised by the imitation and repetition, derisive or otherwise, of another’s words”; “parody is one of the many forms of intertextual allusion out of which texts are produced” and that “In this sense, parody forms part of a range of cultural practices, which allude, with deliberate evaluative intonation, to precursor texts”, and “includes any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice”.14 Parody depends on the recognition of another’s words and precursor texts for its effect and Hutcheon, citing Michael Riffatere and Roland Barthes, accordingly stresses the active role of the reader in parody: writers of parody “rely on the competence of the reader (viewer, listener) of the parody”; and the crucial element of intent.15 Furthermore, Hutcheon introduces the concept that in some structuralist theory parody is positioned as a relatively limited, or finite, form of intertextuality, heavily dependent on the readers’ ability to make connections: Parody would obviously be an extreme case of this [Riffaterre’s conception of intertextuality as decoding texts in the light of other texts], because its constraints are deliberate and, indeed, necessary to its comprehension. But, in addition to this extra restricting of the intertextual relationship between decoder and text, parody demands that the semiotic competence and intentionality of an inferred encoder be posited.16

As Hutcheon continues, Bakhtin himself denotes parody as “passive”, because he sees the author of the parody using the discourse of another to

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facilitate their own.17 While this suggests a rather finite and linear form of intertextuality which contradicts post-structuralist assertions of the ever expanding and infinite web of signification, in that the parodic text X could be said to be a parody of text Y, this is not the case, certainly not in relation to the epyllia. As Hutcheon concludes, “surely, parody can be considered more active than passive if we move away from purely structural categories”.18 The wealth of cultural conveyance, literary and genre traditions and precursors of any text, of any type, ensures this transaction is never this straightforward. Further, the epyllia’s consciously and incestuously intertextual nature, and their obsessive parodying of a range of related targets, proves unlimited potential in a way that is specifically early modern. The essentially playful nature of parody is clear in a rare example of the early modern understanding of parody, as Rose identifies: “Ben Jonson’s use of it in Act V, scene v of his Every Man in his Humour [1598] to describe an imitation of popular verses which made them more ‘absurd’ than they were (‘A Parodie! A parodie! With a kind of miraculous gift to make it absurder than it was’)”.19 In relation to what early modern writers are utilising parody for, Dentith writes: Certainly … ‘imitation’, is widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury writing; in this form, a revered classical model is imitated and updated, and thus given a particular contemporary force. If this is one of the principal forms in which a belated culture manages its relationship to its cultural predecessors, it can be contrasted to the contemporary world. Where a more polemical relation to the cultural past often expresses itself in the practice of ‘writing back’: the canonic texts of the past are scrutinised, challenged, and parodied in the name of the subject positions (of class, race, or gender) which they are seen to exclude. In both these periods, then, parody and its related forms are widespread, though the particular polemical direct that these forms adopt differs widely.20

Such “answering back”21 serves as an opportunity to refute, praise or perpetuate contemporary discourses, whether specifically (i.e. a text or genre) or generally. Interestingly, John Florio defines parody in 1598 as “a turning of a verse by altering some words”; the “turn” here conveying this (inter)textual response back to a precursor text (or texts).22 Jim Ellis writes that “Like any genre, the epyllion exists in relation to literary systems that extend both synchronically and diachronically, although the epyllion is unusual in the extent to which its connections

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to other genres are central to its functioning”.23 This is the language of intertextuality. Ellis highlights reading the genre as a response to the previous centuries’ Christianising and moralising of Ovid and in response to the contemporary fashion for Petrarchan poetry, and we can add to this a response to other poems in the genre,24 to contemporary social structures and to conventional artistic expressions or textual constructions of desire, sexuality, and gender. Such responses constitute an “answering back”, and this playful insolence or resistance to precursor texts also manifests in the ironic tone, humour, and parodic nature of the epyllia. The epyllia are as William Keach puts it, characterised by an “ironic literary self-consciousness”,25 as well as exemplifying some of the aforementioned considerations of parody such as Aristotle’s characterisation of mock-epic narrative poems and Rose’s focus on parody “of comic discrepancy or incongruity between the original work and its ‘imitation’ and transformation”.26 This is arguably what the epyllia exploit and capitalise upon. The subversive potential of parody is that it “typically attacks the official word, mocks the pretensions of authoritative discourse, and undermines the seriousness with which subordinates should approach the justifications of their betters”.27 The epyllia certainly “answer back” to the moralised Ovid and Petrarchan tradition of the previous generations, though in doing so the lessons therein are slippery, and are not necessarily revolutionary. Despite some indications otherwise, as suggested previously regarding parody and as discussed below, the epyllia do not promote a counter-cultural resistance to dominant ideologies of gender, sexuality, and power, in terms of rigid definitions of masculine behaviour, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. These ironic, erotic, and parodic texts ambiguously present non-normative modes of desire, tragic ends for characters that do and do not conform to expectation and culturally prescriptive and restrictive gendered behaviour compliant with normative social structures: “The poems are stories of sexual difference, sexual desire, and gender protocol … Within the poems characters are instructed on behaviour appropriate to their sex and sex itself, and are schooled in the differences that mark out male and female”.28 These are not, then, in the main texts which make a claim for radical repositioning regarding contemporary ideology. Many epyllia contain po-faced moral statements, delivered by their ironic narrators with tongues firmly in their cheeks, as well as invented aetiological narratives. For example, the death of Adonis is said to be

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the reason why “Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend” (1136), and Shakespeare’s rewriting of the myth serves to convey a particularly culturally specific argument concerning the individual’s duty to procreate. More specifically and pointedly, Marlowe offers an explanation as to why the Fates hate love and why scholars will always be impoverished and Beaumont outdoes his predecessors with a variety of lengthy, invented digressions conveying explanations of why roses are red (because beautiful Hermaphroditus touched them), and why Cupid is blind (because Venus took his eyes for Hermaphroditus). Such instances recall the moralising tradition of earlier receptions of Ovidian texts as well as the attempts to read classical mythology as essentially allegorical and as containing moral lessons and advice.29 However, the texts themselves occupy a position of ambiguity in relation to conservative social expectations. As argued elsewhere, the texts under consideration may present the reader with seductive nymphs, cautious young men, confused gender roles, sex changes, and titillating content, but arguably the texts ultimately uphold conventional cultural expectations in these subjects (such as heteronormativity, the prioritisation of homosociality, and misogyny), as well as presenting the rejection of outmoded literary forms as both fair game and approved by the educational establishment.30 The reception of mythology in the epyllia also demonstrates a parodic approach to the imagining of seductive approaches of gods and goddesses. This staple, and intertextual, event of classical texts is undermined in the epyllia which variously re-imagine the event as comedic, unsuccessful, dangerous, and undesirable. For example, Venus says she will “smother” Adonis with kisses (18), and the imagery of hunting and killing, as Venus is compared to a ravenous eagle “sharp by fast / Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste” (55– 57), reinforces the implicit danger, ultimately realised more obliquely in Adonis’s choice of hunting over love. Similarly, Neptune nearly drowns Leander with his amorous approach, and Leander’s naivety regarding Neptune’s interest (“You are deceav’d, I am no woman I” [676]) is exploited in order to elicit a wry smile on behalf of the more sophisticated reader. More comically, Venus’s hefty corporeal presence has been well commented on critically. Her strength (“Over one arm, the lusty courser’s rein; / Under the other was the tender boy,” [31–32]; “Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust, / And governed him in strength, though not in lust.” [41–42]), despite her supernatural weightlessness (“Witness this primrose bank wheren I lie: / These forceless

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flowers like sturdy trees support me. / Two strengthless doves will draw me through the sky,” [151–53]), is implicitly unattractive to Adonis, as well as amusing for the reader in parodying the physical prowess and presence of the divine. The emphasis on inequality here, in that Adonis is “under” and “governed” by Venus physically reinforces the discordance of the scene. Venus’s constraint of Adonis as he is “Forced to content” (61) “fastened in her arms” (68), and later compared to “A lily prisoned in a jail of snow” (362) leads him to be described multiple times as full of shame (36, 49, 69, 76, 379) and “sullen” as he “lours and frets” (75). The gender reversal in depicting a goddess attempting to seduce a mortal man as opposed to the usual model of a god targeting a mortal woman also aims to generate comedy from Venus’s frustration and the assumption that a female cannot rape a male. Beaumont’s retelling of his Ovidian narrative does not deviate from the original in presenting a reluctant youthful male and seductive immortal female, but the same frustration is evident in Salmacis. The very narrative of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as relayed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses operates against cultural expectations of sexual roles. Salmacis is passionate, assertive, and active whereas Hermaphroditus is naïve, demure, and resistant, and it is this contrast that Beaumont explores and exploits. Moreover, Beaumont supplements this inversion of stereotypes with invented surrounding material. Hermaphroditus, we are told, is constantly being pestered by women drawn to his beauty. He is persecuted by nymphs pulling out his hair, and stealing his clothes, and unwittingly attracts the chaste goddess Diana: So wondrous fair he was, that (as they say) Diana being hunting on a day, She saw the boy upon a green bank lay him, And there the virgin huntress meant to slay him; Because no nymphs would now pursue the chase, For all were struck blind with the wanton’s face. (19–24)

This conveys perhaps the danger of adult, powerful women to the beautiful youth, who is characterised as “wanton” based purely on the effect he has on others. The narrator continues, She bent her bow, and loosed it straight again: Then she began to chide her wanton eye, And fain would shoot, but durst not see him die.

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She turn’d and shot, but did of purpose miss him, She turn’d again, and did of purpose kiss him. Then the boy ran: for (some say) had he stayed, Diana had no longer been a maid. (28–36)

Diana cannot kill Hermaphroditus because of his beauty, which is of such strength that his ‘wantoness’ is infectious, seen in Diana’s uncharacteristically “wanton eye” and her compulsion to kiss him, but her approach and action are conditioned by her divine status as the dual deity of hunting and chastity, thus endangering the innocent mortal. However, it is not simply a matter of creating comedy out of the incongruous approach of the immortal to the mortal, emphasised in the narrator of Venus and Adonis ’s ironic and elegiac “She’s Love; she loves; and yet she is not loved” (610), and the imagining of just how awkward that could be in reality. By engaging with other extant cultural and literary conventions, the parody of mythological seduction in Venus and Adonis and Hermaphroditus and Salmacis in particular is deployed in order to generate commentary on gender roles, sexuality, and literary convention. Shakespeare’s text especially is an ironic exploration of accepted modes of expressing desire which subvert expectations through manipulation of myth, literary convention, and ideological anxieties. In addition, its dedication to Henry Wriothesley suggests it also conveys a (rather ambiguous) advisory stance concerning “the world’s hopeful expectation” (Dedication) surrounding Wriothesley’s apparent lack of interest in marriage. The accusations of narcissism and the well-rehearsed, and extremely literary and intertextual, procreation argument (what Adonis refers to Venus’s “over-handled theme”, 770) offer perhaps further parody of such advice freely directed at young men. Adonis’s death, and perfectly valid counter-argument concerning his youth, does suggest this text is not a straightforward supporter of Venus’s interpretation of circumstances. Venus’s assertive approach simultaneously demonstrates the tantalising spectacle of a beautiful boy, entrapped, blushing, and resisting (which we also ultimately find in Salmacis’s cephalopodic embrace), and the ironic comedy of gender reversal in seduction. The Petrarchan references of Venus and Adonis (discussed below) reinforce the allegedly comic spectacle of an amorous female being frustrated by male resistance, as well as demonstrating the inadequacy of Venus’s approach. In both Shakespeare’s and Beaumont’s texts, being compelled (though Venus does not seem to mind) to woo both eroticises the female character, in their forced

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descriptions of their own bodies and invitations to explore those bodies, and provides titillation for the reader in the provision of female characters who are quite literally begging for sexual interaction. As Salmacis says, “Wert thou a maid and I a man, I’ll shew thee / With what a manly boldness I would woo thee” (713–14) with the sexually explicit, “I would beg a touch, and then a kiss, / And then a lower yet a higher bliss” (719– 20). Hermaphroditus’s lack of response is presented as anomalous to his gender, as he doesn’t appear to want “That which all men of maidens ought to crave” (728). Accordingly, Venus’s erotic topography invites the reader, as much as Adonis, to “Graze on my lips, … Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. / … Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain, / Round rising hillocks” (233–36). Simultaneously, the homoerotic drive of the texts is generated via their shared focus on Adonis’s and Hermaphroditus’s beauty and the eroticisation, idolisation, and objectification of their bodies, for a readership dominated by males.31 This is also demonstrated, more explicitly, in Hero and Leander where the celebration and objectification of Leander’s naked body (in contrast to Hero’s elaborate, ridiculous, swaddling costume) are savoured by the narrator: His bodie was as straight as Circes wand, … Even as delicious meat is to the tast, So was his neck in touching, and surpast The white of Pelops shoulder, I could tell ye, How smooth his breast was, and how white his bellie, And whose immortall fingars did imprint, That heavenly path, with many a curious dint, That runs along his backe …. (61–69)

The confiding, gossipy tone of this extract increases the apparent veracity of the statement, as well as the sensuality of the description, which invites readers to imagine not just seeing Leander’s white body, but tasting it and touching it (with the fantastically evocative image of tracing the shape of Leander’s spine). This is augmented by the more conventional references to Leander’s hair and face and leads to the assertions that Leander’s presence can “melt” the “rudest paisant” (79), that “The barbarous Thratian soldier moov’d with nought, / Was moov’d with him, and for his favour sought” (81–82), and to the encounter with Neptune, who explores Leander’s body as he swims in the sea:

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At every stroke, betwixt them [Leander’s arms] he would slide, And steale a kisse … And as he turnd, cast many a lustfull glaunce, And dive into the water, and there prie Upon his brest, his thighs, and everie limb. (668–73)

Taken together, these examples encourage a reading embedded within a (literary) culture that prioritises the value and desirability of male over female. Evidently, Leander is an active and enthusiastic participant in his seduction of Hero, but in a culture that doesn’t limit sexual behaviour along the lines of hetero-/homosexual, the object of desire in Marlowe’s text (as Adonis is in Shakespeare’s, as Hermaphroditus is in Beaumont’s) is very definitely Leander, rather than Hero. Despite these examples, Ellis tends to read the epyllia as determinedly heterosexual, suggesting that “the epyllion invents, through its reinterpretation of Ovidian mythical narratives, a new version of heterosexuality”.32 This is qualified as more of a political relation than erotic, but sexual desire in the epyllia is more ambivalent and inclusive than this. In tandem, the implicit ridiculing of Venus speaks to an underlying misogyny that denigrates heterosexual interests in favour of the homosocial/sexual, more evidently expressed in Adonis’s preference for hunting with his friends over sexual dalliances with goddesses (“He tells her no, tomorrow he intends / To hunt the boar with certain of his friends” [587–88]; “‘I am,’ quoth he, ‘expected of my friends,’” [718]). This is also seen in Hermaphroditus’s continual fleeing from female attention, in contrast to his historic “dallying” with Phoebus, who also prefers young male company to female company (“Phoebus so doted on his roseate face, / That he hath oft stole closely from his place, / When he did lie by fair Leucothoe’s side, / To dally with him in the vales of Ide” [35–38]). Though the sexual implications of “dallying” are dubious, Phoebus’s mythological history details several sexual relationships with young boys. The undermining of Venus in Shakespeare’s text ranges from her comically hyperbolic response to Adonis’s sweaty hand, “The precedent of pith and livelihood / And trembling in her passion, calls it balm - / Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good” (25–27) to her “tedious” song (841), to her pretending to be dead, to the dubious comparison of Adonis as a “froward infant stilled with dandling” (562), which emphasises the imbalance of power and comparative ages of the protagonists, as well as conveying the preposterousness of the situation. Furthermore, Venus’s

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description of her own body and desirable assets also serves to perhaps reinforce negative depictions of ageing female flesh; her self-composed blazon begins with a list of potential defects: Were I hard-favoured, foul, or wrinkled-old, Ill-nurtured, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice, O’er-worn, despis`ed, rheumatic, and cold, Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice, Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee. (133–37)

Only after this negated list of undesirable female characteristics (ugliness, age, a malnourished and deformed body, bad tempered and shrewish [“harsh in voice”], being physically worn out, blind, and infertile) does Venus go on to stress her own lack of wrinkles, beauty, apparent youth, vigour, and fertility. Adonis also identifies Venus’s “abuse” of reason in her attempts to persuade him that it is natural and logical to engage in sexual relations with her: “You do it for increase – O strange excuse, / When reason is the bawd to lust’s abuse!” (791–92). The exclusion of women from the hallowed educational focus on rhetoric functions within this failure of Venus to persuade. Rhetoric, a skill evident of that education and mature masculinity (and a central component of legal training) surfaces repeatedly in the epyllia; in Leander’s maid-deceiving persuasion, for example (line 338), and in the many instances of attempted seduction. Notably, Venus’s attempted persuasion is not given the status of rhetoric. Her words are characterised by Adonis as dishonest, “bewitching”, “wanton”, like that of the legendary destructive, deceptive and monstrous mermaids, “false”, and invasive. As he claims, If love had lent you twenty thousand tongues, And every tongue more moving than your own, Bewitching like the wanton mermaid’s songs, Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown; For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear, And will not let a false sound enter there,

Lest the deceiving harmony should run Into the quiet closure of my breast, And then my little heart were quite undone,

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In his bedchamber to be barred of rest. No, lady, no. My heart longs not to groan, But soundly sleeps, while now it sleeps alone. (775–86)

Persuasion by a female is characterised here as deceptive and inappropriately forward, as implicitly opposed to the skilled, rhetorically impressive, educated persuasion of men. As suggested above, at the heart of Venus and Adonis ’s gender role reversal is Venus enacting the part, to an extent, of the Petrarchan lover, and Adonis’s definitive positioning as the resistant, chaste, beloved, “red for shame, but frosty in desire” (36). The implications of this, and the failure of Venus to persuade, are foreshadowed by an earlier epyllion which overtly parodies Petrarchanism as a literary mode. Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis of 1589 (credited with being the first epyllion) parodies Petrarchan self-pity, the dominant literary mode of the lover for the previous decade or so. The narrator of the text complains to the demigod Glaucus of his misfortune in love (which is soon trumped by Glaucus), and their discussion of the nature of love and the fickleness of women can be read as instructive for their supposed young male readers. However, as Nigel Alexander states, “The only person, according to the poem, really competent to give an account of ‘the course of all our plainings’ would be ‘he that hath seen’ the history of Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Procris, the pangs of Lucina and Angelica the fair. Lodge’s ideal spectator is one familiar not only with Ovid but also the Italian epic”.33 Therefore, Lodge’s ideal reader is one who is aware both of the texts referred to and the intertextual relationship between such texts in the literary construction of love, desire, and complaint. To have this awareness, the reader would, arguably, have to be a (male) product of a humanist education and be familiar with contemporary literature. The mockery of the rejected lover and his Petrarchan embodiment, and the parodying of such, is very clearly presented to the readers of Scillaes Metamorphosis ; initially intended to be Lodge’s male contemporaries and friends at the Inns of Court.34 In Scillaes Metamorphosis Glaucus ironically advises the narrator, and his readers, to: With secret eye looke on the earth a while, Regard the changes Nature forceth there; Behold the heauens, whose course all sence beguile; Respect thy selfe, and thou shalt find it cleere,

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That infantlike thou art become a youth, And youth forespent a wretched age ensu’th.

In searching then the schoolemens cunning noates, Of heauen, of earth, of flowers, of springing trees, Of hearbs, of mettall, and of Thetis floates, Of lawes and nurture kept among the Bees: Conclude and knowe times change by course of fate, Then mourne no more, but moane my haples state. (31–42)

The narrator/reader is advised not to spend his time in mourning over the responsibilities of becoming “a youth”, with the pressure of knowing that a youth “forespent”, i.e. wasted, “a wretched age ensu’th”. They are advised to observe Nature and the heavens, like good, rational men, and to consult “schoolemens cunning noates” in their education, safe in the knowledge that “times change by course of fate”. The urge to “respect thyself” is contrasted or undermined ironically by the end point of this sage advice, to instead bemoan Glaucus’s “haples state” in his lovesickness. Through the experience of the narrator and Glaucus, the reader also learns about the pains of unrequited love and the fickleness of women, as well as the pointlessness and unfashionable status of Petrarchan posturing. As Ellis writes, “While Petrarchan poetry contains within itself anti-Petrarchan sentiments, the epyllion tends to ignore this complexity and characterizes the Petrarchan poet as idealistic, self-deluded and immature”.35 The figure of Glaucus demonstrates the potential to overcome the trap of surrendering to the Petrarchan model, as well as the triumph of doing so. Glaucus and the narrator’s initial dejection parody Petrarchan convention as the male subject suffering from the unrequited love of a cruel yet idolised mistress, bemoaning their state, and writing love poetry about the experience. The narrator is “alone”, “full of grief”, “Weeping my wants and wailing scant relief, / Wringing mine arms” (1–4). Glaucus is comparably at the mercy of “cruel Silla”, and tells his story tearfully with his head on the narrator’s knee. As Ellis suggests, such Petrarchism in many epyllia is associated with immaturity. Glaucus’s cure leads him to, essentially, stop talking and start acting on alternative desires, and is “both sudden and hilariously phallic” as he rises up and “shakes his bushy crest” (550).36

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Lodge’s parody of Petrarchanism should not, however, be understood as conveying the didactic tendency found in earlier responses to classical writing (e.g. as in Thomas Peend’s extended Ovidian translation The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis of 1565). The epyllia are written by very young men themselves (Beaumont, for example, was all of eighteen when he completed Salmacis and Hermaphroditus ) for and about their social group. They mock the inexperienced and intellectually unfashionable, but this largely is the instructive mockery of a peer group (i.e. an eighteen year old advising a fifteen year old), not, as in the case of Peend, an authoritative older male moralising to his juniors. We could argue that Shakespeare’s position, as a social inferior to his addressee, here is potentially analogous (or potentially ambivalent). Femininity is, however, firmly ejected from Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis . The fate of Scilla in Lodge’s poem can be read as the revenge fantasy of a spurned lover. She is compelled to love Glaucus after he has been freed of his desire for her (both have been enchanted by Cupid) and consigned to torment in a cave.37 This is presented, by Lodge, as a moral tale: “With Scilla in the rockes to make your biding / A cursed plague, for womens proud back-sliding” (785–86). Ellis also highlights the amount of male weeping in the text, and that all the precedents that Glaucus gives of his lovesick situation are (weeping) females: “Glaucus’s Petrarchan rhetoric is thus implicitly connected with womanliness”, as is his emotional and verbal incontinence.38 This undesirable and immature state analogous to femininity is cast off, and the punishment of Scilla ultimately rejects the Petrarchan submission to the mistress and instead makes her suffer, the implication is, appropriate pain for her pride and refusal to love. The parody of the Petrarchan lover that we find in the text relies upon an intertextual recognition of those tropes and a clear prioritisation of an alternative model. Read through this lens, as a genre convention, Venus and Adonis similarly undermines Petrarchan poetic convention via a sustained inversion of its tropes. Adonis is obviously and overtly described in Petrarchan terms, as “Rose-cheeked” (3); “More white and red than doves or roses are” (10); “red for shame but frosty in desire” (36), demonstrating “crimson shame and anger ashy-pale” (76). Adonis’s “bashful shame” (49) leads to his refusal to reciprocate Venus’s sexual advances, and her accusations of him as “flint hearted” (95) and “obdurate, flinty, hard as steel” (199) are equally as Petrarchan as the figurative language describing his conventional beauty. The parody here of course

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is in the reversal of gender roles. The narrator of the text refers to “the maiden burning of his [Adonis’s] cheeks” (50), in a figurative association that both exploits the metaphor (Adonis’s blushes are like that of a maiden) and furthers the point about Adonis’s sexual inexperience (he is blushing because he is a ‘maiden’, or virgin) and effeminacy (blushing is an essentially feminine trait, especially in Petrarchan poetic convention). Adonis is clearly a desirable individual in the text, but his position, clearly, is not one to be desired for oneself. In addition, Venus’s approach and self-characterisation as the faithful, yet rejected Petrarchan lover, idolising Adonis through the conventional language cited above is also shown to fail. Therefore the parody that we find in the epyllia as a genre covers a range of targets, including the reception of classical texts, the tropes of such classical mythology, the conventions of early modes of writing about desire, and contemporary expectations of gender roles, courtship strategies, and objects of desire. As such these texts constitute dynamic interventions in cultural currency; the response to essentially the humanist education system (in the circulation of classical texts in all their forms) and the literary establishment, such as it was, encourages the writers of these texts to subvert and mock the previous iterations of received ideas in parodic discursive interactions, “characterised by the imitation and repetition, derisive or otherwise, of another’s words”, or narrative, or approach.39 In addition, and arguably as a result of the interests of the main body of writers and readers of epyllia, the focus on desire and seduction leads to explorations of gendered expectations. Cultural codes are thereby transmitted and perpetuated through a particularly intertextual and parodic genre, the epyllia. The narratives of the epyllia are recast via creative imitation to reinforce certain ideological norms concerning appropriate gendered courtship roles and power differentiation in sexual relationships (both with women and young men) of a masculine subject: “the genre attempts to install a new version of (literary) sexual relations”.40 These are expressed in playful, codified language in, usually, a coterie environment which parodies earlier conventions of literary expressions of desire in order to construct and assert an alternative model. The intertextual nature of the genre functions as part of a cultural milieu perpetuating the values expressed, and these are values that privileged men benefit from: homosocial cultural structures which place them in positions of agency and influence. All the above are discourses or ‘texts’

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highlighted and parodied in the epyllia. This is a compulsively intertextual genre, and one for which parody is essential. Understanding the dynamic relationship of intertextuality, its infinite signification, and parody is crucial to understanding the Ovidian epyllia, and to understanding parody itself. The exploration of intertextuality and parody in the epyllia can be utilised to demonstrate how infinite and unlimited parody can be. The parody of the epyllia is expansive and simultaneous, and reliant on its intertextual referents for effect. That effect, as outlined above, and in contrast to the focus on satire in the following chapter, is playful, which is not to say it is not also serious.

Notes 1. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 43–44. 2. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 44, my emphasis. 3. See, for example, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London: Methuen, 1985); Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). As Rose writes: “some modern and post modern theorists will be seen to have developed new criteria such as intertextuality from examples of general parody,” Parody, 2. 4. Rose, Parody, 185. 5. Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), 10. 6. Dentith, Parody, 10. 7. Dentith, Parody, 11, my emphasis. See Chapter 5 on satire and intertextuality. 8. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 32, my emphasis. 9. Rose, Parody, 37. 10. Rose, Parody, 178. “It is necessary to make this point not only because some other editors and commentators on Bakhtin since Kristeva have continued to underplay the role of parody in his theories – and have either left it out of their indices or misinterpreted it as negative, parasitic, or trivial – but because several other late-modern commentators on parodic intertextuality have reduced parody to the intertextual by denying or overlooking the comic aspects of parody.” Rose, Parody, 180. 11. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” 50. 12. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 32. 13. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 32. 14. Dentith, Parody, 2; 6; 9.

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15. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 19; 22. See the work of Genette, Michael Riffaterre and Roland Barthes on the role of the reader and authorial intent. 16. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 37. 17. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 22. See also Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 70–71. 18. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 22. 19. Rose, Parody, 10. The term is rare in early modern texts, with a search for the word on the LION database (not infallible, but a good indicator) in published texts between 1520 and 1650 only raising three instances: Jonson’s cited above, George Herbert’s “A Parodie”, and a translation of Aristotle. 20. Dentith, Parody, 29, my emphasis. 21. Dentith, Parody, 5. 22. John Florio, Worlde of Wordes, Or Most Copious and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (1598), cited by Rose, Parody, 10. 23. Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 5. 24. Examples of more ‘overt’ intertextuality include epyllia by Thomas Edwards, Michael Drayton, John Weever, Dunstan Gale, and Thomas Heywood being obviously heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593): Edwards’ Narcissus (1595) and his Cephalus and Procris (1595) are full of references to Venus and Adonis; Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594) is heavily indebted to Venus and Adonis. 25. William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), xv. 26. Rose, Parody, 37. 27. Dentith, Parody, 20. 28. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 6. 29. For example in the vast Ovid Moralisé (c. 1300). See Chapter 2 on Sir Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients. 30. See my “Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia,” in Ovid and Masculinity in the Renaissance and Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 31. See A. D. Cousins, “Towards a Reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Adonis: Rhetoric, Narcissus, and the Male Gaze,” Studia Neophilologica, 68.2 (1996): 195–204. 32. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 4. 33. Nigel Alexander, Elizabethan Narrative Verse, ed. Alexander (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 10.

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34. The poem is dedicated “To His Especiall good friend Master Rafe Crane, and the rest of his most entire well willers, the Gentlemen of the Innes of Court and of Chauncerie.” Lodge entered the Inns as a student in 1578 and stayed for seventeen years as a “gentleman in chambers”. 35. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 6. 36. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 57. 37. In the Ovidian version, she is of course transformed into a monster. 38. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 56. 39. Dentith, Parody, 2. 40. Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 7.

Bibliography Alexander, Nigel, ed. Elizabethan Narrative Verse. London: Edward Arnold, 1967. Beaumont, Francis. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. London: 1602. Carter, Sarah. Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Carter, Sarah. “Boys to Men: Fashioning Masculinity and Parody in the Ovidian Epyllia.” In Ovid and Masculinity in the Renaissance, edited by Goran Stanivukovic and John Garrison. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Cousins, A. D. “Towards a Reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Adonis: Rhetoric, Narcissus, and the Male Gaze.” Studia Neophilologica, 68.2 (1996): 195–204. Dentith, Simon. Parody. London: Routledge, 2000. Ellis, Jim. Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. London: Methuen, 1985. Keach, William. Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977. Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 34–61. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986. Lodge, Thomas. Scillaes Metamorphosis. London: 1589. Marlowe, Christopher. Hero and Leander. London: 1598. Peend, Thomas. The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis. London: 1565. Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Shakespeare, William. Venus and Adonis. London: 1592. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

CHAPTER 5

Intertextuality and Satire: Ben Jonson’s Poetaster

Abstract This chapter also focuses on a genre which requires an intertextual response from its audience in order to achieve its ends. Satire requires knowledge of the target of that satire, be that another literal text, a more expansive understanding of ‘text’ as discourse, belief, or idiom, or an individual. Jonson’s satirical play Poetaster is intensely intertextual, presenting Jonson’s ongoing feud with some of his contemporaries in a framework of the production of classical texts by classical writers via its narrative set in the court of the Emperor Augustus. It also instigated an intertextual response, Marston and Dekker’s Satiromastix. As well as investigating the propriety of satire, the text also makes claims for the proper production and use of poetry, all via an intertextual reading. Keywords Intertextuality · Satire · Poetaster · Jonson · Poetomachia

Harold Bloom’s 1973 study The Anxiety of Influence frames intertextuality as a cyclical rejection of the previous generation of writers by the present, a figurative Oedipal impulse which kills the literary father in order to establish authorial status. Thus, as the previous chapter read the parodic epyllia as rejecting an earlier literary model, this chapter focuses on a play which from some critical angles can be read as a rejection of Ovidian

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influence in favour of an alternative (though a just as canonical and classical) model. Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) is both an overt statement on satirical literature, and thereby the function of poetry, and an inescapably and deliberately intertextual play at all levels. Engagement with Ovidian texts is augmented by a depiction of the expulsion of the figure of Ovid himself, written at a time when the fashion for epyllia was at its height. This chapter will consider the intertextual nature of satire, its difference to parody, and argue that Jonson’s Poetaster generates meaning only via an awareness of its various and multifaceted intertexts. As discussed in the previous chapter, parody is, above all, playful. The interplay and intertextual relationships between texts is one of ironic humour. Satire, in contrast, is an attack, potentially both didactic and highly critical, though also reliant on irony (indeed, Northrop Frye terms satire “militant irony”).1 Its function is moral instruction, and all satirists at least claim to speak for justice and truth. Early modern literary commentators distinguish between Juvenalian and Horatian satire, and it is this differentiation and contest for poetic superiority which is dramatised in Jonson’s Poetaster. Jay Simons describes Jonson as “the most deliberate and self-aware Horatian of his age”, and in this play Jonson attempts to assert the moral and artistic merits of Horatian satire over the culturally dominant Juvenalian satire of his mocking contemporaries and rivals, John Marston and Thomas Dekker.2 The profusion of verse satire by writers including Marston, John Donne, Joseph Hall, and Thomas Middleton in the 1590s was halted by the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London issued an edict to the Stationer’s Company to confiscate and burn copies of specific satiric (and other) texts. Such satire, it is generally agreed, is predominantly of the Juvenalian model.3 The particular corrective role of satire differs in representation, style, and approach in Horatian and Juvenalian satire, a difference which is conveyed in the common figurative language and tropes employed by authors. Juvenalian writing is full of metaphors of inflicting pain, such as stinging, biting, and whipping, in order to purify, as well as an insistence on speaking the painful truth about ‘vice’. For example, Everard Guilpin, writing in the late 1590s, describes satire as the strappado and the rack, and claims he will “heale with lashing”, while “Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597–8; i.e., a bundle of rods) announces by its title how the poet wishes his work to be understood”.4 Furthermore, as Ejner Jensen points out, this positioning is reflected in the language employed, as “John Marston insists

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nearly everywhere that deliberate roughness in style and vocabulary is the means to achieving satiric purposes”.5 In contrast, Horatian satire is presented by Jonson moderately as a ‘purge’, in a differentiation of styles summarised by Simons: the primary distinction was between the sharp, indignant censure practice by Juvenal and the good-natured, genial criticism of Horace. Juvenal has a declamatory style, based in part on rhetorical practice and, by his own account, propelled by the vice pervasive in society. Horace, on the other hand, invites us to laugh along with him at his observation of the faults of humankind.6

However, it is suggested that in essence all satire comes from the desire to improve mankind; it is, essentially, for humanity’s own good that they are whipped or stung into proper moral behaviour, or indeed forcibly purged of the immoral. George Puttenham writes, via the common misconception of the etymology of ‘satire’, that satirists have “great care over man, and desired by good admonitions to reform the evil of their life, and to bring the bad to amendment”.7 An ongoing and related debate in the function of satire is in relation to personal criticism and whether it should be focused at specific individuals or at types of behaviour. As John T. Gilmore writes, “This is a question which has been debated since classical antiquity when the Roman poet Horace … discussed in his own satires how far and under what circumstances it was legitimate for the satirist to refer to specific persons”.8 That personal abuse can masquerade as satire comprises a negative and undermining perception of its function and literary merit. However, Horace and other satirists claim rather that the “purpose is to bring about the improvement of society by making people aware of their failings” and achieve what the Blooms term “sociomoral reparation”.9 Jonson, as we shall discuss below, rather than offer Poetaster as a transparent attack on and retaliation to Marston and Dekker in their ongoing so-called Poetomachia or ‘Poets’ War’ asserts that it is a criticism on those like them who share their typical views. This rhetorical sleight of hand is rather disingenuous, as it is perfectly clear what Jonson thought the failings were of his named contemporaries, but it is unarguable that the plot of Poetaster is more than just a personal attack. The role of Ovid would be dramaturgically superfluous, for instance, if this were the case. Jonson’s promotion and demonstration of a more benign satiric style are presented

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arguably as an example of “a moderate purge capable of reforming not only society, but the field of satire itself”.10 Such didactic moral aims do not, of course, exist in a vacuum. Satire is intertextual in the same way that parody is: the audience member or reader needs to be aware of the ‘source’ text or behaviour that is being mocked or critiqued via the satirical text in order to make sense of the latter, indeed the status of the work being satirical depends upon this. Such intertextuality is emphasised in satirical drama. Satirical drama such as Poetaster occupies a fascinating position in that it subverts the concept that satire is universal. What the Blooms call the “transience of a literary situation” is emphasised by performed drama; the moral drive of such satire is potentially lost as soon as the performance concludes.11 As Tom Cain points out, in addition this specific play “demands two areas of knowledge … a knowledge of the particular context of Jonson’s London, especially of his rival playwrights, and a knowledge of the poetry and politics of Augustan Rome”.12 This is emphasised further in a performance where contemporary individuals are personated onstage and the polyvocal intertextuality of stage satire requires some assimilation of the adversaries’ voices. Poetaster sees Jonson frequently parodying his specific adversaries’, and more general, styles of writing. Furthermore, as Matthew Hodgart claims, stage satire in particular “is to some degree allegorical; its characters have to stand in for something beyond the literal level”, that is, they are signifiers for more expansive concepts (the signified), and, moreover, the dissimulation or double meaning of irony “assumes a double audience, one that is deceived by the surface meaning of the words, and another that catches the hidden sense and laughs with the deceiver at the expense of the deceived”.13 As Charles A. Knight writes, “The distances between signifiers and what they signify, between what speakers mean and what they say, and between what is said and what is understood, become both subjects and vehicles of satire”.14 Indeed, Frye’s “militant irony” conveys the exploitation of this gap between signifier and signified, and the satirical weaponising of such spaces for exploitation in a metatheatrical experience. The potential for expansive multitudinous meanings to be inferred from a satirical theatrical experience are evident, particularly in a play which exploits the various levels of its intertextuality. Within this general and inescapable intertextuality of stage satire, there are numerous ways in which Poetaster is specifically and overtly intertextual. Firstly, there is the particular contemporary background of the ‘Poetomachia’, knowledge of which is vital in understanding the

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play. Then there are the direct quotations from a variety of classical and contemporary writers. For example, “To the Reader” is taken from Martial; Ovid’s poem in 1.1.43–84 is Marlowe’s translation of Ovid with some tweaks,15 Virgil’s poem read in 5.2 is from the Aeneid (Jonson’s translation adapted from Surrey’s), 5.3.57–63 imitates Horace’s Odes III.iii.1–8. The infamous purging scene has Crispinus vomiting up neologisms ascribed to Gabriel Harvey and Shakespeare, as well as Marston. There are also entire scenes that imitate preceding texts: 3.1 and 3.2, where Crispinus, the “land-remora” (3.2.4), heedlessly pesters Horace is a dramatisation of Horace’s Satire I.ix; the discussion between Horace and the lawyer Trebatius in 3.5 on the difference between satire and libel is from Horace’s satire II.i. The vomiting device is modelled on an incident in Lucian’s Lexiphanes.16 What needs to be analysed is what effect these multiple and overlapping instances of intertextuality have, in a play which is intensely intertextual on a multitude of levels. As Victoria Moul suggests, the “textual transactions” of Poetaster have been “under-read by critics – both in terms of the depth and detail to which Poetaster is indebted to other texts, and the extent to which these debts and borrowings structure the action”.17 Crispinus’ introductory declaration of his poetic ambitions is outing. “We”, he says, “are new turned poet too, which is more; and a satirist too, which is more than that; I write just in thy vein, I. I am for your odes or your sermons, or anything indeed. We are a gentleman besides: our name is Rufus Laberius Crispinus. We are a pretty stoic too” (3.1.23–28). This personation of the red-haired Marston conveys an embarrassingly amateurish eagerness to impress (and compare himself to) the experienced master satirist Horace (an idealised Jonson). Such a characterisation, which only grows more insulting and specific (referring to Marston’s “little legs” and the colour of the feather in his hat), is a manifestation of the very public feud played out across a handful of plays known as the Poetomachia (‘poets’ war’) or War of the Theatres.18 As Simons summarises, an antagonism started in satirical verse was displaced by the Bishops’ Ban into the theatre: The Poetomachia was initiated by Marston’s representation of Jonson as the scholar Chrisoganus in Histriomastix. The character, whose positive qualities include honesty and a genuine desire to instruct, may have nonetheless touched a nerve with its portrayal of Jonson as an elitist and pedant … Jonson responded by inserting two new characters into Every

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Man Out of His Humour, one of which ridicules Marston’s use of affected diction, the other apparently representing Dekker. He essentially repeated this formula in Cynthia’s Revels , again portraying Marston and Dekker as foolish characters. Dekker responded in Satiromastix, attacking Jonson’s reputation as the “English Horace” by satirizing him as a character named Horace who is distinctly un-Horatian, displaying unabashed sycophancy and a lack of satiric discretion. Jonson fired back in Poetaster, representing both Dekker and Marston as petty, slanderous rhymesters. Critics see the war effectively ending with these two plays (both were performed in 1601 and published in 1602), but are hesitant to declare a winner.19

Dekker’s involvement is announced in Poetaster with a characterisation as “one Demetrius, a dresser of plays about the town here … hired … to abuse Horace” (3.4.321–23) who “has one of the most overflowing, rank wits in Rome. He will slander any man that breathes if he disgusts him” (3.4.337–38). Jonson’s mockery of Dekker as a mere “dresser” of plays (as opposed to a solo author) is not particularly fair given the norm of collaboration in dramatic writing, but it certainly emphasises his status as a jobbing playwright and slanderer for hire, as well as one who is employed to augment other writers’ work. Jonson’s Demetrius states that the reason he gets involved with the targeting of Horace is envy: “he kept better company for the most part than I, and that better men loved him than loved me, and that his writings thrived better than mine and were better liked and graced” (5.3.442–45). Envy’s appearance and vanquishing in The Induction to the play sets up this claim, and also presents the issue as a wider one on the status of dramatic and poetic writing. As Matthew Steggle writes, If Marston ever attended a performance of Poetaster, he would have seen a thinly disguised version of himself, being told off by a version of one of the most revered poets in the classical canon [Virgil]. Poetaster is not just an abstract statement on dramatic or poetic theory, but one constructed oppositionally and in a way that is deliberately provocative, with specific and derogatory reference to other living writers competing with Jonson.20

Jonson’s statement of how poetry should function is discussed below, but throughout the Poetomachia Marston and Dekker characterise themselves as satiric ‘whippers’ in contrast to Jonson’s metaphor of purging, first used in his Humours plays. Dekker’s own conceptualisation, from the paratextual material of Satiromastix, is found in his tongue-in-cheek

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take on what he calls the “terrible Poetomachia” which had “lately commenc’d between Horace the second, and a band of leane-witted Poetasters”.21 Characterising himself and Marston as poetasters suggests a revelling in or reclaiming of the term as a lack of pretension, with their “lean” wits conveying their lack of superfluous material (possibly implying that Jonson’s work by contrast is over-padded, as is, if Dekker is being personal, Jonson’s somewhat corpulent frame). Jonson’s criticisms of Marston sees the latter as a populist with no interest in moral reform, and who is, according to Simons and evidenced by Cynthia’s Revels , “a misguided satirist who grossly overvalues the scintillating, sensational aspects of satire, while he [Jonson], like Crites, is the self-denying scholar unconcerned with outward show, humbly and steadily going about the business of satiric reform”.22 The focus on satire in Poetaster is explicit in 3.5 and extends into a consideration of what constitutes libel and what role the satirist can play in the governance of society. This latter point is one sanctioned by the personation of the irreproachable Virgil, who Jonson uses as a writer who represents all that is moral and true in his ars poetica. Horace’s discussion with the lawyer Trebatius in 3.5 revolves around the tension previously mentioned between satire’s claims for moral authority and the moral or indeed legal propriety of targeted criticism. The discussion also recalls the complaints of Tucca and Lupus concerning their being lampooned and exposed on the stage for their arguably immoral or hypocritical actions. Lupus says that satirical playwrights will, “rob us, us that are magistrates, of our respect, bring us upon their stages, and make us ridiculous to the plebeians. They will play you or me, the wisest men they can come by still. Me! Only to bring us in contempt with the vulgar, and make us cheap” (1.2.39–44), and Tucca concurs, his exaggeration and inaccurate language revealing the irony of his statement: “An honest decayed commander cannot skelder, cheat, nor be seen in a bawdy house, but he shall be straight in one of their wormwood comedies. They are grown licentious, the rogues; libertines, flat libertines” (1.2.49–53). Trebatius advises caution, given that men “hate” the “biting strains” of satire, as demonstrated by Tucca and Lupus, and warns Horace, “There’s justice, and great action may be sued / ‘Gainst such as wrong men’s fames with verses lewd” (3.5.28–29). Horace agrees, but differentiates his own satirical project,

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Ay, with lewd verses, such as libels be, And aimed at persons of good quality. I reverence and adore that just decree; But if they shall be sharp yet modest rhymes, That spare men’s persons and but tax their crimes, Such shall in open court find current pass, Were Caesar judge, and with the maker’s grace. (3.5.130–36)

In this conceptualisation, we see the demarcation between satire that is “lewd” and libellous, and unfairly directed at the undeserving, and that which is “sharp yet modest” and impersonal, criticising actions rather than individuals. This is a clear contrast between Horatian satire and the more vicious and direct Juvenalian satire as practised by Jonson’s allegedly envious contemporaries, a contrast grounded and supported by the intertextual use of Horace’s own writings on the subject. Those in the audience who can detect that the scene is a dramatisation of Horace are able to connect Jonson’s assertions, via his dramatised Horace and sometime mouthpiece, with a classical tradition and whole signifying system debating the role and aim of satirical writing. Trebatius goes on to agree with Horace that the character of the satirist is also important. As Simons puts it only “one free from vice may safely censure those deserving of it. For Jonson, therefore, the effectiveness of satire is not just about style but also has to do with the character of the satirist, or at least the image he projects of himself”.23 Horace complains about being misunderstood, which is typically Jonsonian, and it does seem that the character of this satirist is maligned and underestimated by the other characters in the play. Horace says that “There are, to whom I seem excessive sour, / And past a satire’s law t’extend my power” (3.5.1–2), whereas others denigrate his writing and claim they could do as well, as illustrated by Crispinus’ confident declaration that he is a “new turned” poet and satirist. Demetrius scoffs that Horace is a “mere sponge, nothing but humours and observation; he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again” (4.3.104–7), and Tucca’s accusation that Horace is “all dog and scorpion”, “A sharp, thorny-toothed satirical rascal” who “carries poison in his teeth and a sting in his tail” (4.3.109–116) seems to have confused Horace’s brand of satire with that of his rivals. Indeed, Jonson was criticised by the latter for hypocritically claiming to be a Horatian satirist but in actuality employing the same Juvenalian approach as they did. As Simons writes, Tucca’s “proliferation of metaphors appropriate

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to Juvenalian satire suggests Jonson may have been aware of Dekker’s strategy of depicting him as Juvenalian”.24 The plot against Horace culminates in the plotters attempting to charge Horace with the type of vicious libel he attempts to distance himself and his satire from in the rest of the text. Interrupting Virgil’s reciting of the Aeneid (which should be warning enough of their characters), the plotters charge Horace with “A libel, Caesar. A dangerous, seditious libel. A libel in picture” (5.3.43–44) with an allegorical picture found in his study. Their misreading of this allegory, while comic, makes some serious points about the potential slippage between signifier and signified; the misreading of symbols here allowing an inaccurate conclusion used as political leverage. As Julian Koslow identifies, “The dangers of being misappropriated or misinterpreted take on a vivid political dimension in Poetaster when Horace and his patron are denounced as treasonous through the use of Horace’s own writing”.25 The allegorical aspect here is echoed by the reading of Virgil which it interrupts. He is reading about the attack on the gods by the giants, which, as pointed out by Cain, was interpreted in the period “as an allegory of barbarism’s attack on learning”.26 As discussed in Chapter 2, allegory provides a structuralist model, in offering signs with allegedly stable significations in an intertextual move from one signifying system to another, but one which is limited by an inferred reliance on the ‘correct’ interpretation. Previous to this passage, Virgil refers to Dido and Aeneas’ sexual union in a cave during a storm and admonishes that Dido misappropriates language by calling “this wedlock, and with that fair name / Covers her fault” (5.2.72–73). Thereby the misinterpretation or misuse of signs is depicted as potentially occurring throughout retold stories and the world of the play, which, due to the metatheatrical intertextuality of the Poetomachia, is also the world of contemporary London. The use of “libel” to refer to Horace’s satire is a further misuse of language with nefarious intent, and as such Horace’s enemies find themselves on the receiving end of this accusation.27 The assertion that they are motivated by envy, as illustrated above, further suggests that Demetrius and Crispinus are “far from being even Juvenalian satirists, and consequently their works are libels”.28 Critics agree that satire requires an element of exaggeration or the grotesque or fantasy in order to make its point. As Hodgart writes, “The satirist does not paint an objective picture of the evils he describes, since pure realism would be too oppressive. Instead he usually offers us a

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travesty of the situation, which at once directs our attention to actuality and permits an escape from it”.29 This is illustrated in Jonson’s climactic vomiting punishment of Crispinus / Marston in Poetaster. Jonson’s purging metaphor is actualised here, in having Crispinus forcibly purged of his neologisms and ostentatious, fanciful language. In contrast to Crispinus, Horace is described as a “well-digested” man (5.3.356), and the moral implications of his comparatively wholesome and nourishing language are clear. It is Horace who provides the “Bitter, wholesome” emetic tablets (5.3.396–97) to cleanse both the “brain and stomach” (5.3.388) of the “terrible windy words” that are a “sign of a windy brain” (5.3.490–91).30 Marston’s ‘flatulent’ and unrelenting style is previously hinted at in Horace’s descriptions of Crispinus being “a strong tedious talker” (3.1.199) and a “Hydra of discourse” (3.1.280). Given Jonson’s wider project concerning the role of ‘proper’ constructive satire, Simons writes that the metaphor of purging “could help bring about the cleansing of the inveterately foul Juvenalian satire polluting the body of English literature”,31 and in the actualisation and dramatisation of such a metaphor, depicted onstage in Poetaster with the added bonus of humiliating his rival poet, Jonson is summarising and concluding his argument. Furthermore, the purging offers an illustration of what Koslow terms “the materiality of the signifier” in the depiction of words being vomited from the body of Crispinus32 : Linguistic behaviour attains a visible level of dramatic actuality, and thus of moral consequence, apparently no less concrete than the bodies on the stage. Yet this complex scene also presents a powerful critique of linguistic materialism … Horace’s rough physic administers Crispinus’s linguistic cure and his moral comeuppance together, rendering the bodily experience of the material signifier inseparable here from its instrumental role in punishing a poet whose language is too much of his body, too little of his mind.33

By giving language this material dimension, Jonson is indicating the real consequences of and potential for moral and physical improvement in poetry, which is further illustrated in the recommendation that Crispinus, as prescribed by Virgil, should “observe / A strict and wholesome diet” of “Cato’s principles” and Terence, as well as “the best Greeks” but “not without a tutor” (5.3.525–32). Marston, it seems, needs to go back

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to school in order to consume a more nourishing diet of the ‘correct’ classical writers and models. The lesson from Virgil that follows the climactic comical revenge brings the audience back to the serious points Jonson is making throughout Poetaster via the intertextual application and exploitation of a huge range of texts. As mentioned above, the examples of the words Crispinus / Marston vomits up (“oblatrant – furibund – fatuate – strenuous ”, 5.3.492) are from a range of sources, including Harvey and Shakespeare, which expands the target of Jonson’s satire from the specific to the general in terms of his concept of good poetry and its purpose in the wider world. Virgil’s arraignment of the ‘poetasters’ (false, petty or paltry poets) clearly aligns a moral poetic project with the aims of a moral state, as the event takes place at the court of Augustus Caesar. Here the play dressers and envious imitators, who “traffic” in theatres and on the “open stage” (which Poetaster’s Ovid also distances himself from in 1.2.65) are given a lesson in what true poetry and satire are capable of. Aside from the play’s general project in making the distinction between good and bad (both morally and stylistically) writing and constructive and destructive satire, poetry’s potential nobility is articulated by Caesar himself: “Sweet poesy’s sacred garlands crown your knighthoods, / Which is, of all the faculties on earth, / The most abstract and perfect, if she be / True born and nursed with all the sciences” (5.1.17–20). As he contrasts in the play’s final lesson: It is the bane and torment of our ears To hear the discords of those jangling rhymers That with their bad and scandalous practices Bring all true arts and learning in contempt. But let not your high thoughts descend so low As these despis`ed objects. (5.3.601–6)

Poetaster makes a clear demarcation between genuine poets (the love poets Ovid, Tibullus, Gallus and Propertius, satirical poets like Horace and epic poets embodied by Virgil) and the “jangling rhymers”.34 However, it is only the satirists and the epic poets who can alter and shape their society, and only satire that does this in an immediate, material way.35 Satire is specifically presented as the tool of moral correction, and one which has its place at rulers’ courts. Indeed, even before the unmasking and punishment of the poetasters, Horace’s advice to Caesar

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is welcomed: “Thanks, Horace, for thy free and wholesome sharpness, / Which pleaseth Caesar more than servile fawns” (5.1.94–95). As Virgil summarises later in the act: ’Tis not the wholesome sharp morality Or modest anger of a satiric spirit That hurts or wounds the body of a state, But the sinister application Of the malicious ignorant and base Interpreter, who will distort and strain The general scope and purpose of an author To his particular and private spleen. (5.3.132–39)

As identified by Simons, by placing these judgements in a courtly setting, “Jonson saw himself as one ready to be raised and rewarded by the monarch, offering his virtuous satire for the good of England”.36 Unsettlingly, as Alan Sinfield writes, in the climax of Poetaster, “Cultural and state authority link arms; culture is material because it is determined in the networks of power that license and restrain ideological production”.37 This places Horace (Jonson) at the apex of literary achievement and at the centre of state-sanctioned art and culture, as endorsed by the most celebrated and conservative of the Roman poets, Virgil. Horace sets out this concept more fulsomely in his triumphing over Lupus. He declares that it is those: Such as thou, They are the moths and scarabs of a state, The bane of empires, and the dregs of courts, Who, to endear themselves to any employment, Care not whose fame they blast, whose life they endanger; And under a disguised and cobweb mask Of love to their sovereign, vomit forth Their own prodigious malice; and pretending To be the props and columns of his safety, The guards unto his person and his peace, Disturb it most with their false lapwing cries. (4.8.14–24)

The vomiting imagery here foreshadows the purging of Crispinus and it is clear that the poetasters are not to be punished because they are bad writers but because, indirectly, what Jonson considers to be bad writing

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and bad satire can be socially disruptive and damaging and endanger the “sovereign”. R. Malcolm Smuts relates the political potential of this reading to the Induction of the play spoken by Envy, who refers to the possibility of “Spie-like suggestions, privie whisperings, / And a thousand such promoting sleights” (25–26) employed by self-serving informers.38 It is such informing and misinterpretation that seals the fate of Ovid and is attempted in order to denigrate Horace, but where the former is too focused on the pleasures of love to notice his enemies, the latter’s focus on those that need correction both increases his awareness and ensures his elevated standing in the eyes of the state. The critical focus on the Poetomachia and a metatheatrical disagreement about the function of drama, of satire, and of poetry does not account for the narrative of Ovid in Poetaster, indeed focus on Jonson’s championing of Horace and Horatian satire is at the expense of Ovid’s narrative. As a writer of romantic or erotic fiction expelled from the Roman court, Poetaster seems sympathetic to Ovid’s fate yet unmoved to save the character or defend his particular poetic style. However, this is all part of the same intertextual project. Ironically, it seems Marston provides the potential groundwork here in his rejection and rebranding of his own Ovidian epyllia, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image (1598), as satirical. James D. Mulvihill accurately states that in this text “The poet maintains the pretence of a higher purpose, while openly catering to lower tastes” and highlights Marston’s inconsistency in savaging this type of erotic poetry in his satires having recently produced this (poor) example of the genre.39 Marston disowned Ovidian influence before Jonson’s version of such in Poetaster. Ovid’s role in the play has been a matter of some critical debate, as has discussion over to what extent we can read the character of Ovid as representing (and to what degree) the figure of Marlowe.40 Marlowe’s presence is initially invoked via Jonson’s use of Marlowe’s translation of the Amores in the opening scenes, and the intertextual ramifications of using Marlowe’s text are significant. The translation quoted is from a banned edition and, it is supposed, would have been recognisable to a contemporary London audience. This tribute to Marlowe however, is somewhat “double-edged” given the fate of the character in the play, the fate of the translation, and, as mentioned above, a definite impetus away from the utilisation of popular Ovidian models recommended by the play’s poetical and political drive.41 The foolish banquet in Poetaster, which so enrages Caesar in its religious and sexual impropriety makes it

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clear that this characterisation of Ovid is that as derived from the “banquet of sense”. As identified by Cain, “His life and poetry are erotic, focused on individual gratification, not the social and moral issues Horace takes up, nor the heroic morality and historical sweep of Virgil” and his limitation, according to Karl F. Zender is in “his failure to see the need for a relationship between art and a higher moral order. He is a maker of fictions, and he treats moral values only as imaginative and emotional conveniences”.42 This version of Ovid is arguably that which is evident in the epyllia, rather than earlier claims for an allegorical, moral dimension to be teased out of Metamorphoses . Similarly, the focus on artifice in the banquet scene of 4.5 and the poet’s “ability to create fictions” in the imitations of the gods and the elevation of women as divine is shown to be antithetical to a project which aims to align poetic achievement with both moral righteousness and the ideal state.43 Mulvihill writes that “What Jonson is exposing is both the treachery and the vulnerability of expression, poetic expression in particular”, in the possibility of slippage between what is said and what is meant; or what is written and how it is interpreted.44 Like Dido’s wedlock or the misreading of allegory, there is an attempt here to consolidate the literary process so the relationship between signifier and signified is stable and linear, and the way this is achieved, it seems, is via the moral standing of the author. The importance of intertextuality in reading Poetaster is evident at both a macro- and micro-level. Furthermore, the intertextual response in succeeding play texts and performance can be as specific as particular passages referencing previous plays’ scenes or speeches and as expansive and opaque as critical claims that the Poetomachia spread beyond the bounds of the plays directly involved in the dispute between Jonson, Marston, and Dekker. For instance, Cain suggests both that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night participates obliquely in the war of the theatres and that the discussions of libel in Poetaster contains possible references to the Essex rebellion.45 The farewell scene between Ovid and Julia owes a textual debt to Romeo and Juliet . The intertextual ramifications here are working beyond a specified mockery of specified individuals, and the fact that critics have suggested the peripheral involvement of a wealth of other writers including Joseph Hall, John Weever, Everard Guilpin and Shakespeare suggests the issues at stake here are both intensely contemporary but also widespread. As indicated with Dido being quoted as “covering her fault” by misappropriating language, the play attempts to connect a

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certainty of artistic meaning and purpose with an elevated understanding of the importance of poetry in a successful state. As Cain identifies: Poetaster is clearly about the role of the poet in society, but it is also about (among other things) the corrosive power of envy and detraction, about language, its use and abuse, its struggle, for Jonson, towards singleness of meaning, and its disturbing tendency to fracture into multiple meanings which, especially in the mouth of Tucca, threaten the authority of the humanist arbiter; in this sense it is a play about authority, as it is also in its statement of Augustanism.46

In this sense, we can read Poetaster as a play overtly concerned with what can be described as a structuralist conceptualisation of the creation of meaning in poetic writing but which expresses this with an ironic dependence on a pervasive intertextuality. For example, the figure or character of Horace, which exists in different versions in Satiromastix, Cynthia’s Revels (as Crites), Every Man Out (Asper) is an intertextual composite and in his play “Dekker freely identifies Horace with these other characters, referring to their words and actions as if spoken and committed by his own Horace”.47 As Simons goes on to elaborate, Dekker makes this explicit, having his version of Tucca address Horace as one who “must be call’d Asper, and Criticus, and Horace”.48 Jonson cannot, it seems, keep control of his characters and their part in his overarching project if rival playwrights appropriate them and exploit the intertextual possibilities of shared references. However, this perhaps supports Jonson’s point concerning the need to be able to control meaning so the mockers and vicious satirists cannot disrupt the good, moral intentions of writers such as himself. This reading, however, rather takes Jonson himself at face (po-faced?) value, and overestimates his own position in relation to the contemporary government. As Smuts writes: Poetaster is a coy and clever play about how to violate government decrees against defamatory and politically provocative writing while pretending not to do so … This does not make it any less a play about the role of poets and poetry in a properly governed commonwealth but it does qualify interpretation of Jonson’s view of the poet’s role … [Jonson’s posture] provided Jonson with rhetorical cover while he produced work that was often highly topical, politically pointed, and caustically libellous. By pretending critical detachment, parading his humanist learning, and claiming to follow his

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Latin sources with scrupulous accuracy he managed to deny the fairly obvious fact that his writing mocked and defamed his contemporaries, including members of the court elite.49

Sinfield too reads Jonson as using the figure of Virgil “as the writer who figures the unity of state and cultural production” to “gain space” for the more critical eye of Horace, and Moul concurs, asserting that “The real cultural authority of the play is invested not in the emperor, nor even in Virgil, but rather in Horace, whose Satires structure the play as a whole, and inside whose authorial framework even Act V’s fragment of the Aeneid is held”.50 Jonson is not only reworking and promoting classical conceptions of authorial responsibility and role which coincide with his preferred method and self-fashioning, but also creating expectations of that role via an intensely intertextual play. There are so many signifying systems being moved between in Poetaster that more space is needed than at present to be able to investigate the particular implications of all of them: “a myriad details of plot, dialogue or song, as well as whole scenes, are defined by their relationship to other texts”.51 What can be asserted is that this is a play which relies heavily on its intertexts for both its satirical function and its wider ambitions regarding conveying expansive concepts on how creative writing should function within society. Part of this is in the rejection of earlier popular models that distract from the serious moral potential of poetic and dramatic writing, in Jonson’s very evident championing of Horace over Ovid and indeed Virgil, as well as Horace’s version of satire over the more severe (envious, vicious, personal) Juvenalian satire. Furthermore, the very genre of the play as satirical imbues an intense intertextuality as the space between what is said and what is conveyed via its “militant” irony encourages a multiplicity of readings, as does the thematic focus on the misuse and abuse of signifiers at the level of individual words, symbolic pictures, whole texts, and genres. All of this is held in an intertextual framework of Horatian texts and it is via this framework that Jonson derives his authority and literary pedigree in order to practise his brand of complex, sophisticated, endlessly referential drama and fruitlessly attempt to control the literary sign.

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Notes 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 223. 2. Jay Simons, Jonson, The Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire (London: Routledge, 2018), 4. 3. There is some interesting critical work here on the reasoning behind the banning of some texts which are arguably not particularly satirical, but may be particularly salacious or sexually explicit. See Lynda E. Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualisation of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Micael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Gabriel A. Rieger, Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2009). 4. Everard Guilpin, “Satyre Preludium,” in Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), line 71; Ejner J. Jensen, “Verse Satire in the English Renaissance,” A Companion to Satire Ancient and Modern, ed. Ruben Quintero (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 102. 5. Jensen, “Verse Satire,” 102. 6. Simons, Jonson, 3. 7. George Puttenham, “The Art of English Poesy” (1589), in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), 83. Early modern commentators on satire commonly but mistakenly state that the word is derived from ‘satyr’ and the satyr plays, and hold that this is behind the care of humankind by the satirist (Puttenham says that ancient satirists would dress as satyrs as correction from earthly “gods of the woods” would be taken more seriously, 83). This identification also legitimises the roughness of the satirists’ language. As Ruben Quintero expands, the source of satire as the satyr plays gives “dramatic license for a crude, animated, and hostile language appropriate to the coarse but wise woodland creature”, Quinero, “Introduction: Understanding Satire,” in A Companion to Satire, ed. Quintero, 6. See Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959); and Simons, Jonson. 8. John T. Gilmore, Satire (London: Routledge, 2018), 6. Gilmore highlights the differentiation noted by Samuel Johnson between ‘proper’ and ‘personal’ satire, the former having the just aim of reforming behaviour in society, the latter purely being a personal attack, 8. 9. Gilmore, Satire, 118; Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, Satire’s Persuasive Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 16. 10. Simons, Jonson, 1. 11. Bloom, Satire’s Persuasive Voice, 17.

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12. Tom Cain “Introduction,” to Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Cain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 2. 13. Matthew Hodgart, Satire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 189; 130. 14. Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 119. 15. Cain’s note here suggests that Jonson “expected the audience to recognise this version as Marlowe’s, but that he took the opportunity to ‘improve’ and correct it.” Cain, Poetaster, 80. 16. See Cain: “outside of the scenes which are direct imitations of Horace, the notes record over thirty such echoes of Horace, with Ovid, Martial … and the younger Seneca being the next most frequently utilised,” “Introduction,” 8. Also see Victoria Moul, “Poetaster: Classical Translation and Cultural Authority,” in Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135–72; and Raphael Lyne, Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 228–29. 17. Moul, “Poetaster,” 136. 18. See 2.1.91, though this could also refer to the boy actor playing Crispinus, and 3.3.1–2 regarding the “ash coloured feather”. See Matthew Steggle, “The different names of the War of the Theatres reflect different conceptions of what it might be: the choice is between the old term ‘Stage-Quarrel’ which portrays the conflict as a personal feud between dramatists; ‘The War of the Theatres’, favoured by most critics, which sees it as an argument between the different dramatic companies; or ‘The Poetomachia’ or Poets’ War, favoured by some more recent writers, in which it is viewed as an argument between poets and about poetry. The third of these has the best contemporary warrant, being Dekker’s own term for the quarrel.” Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1998), 21. 19. Simons, Jonson, 11. 20. Steggle, Wars of the Theatres, 39. 21. Dekker, “To the World,” Satiromastix, ll. 7–9. 22. Simons, Jonson, 81. 23. Simons, Jonson, 7. 24. Simons, Jonson, 118. 25. Julian Koslow, “Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster,” ELH 73 (2006): 150. 26. Cain, “Introduction,” 25. 27. For the relationship between satire and libel see Cain; R. Malcolm Smuts, “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Politics of Defamation,” ELR 49 (2019): 224–47; Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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28. Cain, “Introduction,” 25. 29. Hodgart, Satire, 12. Also see Frye. 30. Cain’s notes here point out that, “The relationship between physical flatulence and the brain was not simply metaphoric in Renaissance medicine; see, e.g., Burton, Anatomy, I, 222: ‘All pulses are naught … they fill the brain … with gross fumes … and cause troublesome dreams’,” Poetaster, 252. 31. Simons, Jonson, 21. 32. Koslow, “Humanist Schooling,” 120. 33. Koslow, “Humanist Schooling,” 121. 34. The historical Ovid explicitly aligns himself with these three elegaic love poets in Tristia 4.10.53–54. 35. See Cain, “Introduction,” 17–18. 36. Simons, Jonson, 114. 37. Alan Sinfield, Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality (London: Routledge, 2006), 40. 38. Smuts, “Jonson’s Poetaster,” 224. 39. James D. Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Ovidian Debate,” Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 249–50. Mulvihill writes, “The satiric verse of the period, notably that of Hall and Marston, was frequently directed at the lasciviousness of the ‘new Poetry,’ as Hall calls it in his Virgidemiarum (1597)”, 241. 40. See, for example, Oscar James Campbell, “The Dramatic Construction of Poetaster,” Huntingdon Library Bulletin 9 (1936): 37–62; Karl F. Zender, “The Function of Propertius in Jonson’s Poetaster,” Papers on Language and Literature 3 (1975): 308–12; Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster”; M. L. Stapleton, “Marlovian Residue in Jonson’s Poetaster,” EMLS Special Issue 23: Christopher Marlowe: Identities, Traditions, Afterlives (2014): 1–26. 41. Cain, “Introduction,” 19. 42. Cain, “Introduction”; Zender, “Function,” 309. 43. Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster,” 244. 44. Mulvihill, “Jonson’s Poetaster,” 253. 45. See Cain, “Introduction,” 36 onwards; 40. 46. Cain, “Introduction,” 4–5. 47. Simons, Jonson, 98. 48. Simons, Jonson, 100. See Satiromastix, 1.2.311–12. 49. Smuts, “Jonson’s Poetaster,” 245. 50. Sinfield, Shakespeare, 44; Moul, “Poetaster,” 136. 51. Moul, “Poetaster,” 158.

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Bibliography Bloom, Edward A., and Lillian D. Bloom. Satire’s Persuasive Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Boose, Lynda E. “The 1599 Bishop’s Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualisation of the Jacobean Stage.” In Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Campbell, Oscar James. “The Dramatic Construction of Poetaster.” Huntingdon Library Bulletin 9 (1936): 37–62. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Gilmore, John T. Satire. London: Routledge, 2018. Guilpin, Everard. “Satyre Preludium.” In Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth. London: 1598. Hodgart, Matthew. Satire. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. Jensen, Ejner J. “Verse Satire in the English Renaissance.” In A Companion to Satire Ancient and Modern, edited by Ruben Quintero, 101–17. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Jonson, Ben. Poetaster. Edited by Tom Cain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Knight, Charles A. The Literature of Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Koslow, Julian. “Humanist Schooling and Ben Jonson’s Poetaster.” ELH 73 (2006): 119–59. Lyne, Raphael. Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. McRae, Andrew. Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Moul, Victoria. Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Mulvihill, James D. “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Ovidian Debate.” Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 239–55. Puttenham, George. “The Art of English Poesy” (1589). In Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Gavin Alexander, 55–204. London: Penguin, 2004. Quintero, Ruben. “Introduction: Understanding Satire.” In A Companion to Satire Ancient and Modern, edited by Ruben Quintero, 1–12. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Rieger, Gabriel A. Sex and Satiric Tragedy in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2009. Simons, Jay. Jonson, The Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire. London: Routledge, 2018.

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Sinfield, Alan. Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality. London: Routledge, 2006. Smuts, R. Malcolm. “Jonson’s Poetaster and the Politics of Defamation.” ELR 49 (2019): 224–47. Stapleton, M. L. “Marlovian Residue in Jonson’s Poetaster.” EMLS Special Issue 23: Christopher Marlowe: Identities, Traditions, Afterlives (2014): 1–26. Steggle, Matthew. Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson. Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1998. Zender, Karl F. “The Function of Propertius in Jonson’s Poetaster.” Papers on Language and Literature 3 (1975): 308–12.

CHAPTER 6

Text, Intertext, Hypertext?

Abstract The concluding chapter draws together the arguments of the preceding chapters and looks ahead to potential further avenues of exploration. One of these is the use of the intertextual model to specifically look in more detail at language, for example, in the way metaphors work, and picks up on some of the ideas in the introduction concerning metamorphoses (of words/characters), in a conflation of some of the repeated elements of the texts studied. The chapter also surveys recent studies in adaptation that support the argument concerning the importance of intertextuality in textual analysis. It also outlines the possibility of aligning intertextual theory with that of hypertexts and proposes the construction of a hypertext model using early modern texts to act as an electronic model of intertextuality. Keywords Intertextuality · Adaptation · Hypertext

Intertextuality is a theoretical approach plagued with misleading simplification in interpretation and is tantalisingly difficult to pin down in terms of a methodology. This latter aspect appropriately enough recalls the amorphous and expansive nature of the theory itself as envisioned by theorists such as Julia Kristeva or Roland Barthes, and as explored in the introductory chapter. This concluding chapter will assess the preceding © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7_6

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chapters’ assertions, the current critical climate regarding intertextuality and suggest where we can go from here in asserting the benefits of an intertextual approach to reading early modern texts. The preceding chapters have collectively demonstrated that there is revealing potential in a return to a more theorised understanding of intertextuality as developed through structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to analyse early modern works of creative writing. The central elements of early modern writing such as imitation, translation and adaptation as well as the humanist pedagogical focus on classical texts mean that an intertextual approach is one with huge potential. Such an approach can be at a multitude of levels ranging from the linguistic (individual words, character denominations, or ‘signs’) to genre-specific studies, and the present volume has explored reading mythological narrative as systems of meaning, reading early modern allegory as a structuralist enterprise, traced the manipulation and adaptation of various narrative models and forms, as well as the intertextual nature of specific genres such as parody or satire. These chapters have conclusively demonstrated that an early modern text epitomises the conceptualisation of a text as an open system, continuously and discursively referring to other texts and other signifying systems, be they cultural codes, narrative systems of mythology and folklore, and awareness of literary convention, and it is the interplay and interdependence of these systems that generates meaning. We have focused upon genres and approaches that are particularly rich in intertextual potential: allegory, folklore, the epyllia, parody, and satire, and within these the potential for the invocation of earlier intertexts in order to reject those precursors. The foregrounding of dominant literary convention demonstrated in Milton’s rejection of folkloric intertexts, the epyllia’s rejection of Petrarchan codification, and Jonson’s rejection of Ovidian influence, as well as Bacon’s manipulation of mythical allegoresis, all indicate a self-conscious awareness of how texts participate in culture and the culture of writing, and the importance of intertextuality in expressing this. This book argues for a model of a ‘materialist’ intertextuality, working on the premise of such critical concepts like Stephen Greenblatt’s cultural subconscious or Peter Barry’s “textual reading” guiding an intertextual approach grounded in materialist circumstances of early modern writing, education, self-assertion, and reading. Recent examinations of textual adaptation and intertextuality both support and extend this approach. For instance, Raphael Lyne’s approach inspired by cognitive literary theory highlights the conscious and subconscious role of memory in producing

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texts, writing “In the course of imitating other writers, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton offer a series of searching questions and insights into how things are recalled and forgotten, what triggers these processes, what they say about who we are and how we work”.1 While intertextuality of course goes beyond such imitation, to the extent that some critics find the scope of intertextuality somewhat disorderly and problematic, Lyne’s combining of cognition and materiality in memory is extremely interesting. “Poetic memory”, he states, is “the poem’s memory”, comprising the author’s, reader’s, and the “critical or cultural” memory.2 This translates to intertextuality as: By envisaging a text remembering its sources directly and advisedly on the one hand, but automatically and more serendipitously on the other, and these two processes in constant productive dialogue, it is possible to generate new impressions of why and how these aspects of literature work.3

Here the text functions on both a conscious and subconscious level, but both are grounded in material circumstances. Lyne also addresses the potentially antagonistic conceptualisation of intertextuality and allusion, often set against one another as contesting the status of intention (i.e. allusion is intentional, intertextuality is not). This work evidently does not distinguish between conscious and unconscious textual allusion, and neither does Lyne, opting for a model of poetic memory as a “metaphorical framework that can encompass them both, can recognize their interactions and interdependences, and can illuminate them as well … as parts of a single system”.4 While this approach may be seen as at best embracing the disorder and incoherence of a nebulous, allencompassing system (Kristeva’s intertextual web) and at worst theoretical fence sitting, it is supported by recent developments in adaptation theory. Lisa S. Starks’ edited collection on Ovidian adaptation and appropriation, for example, takes Douglas M. Lanier’s theorisation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ model as a starting point.5 This model figures the relationships between texts as being lateral rather than linear, akin metaphorically to rhizomatic root systems in certain plants as opposed to a vertical “arboreal” structure. As Lanier writes: To extend this metaphor to Shakespeare, an arboreal conception of adaptation encourages one to trace back Shakespeare’s cultural authority ultimately to the originary Shakespearean text. A rhizomatic structure, by

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contrast, has no single or central root and no vertical structure. Instead, like the underground root system of rhizomatic plants, it is a horizontal, decentered multiplicity of subterranean roots that cross each other, bifurcating and recombining, breaking off and restarting … Within the Shakespearean rhizome, the Shakespearean text is an important element but not a determining one; it becomes less a root than a node that might be situated in relation to other adaptational rhizomes.6

In addition, this model stresses the status of the text as dynamic and unfinished, “in a perpetual state of becoming”.7 To return to Kristeva, as previously cited in the introductory chapter Kristeva describes the movement across the imagined lateral rhizomatic web, and reading the text as a dynamic process: every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality) … its ‘place’ of enunciation and its denoted ‘object’ are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered.8

Certain ways of approaching adaptation, such as the rhizomatic or ‘remnant’, do however offer inspiring metaphors for lateral connections, resurfacings, and networks that intertextuality perhaps does not in its more theoretical origins that infer a multidimensional web or it’s watereddown versions which point to a ‘source’ text. The proliferation of new terminology used in adaptation study, or even source study (as listed by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith) draws from a variety of discourses, such as hauntology.9 As Maguire and Smith assert, both “hauntology and trauma studies allow for the unconscious or unbidden irruption of past texts into the present”, much in the way Lyne articulates.10 Furthermore, a lateral model’s lack of hierarchy also perhaps conveys the importance of context that I am arguing for; a period of simultaneous production in specific cultural conditions rather than an atemporal, multidimensional network or rigid hierarchies of source texts and descendant texts. Looking ahead, we can suggest further areas of investigation which both foreground and highlight an intertextual approach as explored throughout. For example, we could also use intertextual theory to specifically look in more detail at language, for example, in the way metaphors work as dynamic moves between what words signify, and greatly expand some of the concepts explored in the introduction concerning the metamorphoses of words as well as characters, in a conflation of some of the

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repeated elements of texts studied.11 On a more macro-level, we could attempt to create an electronic model of intertextuality using hypertext technology and theory. Using early modern texts, this experiment could be constructed using hyperlinks between transcripts of texts. This system would have no “starting point”; as stated by Lanier, the “decentred structure of the internet provides an apt example of rhizomatic structure”.12 Indeed, there is some intriguing cross-over of theory in work on digital fiction. Paul Cobley, writing about hypertext fiction (a web-based form of non-linear narrative where the reader follows hyperlinks to access different pages in a variety of sequences), claims that: The kind of reading that hypertext encouraged was not new … The term was actually coined in the 1960s, but an old sacred text such as the Talmud, surrounded by the commentaries of religious scholars, or other early printed texts that incorporated glosses on the printed page, offer demonstrations of the hypertext principle, as do many literary works characterized by an immense depth of allusion, from The Divine Comedy to The Waste Land.13

Both an “immense depth of allusion” and paratexts constitute a text’s intertexts. Furthermore, theorists have long argued that such digital narratives, and the World Wide Web in general, embody the ‘democracy’ of a linear structure suggested by the literary ‘rhizomatic’ structure. The digital realm is described as “democratic, fluid, tending towards disorder, consisting of endless chunks of textual matter, connected actively and deliberately through links, and passively and potentially through search queries, allowing endless permutations and recombinations”.14 Furthermore, Adam Hammond recounts earlier digital theorists’ tantalising assertions linking hypertexts and post-structuralist conceptions of text: Landow argues that hypertext “creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment” of two crucial poststructuralist ideas: Roland Barthes’s conception of the “readerly” text and Jacques Derrida’s emphasis on discursive decentering. Landow quotes Barthes’s description in S/Z (1970) of an “ideal text” in which “the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to supress the rest” … For Landow, Barthes’s “ideal text” “precisely matches that which has come to be called computer hypertext.” … Citing Barthes’s distinction between work and text – where the “plural” text links reader and writer “together in a single signifying

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process” – Bolter finds it remarkable that someone “who did not know about computers” could produce such insightful descriptions of hypertext. Citing Derrida’s description of text as “a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself,” Bolter argues that it “sounds very much like text in the electronic writing space”.15

There is much to unpack here, but the analogous concepts in digital and post-structuralist thought as outlined above offer both an intriguing possibility in the construction of a model of intertextuality in cyberspace and further discussion on the implications of the linear, intertextual network. Intertextuality disrupts the concept of a text’s sources, because, demonstrably, a text is never a monolithic and monologic artefact with a clear line of descent. Maguire and Smith, inadvertently, point to this repeatedly, suggesting that “the most significant source may be the most thoroughly assimilated, most subliminally absorbed – and therefore the most invisible”; and discussing the “limited practical understanding of what a source might be” in noting another critic’s difficulty in determining a term for such an amorphous relationship to a “source”.16 The former statement describes intertextuality and the term for the latter conundrum is an ‘intertext’. Further, as is identified, “traditional source study does not have room for cognitive theory in which memories can be distorted or in which material one reads earlier in life remains with one longer”.17 As argued by Lyne, intertextuality does have room for such cognitive theory. The intertextual approach is one with such scope and such applicability, especially to early modern creative writing, that its value seems unarguable. The focus on the early modern author as reader, and as part of a metaphorical linear network, offers a fertile starting point for tracing the production of meaning in a text via its moves between signifying systems and its intertexts. Such open, discursive texts, some of which are explored in this volume, clearly demonstrate the applicability of intertextual theory, methodology, and analysis, as proven by the preceding study. Evidently, the importance of the comparative narrative systems in the construction and meaning of texts is one which early modern writers were entirely aware of and one which they exploited fully.

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Notes 1. Raphael Lyne, Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1. 2. Lyne, Memory, 13. 3. Lyne, Memory, 43. 4. Lyne, Memory, 25–27. 5. Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre, ed. Lisa S. Starks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 6. Douglas M. Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value,” in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 28–29. 7. Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics,” 30. 8. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 60. 9. See Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, “What Is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe,” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 16. 10. Maguire and Smith, “What Is a Source?,” 24. 11. Interestingly, Lyne also refers to founding work of a cognitive approach to literature focusing on the “workings of metaphor”, Memory, 7. 12. Lanier, “Shakespearean Rhizomatics,” 29. 13. Paul Cobley, Narrative (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 184. 14. Adriaan van der Weel, Changing Our Textual Minds (2011), cited by Adam Hammond, Literature in a Digital Age: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 14. 15. Hammond cites George P. Landow, Hypertext (1992) and Jay David Bolter, Writing Space (1991), Literature in a Digital Age, 157. 16. Maguire and Smith, “What Is a Source?,” 30; 17. 17. Maguire and Smith, “What Is a Source?,” 17.

Bibliography Cobley, Paul. Narrative. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Hammond, Adam. Literature in a Digital Age: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Lanier, Douglas M. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.” In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lyne, Raphael. Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

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Maguire, Laurie, and Smith, Emma. “What Is a Source? Or, How Shakespeare Read His Marlowe.” Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 15–31. Starks, Lisa S., ed. Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Index

A Allegoresis, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31–33, 108 Allegory, allegorical, 2, 6–8, 11, 13–15, 21–34, 37, 52, 56, 71, 88, 93, 98, 108 Allen, Graham, 4, 16, 18, 33, 38 Apuleius Works The Golden Asse, 11, 12 Aristotle, 5, 6, 67, 70, 82 Artese, Charlotte, 44, 46, 47, 59 Audience, 10, 13, 14, 22, 30, 42, 44, 45, 50–52, 57, 88, 92, 95, 97. See also Reader B Bacon, Sir Francis Works De Sapientia Veterum, 6, 16, 21, 25, 29, 34–39 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 5, 66–68, 81, 82 Barry, Peter, 2, 3, 8, 15, 108 Barthes, Roland, 3–5, 16, 26, 45, 68, 82, 107, 111

Beaumont, Francis Works Salmacis and Hermaphroditus , 66, 72, 79 Belsey, Catherine, 18, 44–46, 59 Bishops’ Ban, 86, 89, 101 Bloom, Harold, 8, 85, 87, 88 Bridgewater, Earl of, 52, 54. See also Castlehaven scandal Briggs, K.M., 17, 46, 59 Browne, Sir Thomas, 43, 58

C Cain, Tom, 88, 93, 98, 99, 102, 103 Carnivalesque, 67 Castlehaven scandal, 54. See also Bridgewater, Earl of Catholicism, 55, 56 Cognitive theory, 112 Comes, Natalis (Natale Conti), 30, 33 Cultural property, 42 Cultural subconscious, 8, 10, 15, 44, 108 Culture wars, 56

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 S. Carter, Early Modern Intertextuality, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68908-7

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INDEX

D Daniel, Samuel, 6, 16 Dekker, Thomas Works Satiromastix, 85, 90, 99, 102 Dentith, Simon, 67–69, 81–83 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 111, 112 Dialogism, 5

E Ellis, Jim, 69, 70, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83 Epyllia, 66–71, 75, 76, 78–82, 85, 86, 97, 98, 108

F Florio, John, 69, 82 Folklore, 2, 9, 15, 42–46, 49, 53, 56, 57, 108 Folktales, 11, 33, 34, 38, 42–49, 51, 52, 56 Folktale-type catalogue, 47 Fox, Adam, 7, 17, 42–45, 58 Frye, Northrop, 86, 88, 101, 103

G Gender conventions, 66 Golding, Arthur, 14, 24 Gorges, Arthur, 16, 21, 26, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37 Greenblatt, Stephen, 8, 9, 15, 17, 18, 108 Greimas, A.J., 33 Guilpin, Everard, 86, 98, 101

H Hall, Joseph, 86, 98, 103 Harington, Sir John, 23, 24, 27, 28, 35–38 Hauntology, 110

Hawkes, Terence, 32, 33, 38 Heteroglossia, 5 Heteronormativity, 70, 71 Homoeroticism, 74 Homosocial, 71, 75, 80 Horace, 5, 6, 16, 87, 89–100, 102 Horatian satire, 86, 87, 92, 97. See also Satire Hutcheon, Linda, 67–69, 81, 82 Hypertext, 15, 111, 112

I Imitation, 2, 5–7, 9, 14–16, 42, 66–70, 80, 98, 102, 108, 109 Irony, 29, 86, 88, 91, 100

J Jardine, Lisa, 29, 30, 33, 37, 38 Jonson, Ben Works Cynthia’s Revels , 90, 91, 99 Every Man in his Humour, 69 Every Man Out of His Humour, 89–90 Poetaster, 86–91, 93–100, 102, 103 Juvenalian satire, 86, 92–94, 100. See also Satire

K Kastan, David Scott, 3, 5, 8, 15, 16 Keach, William, 70, 82 Kristeva, Julia Works Revolution in Poetic Language, 16, 32, 38, 113 “The System and the Speaking Subject”, 32, 38

INDEX

L Lamb, Mary Ellen, 9–12, 17, 18, 43, 48, 49, 52, 58–60 Lanier, Douglas M., 109, 111, 113 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 32, 38 Lewalski, Barbara K., 55, 56, 60, 61 Lodge, Thomas Works Scillaes Metamorphosis , 66, 77, 79 Lyne, Raphael, 102, 108–110, 112, 113

M Marlowe, Christopher Works Hero and Leander, 66, 74 Marston, John Works Histriomastix, 89 Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image, 97 Masculinity, 48, 65, 76, 82 Masques, 54, 55, 61 Memory, 24, 27, 57, 108, 109 Metamorphosis, metamorphoses, 9, 12, 14, 18, 24, 25, 36, 39, 51, 66, 72, 77, 79, 82, 98, 110 Metaphor, 8, 12, 23–25, 28, 29, 34, 80, 86, 90, 92, 94, 109, 110 Milton, John Works Comus , 42, 43, 52, 53, 55–57, 60, 61 Minsheu, John, 25, 35, 36 Misogyny, 71, 75 Monstrosity, 11, 31 Moral tradition, 24, 29 Mumming, 54 Mundhenk, Rosemary Karmelich, 54, 60, 61

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Mythology, 2, 6, 7, 14, 22, 24, 25, 29, 32, 42–44, 48, 66, 71, 80, 108

N Nashe, Thomas, 25, 36, 59

O ‘Old wives’ tales’, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 58–60 Oral tradition, 48, 49, 59 Ovid Works Metamorphoses , 9, 12, 14, 18, 24, 25, 36, 72, 98

P Parody, 2, 5, 8, 13–16, 55, 66–70, 72, 73, 77–81, 86, 88, 108 Parresia, 26, 36 Peele, George Works The Old Wife’s Tale, 42, 49–53, 57, 60 Peend, Thomas, 79 Petrarchan, 66, 70, 73, 77–80, 108 Plato, 5, 43, 58 Playful, 67–70, 80, 81, 86 Poetomachia, 87–91, 93, 97, 98 Propp, Vladimir, 33, 46, 59 Puritanism, 52 Puttenham, George Works The Art of English Poesy, 23, 35, 36, 101

Q Quilligan, Maureen, 26, 33, 36–38 Quintilian, 6, 7, 16, 59

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R Rabelais, François, 25, 36 Reader, 5, 13, 15, 23, 28, 29, 31, 34, 44, 68, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 88, 109, 111, 112. See also Audience Rhetoric, 6, 26, 76, 79, 82, 87, 99 Robin Goodfellow, 9, 45, 46 Rose, Margaret A., 66, 67, 69, 70, 81, 82

S Sandys, George, 18, 34, 39 Satire, 2, 8, 15, 51, 67, 81, 86–89, 91–97, 100, 108 Horatian, 86, 87, 92, 97 Juvenalian, 86, 92–94, 100 Scot, Reginald, 45, 58, 59 Seasonal cycles, 41, 52 Seznec, Jean, 24, 30, 33, 36, 38 Shakespeare, William Works Cymbeline, 47, 58 King Lear, 46 Much Ado About Nothing , 47 Romeo and Juliet , 12, 98 The Merchant of Venice, 47

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2, 7, 9, 15, 17, 18, 42, 46, 58 Titus Andronicus , 47 Venus and Adonis , 66, 73, 77, 79, 82 A Winter’s Tale, 42, 48–52, 57, 60 Sidney, Sir Philip, 13, 18, 25, 36 Social anthropology, 32 Socratic dialogues, 5 Source study, 15, 44, 110, 112 Spenser, Edmund Works The Faerie Queene, 23 The Shepheardes Calendar, 23 T Translation, 6, 12–14, 24, 26, 27, 34, 79, 89, 97, 108 Transposition, 4, 14, 44, 66, 110 W War of the Theatres, 89, 98. See also Poetomachia The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypol , 52 Wriothesley, Henry, 73