The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England 0754664457, 9780754664451

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THE POETICS OF LITERARY TRANSFER IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

Other Ashgate titles of interest: Writing a New France, 1604–1632 Brian Brazeau English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 Anne E.B. Coldiron Machiavelli in the British Isles Alessandra Petrina Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance Elisabeth Hodges

Für Dorothea

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in early Modern france and england

hassan MeLehy University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, USA

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © hassan Melehy 2010 hassan Melehy has asserted his right under the copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Melehy, hassan, 1960– The poetics of literary transfer in early modern france and england. 1. du Bellay, Joachim, ca. 1522–1560 – Themes, motives. 2. spenser, edmund, 1552?– 1599 – Themes, motives. 3. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533–1592 – Themes, motives. 4. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Themes, motives. 5. Classicism in literature. i. Title 821.3’09–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Melehy, hassan, 1960– The poetics of literary transfer in early modern france and england / by hassan Melehy. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6445-1 (alk. paper) 1. French literature—16th century—History and criticism. 2. French literature—17th century—History and criticism. 3. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 4. French literature—Roman influences. 5. French literature—English influences. 6. English literature—Roman influences. 7. English literature—French influences. 8. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title. PQ245.M385 2010 840.9’355—dc22 ISBN: 9780754664451 (hbk)

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Contents Acknowledgements Epigraph Notes on Text Introduction

vii ix xi 1

Part 1 Du Bellay 1

Defending the Space of Early Modern Culture

17

2

Time in Rome

31

3

A Dream Language

51

Part 2 Spenser 4

Translation, Imitation, Ruin

75

5

Visions of Spenser

95

6

Antiquities of Britain

119

Part 3 Montaigne 7

Institutional Authority

139

8

The Words of Vanity

161

9

America, the End of Western Dreaming

179

Part 4 Shakespeare 10

The Sonnets and Time

205

11

Old and New Roman Times

221

12

The Representation of the Other

237

Works Cited Index

257 273

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Acknowledgements The most important transfers of this book are personal and hence largely hidden. Many people who deserve to be named are responsible for all the best parts of this book. Among the great teachers whose marks on my thinking I am continually aware of are Jonathan Beecher, Réda Bensmaïa, Harry Berger, Tom Conley, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Ronald Sousa, Georges Van Den Abbeele, and Samuel Weber. Among the colleagues whose steady interest in my work has led me to continue it with improvements are Edward Benson, Jean-Claude Carron, Anne E.B. Coldiron, Michael J. Giordano, Richard Peterson, Anne Lake Prescott, Timothy J. Reiss, and Janet Whatley. In addition to those I’ve named so far, among the friends who have put up with my moods and reveries about all manner of things as I’ve worked on this book are Martine Antle, Paul Assimacopoulos, Philippe Barr, Norma Bouchard, Marion Callis, Anika Cazenave, Anne Dawson, Doris von Drathen, Dominique Fisher, Rose Freymuth-Frazier, Catherine Gimelli Martin, Bruce Hayes, Kristin Kelly, Tomoko Kuribayashi, John Lucas, Michael Markos, Monica McCormick, Nancy Nenno, Lisa Rathert, Claudia Rhodes, Angela Rose, Todd Thorpe, and Cherie Ann Turpin. In the years that I’ve worked on this book, I’ve presented parts of it at various stages of completion in a number of forums, including the Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, the MLA Division on Sixteenth-Century French Literature, the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, and the Lilian R. Furst Forum in Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I thank all those connected with these forums whom I have not named already for their attention to my work, especially Deborah Lesko Baker, Emily Cranford, Eric Downing, Virginia Krause, Jasmine McKewen, John Ribó, and Richard Vernon. A Research and Study Leave granted by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill allowed me to make great progress on this book, and I am very grateful to the Department and the College of Arts and Sciences for that time and support. I am very thankful to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University for granting me the position of Visiting Scholar in the spring of 2002, during which time I did much of the research for this book. The position of Visiting Scholar that I held in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at the Universität Regensburg in the summer of 2008 allowed me to complete this book; for that opportunity I thank the Institut, the university, and in particular Udo Hebel. I also thank the University Research Council of the University of North Carolina for generously covering some of the costs of publishing this book.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

I thank the tireless librarians at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for their assistance in my searches for materials for this study. Christine Cooper and Sarah Johnson very industriously assisted me in translating a text from Latin that figures in Chapter 2, and I thank them for it. I thank my editor at Ashgate, Erika Gaffney, for her impeccable professionalism, efficiency, and generosity. For the immense amount of work they did on the preparation of this book for publication, I thank Whitney Feininger and Kathy Bond Borie, respectively Assistant Editor and Desk Editor at Ashgate. And for her extremely insightful and incisive comments on my manuscript at several stages, I thank Deanne Williams. As the one who has given me more than all others combined, I reserve my warmest, most heartfelt thanks for my wife, Dorothea Heitsch. For this book’s defects, I claim sole responsibility.

O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistence. [O worldly inconstancy! Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time.] Du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome Why then dooth flesh, a bubble glas of breath, Hunt after honour and advauncement vaine, And reare a trophee for devouring death, With so great labour and long lasting paine, As if his daies for ever should remaine? Sith all that in this world is great or gaie, Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie. Spenser, The Ruines of Time Qui ne voit que j’ai pris une route par laquelle, sans cesse et sans travail, j’iray autant qu’il y aura d’ancre et de papier au monde? [Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?] Montaigne, “De la vanité” How many Ages hence Shall this our lofty Scene be acted over, In State unborne, and Accents yet unknowne? Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit! [For I love you, O Eternity!] Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra

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Notes on Text An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as Hassan Melehy, “Du Bellay and the Space of Early Modern Culture,” Neophilologus 84.4 (October 2000): 501–15. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. The revised text is reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as Hassan Melehy, “Du Bellay’s Time in Rome: The Antiquitez,” French Forum 26.2 (Spring 2001): 1–22. © 2001 The University of Nebraska Press. The revised text is reprinted with kind permission from The University of Nebraska Press. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared as Hassan Melehy, “Joachim Du Bellay’s Dream Language: The Songe as Allegory of Poetic Signification,” Renaissance et Réforme/Renaissance and Reformation 24.2 (2000): 3–21. © 2000 The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. The revised text is reprinted with kind permission from The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as Hassan Melehy, “Spenser and Du Bellay: Translation, Imitation, Ruin,” Comparative Literature Studies 40.4 (2003): 415–38. © 2003 The Pennsylvania State University. The revised text is reprinted with kind permission from The Pennsylvania State University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as Hassan Melehy, “Antiquities of Britain: Spenser’s Ruines of Time,” Studies in Philology 102.2 (2005): 159–83. © 2005 The University of North Carolina Press. The revised text is reprinted with kind permission from The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpts from Joachim Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Illustration of the French Language,” edited and translated by Richard Helgerson, © 2006 The University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Used with kind permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpts from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech, © 1987 and 1991 M.A. Screech. All rights reserved. Used with kind permission of Penguin Group.

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Introduction Beginning This book is about the formation of the literary canons in early modern France and England, by way of readings of four authors whose work displays a concern for the role of a literary canon in an emergent national state. My focus is on the ways that these authors—Du Bellay, Spenser, Montaigne, and Shakespeare—engage in strategies of rewriting the literary work of other places and times. In the texts I have chosen for this study, each author not only redirects and transforms writing from other literary canons to the end of supporting the one to which he is contributing; in so doing, he also reflects on the processes by which such incorporation of other texts takes place. Also at issue in the works that I examine, then, is the poetics of this literary transformation or transfer. These texts are, variously, works of prose, poetry, and drama, and I will address them in their generic specificity as I analyze them. They have in common a participation in this poetics, which functions in both their composition and in their relationship with phenomena external to them. All four authors begin by looking at ancient Rome and its various manifestations during their own time. These include the tourism of Roman ruins and the myth of the Eternal City, as well as the pageantry by which state institutions establish themselves through images of Rome. In each case, these authors’ work plays at least some part in the proliferation of these images; they situate their writing with respect to it and also with respect to the competing states in Europe. These authors are each, to varying degrees, concerned with problems of translation, specifically of how a text in a foreign language can be adapted as well as how an emergent national literature can build itself on material that is initially foreign to it. In addition to examining Rome, Du Bellay looks to Italy, especially Petrarch. In his own explorations of Roman and Italian writing, Spenser’s focus is primarily on Du Bellay’s French importations of these. Montaigne looks at the legacy of Rome that comes to him through humanism, as well as to Du Bellay and the physical ruins of Rome. Shakespeare draws heavily on Spenser, and by way of him Du Bellay, as well as on Montaigne; I examine ways that he not only incorporates their texts into his own but also engages the problems they raise. All of these writers encounter skepticism in their examinations of the literary canon and state durability. For Montaigne and Shakespeare, this skepticism is most powerfully manifested in the fact of the existence of well-developed cultures outside Europe, particularly in the New World. Hence, the problem of apprehending other cultures and transferring semiotic material from them becomes a broadly epistemological one; their texts stage the rhetorical operations by which such transfer may occur. My study focuses on parts of early modern French and English literary history—but especially on how these authors conceive of the literary history

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

2

in the formation of which they are aware of taking part. It also looks at how, through the rhetorical operations of their texts, they articulate the relationship of literary practices to the cultures in which they take place, above all in the context of the major regional and global transformations that the early modern period sees. A rigorous examination of the materials of this study, then, necessitates a combination of literary history and formalist methodology. Textual Materials In its struggles among various historicisms and formalisms, literary studies is rarely dominated by one camp—and often enough sees hybrids of the two poles. In early modern studies there is always a strong historicist tendency; especially in French studies, where I do most of my work, it gravitates toward positivism. It is of course far from the case that theory has disappeared, despite pronouncements of its death—in favor of historically based studies—over the last 10 or 15 years. There is little criticism that is so positivist as to involve no interpretation, and few interpreters who could honestly claim that their practice owes nothing to any of the available theoretical models. But for quite some time now, there has been a tendency to insist that interpretive claims be grounded in and justified by reference to the historical circumstances in which a text was produced. Perhaps this is a final move away from New Criticism, but questions are very quickly asked when one invokes simulacrum, trauma, supplement, or any number of other concepts stemming from twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory without demonstrating, through reference to other cultural documents and materials, that such a phenomenon occurs in the culture at issue. Indeed, many seem to be under the impression that serious research in literary studies necessitates a firm grounding in literary history and often costly trips to archives.1 With this turn to a far more detailed grasp of historical circumstances, suspect also are the terms designating broad cultural swaths that used to facilitate detailed textual explication. In connection with Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets, for example, it no longer suffices in the French scholarly journals to speak of the poet’s interest in “the idea of Rome as the Eternal City,” which he then debunks through his exposure of the complete ruin and hence temporal vulnerability of the ancient city. One must cogently establish the materialization of the idea of Rome in writings contemporaneous with Du Bellay’s stay there between 1553 and 1558. Although I have several objections to this state of affairs, I’m not in broad opposition to it. It was just such a criticism of my formulation of “the Renaissance idea of Rome” when I first submitted an article on Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome [Antiquities of Rome] (a very early version of Chapter 2) that led me to a delightful discovery. In pursuing some very helpful suggestions by readers to 1

Jane Gallop takes this perception as the basis of a strong criticism of the move away from close reading in literary studies, a criticism with which I am in broad agreement: “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,” Profession 2007: 181–6.

Introduction

3

remedy the vagueness of my initial formulation, I came across the near-certainty that Du Bellay was writing his poetry not only on the basis, familiar to criticism, of Ovid, Virgil, and several humanist poets, but also, and more directly, on that of the most important Roman tourist guides. The authors of these were Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani and Andrea Palladio, and their very widely read guides both saw Italian editions in the 1540s and 1550s titled L’antichità di Roma. The coincidence of these titles with Du Bellay’s piqued my interest. Since at the time I was in proximity to the Beinecke Library at Yale University, it was easy for me to look at editions of them. I found that Du Bellay’s presentation of the city of Rome as an empty field of ruins contrasted sharply with these guides, which present the monuments of ancient Rome as though they were still there. (Montaigne also criticizes the guides on this point in his Journal de Voyage.)2 I also discovered, in the course of my research, that guidebooks by Lucio Fauno, Pirro Ligorio, and Lucio Mauro were available in Rome around the time of Du Bellay’s stay there, and that they were all at some point published under a title close to if not exactly L’antichità di Roma. These discoveries enabled me to gauge a number of resonances of Du Bellay’s sonnet sequence in early modern France. Many French readers who had also been tourists in Rome would have immediately recognized his title as reproducing that of the guidebooks; Du Bellay’s title then turns out to address much more then the antecedent poetry about Rome that criticism previously noted. I was able to expand my intertextual approach to Du Bellay beyond the realm of circumscribed literary history. It became clear to me that Du Bellay was addressing an idea of ancient Rome that circulated materially as part of the thriving tourist industry of the sixteenth century. Before I knew very much about New Historicism, my study of Du Bellay involved practicing that approach’s broad examination of discursive networks that cut across institutionally prescribed genre distinctions. However, my own approach maintains a notion of the autonomy of the literary text as a privileged site of the confluency and negotiation of discourses, more than New Historicism has generally recognized. Because one of the points of a well-executed literary text is to engage in an abundance of rhetorical operations, my approach in this book presupposes that it is often from literary texts that one learns the most about how networks of discourse, language, and cultural signs operate. On a small scale, an excellent example is Du Bellay’s use of the word antiquité. In his title, the word reproduces the uncomplicated sense that the word has in the tourist guides, which is more or less “old and hence venerable.” The fact that Du Bellay starts with this notion makes all the more powerful his transformation of the word in the course of the Antiquitez to mean “decrepit,” “worn down,” “faded away,” even turning the word against the venerable grandeur of the Roman Empire that was a principal attraction of Roman Michel de Montaigne, Journal de Voyage, ed. Fausta Garavini (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 200–201. Cf. Margaret McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 229–31. 2

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

tourism. The word’s specific connection with tourism, which I discovered in the guides, enhanced my detailed, close textual reading of Du Bellay’s sonnets. Although the anonymous readers of my article submission pointed me to the tourist guides, nothing they said suggested the intertextual connections that I found. They cited the titles of the guides in Latin: Urbis Romae Topographia in Marliani’s case, Antiquitates Urbis Romae in Palladio’s. In Du Bellay criticism these titles are known, but the very specific textual connections to the Italianlanguage tourist guides, most notably their title (I have found no evidence of guidebooks published in French under the title Les Antiquitez de Rome) had not previously received attention. I’m sure these readers had no objections to my findings—as the very best peer reviews do, theirs led me to an unexpected and very interesting series of insights. Their recommendations, however, had more to do with understanding “the Renaissance idea of Rome” according to a perspective belonging to the history of ideas, albeit an interdisciplinary one, which involves getting a sense of the mindset of early modern writing on Rome. The textual empiricism that I learned while immersed in the poststructuralist theory of the 1980s and early 1990s oriented my examination of the materials. And, ironically, an important component of my discovery occurred not in the archives but rather through WorldCat, where I found long lists of books with variations on the title L’antichità di Roma. Since then, I have strongly recommended WorldCat searches to students whose research would be strengthened through a preliminary overview of the publication history of a title. I made the additional discovery, also based on close textual reading in connection with library and archival research, that it is very probable that Du Bellay was reading and alluding to one or more French translations of the Bible, rather than the Vulgate, as all commentators on the matter had assumed. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 3, this idea suddenly makes Du Bellay’s Songe [Dream], long regarded as highly cryptic, much more readable. In fact, Du Bellay’s poetry turns out to be even more of a vast intertextual field than commentators had previously signaled, one that takes quite a number of texts from his own and prior times and rewrites them so as to produce a new poetry whose very distinction is its confluency of sources. In its several major French versions, the Bible is also a part of the thriving literary production of sixteenth-century France, and as such is available to Du Bellay for his own efforts. For this reason, I don’t see as big a problem as some commentators do with the mixture of Christian and pagan texts in Du Bellay—or, for that matter, in the more blatantly pious Spenser. The aim was to create modern, national literatures, and all texts appear to have been, at least to some degree, fair game. References and allusions to the Bible usually accompany a religious purpose; but as meditations on temporality, eternity, death, and divinely guaranteed royal power, Du Bellay’s and Spenser’s texts already entail such a purpose. An aggressive disposition with respect to the availability of all texts is very much a part of Du Bellay’s prescriptions for modern poetry in La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [The Defense and Illustration of the French Language]: in Chapter 1, I will demonstrate that, despite vacillations on the definition of imitation, he comes down in favor of the notion that it involves taking

Introduction

5

concrete pieces of prior texts—whether they are written in French, another language, or translated into French—and recontextualizing them in order to form a new text. Their meanings and purposes are recast, reconfigured, and often ironized and parodied. As I will show in Chapter 3, Du Bellay goes so far as to recast some consequential theological notions of time by rereading the Book of Revelation. Literature in History The term intertextuality very effectively describes large parts of the process that Du Bellay advocates. I use the term pretty much as it was defined from the 1960s to the 1980s by such critics as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Michael Riffaterre, and detailed in a fashion still of value to literary criticism by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism.3 As Hutcheon shows, one of the most important turns in the history of this critical concept was its role in opening literary studies to cultural studies: when the notion of a text expanded to include a wide variety of organized semiotic fields, postmodern literary texts could be viewed as closely connected to areas of social and cultural activity that had previously not been recognized as literary. Criticism was able to view literature as in constant interaction with these “other textualizations of experience.”4 The next step was to view these areas as worthy of scholarly inquiry in their own right. Since many of them involve semiotic fields that don’t fit traditional notions of textuality, Hutcheon suggests the term “interdiscursivity … for the collective modes of discourse from which postmodernism periodically draws … .”5 Within literary studies, such notions of a widely interconnected discursive field have enabled New Historicism to presuppose the radical coherence of a culture such that all discourses may be seen as operating under the same principles and explainable as closely related phenomena. In an assessment of the aims and procedures of New Historicism, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt speak of their “fascination with the possibility of treating all of the written and visual traces of a particular culture as a mutually intelligible network of signs” and of “treating all the traces of an era, even if its boundaries could be successfully demarcated, as a single cultural formation.”6 My own approach, which is indebted to New Historicism, privileges the literary text as a site where the rhetorical operations of the mixing of discourses in a culture are strenuously reflected on and enacted. The works that I focus on in this study involve the transfer of portions of other cultures in order to produce a new configuration principally based on the emergent nation; I have chosen them because they embody and address the poetics of this cultural transfer. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), 105–40. Ibid., 129. 5 Ibid., 130. 6 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7–8. 3 4

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

6

New Historicism has been the most radical of the historicisms to arise in the last 20 or 30 years because its procedures don’t allow the persistence of a hermetically-sealed area of culture, nor that of the strict integrity of the discipline that would make such an area its object. However, as Gallagher and Greenblatt indicate, the framework in which New Historicism holds cultures to be unified is the conservative one of periodization7—conservative because it is bestowed by institutional regularity. New Historicism shares this investment in periodization with all historicisms current in literary studies. Of course, it’s difficult to call this a shortcoming when even Du Bellay’s use of the familiar word antiquité takes on notable new dimensions. And literary criticism is better off than a generation ago, when a commentator, examining the gender division of labor that allowed Montaigne his leisure time, could speak easily of the essayist’s degradation of women in his statement that their most important quality is mastering “la science du mesnage [home management].”8 Any historicism would demand some exploration of the vastly important role of the noble ménage in the social, political, economic, and cultural life of sixteenth-century France, quite distant from the petty bourgeois confinement that the term “housewife” denotes.9 But the problem with the historicisms that have recently nudged themselves into literary studies—this may be more the case for French studies—is their insistence that a literary work should be comprehended primarily, if not exclusively, by way of reference to the historical configuration of its age.10 In the mid-1990s, against the theoretical models still prevalent at the time and in support of a type of historicism that has come to prominence, one French Renaissance scholar went so far as to refer to Rabelais’ books as “unreadable” to those without background in at least some of the areas of sixteenth-century intellectual and cultural activities that only specialists can truly know.11 Certainly, the reading of Rabelais is considerably enhanced by access to such knowledge and an awareness of the discourses that his books are engaging, examining, parodying, and challenging. But certainly also, Rabelais is worth much more than a few cheap laughs even if one brings nothing of that knowledge but rather one’s own cultural background, experiences, 7

Ibid., 7. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 3.9, “De la vanité,” 975; Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 1102. 9 Cecile Insdorf, Montaigne and Feminism (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976), 49. 10 English is, of course, also subject to such insistences. In Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), David Scott Kastan announces his plan to “restore Shakespeare’s artistry to the earliest conditions of its realization and intelligibility: to the collaborations of the theater in which the plays were acted, to the practices of the book trade in which they were published, to the unstable political world of late Tudor and early Stuart England in which the plays were engaged by their various publics” (11). 11 Barbara Bowen, “Rabelais’ Unreadable Books,” Renaissance Quarterly 48.4 (Winter 1995): 742–58. 8

Introduction

7

and interests to his marvelous books. That is, text can continue to be effective in periods and in connection with situations that are decidedly not the ones in which he lived. This is the case with many early modern texts, although the accumulation of knowledge in literary studies continues to demonstrate numerous links to discursive practices in their times. For example, Jack Kerouac’s consideration of Rabelais’ books as a model for Dr. Sax (1959), an extravagant and fantastic narrative of the culturally mixed, polyglot life of French-Canadian Lowell, Massachusetts, has a good deal to do with the challenges that Rabelais presented to dominant culture in his own time.12 And Ernst Lubitsch’s cinematic reworking of Shakespeare in To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which Shakespearean metatheatricality is put into play in order to examine the relationship between political power and representation in the National Socialist state,13 certainly sheds light on and develops a similar problem in any number of Shakespeare plays. Finally, Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, in placing Shakespeare’s The Tempest firmly in the colonial context, without question offers a commentary not only on Caribbean colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also on the historical dynamic of colonialism in which The Tempest participates. I’m not getting at some historically transcendent notion of political power embodied in both early modern tyranny and Nazism, but rather a way of bringing together a more recent and a more distant past in order to understand, in the present, something about both of them. If an early modern text can instantiate itself and be available for rereading in a subsequent historical era, then some phenomenon in that era is repeating some part of the text such that the reading of the latter is possible in the first place; an examination of this phenomenon will then yield insights of scholarly value to the early modern text. After such insight is gained, scholarship then needs to situate the text in the historical context of the latter’s own era. Here I am allying myself with the “presentism” that Terence Hawkes has valorized, insisting that any reading of a text from the past must of necessity pass through the history of readings of that text and must to some degree account for them.14

12 In a letter to John Clellon Holmes dated June 24, 1949, Kerouac writes of Rabelais’ “Crazy-Book”: Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 199. Four days later, in a letter to Elbert Enrow, he speaks of “the CrazyBook of Doctor Sax” (205). Writing to his future wife, Stella Sampas, on November 17, 1962, he praises the French translation of Dr. Sax by Jean Autret by saying that it “reads like Rabelais”: Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 353. 13 Ernst Lubitsch, To Be or Not to Be (Romaine Film Corporation, 1942). See also my “Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be: The Question of Simulation in Cinema,” Film Criticism 26.2 (2001–2002): 19–40. 14 See Hawkes’s rather polemical outline of this position: Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1–5.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Formal Matters What I find troubling in the historicism to which much criticism has lately defaulted is a tendency to downgrade the value of present-day insights, especially those which come from supposedly less-educated readings. One begins instead with the early modern historical configuration—as though the very notion that the intellectual configuration of a past era can be known in its totality were not also a disposition belonging to recent literary studies as the belated heir to the nineteenthand twentieth-century historiographies. Of the historicisms that emerged from the theory wars of the 1970s and 1980s, New Historicism remains the only approach that seriously problematizes the relationship of past to present.15 If privileging a set of political concerns amounts to an “agenda,” as detractors of New Historicism have claimed,16 it is only because the agenda of refusing the importance of these political concerns in the present by also refusing them in the study of the past has, in pettily conservative fashion, masked itself as neutral. But New Historicism has in different ways reinforced the separation between the past and the present: through its recourse to periodization, it has confined the energies of literary texts to an era that has little communication with our own. Of course, New Historicism is very broad and doesn’t entail a subscription to any single set of principles; the criticisms I am about to make pertain to work by Greenblatt and one or two others who have been professionally close to him. Although New Historicism generally presupposes the unity among networks of discourse belonging to a certain culture in a certain period, Greenblatt can still proclaim, with justification that is primarily disciplinary, that he remains interested in privileging works of literature and art precisely because of their role in the negotiation of multiple discourses.17 But the perspective informed by notions of the unity of discourse tends to regard the literary text as a passive receptacle of discursive action and not so much as an apparatus that encounters, brings into interaction, and redirects discourses in particularly concentrated fashion. The task and the duty then fall to those of us fortunate enough to live in the present, more than to any agency discernible in the past, to state just what those discourses are doing in the texts we read. That is, New Historicism often 15 For a critique of this claim made for New Historicism, see Robin Headlam Wells, “Historicism and ‘Presentism’ in Early Modern Studies,” The Cambridge Quarterly 29.1 (2000): 37–60. 16 See, for example, B.J. Sokol, A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Maidson and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 79. 17 See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 7: “I want to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify such powerful energy.” And Gallagher and Greenblatt, 9: “[N]o matter how thoroughgoing our skepticism, we have never given up or turned our backs on the deep gratification that draws us in the first place to the study of literature and art.”

Introduction

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downplays the critical energy that the texts themselves embody in favor of the talents of the present-day critic. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 12, with regard to one of the favored texts of New Historicist criticism, The Tempest, this neglect of the rhetorical apparatus is evident in limited attention to what has traditionally been regarded as the most important part of the play, Prospero’s masque in Act 4. This is of course the place where this very metatheatrical play is at its most metatheatrical and reflects on its own representational functioning. Greenblatt and a number of others have dazzlingly and unquestionably pointed out the play’s negotiation of discourses of colonization, particularly that of the New World, and how these discourses are involved in conflicts over the representation of the colonial other. But the masque, as a deliberate reflection on representation, when it is read in connection with these discourses, actually demonstrates the operations of their conflict so as to produce a critical epistemology of this other. Greenblatt refers to the masque as “the play’s most memorable but perplexing moment”;18 but he attributes to it the rather small role of concentrating the anxiety involved in the struggles of political power that The Tempest addresses rather than as a deliberate staging of the play’s broad metatheatrical problematic. In Chapter 12, I will bring this aspect of the play to light through a reading of the most empirically evident instance of engagement with discourses on colonialism, Shakespeare’s appropriation of Montaigne’s “Des cannibales [On the Cannibals].” In Chapter 9 I will explore this essay as an amalgamation of writings on the New World that, by foregrounding their interplay, demonstrates a failure to represent the other. Part of my reading of Shakespeare, which involves his reading of Montaigne, points out the fact that he begins to engage the most important political theory of his time. The principal difference between my approach in this book and New Historicism is that I am considerably more interested in placing emphasis on the formal operations of particular texts. New Historicism is itself a welldeveloped formalism,19 a hybrid of historical methodology and discourse analysis; Greenblatt’s other term for the practice, “cultural poetics,” indicates as much. Its analysis focuses on the rhetorical operations of larger discursive fields. Perhaps in a continual attempt to distinguish itself from the New Criticism in which its first purveyors had been immersed during their formative years, it has avoided examining literary texts in ways that might seem to grant them autonomy. As such, though, it has insisted on reading early modern works as strictly tied to their discursive networks; hence, like the more conservative historicisms I have cited, it has placed the same barrier between these works and the present. But as Greenblatt has always recognized, the distinguishing mark of literary texts is their rhetorical energy, or what he calls their encoding of “social energy,” because it is something generated in the wide network of discourses that makes up a society: “Whereas most collective expressions moved from their original setting to a new 18 19

Greenblatt, Negotiations, 144. Cf. Kastan, 29–31.

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place or time are dead on arrival, the social energy encoded in certain works of art continues to generate the illusion of life for centuries.”20 In my own approach, I place emphasis on literary texts as sites of the organization and concentration of such energy; this view offers more compelling reasons to make them a privileged object of study than the happenstance of disciplinary organization. It is just such rhetorical energy, the capacity of literary texts to be sites of the poetic operations of networks of discourse as well as places where this poetics is reflected on and hence eminently readable, that enables literary works to enter into new discursive situations and to last over centuries. The complexity and multidirectionality of their organization of language is the quality that allows them to be adaptable to situations in subsequent time periods, no matter how specialized the knowledge of the discourses that they engage in their initial production. To be sure of deflecting misunderstanding of my proposals as involving residual traces of “timelessness,” I will be clear that I see the reading agency of later eras as that which produces the durability of certain texts in its rewriting of them. There is nothing inherent in any literary text that makes it last through periods of indifference to it; but the rhetorical composition of certain well-executed texts is particularly suited to subsequent readings and rewritings. It certainly isn’t the case that all texts in the literary canon may be characterized this way, nor that all wellexecuted, rhetorically energetic texts will be durable—nor that artifacts and other phenomena that aren’t “literary” are never composed in such dynamic fashion. But I take it as axiomatic that there is notable overlap between the texts institutionally designated as “literary” and those whose rhetorical energy occasions a historical momentum. Although literary works are always put to use in support of values and ideologies, it is precisely their continual questioning and renegotiation of the latter that render them available for rewriting and recasting in new localized contexts. Just as values and ideologies belong to the present, so do critical methodologies and acts of interpretation. A reflection on methodology and practice, combined with an accounting for the historical difference that older texts present, is necessary for challenging and consequential critical work to take place in the present. Poetic Transfers These criticisms of New Historicism are not major; I make them sympathetically and with the aim of suggesting a few correctives. I am most interested in advancing an understanding of literature as involving a mutual effectiveness between the present and the channels of transmission of the past. Such an effectiveness, as it operates in the formation of the literary canons of early modern France and England, is the object of this study. Hence, I hope to bring to light the historical dynamics that continue to make the literature of the past of value to the present. When Du Bellay develops the notion of imitation, he proposes a regard to the past 20

Greenblatt, Negotiations, 7.

Introduction

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that preserves it and conveys it to the present; in so doing, this regard rewrites and transforms the past. The French literary canon can in this way promote itself and eventually displace the canons that precede it. Du Bellay’s examination of Rome, which he carries out mainly by way of Italian preservations and rewritings of Roman literature but also by closely related meditations on the Roman ruins themselves, involves a reverence for the past insofar as that past may be transferred to the present and in fact left behind. Hence, Rome is preserved not simply as Rome but also as a means of creating the new French canon; this canon establishes itself through its transformation of Rome. I understand the reflections on cultural transfer offered by the texts I examine in this study to be of methodological value for present-day criticism, which should never stop its effort to understand the relationship between past and present. Du Bellay recognizes the temporal and spatial dimensions of this transfer, which necessitates that French literature look to another time and another place in order to produce itself as something in the present and in a certain geographical location. One of his main purposes, in both La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse and the poetry that follows it, is to articulate the poetics of this process of literary transfer. Spenser borrows heavily from Du Bellay, imitating him in his own self-conscious contribution to the foundation of the modern English canon so as to import his predecessor’s poetics into his own country. Although this study is concerned with a number of the different discourses that these writers confronted, the principal focus is on the relations among literary texts from different national traditions, as it is in these that the poetics of literary transfer is most distinctly readable. Montaigne also looks to the ruins of Rome and the closely related writings on them in order to demonstrate, through the temporal and spatial distance from the ancient city, the necessity for modern European cultures to base themselves on Rome and the inevitability of the very shaky position they find themselves in as a result. In addition, Montaigne considers the instability of European culture in relation to the vastness of the world that its empires are discovering as they expand, the most powerful evidence of which is the presence of a whole set of civilizations in the Americas. Montaigne dramatizes this instability by examining the continual attempts at the epistemological domination of the peoples of the Americas, which operate according to a rhetoric borrowed from that of apprehending the past of antiquity, and their continual failures. Finally, Shakespeare looks at the temporal dimension of literary transmission and comes up with a largely pessimistic assessment of any kind of durability. He carries this into his representation of Rome in Julius Caesar, where he furthers discoveries by Du Bellay and Montaigne on the durability of Rome by suggesting that this durability is an effect of theatrical representation. In The Tempest Shakespeare dramatizes the limits of the epistemology that arises in his reflections on theater by showing the struggles involved in dominating the colonial world, particularly the Americas, in a partial rewriting of Montaigne.

12

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

As a work of comparative literature, this book has led me to consider the mutual regards and intermeshings of early modern European literary cultures. My examinations of the ways that the French and English canons founded themselves through cultural transfer demonstrates their heterogeneous composition. The coming pages thereby challenge the investment in the national integrity of these canons that tends to run through the disciplinary versions of national literatures, which too often take for granted the immense labor that it took in the early modern period to produce the very notion of a national literature in the first place. Approaches In order to address these problems, I situate these texts in literary history, a procedure involving a certain amount of archival research. A number of the works I needed to examine are available only in older editions. Mainly, I have taken advantage of a most fortunate development for literary scholarship, PDF documents widely distributed on the World Wide Web. Much of the research that used to necessitate expensive and time-consuming trips to archives, and hence to freeze out many scholars who didn’t work for major research universities, can be done through the examination of PDF versions of early editions rather than the printed books themselves.21 My work on establishing literary and cultural contexts was greatly enhanced by my engagement with close reading, which has brought to light many intertextual connections among the works in my study as well as the complex rhetorical operations that these links showcase. My practice of close reading results from an immersion in poststructuralist criticism as a student in Santa Cruz, Minneapolis, and Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. A number of related areas of inquiry are also sources of the critical concepts I deploy: chief among them are semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Most of the terms I use are familiar in literary criticism. There is one term that I would like to explain in some detail here, mainly because it is so very charged (I would also say much misunderstood) and because it is hardly used in early modern literary studies: this term is simulacrum. Because of the unfortunate habit in criticism to posit an authoritarian family relationship between a particular term and a thinker who is known to have written about it, this concept is inextricably tied to the name of Jean Baudrillard. Although Baudrillard’s work on it is certainly of value, I rely on the more elaborate and more widely pertinent notion of the simulacrum that Gilles Deleuze developed in a number of works, well before Baudrillard used the word.

21 Early English Books Online (EEBO), offered by Chadwyck-Healey (http://eebo. chadwyck.com/) is of course an invaluable resource in English scholarship. But it is a database that institutions must pay dearly for. I would like to see more institutions follow the model of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which through Gallica, its digital library, has made millions of pages available to the general public in PDF documents (http://gallica.bnf.fr/).

Introduction

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By the term simulacrum, I understand the type of image that stands in relation to another image rather than to the object that is its purported original. That is, it is an image whose relation to its model seriously calls into question any notion of effective representation. If an image reveals itself to be a version of another image, and the latter bears a similar relationship to still more images, then a question arises of just what the original object is and whether any image can capture it. Both Deleuze and Baudrillard valorize this power of the simulacrum. Baudrillard takes up the simulacrum as an effective way of conceiving the logic of popular culture and the experience of life in a world dominated by mass media; so many images on television, in advertising, and the movies raise the issue of the groundedness of any image. As a purportedly false image from the point of view of dominant culture, the simulacrum can function propagandistically to hide the ungroundedness of ostensibly true images. Baudrillard examines this process: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,” he writes, “when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it [because they function as a play of illusions and phantasms] are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation.”22 For Deleuze, the simulacrum offers an understanding of much of the history of philosophy and consequently that of representation in the West. He begins his valorization of the simulacrum as a response to Plato, who presents the seductive power of the simulacrum (phantasma in Greek) as a threat to the integrity of the true image; the latter claims participation in the Form or Idea (eidos).23 Deleuze sees in this power a reconception of the operations of thought.24 As he recasts it, the simulacrum debunks the notion of the true image when it reveals itself to be part of a series of images; the original object recedes from representation such that it is only available as a function of transmission through this series. With the discovery that the simulacrum is one of many images, none of which can affirm anything like close proximity to the original model, then the question arises whether a model really exists or is rather an effect of an image that lays a forceful claim of authenticity against the others. “The simulacrum is not just a copy,” writes Deleuze, “but that which overturns all copies by also overturning the models: every thought becomes an aggression.”25 The dominant philosophical conceptions of representation that Deleuze criticizes involve notions of plenitude, of giving a full and accurate picture; the simulacrum, on the other hand, is a repetition, a reiteration of another image that 22 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 175. 23 Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1200–201, 596a–597b. 24 Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” in The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 253–66. 25 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xx.

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itself refers back to an image anterior to it. In the series in which this relation of images takes place, the purported original reveals itself also to be one term in the series. One of Deleuze’s preferred areas of reference is the theater. He speaks of the “theater of repetition,” which he distinguishes from the “theater of representation.” The latter presents itself as subordinate to the depiction of an event that, whether real or fictional, has occurred earlier and elsewhere; the former is concerned with “the theatrical space, the emptiness of that space, and the manner in which it is filled and determined by the signs and masks through which the actor plays a role which plays other roles.”26 The theater of repetition is focused on the energy of the performance, related to what I term rhetorical energy, in which what matters is its effect on thinking rather than its request that thinking subordinate itself to a situation or phenomenon that is represented and hence not present.27 In the following pages, this notion of the simulacrum plays the role of explaining the relationship with other cultures and with the past that each of the writers engages in. In order to explain this role and also to conclude this introduction in reference to the problems of the opening chapters, I will sketch the function of the simulacrum in the work of Du Bellay. When Du Bellay looks to ancient Rome as a model of solidity, he seeks a ground of poetic quality, of the meaning of language, and of the stability of the modern state. But the very fact that it is possible to conceive of establishing a new poetry and a new imperial state is predicated on the absence of Rome, its having passed away in the course of time. The stability that Rome attributed to itself, its splendor as the eternal city, turns out to have been an effect of simulation, which is visible in the monuments that no longer stand and the poetry that is a thin trace of former grandeur. The bedrock of Roman stability was a simulacrum in ancient times and it is a simulacrum in modernity; the new poetry produces itself by mobilizing this simulacrum in its own favor, repeating ancient Rome with the difference that its grandeur occurs in another time and place. The simulacrum, then, is the very form of the relationship with the past, through poetry and the history that passes through poetry. Its energy is that of the transmission of images of the past into the present so that they may be reworked; the ensuing images then enter the momentum of history where they may be conveyed to the future. As each writer that I examine in the course of this study apprehends the past and rewrites it along with the work of his predecessors, he draws on the vital, creative energy of the simulacrum that is an integral part of the poetics of literary transfer.

26

Ibid., 10. A book that I have found immensely helpful in understanding different conceptions of the simulacrum and their limitations in postmodern theory and culture is Scott Durham, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 27

PART 1 Du Bellay

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Chapter 1

Defending the Space of Early Modern Culture The Field of Poetry When in the mid-sixteenth-century Joachim Du Bellay composed La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [The Defense and Illustration of the French Language] (1549), he faced not only a question of ultimately transforming French into a literary language on a par with Greek and Latin, but even more so one of inventing a space that the modern language would both frame and occupy. The invention1 is also that of a certain relationship with antiquity by which modernity is demarcated. Indeed, as I would like to show here, this gesture is the most essential aspect of the project: it has been pointed out numerous times that Du Bellay’s defense against those who hold that the works of antiquity are inherently superior, and that Greek and Latin are still the only appropriate languages for poetry, is at the very least an exaggerated one. One of Du Bellay’s first interlocutors, Barthélemy Aneau, writing the Quintil Horatian in 1550, signaled that there is considerably less call to defend the French language than Du Bellay’s rhetoric indicates. Aneau writes, “Qui accuse, ou, Qui ha accusée la langue Françoise? Nul certes: au moins par escript [Who accuses or who has accused the French language? Surely none, at least not in writing].”2 When Du Bellay sets his sights on “ces ambicieux admirateurs des Langues Greque, et Latine [those ambitious admirers of the Greek and Latin languages],”3 Aneau responds, “Tu es de ceulx là [You are one of them]” (322). It is Du Bellay, according to Aneau, who has no regard for the thriving tradition of writing in French, Du Bellay who writes it off in favor of the ancient models. 1

I use this term deliberately, as it is important to Du Bellay’s treatment of rhetoric and more generally of literary production. Susan Delaney keenly points out that in the Deffence, the word is used in both its classical sense, “from the Latin invenire (‘to come into’ or ‘to find’),” and its modern sense, “creation”: “Inventing the Poet in Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse,” Iris 4.1 (1988): 8. 2 Barthélemy Aneau, Quintil Horatian, in Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 307. The translation of the Quintil Horatian is mine. 3 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. JeanCharles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 83; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 330. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Deffence in the body of the text.

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Although, as Terence Cave says of the Deffence, “its aggressions may seem an oddly misplaced piece of shadow-boxing which proves the superiority of no one,”4 my intention is to examine Du Bellay’s instituting gestures with regard to the greatness of antiquity as part of a dialogue that is necessary for the formation of a modernity. As I understand modernity, it entails a break with the past by way of a paradoxical insistence on a continuity with the past. It requires a historicity in order to produce itself as autonomous: it must have a past, a site of orientation, whose achievements it will name and then repeat in order to differentiate itself from this site and demarcate its own proper space of operation. Modernity does not simply occur as a series of dates on a time line; it is, along with its historicity, enacted or performed. Du Bellay’s performance is a recognition of the ways that the literary canons of modernity will be constituted—and, I will argue, a call for them to be open to transformation as a necessary precondition. It is not the case that French had not been “accused.” As Margaret Ferguson points out in Trials of Desire, during the French Renaissance there were in fact many who expressed “their low opinion of the vulgar tongue in writing as well as in speech.”5 Nonetheless, she remarks, the use of French was quite widespread and highly regarded by many, independently of those who insisted on the primacy of antiquity. In Trials and in an earlier article, “The Exile’s Defense,” a masterful working-through of the complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes of the Deffence, Ferguson makes the highly provocative suggestion that the word deffence, in Du Bellay’s context, has “legal and military connotations”;6 she writes, “Like any good defense, Du Bellay’s hides an offense.”7 I would like to take her evocation of the offensive side of Du Bellay’s book as a point of departure, but I will proceed in a direction somewhat different from hers. Ferguson’s aim is to analyze the contradictions of the Deffence so as to bring out its functioning as a dialogue— with antiquity, with contemporary Italy (which is occupied by France and by way of which France may take over the traditions of antiquity), with contemporary French writing, and within Du Bellay himself. The effect of this multiple dialogue is that the poet of the Renaissance is to be found between two poles, in a state of Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 75–6. See also Thomas M. Greene’s comments on this judgment: The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 193. 5 Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 20. As a source on the accusations of French in Du Bellay’s time, Ferguson cites a twentieth-century defense of the Deffence: Michel Dassonville, “De l’unité de la ‘Deffence et Illustation de la langue françoyse,’” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 27.1 (1965): 96–107. 6 Margaret W. Ferguson, “The Exile’s Defense: Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse,” PMLA 93.2 (1978): 275. Greene rightly states of Ferguson’s article that “all future commentary [on the Deffence] will have to take [it] into account” (192). See also Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 18–53. 7 Ferguson, “Exile,” 275. 4

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exile with respect to the materials and spaces of his or her work. My own argument has to do with the fact that such a dialogue is set in motion, that the relationship with antiquity is beginning to be mapped in the interstitial space of exile such that a modernity may be announced. Educated in the law like many of the humanists, in composing the Deffence Du Bellay takes on the role of advocate, or defender, of a modernity in emergence.8 Migrations of the Renaissance The French Renaissance began, in Michelet’s account of it, at 3 p.m. on December 31, 1494, when the army of Charles VIII entered Rome.9 Achieved were military superiority over the glory of Italy and possession of the city of legend. The Italian poetic tradition was discovered, as were the Roman writings it housed and the Greek legacy the latter incorporated. Rome subsisted in a portion of the French imaginary—that in which Du Bellay and the Brigade (and subsequently the Pléïade) participated—as the invincible city that would never be surpassed. Hence Du Bellay wished to go to Rome; he did so in 1553 with his older relative Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, whom Henri II had appointed to further the interests of France by influencing Pope Julius III in France’s favor, against Spain, in the wars for political dominion over Italy. For Joachim, the voyage represented the possibility of reclaiming the Latin poetic tradition, of advancing the dream expressed in the Deffence.10 In the following two chapters I will discuss at length his two sonnet sequences on ancient Rome, Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] and the Songe [Dream], and in so doing elaborate on the status of Rome in Renaissance Europe. Even in the Deffence, the political and the aesthetic are intertwined: the glory of the French language is the glory of France, to be celebrated according to the models provided by the model of political and aesthetic glory; and the military occupation of Rome is assimilated to the reclaiming of the literary tradition. As the conquest of Italy is still a living event, Du Bellay is able to affirm that France has laid claim to its own national space. The superiority of Italy is perceived by not only French poets but also French kings, who initially imitated Italian court manners; François 8 Greene remarks, “Ferguson’s reading leads one to ask whether Du Bellay’s conflicts can ever be read as productive dialectic rather than unstable vacillations” (193). I am asking this question. In his own answer, Greene states, “The movement back and forth between a nourishing, overshadowing tradition and a groping, miraculous invention is precisely the movement of the Deffence, which needs to be read synecdochically as the fissured crystallization of an era” (195–6). It is in the movement Greene describes that I find the opening of the space necessary to early modern culture; however, I see invention also taking place with regard to the placement of the tradition. 9 Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au seizième siècle, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, ed. Robert Casanova (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 113. 10 See Eric MacPhail, The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford French and Italian Studies, 1990), 38–40.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Ier went so far as to relocate Leonardo to France in 1515 as a supreme gesture of French dominion, which of necessity acknowledged its source as Italy. When Du Bellay writes the title of the second chapter of the first book of the Deffence, “Que la Langue Françoyse ne doist estre nommée barbare [That the French Language should not be called barbarous]” (76/324), although the ostensible languages of reference are Latin and Greek, it is with respect to contemporary Italy that the French have been termed barbaric, or foreign, not with respect to Greece or Rome. To affirm French dominion, Du Bellay responds to those who would declare French a barbaric language in relation to Latin. But he also does a certain amount of invention of the looming monument of ancient Rome in order to begin building the new poetic glory of France—that is, the latter’s modernity. The many paradoxes of Du Bellay’s argumentation become evident: they stem largely from the notion that in order to define its autonomy in relation to antiquity, France must still make reference to antiquity as providing its models. The word barbare itself, Du Bellay indicates, derives from Greek: Barbares anciennement etoint nommez ceux, qui ineptement parloint Grec. Car comme les etrangers venans à Athenes s’efforçoint de parler Grec, ilz tumboint souvent en ceste voix absurde βάρβαρας. (76–7) [… in antiquity they were called barbarous who spoke Greek badly. For as foreigners coming to Athens attempted to speak Greek, they often fell into this absurd sound Barbaras.] (324)

Hearing what they assumed was poorly articulated speech, the Greeks “transportarent ce nom aux meurs brutaux, et cruelz, appelant toutes nations, hors la Grece, Barbares [transported this name to brutal and cruel manners, calling all nations outside Greece barbarous]” (76/324). Language as Du Bellay conceives it involves a motion—a metaphorization (from metapherein, “to transport” in Greek)—and hence a demarcation of space, of the limit between here and elsewhere, through the new meanings produced. By a continuation of this transportation of names, in modernity the languages that are not Latin or Greek are called barbarous; this is also the case for the language spoken by the people who are not from modern Rome. Modern Rome and ancient Rome together constitute the metropolitan center in this portion of the Western imaginary—both a temporal and spatial center, which serves Du Bellay as he demarcates and moves into the new space. To do so, he changes the direction of this linguistic motion with a reorientation of the word barbare with respect to the thing it designates: he shifts from a descriptive to a normative sense. The word is inappropriate for the French, since … en civilité de meurs, equité de loix, magnanimité de couraiges, bref en

toutes formes, et manieres de vivre non moins louables, que profitables, nous ne sommes rien moins qu’eux [les Grecz]: mais bien plus, veu qu’ilz sont telz maintenant, que nous les pouvons justement apeller par le nom, qu’ilz ont donné aux autres. (17–18)

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21

[… in civility of manners, equity of laws, greatness of courage, in short, in all forms and ways of living that are no less praiseworthy than beneficial, we are nothing inferior to them, but rather superior, seeing that they are now such that we can justly call them by the name they gave others.] (324)

Both time and space are involved in this conquering migration of words from one thing to another; indeed, time has reversed the spatial relation between those who name with the word barbare and those named by it. Rome is elided, and so constitutes a sort of absent middle term: speakers of French receive the Greek language and tradition by way of Rome; now that ancient Rome is gone, Greece has gone with it; and the French possess Rome, along with the traditions of antiquity, and in their possession they may redirect the words that no longer belong to those who once used them. But the monument of antiquity still looms; in Du Bellay’s writing it appears as the center by which French speakers must orient themselves in order to take control of further orientation, to become modern, as a great entity that they must equal in order to prove their autonomy. Cultivating Words Even though Du Bellay insists, in the Deffence, on the grandeur of the works of antiquity, and on the fact of their invocation against the potential greatness of works in the vernacular, he himself invokes their grandeur to show that they are in effect a set of monuments—funeral monuments. In writing of them, in prescribing their use as models to be imitated, he is calling for a poetry in the genre of the tombeau or tomb, the epitaph or eulogy (what he himself will write with Les Antiquitez de Rome, the sonnets of this sequence themselves constituting ruins, relics, or tombs).11 His detractors are right, then, that he is contributing to the placement of the tradition of antiquity in a superior position with regard to the vernacular more than he is responding to it; but they are wrong in concluding that such a strategy denigrates works in French.12 Rather, by locating the works of antiquity in such a way that they are acknowledged as simulacra,13 he is enabling their incorporation in the vernacular such that the latter may enter the movement that is becoming the history of modernity. Already a national space in which deeds may be done that were not possible before (such as the conquest of Rome), the space of modern poetry will contribute to the new status of France through an imitation of the Latin and Greek models that have become available in the national space. The space of poetry is none other than that of culture, in both the sense in which the word is currently understood and its older metaphorical meaning. Du Bellay develops the 11

Cf. Eric MacPhail, “The Roman Tomb or the Image of the Tomb in Du Bellay’s Antiquitez,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 48 (1986): 359. 12 As Aneau states: “Est cela defense, et illustration ou plustot offense & denigration [Is this defense and illustration, or rather offense and denigration]?” (Quintil Horatian, 322). 13 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

metaphor of culture in order to show how the cultivation of the Latin language was accomplished through a borrowing that constituted an imitation; and French, imitating Latin, must do something similar. The ensuing culture of poetry will be nothing else than the culture of the French language, collocational with the embryonic French nation. In Chapter 3 of Book 1 of the Deffence, Du Bellay describes how the Romans, “en guise de bons Agriculteurs, … ont premierement transmuée [leur langue] d’un lieu sauvage en un domestique [like good farmers, first transplanted (their language) from a wild to a cultivated site]” (81/328). The transmutation is both a change and a transportation, according to the word’s etymology; the Latin language, in Du Bellay’s account, needed attention in order to be at home in Rome. All languages are born in a wild place—and hence are in principle of equal potential, as Du Bellay signals in the first chapter of Book 1; but the cultivation or culture of the language is what provides it autonomy, its own singularity. And this autonomy is at least initially composed of the heterogeneous portions of this language born in the wild, as well as of the pieces that it may strategically take from the other languages that it institutes as offering models. (Hence Du Bellay’s ostensibly descriptive account of the status of Greek and Latin turns out to be normative, or instituting.) The domestic space that the new language occupies is produced by the act of culture; the space is characterized by the shapes that arise from this action, in the new language: … puis affin que plus tost, et mieux elle peust fructifier, coupant à l’entour les

inutiles rameaux, l’ont pour echange d’iceux restaurée de Rameaux francz, et domestiques magistralement tirez de la Langue Greque, les quelz soudainement se sont si bien entez, et faiz semblables à leur tronc, que desormais n’apparoissent plus adoptifz, mais naturelz. (81)

[… then, so that it might yield fruit better and more quickly, pruning away the useless branches, they replaced them with fine and cultivated branches, taken in masterly fashion from the Greek language, which were rapidly so well grafted to their trunk and made to resemble it that from that time on they have no longer appeared adopted but natural.] (328)

There is a language that is original or “natural” to the Romans, the “tronc [trunk]” in this metaphor of cultivation. The “rameaux francz & domestiques [fine and cultivated branches]” borrowed from Greek models are grafted onto the trunk; but as with any grafting procedure, the result is a hybrid, and the original or “natural” condition changes into something else. Through his choice of words, Du Bellay suggests that the linguistic movement is already making way for French: these “rameaux francz” will ultimately become part of the French language, the frank language spoken by the Franks, the Frankish language. Although the trunk may be recognizable as what was there first, it has changed in joining with the new grafts. It is no longer what it was naturally; the grafts are not in essence part of the tree’s nature, but rather in being adopted appear (apparoissent) to be natural to the tree:

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the nature of the new tree becomes a simulacrum. In assembling itself as such, Latin displaces itself from the position of origin. Although the space of Latin culture is domestic, it is not a homogeneous space but instead reveals its multiple tributaries. Culture in this sense must always identify itself as in emergence, as being able to take on something new, a simulacrum that can take on other simulacra and appear to be integral and natural. Nature, then, ceases to be a primal or originary being, if something cultural can through its cultivation appear natural. The language will achieve an autonomy in this space that its construction frames. It does so in becoming part of a series of repetitions or simulacra that does not have a discernible origin, instead of being itself an origin or the copy of a Roman original. Although Du Bellay may appear to be displacing the origin of linguistic greatness from Latin to Greek, in his continuation of the metaphor he suggests otherwise: De la sont nées en la Langue Latine ces fleurs, et ces fruictz colorez de cete grande eloquence, avecques ces nombres & cete lyaison si artificielle, toutes les quelles choses, non tant de sa propre nature, que par artifice toute Langue a coutume de produyre. Donques si les Grecz, et Romains plus diligens à la culture de leurs Langues que nous à celle de la nostre, n’ont peu trouver en icelles si non avecques grand labeur, et industrie ny grace, ny Nombre, ny finablement aucune eloquence, nous devons nous emerveiller si nostre vulgaire n’est si riche comme il pourra bien estre, et de là prendre occasion de le mepriser comme chose vile, et de petit prix? (81–2) [From this were born in the Latin language those flowers and those fruits colored with great eloquence, along with meter and the skillful blending of sound with sense, all of which every language produces not by its own nature but by art. Thus if the Greeks and Romans, more diligent in the cultivation of their languages than we are in that of ours, could not find in theirs, save as the result of great labor and industry, either grace or meter or indeed any eloquence, should we be surprised if our vulgar tongue is not as rich as it might be and take that as a reason to despise it as vile and worthless?] (328)

Du Bellay indicates that every language achieves its greatness only through artifice, not through nature, through combinations of elements that are by nature heterogeneous. And in the following sentence, Du Bellay explicitly includes Greek in the languages whose greatness involves culture; Greek, then, would have had to be subject to art or artifice, would constitute another member in this series of repetitions. The suggestion is twofold: since the Greeks cultivated their language in the way the Romans did—in a way the Romans imitated—the origin of the series must necessarily precede Greek, if indeed the series has a single, discernible origin at all. French itself must be recognized as one of the repetitions and hence perhaps not the last in the series. Du Bellay is by no means trying to resurrect Latin; he aims to bury it, to place it in the past such that French may become the present language. His defense of French posits Latin as the source of linguistic greatness, in its position as antecedent, but also then as that against which French defends itself in affirming its own autonomy.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Defense in Dialogue Du Bellay is not only defending but illustrating the use of a vernacular language in the production of cultural space:14 in 1908, Pierre Villey was the first to point out that Du Bellay borrows extensively from the Italian Sperone Speroni.15 For most of the twentieth century, this finding led to a near consensus among commentators that Du Bellay’s text constituted something close to plagiarism and little more.16 But in 1989, Ignacio Navarrete contested the charge of a lack of originality on Du Bellay’s part.17 He convincingly demonstrated that, far from simply adopting Speroni’s views, Du Bellay takes them up and forcefully redirects them. As its title indicates, Speroni’s text is a dialogue: its speakers “constantly engage one another in discussion, attempt to sidetrack the argument, and sometimes even contradict themselves. They also consistently disagree on the meaning of one another’s remarks.”18 There is a variety of views expressed in the Dialogo, none of them preponderant and most of them not thoroughly coherent. Navarrete refers to the Deffence as an “interpretation” of the Dialogo, and “a strong misreading that radically shifts the context of this interpretation from the Italian questione della lingua to the literary situation in France.”19 I am less interested in precisely what Du Bellay does to Speroni’s work—that is the focus of Navarrete’s commentary—than in the fact that he does it, and in what ways this fact is connected to the project he is advancing. Du Bellay is transferring to his own practice of writing what he attributes to the Romans—he takes from Italian what the Romans took from Greek, what the Italians have also taken from Latin and Greek, what he will in a moment advocate that the French take from Latin and Greek.20 He is performing (illustrating) and advocating (defending) an 14 Jean-Charles Monferran discusses the historical reasons for treating the Deffence from a rhetorical perspective—that is, as a text that incorporates its own prescriptions for poetry: “La prose illustre de la Deffence,” in Jean Vignes, ed., La Deffence & L’Olive: Lectures croisées (Paris: Université Paris Diderot, 2008), 13–32. 15 Pierre Villey, Les Sources italiennes de la “Deffence et illustration” de Joachim Du Bellay (1908) (Paris: Champion, 1969), 101–10. 16 Monferran provides the entirety of the first edition of the Dialogo delle lingue in his edition of the Deffence, in facing-text format with Claude Gruget’s 1551 translation of the Dialogo (193–279). Monferran also indicates, with italics and footnotes, the passages that correspond to the sections of the Deffence. 17 Ignacio Navarrete, “Strategies of Appropriation in Speroni and Du Bellay,” Comparative Literature 41 (1989): 141–54. 18 Ibid., 142. 19 Ibid., 143. 20 Later in the Deffence (Book 2, Chapter 3), Du Bellay advocates an imitation in French of whatever is available, hence pushing for a reduction of the distance between the materials of antiquity and those of the present: “je veux bien avertir ceux, qui aspirent à ceste gloire, d’immiter les bons Aucteurs Grecz, et Romains, voyre bien Italiens, Hespagnolz, et autres: ou du tout n’ecrire point, si non à soy (comme on dit) et à ses Muses [I do want to

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imitation of the Italian gesture of incorporating the other languages, as part and parcel of what France takes from Italy in the various aspects of its conquest.21 What it takes from present-day Rome are the textual traces, the simulacra, of ancient Rome, to be adopted for the production of French national space such that this space will appear natural or integral. In these traces and their subsistence in modernity lie the materials of literary production to which Du Bellay is moving French. This national space must remain heterogeneous, signaling these traces as traces; autonomy may be found only in the heterogeneity of its composition. Du Bellay transfers or translates the practice he ascribes to the Romans, through his transfer from Speroni to his own text, to the French language; hence he declares the latter’s possibilities. Here it becomes evident that literary production is intimately linked to the production of a French national space, a French culture. The models mentioned are from antiquity; they belong to the antiquities of Rome (and Greece, through Rome) but take on a French singularity in the movement of transference. By recognizing this poetics of literary transfer, one may resolve the paradox I raised earlier concerning the use of ancient models to produce modernity in France, the first of the series of paradoxes that runs through the Deffence. Le tens viendra (peut estre) et je l’espere moyennant la bonne destinée Françoyse, que ce noble et puyssant Royaume obtiendra à son tour les resnes de la monarchie, et que nostre Langue (si avecques Françoys n’est du tout ensevelie la Langue Françoyse) qui commence encor’ à jeter ses racines, sortira de terre, et s’elevera en telle hauteur, et grosseur, qu’elle se poura egaler aux mesmes Grecz et Romains, produysant comme eux, des Homeres, Demosthenes, Virgiles, et Cicerons, aussi bien que la France a quelquefois produit des Pericles, Nicies, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Cesars, et Scipions. (82) [The time will come—and with the help of the good fortune of France, I have high hopes for it—when this noble and powerful kingdom will in turn seize the reins of universal domination and when our language (if with François [or the French—Du Bellay plays on the double entendre] the French language has not been wholly buried), which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and grow to such height and girth that it will equal the Greeks and Romans themselves, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros, just as France has sometimes produced Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Caesars, and Scipios.] (328)

warn those who aspire to that glory to imitate good Greek and Roman authors—indeed, even Italians, Spaniards, and others—or not write at all, unless for yourself (as we say) and your Muses]” (128/370). 21 Monferran points out that in the sixteenth century, Du Bellay’s poetic composition of a treatise on poetics was downright shocking. He presents this as among the reasons for Aneau’s aggression in the Quintil Horatien (Monferran, “Prose,” 16–17). Monferran also demonstrates that the prose of the Deffence is a rhetorical illustratio of Du Bellay’s argument.

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Du Bellay cannot avoid, in this hope, imagining a world dominated by France and the French language, of course after the fashion of the Roman Empire (monarchie here means “universal domination”);22 it will, then, leave writings to the future to function as models. In continuing to use the metaphor of the tree, he is placing French in the position of a language that may eventually belong to the past, from which future languages may take grafts in their own cultivation. Du Bellay is willing to admit, even if somewhat glibly, that French may someday have moved into the past—that its fate may be similar to that of Rome, against Roman affirmations of invincibility. Again, he is at once reverent to Rome and willing to celebrate its passing—in the very act of taking its writings as models, recognizing their durability, he declares the failure of the predictions of Roman panegyric. In this way, with regard to its literary works, French will attempt to borrow from Rome’s durability and may perhaps follow Rome in the fate that it did not foresee for itself. The imitation that Du Bellay advocates, then, involves a respect for the past that adapts its texts precisely to the present context. Du Bellay looks back to Rome and forward to the new French world, admiring both of them. It is in this admiration, a deployment of a poetic imagination, that the present-day space of culture takes place. Floyd Gray terms this projection of a future, all-encompassing cultural space a “linguistic utopia”23—it is a utopian space imagined in the present, made up of material available in the present, drawn from the literary past. The production of culture in the present, then, is tied to an awareness of historicity—of movement in relation to the past, and of becoming something else in the comportment toward the future. In this sense, the Deffence is a thoroughly modern text:24 it posits the greatness and preponderance of antiquity—aggressively, with exaggeration—so as to offer a sense of openness and becoming to the present time. The modernity that Du Bellay announces with the Deffence is accompanied by a suggestion that the movement of history will relocate the present into the past—that the models produced in French may also one day be relegated to the status of antiquity or tomb, the dead letter that will function as the textual trace to be reinscribed in the future and hence contribute to the production of cultural space. Imitatio Studii Du Bellay specifies that this gesture is to be undertaken solely through the literary practice of imitation. What Du Bellay means by imitation has been debated, as he doesn’t offer a full explanation of it, insisting that it is to be distinguished

This is Monferran’s gloss on the term in his edition of the Deffence (395), as well as Helgerson’s translation. 23 Gray, 20. (My translation.) 24 Cf. Jean-Claude Carron, “Imitation and Intertextuality in the Renaissance,” New Literary History 19.3 (1988): 565–79. 22

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from translation.25 I will venture to say, on the basis of this distinction and of the passages just quoted, that it is not the reproduction or copying of a model but rather the latter’s reinscription, a reworking of its textual elements in its new context. In translation, an attempt is made to reproduce the model. This attempt forecloses dialogue in that the translator is expected to be faithful to the expression of the original, to its “Naif” (88) or natural, inborn quality (334); if one understands the latter as defined according to the notion of “natural” that I discussed above, then this faith is in the singularity of the original language. So translation emphasizes the distance between the model and the new language, between the original language and the singularity of the new language; in translation the new language must force itself to retreat from the space to which it properly belongs. The law of translation disallows the openness of imitation. Through observation of this law, “qui est n’espacier point hors des Limites de l’Aucteur, vostre Diction sera contrainte, froide, et de mauvaise grace [which is never to stray beyond the bounds of the author, your diction will be constrained, cold, and graceless]” (88/334). Admiring a work in translation involves a kind of idolatry, a dead, empty, and immobile admiration, which would result if one took the word of the Roman authors praising the glory of Rome: but such admiration is not what Du Bellay wants the antiquities of Rome to be. The space of their culture is gone, but it may supply materials for the production of the new French space. Du Bellay’s practice, however, would seem to allow for some translation— as with his own of Speroni and of the numerous authors from whom he borrows,26 the textual fragments of which function as grafts onto his own text and context. He takes Speroni’s text outside its spatial limits to function in French cultural space—indeed, to enact the latter. And there is also a broader notion of translation at work in Du Bellay’s entire project, which encompasses both the relationship with antiquity he is instituting and his translation of antecedent texts. As Jean-Claude Carron points out, Du Bellay’s notion of imitation “is functionally dependent on the medieval concept of translatio studii.”27 This concept involves, as Ernst Robert Curtius characterizes it, the transfer or translation of learning from predecessor to successor, in the general direction of the growth of the West.28 In placing the 25

See especially Ferguson, “Exile.” These include Erasmus, Geoffrey Tory, Etienne Dolet, Jacques Peletier du Mans, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian (Navarrete, 142nn1–2). 27 Carron, 566. 28 See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 29. See also Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds, The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55–67. Stierle identifies Otto von Friesing as probably the first writer to give formula, in his Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (1143–6), to the movement of translatio: “potentiae seu sapientiae ab oriente ad occidentem translationem” [“the transfer of power or learning from east to west”]: Ottonis episcopi friesingensis chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus (Hannover and Leipzig: 26

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old texts in continually new contexts, adding to their numbers, rearranging them according to whatever new importance or lack thereof may arise, this movement is also a translation: it is a reordering and adaptation that necessarily contributes to the situation into which it is carried. Du Bellay’s translation of Speroni and others, and his insistence on imitation, are involved with translatio studii. There is then also, in Du Bellay’s contribution to the inauguration of modernity, a relationship with texts other than those of antiquity: according to Carron, even though Du Bellay disavows the medieval tradition of French writing, the assumption of and dependence on this practice also situate the Middle Ages with respect to the Renaissance.29 So, in the modernity of the Renaissance, the translation or transfer that takes place in imitation involves a multilingual dialogue with the past that at once affirms the impossibility of resurrecting it and allows it to persist in the different creations to which its elements will contribute in the present. Again, the poetics of transfer involves a paradox, that of the simultaneous rejection and use of translation: the two together constitute a process of intertextuality where texts, or

Adolf Hofmeister, 1912), Book 7, Chapter 35, 372; qtd by Stierle, 56. (My translation.) In the Middle Ages translatio studii was, according to Stierle, closely bound up with translatio imperii, the westward movement and expansion of the power that had once belonged to the Roman Empire; it constituted a valorization of the imperium, and a placement of all cultures beneath the latter’s domain—Stierle terms it a “model of verticality” (ibid.). He identifies a break between translatio studii and translatio imperii in Petrarch, who “on the political level radically opposes the concept of translatio imperii” (63), seeking instead a renovation or renaissance of antiquity in the present (63–5). For the Renaissance, says Stierle, translatio studii becomes horizontal, and gives way to dialogues not only between modernity and antiquity but also among the different cultures of modernity. Such dialogue is of the sort that Du Bellay engages in, and that, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 4, Spenser engages in with Du Bellay, certain other modern European precursors, and the verse of antiquity. 29 Although Carron acknowledges that it is possible to view both antiquity and the Middle Ages as offering intertexts to the Renaissance, he stresses the need to see a relationship with antiquity of a type markedly different from that with the Middle Ages, for the very reason that antiquity is posited as offering the models. He remarks, “For my own purposes I am more interested in the impersonal dimension of intertextuality, and I choose to oppose it precisely to what I call ‘imitation,’ emphasizing the process through which the poets of the Renaissance will choose some models and eliminate others” (579n31). I would like to counter by saying that it is through this gesture of choosing and eliminating—a strategy of aggressive defense, one might say—that the canon of antiquity becomes something very open-ended, that modernity is produced as highly intertextual and as capable of incorporating all manner of intertexts. My reading of the Deffence on this point is closer to that of Navarette, who sums up his treatment as follows: “While employing many of the same arguments as his Italian and French predecessors, Du Bellay must be seen as the author of a key innovation in imitation theory, one that sees all national canons as part of a single polyglot literary system, and that encourages intercanonic plundering” (153).

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parts of them, are borrowed, transferred, translated, and integrated according to the demands of the present, and hence contribute to the formation of the present.30 Rather than reproducing or copying the original, imitation repeats it, repeats it as a simulacrum so as to insist on the difference between itself and what is being imitated, to affirm itself as in and part of the context of the present, to inform and form the present.31 Only through this production of a simulacrum may autonomy be achieved and the models of antiquity paralleled. As Michel Deguy remarks on Du Bellay’s relationship to the authors of antiquity, “Don’t imitate them so as to be like them; imitate them to achieve the difference of equality.”32 In the repetition of the simulacrum that is a valorization of difference—in this poetics that by appropriating what comes from elsewhere, in time and space, remains open to transformation into something new—an awareness of historicity is opened, of the movement from one place to another, of the movement toward something as yet nonexistent. And as one examines such a gesture, a contribution to the foundation of the canons of modernity and indeed to that of modernity itself, one must recognize with Du Bellay that it is the character of these canons to be in a condition of becoming, transformation, open-endedness, in continual contact and dialogue with what they have previously not admitted. To treat them otherwise is to regard them as composed of crumbling funeral monuments, and so to do them the greatest disrespect.

30 Ferguson, emphasizing the undecidable character of much of Du Bellay’s series of paradoxes, affirms that Du Bellay “does not pursue the idea of imitation as an interpretive reordering of the ‘parts’ of an ancient text because he refuses to stop oscillating between a reverent and a critical stance toward the ancient originals” (“Exile,” 285). It is true that, even though he suggests this idea, Du Bellay does not explicitly pursue it; but it is valorized, and the “reverent … stance toward the ancient originals” undercut, by Du Bellay’s own practice in composing the Deffence. So the idea is implicitly pursued in this practice. 31 Cf. Carron: “Instead of asking of the new poets an impossible fidelity to an imaginary model (anachronistically taken to be real), imitation involved liberating them from such futile constraints. It gave them the means to achieve a modern poetics. Through imitation, the poets could appropriate for their time what their period was ready to assimilate. In doing so they were able to recognize, in spite of the distance which alienated them from the past, the possibility of a continuity with such a past, a continuity which would be understood as a ‘historical’ and personal dialogue” (570). 32 Michel Deguy, Tombeau de Du Bellay (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 108. Qtd in Carron, 570. (My translation.)

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Chapter 2

Time in Rome Rome and the Present When in 1553 Joachim Du Bellay accompanied his uncle, Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, to Rome, their diplomatic mission was also, for Joachim, a poetic one: he was in search of the ancient models that would provide the source of a new French poetry, the task he had laid out in the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [Defense and Illustration of the French Language]. Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] is, of course, an expression of the poet’s1 profound disappointment at what he saw before him, in which he found neither the greatness nor the durability that he had hoped to bring back in order to promote both poetic and political grandeur for the future of France. Precisely what Du Bellay found in Rome and what he tried to bring of it to French poetry have been widely debated in criticism, which for most of the twentieth century held that the Regrets constitutes an obviously superior work.2 In spite of the regret also expressed in the Antiquitez, the title page terms the work “une generale description de [la] grandeur [a general description of (the) greatness]” of Rome.3 That is, there is still a greatness available in Rome, which in the sonnets is most frequently identified with Roman writing. I would like to pursue the notion that the absence of the “original” Rome in which these writings were produced is not simply lamented in the Antiquitez; rather, their current lack of groundedness allows them to be taken up and reworked by the French Renaissance poet, who thereby produces the space in which a properly French poetry will take place.

1 The poet implicated in the Antiquitez and the Songe, the speaker who is ostensibly writing the verses, is not strictly identical to Du Bellay; rather, his experiences and attitudes often fictionalize those of Du Bellay. A formal distinction must therefore be made between this poet and Du Bellay. Throughout, I will maintain a terminological distinction between the two. 2 Cf. George Hugo Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay and the Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1–2, 45–6; G. Hugo Tucker, “Writing in Exile: Joachim Du Bellay, Rome and Renaissance France,” in Zweder van Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1994), 120–21. 3 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech, third edition (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 269; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 245. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Antiquitez in the body of the text by sonnet number; translation occasionally altered.

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That is, the Antiquitez is not primarily an expression of lamenting nostalgia, but instead a production of a poetry in the present and for the future. Du Bellay is pursuing, in rigorous fashion, the notion of imitation that he put forth in the Deffence. Although it would be tempting to view the Antiquitez as an instance of practice in relation to the theorization elaborated in the Deffence, I would rather view the Antiquitez as also continuing that theorization—as I pointed out in the preceeding chapter, the Deffence itself is not only theory but illustration or practice. And with Margaret Ferguson, I believe it is important to overcome an old prejudice that makes a sharp distinction between “critical and imaginative texts” to see how each genre may illustrate the other.4 I would like to show here that Du Bellay extends the notion of imitation to the Roman ruins themselves: just as Roman writing is composed of signs now severed from their original context, or signifiers bearing an indefinite relationship to what they signify, the ruined monuments that the poet views also no longer signify the greatness that they did when they were first built. Du Bellay imitates this capacity of the signs constituted by the monuments: he represents them as continually moving away from what they first represented, and in so doing he borrows from the motion of signs in order to rearrange them in a new configuration that will constitute the new French poetry. This poetry is thereby composed of signs whose mobility is valorized; it may hence offer models for future imitations. In the Antiquitez, the mobility of signs is characterized as a temporality, such that the present may be viewed as the future of ancient Rome, and the ruining of the latter in time as the very process by which poetry arises in the present. Indeed, as I hope to show, Du Bellay goes so far as to demonstrate that the difference between the ruin of modern Rome and the glory of ancient Rome occurs on a continuity in which each configuration of signs constituting Rome is a repetition, though altered, of the previous one. In lamenting the ruins of Rome, then, Du Bellay is able to form the tie with Rome’s greatness that is necessary to the production of French greatness in the present and for the future. In antithesis to the “generale description de [la] grandeur [a general description of (the) greatness]” of Rome, the title page further qualifies the Antiquitez as “comme une deploration de sa Ruine [as it were, a lamentation of her ruin]” (269/245)—although, as I will show, this lamentation is dramatized so as to be overcome by the production of poetry in the present. The ensuing sonnets point to the emptiness of the ruins they describe: they suggest and demarcate the void faced by the poet who has come to Rome. This void is pointedly explored in Sonnet 3, Margaret W. Ferguson, “The Exile’s Defense: Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse,” PMLA 93.2 (1978): 276. According to Jean-Charles Monferran, this distinction was quite established in the sixteenth century, and Du Bellay’s refusal of it by writing the Deffence, a treatise on poetics, in poetic language was one reason for the hostile reception it saw: Jean-Charles Monferran, “La prose illustre de la Deffence,” in Jean Vignes, ed., La Deffence & L’Olive. Lectures croisées (Paris: Université Paris Diderot, 2008), 14–18. 4

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the one in the sequence that has attracted the most attention. George Hugo Tucker has made the case not only for the necessity of accounting for the intertextual relationship between the Antiquitez and numerous other poems on the status of ancient Rome in modernity, most notably those of Janus Vitalis,5 but also for that among the sonnets in the collection.6 I would also like to consider the intricate associations between the Antiquitez and a series of texts that describe the city of Rome and its antiquities in great detail. This series amounts to a tradition that was thriving by the mid-sixteenth century, that of the Roman tourist guidebook; guidebooks were quite available to any visitor to Rome who wished to explore the city, especially someone on a pilgrimage, as was Du Bellay. Two of these are of particular interest—not just because of their popularity, but also because of the temporal proximity of their publication with Du Bellay’s stay in Rome. It is also of note that Du Bellay imitatively takes the title of his sequence of sonnets from them: the first is Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani’s Antiquae Romae topographia, published in Italian translation in 1548 under the title L’antichità di Roma, and Andrea Palladio’s 1554 L’antichità di Roma. In the tradition of guidebooks to which they belong, part and parcel of the booming tourist trade in sixteenth-century Rome, many titles are a variation on this one. Also noteworthy in this connection is Andrea Fulvio’s 1513 Antiquaria urbis, published in Italian in 1543 as Delle antichità della città di Roma, and again in 1588 under the title L’antichità di Roma.7 Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey, especially 105–73. Ibid., 3–4 and passim. 7 To my knowledge, prior to my 2001 article from which this chapter derives, no commentator had previously signaled Du Bellay’s duplication of the Italian title of Marliani’s and Palladio’s books, or the importance of the tradition of the guidebook in Du Bellay’s approach to Rome: Hassan Melehy, “Du Bellay’s Time in Rome: The Antiquitez,” French Forum 26.2 (Spring 2001), 1–22. Other guidebooks worth noting are the following: Lucio Fauno, Delle antichità della città di Roma (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1548); Pirro Ligorio, Delle antichità di Roma (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1553); and Lucio Mauro, Le antichità de la Città di Roma (Venice: G. Ziletti, 1556). Marliani’s book, the most widely distributed of the tradition, was published in a number of editions from 1534 to the end of the sixteenth century. Those of interest here are the following: Giovanni Bartolomeo Marliani, Antiquae Romae topographia (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1534); Vrbis Romae topographia (Rome: Academia Romae, 1544); L’Antichità di Roma, trans. Hercole Barbarasa (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1548). There is also an English translation: John Bartholmew Marlianus, The Topography of Rome in Ancient Time, in Livy, The Romane Historie, also, The Breviaries of L. Florus, with a Chronology to the Whole Historie, and the Topography of Rome in Old Time, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1600), 1074–1122. I have found no reference to a French translation. According to Peter Murray, Palladio’s Antichità di Roma (Rome: Vencentio Lucrino, 1554) and its companion volume, Descritione de le Chiese de Roma (Rome: Vencentio Lucrino, 1554), the pair of which follow Francesco Albertini’s division of Rome into nova et vetus urbs, remained a standard set of “pocket guides” until the mid-eighteenth century, seeing 30 editions in that time: introduction to Five Early Guides to Rome and Florence (Westmead, UK: Gregg, 1972), 5 6

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Greatness in Ruins In the third sonnet, the emptiness of present-day Rome is illustrated through the disparity between two dramatically different significations of the name Rome. This difference is important in connection with the fluid relationship between signifier and signified that Du Bellay’s poetic project promotes. In the first quatrain, the repetition of the name Rome brings to view its capacity as a signifier with multiple signifying capacities: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. (ll. 1–4) [Newcomer, you who seek Rome in Rome and see nothing of Rome in Rome, these old palaces, these old arches that you see, and these old walls, this is what they call Rome.]

The “tu” of this poem is the French newcomer seeking to witness the glories of Rome in the relics of its past, the ruins or antiquities of Rome. Now, antiquité and ruine function as both descriptive and normative terms: the suggested expectation of the interpellated witness, in a relationship of linguistic intimacy with the poet,8 is that Rome displays monuments that clearly signify its glory, even if this glory belongs to the past. But here and throughout the Antiquitez, the pejorative connotations of the two words on the title page are valorized through a continual disruption of the expectation. What constitutes the ruin of Rome is a failure to signify the eternal city, the failure of the city and of its name to do so. In the dense texture of this quatrain, Du Bellay brings out the emptiness of the spectacle of the city, which penetrates to the very signifying capacity of the words used to describe it. The repetition of Rome is situated in a sequence of graphic and phonetic repetitions, which complement the semantic functioning of the words in which they occur: in “nouveau venu,” the repetitions are of n and v respectively. Given that these poems are about ancient things, the word nouveau stands out: it throws the word vieux, written three times in two lines, into sharp relief, the tension of the semantic opposition emphasized by the common letter. The lower-case v, in Du Bellay’s typography, appears as u, or an inverted lower-case n: the resemblance underscores the proximity that contains an apparently intractable opposition. The word venu (uenu) not only designates the witness but illustrates him as caught between the opposing terms of the old and the new Rome. The letter v also begins n.p. Murray remarks of Rome, “Even in classical times it was a legend rather than a city.” And it is in the tradition of the tourist guidebook, he suggests, that this legend subsists and is propagated. 8 The use of the pronoun tu suggests that the words also belong to this witness, and that the language of both poet and witness is thereby French.

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vois, what the venu or witness is doing, the activity by which he is a witness and that is primary in this description of the ruins of Rome. The word vieux stands in phonetic proximity to the sense invoked, that of the vue.9 The n in venu begins a series that includes the negation (“rien … n’apperçois”) that signifies the emptiness or nothingness encountered in the view of the city. The word that ends the series, “nomme,” is repeated in the fourth line, where it functions as an internal rhyme to Rome; this repetition repeats the line’s end rhyme with the second occurrence of Rome in the first line, the latter constituting the first repetition of this name. That the series of repetitions of Rome is finished by nomme stresses the function of Rome as a movable name in the poem, as well as the fact that the name most at issue in the problem of naming raised here is Rome. Implicit is the very word rime, which designates a specifically modern practice in contrast to the poetry of Rome, and which is anagrammatically and phonetically tied to the word Rome. Du Bellay repeatedly invokes such relations in order to emphasize contrast and difference. Rome also stands in a graphic and phonetic, and through these semantic, relation to rien, by way of both the letter r (which is also placed in the words designating two of the general forms in the spectacle of Rome, arcz and murs) and this word’s location in the series of nasals that echoes the sound -om-: en, rien, en, on. On, finishing this series and also functioning as the generalized, French-speaking subject of the act of naming, announces that the language in which Rome will now be named, described, inscribed, and circumscribed is French. Rien is also phonetically and anagrammatically related to ruine, a word to whose semantic functioning it contributes.10 The name Rome, in this context, pushes forth the word ruine. And as I will show in Chapter 4, in his translation and imitation of Du Bellay’s poems Spenser will further exploit the alliteration of this pair. For the newcomer to Rome, then, the ruins of Rome demonstrate that Rome is in ruins. What is available to view is that, ironically, there is nothing to view; visible in the ruins are only traces of a former grandeur, at a remove from their source. The first time the name Rome is mentioned, to signify the Rome that the newcomer seeks, at issue is the Rome of the Renaissance imaginary, the eternal city. The second time, almost immediately afterward, the word signifies the present-day city that the newcomer has found. Du Bellay situates these meanings in opposition, although much writing of the Renaissance presents them as coincident, as though 9 On the importance and paradoxical nature of viewing in the Antiquitez, see especially: Françoise Giordani, “Utilisation et description de l’espace dans Les Antiquitez de Rome de Joachim Du Bellay,” in Yvonne Bellenger, ed., Du Bellay et ses sonnets romains (Paris: Champion, 1994), 22; and Floyd Gray, La Poétique de Du Bellay (Paris: Nizet, 1978), 52–3 (cited by Giordani). 10 This portion of my analysis owes much to a number of different commentators and critics: Gray, 46; Deborah Lesko Baker, “Du Bellay’s Double Eternity: Two Sonnets from the Antiquitez de Rome,” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 354; and Barbara Bowen, The Age of Bluff: Paradox and Ambiguity in Rabelais and Montaigne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 17–20.

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the eternal city were still to be found in the ruined one, contemporary with it—the dramatized expectation of Du Bellay’s poet. Gilbert Gadoffre offers an extreme example of such an attitude, in Petrarch’s unequivocal support of the 1347 coup by Cola di Rienzo, which culminated in the claim to European governments for a resurrected Roman Republic of “the same authority, power, and jurisdiction that it had in the past, and [the annulment] of all privileges contrary to this right.”11 The Past in the Present Now I would like briefly to examine Marliani’s and Palladio’s respective Antichità di Roma, as well as Fulvio’s Antichità della città di Roma, which are of singular relevance to Du Bellay’s project. Marliani’s and Palladio’s books are conventional in the tradition of the Roman guidebook, containing highly detailed descriptions of the entire city, the artifacts that still stand, and the artifacts that once stood. Marliani provides the exact situation and dimension of each of these in relation to what a sixteenth-century tourist in Rome would find. Name after name is provided—in contrast to Du Bellay’s book, from which names are markedly absent (I will return to this point below)—as though the ancient city were still present in the present-day city. Quite remarkable is the dedication to François Ier in the abridged 1544 edition: “FRANCISCO REGI GALLORVM VRBIS ROMAE LIBERATORI INVICTO [TO FRANÇOIS, KING OF THE FRENCH, UNCONQUERED LIBERATOR OF THE CITY OF ROME].” Marliani uses the word invictus to describe the unconquered status of the French king. As may easily be expected, he also ties it to ancient Rome in the first sentence of the dedicatory statement, speaking of the ancient citizens as “invictis.” Marliani paradoxically links the specifically Roman characteristic of being unconquered to the contemporary conqueror of Rome, eliding the paradox by designating François as Rome’s “liberator.” At the same time, he makes a gesture of transmitting and reviving this characteristic through the French conquest. Marliani writes of those Roman posterity who, living “in … Imperatorum memoria [in … memory of the Emperors],” “immortalibus aedificiis eam ornavere [adorned (the memory) with immortal monuments].”12 Gilbert Gadoffre, Du Bellay et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 92. (My translation.) The full passage is as follows: “Romani Illi prisci invictis, Rex cum maioribus, magisque necessariis rebus animum adiecissent, huius urbis pulchritudinem contemnere visi sunt. Posterivero, ateque in praesertim, qui Imperatorum memoria fuere, multo labore, summa arte, summaque impensa innumerabilibus, & praeclarisimis, ac pene immortalibus aedificiis eam ornavere.” [Those ancient Romans, O King, are seen to have despised the beauty of this city, as they turned their minds to their unconquered elders and more necessary matters. But in truth posterity, and especially those who lived in the memory of the Emperors, with much labor, the greatest art, and the greatest expense adorned it with innumerable, and most striking, and as I may say immortal monuments.] I would like to thank Christine Cooper and Sara Johnson for generously assisting me in translating Marliani’s Latin. 11

12

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He underscores the immortal, unconquerable nature of the city of Rome, even in the face of its antiquity and conquest. By contrast, Du Bellay addresses this notion of Rome and its status during the French occupation by underscoring the age of the monuments, the decayed signifiers of Roman immortality. Palladio also insists on the immortal quality of Roman monuments, even while acknowledging that many lie in ruin. This quality results from the fact that the monuments are a commemoration of Roman military feats. And in his preface to readers he makes the suggestion, which Du Bellay takes up and reworks, of the connection between, on the one hand, writing as commemoration of both deed and monument, on the other hand, and monument as commemoration: E chiaro gia à tutto il mondo gli antichi Romani haver fatto molte piu cose ne l’arme, che non sono ne i libri scritte; & molti piu nobili, e grandi edificii fabricati in Roma, per eterna memoria del lor valore, & essempio à gli posteri, che non si veggono chiaramente hoggi in piede. [It is clear to everyone that the ancient Romans achieved more in the affairs of arms than there are books written about these; and that there were many more noble and grand buildings erected in Rome for the eternal memory of their valor, and an example to their posterity, than may clearly be seen standing today.]13

Palladio’s book is composed according to the notion that such painstaking descriptions as he presents, after the fashion of Marliani, complement the work of the monuments in preserving the eternal memory of acts of Roman valor. Du Bellay, in response, emphasizes the discontinuity that writing dramatizes between its own signs, the monuments that it imitates, and the existence of the Eternal City. Palladio acknowledges his debt to Marliani, inscribing his own book in the tradition of the latter, in which he also includes Livy, Pliny, Plutarch, Valerio Massimo, Fulvio, and Lucio Fauno—as though there were a continuity between the ancient authors and the modern ones, a living presence of old Rome in the new, persisting through the visibly evident ruins. What is striking in Fulvio’s text is the constant quotation of Roman writers as punctuation for his descriptions, in Latin in both the Latin and the Italian versions of his book.14 In his text these citations function as monuments, from which he rebuilds ancient Rome through detailed description. All of the guidebooks that I have examined share the assumption that, in the writing of modernity, Rome may be rebuilt and persist as a living presence. It is precisely with this assumption that Du Bellay takes issue.

13

Palladio, n.p. (My translation.) Andrea Fulvio, Antiquaria urbis (Rome: Jacob Mazochio, 1513); Delle antichità della città di Roma (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1543); L’antichità di Roma (Venice: Girolamo Francini, 1588). The Latin edition I consulted is titled De urbis antiquitatibus (Rome: Valerio Dorico, 1545). 14

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Words and the World By taking the name of Marliani’s and Palladio’s books (which also turns up throughout the sixteenth century on many of the tourist guides) and placing it on his own in a reworking imitation, Du Bellay treats it as a floating signifier. His own book presents the signs available in the tradition of the guidebook as vastly distant from what they signify. The first meaning of the signifier Les Antiquitez de Rome (L’antichità di Roma), that of the guidebook tradition, is ancient Rome in its full presence in the present; the second, Du Bellay’s, is the emptiness of presentday Rome. The two meanings stand in opposition to each other, the one nearly synonymous with the first meanings of the word Rome in Sonnet 3, the other with the second. The word antiquité also carries a twofold sense, implying both venerability and decrepitude, grandeur and ruin. The poet evidently wishes for the first meaning of Rome, expressed in the guidebooks he is reading and rewriting, to be the only one; he wishes for a unique and stable meaning. To write Rome, if this were the sole meaning of the word, would be to inscribe the city that inscribes the entire world, the seat of empire. As such, the word Rome of stable meaning designates the city that contains and stabilizes the world, and with it, the poet would hope, the meaning of all words. The wish is that this city, when its name is written, were available in its totality before the witnessing poet. Du Bellay says as much in the two tercets of Sonnet 26: Rome fut tout le monde, & tout le monde est Rome. Et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme, Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer, La nommant par le nom de la terre & de l’onde: Ainsi le monde on peult sur Rome compasser, Puis que le plan de Rome est la carte du monde. (ll. 9–14) [Rome was the whole world, and the whole world is Rome. And if we call the same things by the same names, just as we could do without the name of Rome, Calling her by the name of the earth and the sea, so we can measure the world by measuring Rome, for the map of Rome is the map of the world.]

In this context, Rome is represented as signifying this totality as a presence. The doubt as to whether names are indeed tied to the things they name is forestalled by the posited solidity of the meaning at issue: Rome by another name would still be Rome, since Rome is the entire world, all together and all at once. The plan of the city, which may be inscribed by the single name Rome, inscribes the world as a map: Rome is thereby said to be synonymous with the world. World domination, which transposes the plan of the city over all known space and offers the latter in a single view, would also make the meaning of words—“mesmes noms” signify “mesmes choses”—fully available and transparent to the poet.

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The movement from past to present tense in these lines15 indicates that the wish is that the solidity of the city, the world it dominates, and the name that designates it were durable: Rome ought to be the eternal and correlatively unshakable city. The name Rome, then, should be the anchor of meaning for all words, what binds names to what they name, signifiers to their signifieds. Rome is the ultimate loveobject, the full possession of which would be the overcoming of all division and the satisfaction of all desire.16 In the third of Du Bellay’s Amores, the word Roma in the first line is anagrammatically reversed in the course of the poem and appears as its very last word, Amor. Rome begins as the place where love can’t be found: Ipse tuas nuper temnebam, Roma, puellas, Nullaque erat tanto de grege bella mihi.17 [I myself have of late, Rome, despised your girls, And none in such a large crowd has been beautiful to me.]

At the beginning of the poem, Rome, the city, has a function in the area of sexual love comparable to that which it has in relation to the love of the ancient city. But when the name Roma is reversed to spell Amor, and Amor shoots his flaming arrow into the poet’s heart, love is found in Faustina, who, before being taken away, “Venit in amplexus terque quaterque meos [Came in(to) my embraces three or four times].” But now that she is gone, Scilicet hoc Cypris nos acrius urit, ipse Altius in nostro pectore regnat Amor. (ll. 13–14) [Of course as this Cypris burns us the more sharply, The higher in our heart reigns Amor.]

Love makes its presence felt by the absence of the beloved. In Roma is Amor, which signifies this great lack. The Renaissance poet who has made the voyage to Rome wishes to take in his love-object, the durable ancient city, in one view and by uttering one name. But such a spatial and temporal totality is by all evidence no longer available in the city or its name. Any prelapsarian age of poetry (which the poet is transposing from Eden to Rome), during which a name may have been firmly fixed to its See Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey, 129–30. See Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Du Bellay’s Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrarquist Sonnet Sequence,” Renaissance Quarterly 33.4 (1980): 609–22. In response to earlier critical consensus, Rebhorn sees Du Bellay as maintaining the sonnet’s traditional subject of love rather than abandoning it. In the Antiquitez, then, Rome becomes the idolized mistress who resists the lover’s efforts. 17 Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. 7, ed. Geneviève Demerson (Paris: Nizet, 1984), 137, ll. 1–2. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. (My translation.) 15 16

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meaning, is irretrievably lost. The meaning of the word—the ultimate of meanings, the entire world in full, eternal presence—is quite absent. This is quite evident when the name Rome, again in Sonnet 3, is written a second time. This second instance shows that the word’s function may be entirely different, even such a short space away on the page: the present-day city signified by the name is present, but its presence indicates the glaring absence of the desired meaning as well as the absence at the heart of the word’s signification. Not only is modern Rome in ruins; the ruins indicate that the very name Rome, which should signify as fully as a word can, is the most mobile of signifiers. It moves in the very small space of a single written syllable across the vast distance between the two notions that it can signify. By implication, then, with no anchor available, words are not firmly fixed to what they mean; any word may, as Floyd Gray puts it, fall into ruin.18 The Temporal Limits of Eternity The poet is not only reminded by the ruins that a certain golden age of poetry in which the writings of antiquity may have been produced no longer exists; he is also faced with the cruel paradox that the eternal city had a limited life span. In the second quatrain of the third sonnet, Du Bellay elaborates the description of the two meanings of the name Rome, again showing the contrast between them. He names an attribute proper to the Rome of the imaginary, orgueil; on this trait the city rose to such heights of glory as to rival with the realm of divinity, and hence came as close to immortality, eternity, as anything in this world may.19 In Sonnet 6, the final lines state that Rome did indeed reach such heights. But the verb tense indicates that this feat very strictly belongs to the past: Rome was able to render equal “Sa puissance à la terre, & son courage aux cieux [Her power to the earth and her daring to the heavens],” and hence, in its domination of the earth, to surpass all other human power. This equality with the heavens is also an equality with heaven, the realm of Christian divinity, which Du Bellay transposes to the realm of the pagan gods. In Sonnet 24, Du Bellay speaks of “quelque vieil peché [some ancient sin]” (l. 10) as having determined the ultimate fate of Rome: “Vos murs ensanglantez par la main fraternelle [Your walls, bloodied by a brother’s hand]” (l. 13). Following a tradition whose origin Gadoffre attributes to Saint Augustine,20 the entirely Christian notion of original sin is mapped onto the foundation of Rome, the murder of Abel by Cain onto that of Romulus by Remus. Hence Du Bellay takes up medieval conceptions of the sin of pride in his characterization of Roman hubris. This equality with the heavens/heaven, involving “courage,” could thus not make Rome equal to the heavens/heaven in “puissance”: Rome rivaled the heavens/ 18

Gray, 52–3. I would like to recall Marliani’s statement concerning Rome’s adornment with “immortalibus aedificiis” (see n12). 20 Gadoffre, 128–30. 19

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heaven in such a way as to threaten them (Sonnet 27: “L’antique orgueil, qui menassoit les cieux [The ancient pride, which threatened the heavens]” [l. 2]), and hence to be struck down. Of course, then, in the text of Sonnet 3 orgueil is followed immediately by its negation in ruine. As ruine also indicates rien, the juxtaposition of orgueil and ruine,21 ostensibly an antithesis, may also be read as a synonymity: in its very striving for immortality, Roman pride was struck down by the heavens and thereby amounts to nothing.22 Roman immortality was, after all, subject to the same destructive forces as everything else under heaven—in other words, it was not immortality: Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine: & comme Celle qui mist le monde sous ses loix Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois, Et devint proye au temps, qui tout consomme. (ll. 5–8) [See what pride, what ruin, and how she brought the world under her laws, in vanquishing all, at last vanquished herself and became the prey of time, which consumes all.]

Again, Rome was the unique locality that was able to master the world, to bring it together as a totality under one set of laws. Like the gods, it dominated everything. But inasmuch as it belonged to the world, it too fell under the very power of domination and destruction that it harnessed in order to conquer the world. Deborah Lesko Baker has indicated the ambiguity in the verb se donta with regard to its functioning as either a reflexive or a passive.23 It appears that Rome subjugated itself through the same forces that it directed toward its own subjugation of everything else. But the next line, Baker points out, indicates that Rome was consumed by something other than itself, time, that to which nothing in this world, in the realm of mortality, may offer resistance—hence, se donta appears to be functioning as a passive. The first tercet tells us that it is indeed Rome that defeated Rome—the ambiguity is that the former and the latter Rome may or may not be the same. The repetition of the word seul suggests that Rome is unique, even as it is vastly transformed over time: Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. (ll. 9–10)24 [Rome is the only monument to Rome, and only Rome conquered Rome.] 21 Cf. Margaret M. McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. 22 See Baker, 355. 23 Ibid. 24 See Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey, 160–61.

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I concur with Baker that the ambiguity of the pronominal verb remains. Here again there are two meanings of the same name, evident in the first line of the tercet: present-day Rome, the city of ruins, is the monument or tomb of the ancient, glorious Rome that has died. The repetition of this repetition in the second line suggests that it is the Rome of ruins that defeated old Rome. A return to the second quatrain allows a reading of time as that which consumed the old Rome and transformed it into the later Rome, the tomb or monument of the earlier one that marks its past grandeur. Carried along by time, the only enduring destructive force, the Rome of ruins defeated glorious, invincible Rome. It is the mobility of the name Rome that gives se donta its concurrent reflexive and passive functions. The fact that Rome could be defeated by itself, or by a version of itself that, by virtue of the consuming power of time, was other than itself, indicates that the invincible city could be defeated, that the eternal city could fall prey to time.25 Shaky Ground There is, then, in the very difference between the past city and the present one, a continuity between the two: the latter reveals the former to be what it is, against what it might have wished to be. This reading is supported by Tucker’s excellent observation that the word consomme in the eighth line of Sonnet 3 should be read as involving both consumere (to consume, destroy) and consumare (to perfect, complete, consummate).26 The consumption of Rome by time is also its consummation or completion: Rome is revealed to be what it is, something that has persisted over time, vastly metamorphosing rather than simply perishing. A positive aspect of the word Rome begins to emerge, even as it designates an absence: this completion, which marks a total transformation, is precisely its availability to the Renaissance poet. Rather than simply marking an irrevocable opposition, the two senses of Rome reveal a flow of meaning, the one transforming into the other over time. The labor of the poet reveals not only that the city of ruins is a decayed image of the glorious city, but also that the glorious city of the Renaissance imaginary is merely an imaginary city, a phantasm, an ill-founded image or simulacrum with no existing original.27 A city that is eternal could not die, as ancient Rome evidently has. Du Bellay’s text offers a criticism of a set of close intertexts, that exemplified by Marliani, Palladio, and Fulvio, which presents ancient Rome as still existing, its monuments as immortal. This simulated image of Rome is dislocated from what it ostensibly represents; likewise, the word associated with it is a signifier that has no necessary tie to what it signifies. This image, designated by one usage of the word Rome, itself becomes mobile and thereby available to the poet for 25

See Bowen, 19–20. Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey, 63n16. Tucker points out that both Cotgrave and Nicot give only the latter definition. Cf. also 166–7, and Tucker, “Writing in Exile,” 128–9. 27 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14. 26

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his purposes. The name Rome thereby functions in a way that imitates that which it names, movable and transposable from one meaning to another in the poetic language in which it is written or uttered. As Rome, the word, and Rome, the city, have been sought as anchors of meaning in the quest for a meaningful language in which to write poetry, a corollary of the discovery that they are fluid images is that all words have such a fluidity with regard to their meanings. In the poetics implied by the Antiquitez, the relationship between signifier and signified, as that between the present image of the city and what it represents, is one of fluidity, a fluidity that necessarily involves temporality. Time, the consuming and consummating force, is what moves a sign from one meaning to another. The movement of time is figured as fluidity in Sonnet 3. In the first and second tercets, the Tiber is named as that which has survived Rome’s decay: Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit, Reste de Rome. (ll. 11–12) [Only the Tiber which flees to the sea, Remains of Rome.]

It is by way of the Tiber that old Rome is connected to present-day Rome, through a process of rester or remaining.28 This reste, remainder, or remains of Rome are explicitly said to constitute the one thing in Rome that is not in ruin and hence what remains living and visible from the old Rome. Of course, as a reste, it also signals that old Rome doesn’t remain intact; it thereby forms the only possible link to that city. The flow of the Tiber, then, like that of time, brings into association past and present, signifier and signified, representation and represented.29 Indeed, as Tucker and Eric MacPhail have pointed out, the movement of the Tiber represents or imitates that of time.30 They support this interpretation with Du Bellay’s placement of the face of Saturn, god of time, on the Tiber, in Sonnet 9 of the Songe appended to the Antiquitez. In associating time with the Tiber, Du Bellay is espousing a particular philosophical notion of time.31 This notion involves flow and, in antiquity, is derived See Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey, 160–61. Cf. Cynthia Skenazi, Le Poète architecte en France. Constructions d’un imaginaire monarchique (Paris: Champion, 2003), 212. 30 Ibid., 164–8, and Tucker, “Writing in Exile,” 128; Eric MacPhail, “The Roman Tomb or the Image of the Tomb in Du Bellay’s Antiquitez,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 48.2 (1986): 364. Tucker does a fine reading of these verses in Sonnet 3 alongside two of Du Bellay’s principal intertexts for this poem, Janus Vitalis’ “Roma Prisca” (1553) and “De Roma antiqua” (1554), two versions of the same Latin poem that Du Bellay imitates (157–73). See also Bowen, 18–19. 31 Jason Leubner convincingly demonstrates that Du Bellay also borrows his conception of the poet’s temporal realtionship with Rome from Petrarch’s temporal relationship with Laura: “Temporal Distance, Antiquity, and the Beloved: Petrarch’s Rime sparse and Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome,” MLN 122 (2007): 1079–104. 28 29

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from receptions of Heraclitus, who comes to Du Bellay through his translation of a passage from Ovid. In this perspective, time is a succession of moments, each involving a change from the previous one, none of which may be reproduced in its original state. Du Bellay’s translation suggests as much: Comme un fleuve, le temps coule eternellement, Le fleuve ne se peult arrester nullement, Ny l’heure, mais ainsi que l’onde pousse l’onde, Et que premiere à l’une, à l’autre elle est seconde, Ainsi le temps leger se fuyt en se suyvant Et tousjours est nouveau: car ce qui fut devant Vient apres, & se fait ce qu’il n’estoit à l’heure: Ainsi jamais le temps sur un point ne demeure.32 [Like a river, time flows eternally: the river can in no way stop, nor can time. But just as wave drives wave, and leading one, it follows another, so swift time flees as it continues, and is always new. For what was ahead comes behind, and becomes what it was not a moment ago: so time never lingers at a single point.]

This is a conception of time that allows for Rome to have transformed, for the present-day Rome to be a decayed image of the past one, for ancient Rome to have borne the image of eternity for only a limited duration—that is, for Rome to have been its own simulacrum, the simulacrum of the eternal city. By the same token, ancient Rome was only one configuration of the city, preceded and followed by unlimited other configurations. The succession of moments from past to present is indeed a flow, one in which each configuration may refer to an antecedent one in producing its own meaning, but may not reproduce or depend on it in order to be firmly fixed. Imitating Ruins The difference between past and present may hence be seen not only in the relationship between modern and ancient Rome, but also in that between ancient Rome at one moment and another, modern Rome at one moment and another; difference permeates the continuity of moments that is the flow of time. Each 32 Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. 6, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Droz, 1931), 430. (My translation.) The actual statement of Heraclitus is the following: “As they step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow upon them.” T.M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), fragment 12, 16–17. Through restatements during antiquity, especially by Plato (Cratylus 402a) and Aristotle (Metaphysics 1010a), this sentence came to be understood as expressing a metaphysical principle on the constancy of change in all things, that is, the famous “You can’t step twice into the same river.” See Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 54. The Ovidian version, in Du Bellay’s translation, names time as the continuum in which change ceaselessly occurs.

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of these moments, in following or repeating previous ones in the continuity of temporal flow, affirms its difference with them (“ce qui fut devant/Vient apres, & se fait ce qu’il n’estoit à l’heure [for what was ahead comes behind, and becomes what it was not a moment ago]”). In such a conception of time, every configuration of Rome must be a simulacrum: in the unlimited series of configurations, none may be seized as the primary antecedent, none may claim to be the original. This condition of Rome is revealed to the poet viewing modern-day Rome. Again, then, the name Rome is in flux, a floating signifier that continually refers to prior signifiers in order to derive its meaning; these are necessarily different from one another. As with the repetitions of sounds in Sonnet 3, organized around the name Rome, there is never an exact reproduction from one meaning to the next.33 Still, Rome maintains a certain continuity through the fragile stability of its monuments; the name Rome itself, even in its fluidity as a sign, functions as such a monument. As Marie-Françoise Notz astutely indicates in a rhetorical analysis of the Antiquitez, Rome the place and Rome the proper name function as a commonplace in the classical sense, a topos, which enables the transposition of a continuity onto what is otherwise a temporally transforming succession.34 Du Bellay finishes Sonnet 3 with a further affirmation of the association between fluidity and temporal flux. Again, the transformative power of these two is presented as destructive, even though that meaning is not stable in the poet’s words: O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps detruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance. (ll. 12–14) [O worldly inconstancy! Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time.]

The lamentation that follows the observation on the Tiber as the remainder of Rome has an ironic dimension, as time has made Rome available to the poet for positive transcription and repetition. The O whose form indicates emptiness and absence may be read not only as opening the lamentation but also as being answered by the rest of it. “Mondaine inconstance” is to be lamented, but it is also the character of that which is transformed so as to become available to the poet. The final two lines employ the antithesis that has marked the poem, an antithesis See Marie-Françoise Notz, “Nom propre et lieu commun dans Les Antiquitez de Rome,” in James Dauphiné and Paul Mironneau, eds, Du Bellay: actes des secondes Journées du Centre Jacques de Laprade (Pau: Centre Jacques de Laprade, 1994), 39: “The sounds that seem to repeat are never exactly reproduced. … The sounds and the meaning flow like a river, ‘Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit,’ without ever coming back.” (My translation.) 34 Notz refers to Cicero for her definition of the topos: “a nodal point, which enabled one to handle the individual case and the extension of the law; to bind the present to the past by finding a script transposable to a new occasion; and finally, to enable the audience to ‘follow’ the reasoning of the orator, even if in an imaginary relocation” (40). (My translation.) 33

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that nonetheless suggests equivalences. Du Bellay has made evident that what is “ferme” cannot possibly be eternal and so must be transformed and ultimately destroyed in the movement of time. The flight or flux of the Tiber may resist time because it figures time, moves along with it, does what it does. The very nature of the Tiber is to transform, in both the transitive and intransitive senses of the verb. The word resistance should also be understood according to both Latin senses of the verb resistere, the first of which is the literal “to stand again,” and the second, by extension, “to stay, continue.” The prefix re- suggests the repetition involved in the river’s movement, such that it stands again as it did in ancient Rome. The Tiber is, then, both the signifier of Rome’s standing again, continuation, in the present day, and the figure of that which has completely transformed it. The name Rome continues to stand in relation to its multiple signifying possibilities. In this succession of different configurations of Rome that the poem discovers, the ruins or antiquities of Rome don’t function as the historic Rome or even as a clear representation of that city from which the poet may derive inspiration. Likewise, the poet can’t give, in this description of Roman grandeur, a true picture of the glorious presence of the ancient city. Through examining the procedure of naming and its fluid relation to meaning, the poet has found that this Rome never existed, that the model he has sought was and remains a simulacrum. The antiquities named in the title of the sequence of sonnets refer only obliquely to the physical ruins that Du Bellay finds in Rome,35 in a full affront on the painstaking descriptions and extensive naming of the guidebook tradition. As it describes the city, his description imitates aspects of the things the poet sees: by their decay and amorphousness they indicate how far removed they are from the grandeur they once represented. They are, in Du Bellay’s context, signs of the difference between modern-day and ancient Rome, a difference all the more pronounced by the state of the signs.36 And as signs, they are mobile with regard to what they signify: a city that has fallen into ruin, or the glory of a magnificent though definitively temporal empire. The status of Rome and of its literary tradition as model for the poet of the French Renaissance, then, is by no means that which will enable the poet to reproduce mimetically what he finds in the model; indeed, it isn’t possible for him to leave the model alone, to leave it untransformed as he proceeds. Like the word Rome in Du Bellay’s context, these mobile signs participate in the procedure of naming the city that the poet wishes to evoke, even if he can’t find that city in front of him. What Du Bellay does, setting an example for writing a poetry in French

35 V.-L. Saulnier points out that the poet shows little interest in these ruins: of the “palais,” “arcz,” and “murs” he mentions in Sonnet 3 and throughout, he does not provide even a single name. V.-L. Saulnier, “Commentaires sur les Antiquitez de Rome,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 12 (1950): 139. See also Giordani, 22. 36 See Giordani, 24. And also Gadoffre, 88–9: “Du Bellay doesn’t delay description. Passing through the rocks and the past, he goes right to what is essential to him: signification.” (My translation.) (Giordani cites Gadoffre.)

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that will declare the glory of France, is to imitate the ruins of Rome in order to produce his own Antiquitez de Rome. In the Deffence, of course, Du Bellay speaks of imitating not physical ruins but rather the work of other poets, particularly those of antiquity, as well as that of the best contemporary ones from the various European traditions. In the Antiquitez, he engages extensively in imitation, taking numerous pieces of text from both ancient and contemporary sources. The significance of his imitative use of the title that stems from the guidebook tradition, and of the pointed and vast differences between the representations of Rome in his book and in the guidebooks, should not be underestimated. Sonnet 3 alludes back to two versions of a Latin poem by Vitalis, and Du Bellay translates and reworks it according to the needs of his own context: whereas in Vitalis’ account the eternal city simply ceased to exist, Du Bellay’s innovation in the imitation is the discovery that it never existed.37 Again, a city is not eternal or immortal if it dies, and these characteristics are integral to the Rome of the Renaissance imaginary, which subsists and persists by way of the guidebook tradition. This interpretation of the ruins of Rome is of value to Du Bellay because it enables the notion of poetry as actually productive of a simulacrum, so that an image of glory for France may be created by the same token that such an image of Rome has been. That Rome’s uniqueness consists in its having been able to produce an image of this sort makes it possible for such production to be repeated as a simulacrum. Specters of Truth It is in writing that the ruins or visible signs of Rome will be transcribed and their multiple signifying possibilities discovered; the intermediary of Roman writing remains crucial to this procedure. This notion is put forth in Sonnet 5, where the poet again relates the ruins he sees before him: if the “architecture” of the city Quelque umbre encor de Rome fait revoir, C’est comme un corps par magique sçavoir Tiré de nuict hors de sa sepulture. (ll. 6–8) [Still shows some shade of Rome, it is like a body raised by magic powers from its sepulchre at night.]

The “umbre” or phantom of Rome, visible in its architecture, is comparable to a revived corpse, a poor or even false image of ancient Rome—it no longer carries the latter’s “esprit” (mentioned in the last line of the first tercet) and hence moves without direction. If Rome indeed had a spirit, its departure is simply part of the 37

For more on Vitalis and the reworkings in numerous European traditions of his epigram on Rome, see Malcolm Smith, “Looking for Rome in Rome: Janus Vitalis and His Disciples,” Revue de littérature comparée 51.4 (1977): 510–27; and “Janus Vitalis Revisited,” Revue de littérature comparée 63.1 (1989): 69–75.

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flow and inevitable destruction of time, which of course leads to the generation of new configurations of signs. But the image of Rome that was produced during antiquity, the image that Du Bellay wishes to imitate as a contribution to his patria, subsists in what is designated by the word in the first line of the second tercet that is associated anagrammatically and phonetically with esprit, escripts. It is in the writings of Rome that its image, available for the poet willing to undertake the labor of reworking or imitating, may be found: Mais ses escripts, qui son loz le plus beau Malgré le temps arrachent du tumbeau, Font son idole errer parmy le monde. (ll. 12–14) [But her writings, which in spite of time wrest her fairest praise from the grave, keep her specter wandering throughout the world.]

These writings wrest something else from the tomb, the “loz,” the grand image of Rome, which is resurrected as long as the writings are read actively, that is, reworked through the labor of writing. Again, even in honoring Rome, Du Bellay can’t leave it in an untransformed state. The “idole” of Rome that is brought to wander through the world is, according to Screech’s etymological reading, its eidolon or specter,38 an image that is separated from the object it represents, the simulacrum that the poet may place in his own context. It may be viewed as the spirit of the otherwise dead letter of Roman writing; but as a sign it is both corporeal and spiritual, and may hence be situated in the new context.39 It is in writing that the idole subsists—in the Latin literary tradition that Du Bellay is discovering, and in the modern writing that situates this tradition as antecedent in order to repeat it. Writing is the labor that maintains and carries forward the literary remainder of the Roman Empire. Of course, errer and idole should also be read in their double sense, as Wayne Rebhorn suggests: errer additionally signifies an aimless wandering rather than a directed movement, and idole may be understood to mean an idol or false god that leads the adorer away from “the true Christian one.”40 But the task of Du Bellay’s poet is to direct that idole to the appropriate purpose: the invention of a new poetry that will glorify the French language and by the same token the French patria. Du Bellay valorizes poetry and the complexities of its simulating capacities, and in so doing debunks the notion that there is a unique, eternal form or idea of patria embodied in Rome. Imitation is not for the purpose of participating in such an eternity, but rather for taking those aspects of the signs of which the patria is composed in order to produce the configuration of signs that Screech, in Du Bellay, Regrets, 278n to l. 14. My understanding of the relation between the word loz and the labor of writing is indebted to that of Miriella Melara, detailed in her “Du Bellay and the Inscription of Exile,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 28.2 (1992): 10. 40 Rebhorn, 617. 38 39

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will constitute the glory of the new French patria. The poet, as the manipulator of language and its imagery, may hence relocate the patria to contemporary France— only to leave it free to move on again, with the passage of time. There is, however, a type of simulacrum whose deceptive effects Du Bellay warns against, that found in the empire that has supplanted the Roman one. After the fall of Rome, he tells us in the first tercet of Sonnet 17, Alors on vid la corneille Germaine Se deguisant feindre l’aigle Romaine … (ll. 9–10) [Then the German raven disguised itself to resemble the Roman eagle …]

For the Latin poets, Screech remarks, it is the nature of the raven to disguise itself and imitate.41 Du Bellay distinguishes his own participation in translatio studii from that with which it has been associated throughout the Middle Ages, translatio imperii, now manifested in the extension of the Holy Roman Empire. The criticism of the Holy Roman Empire in these lines, what distinguishes its version of imitation from Du Bellay’s, is that it presents itself as that which preserves the Roman Empire and posits the simulacrum of Rome that Du Bellay has debunked as the original idea in which it participates.42 The imitation practiced by the German raven, presenting itself as the one true image of eternity in its ascendancy above the earth, can only forestall the further imitation that Du Bellay seeks in his valorization of the simulating function of poetry. This imperial version of imitation refuses to admit the mobility of signs that the ruins of Rome offer to Du Bellay, that he wishes to exploit in the invention of a new French poetry. The imitation that Du Bellay defends and illustrates in Les Antiquitez de Rome necessitates a recognition that written signs are mobile and thereby transposable to other contexts; in similar fashion, the interpretation of the ruins as antiquities and signs contributes to the rearrangement of the signs by which the ruins are signified in poetry. The procedure of naming exemplifies the poet’s task; it is the initial quest for a fixed meaning of the name Rome, the result of which is to demonstrate that none may be found. Naming demonstrates and actualizes the fluidity of signs by which the French-speaking newcomer may, on arriving in Rome, take from what is old in order to introduce something previously unseen into the language of his own country.

41

Screech, 290n to l. 10. Du Bellay is refusing the new imperium in good humanist fashion, as Gadoffre suggests in connection with this passage and several others: “Here we find ourselves in the presence of a no that resounds as an echo to the no of Erasmus, himself an adversary to the fanatics of translatio imperii, and ready to see in the notion of ‘universal monarchy’ an absurd survival, a dangerous ghost of an idea, inanem magni nominis umbram” (99). (My translation.) 42

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Idolizing Imitation Du Bellay opens Sonnet 32, the last in the sequence, with the following questions: Esperez vous que la posterité Doive (mes vers) pour tout jamais vous lire? Esperez vous que l’oeuvre d’une lyre Puisse acquerir telle immortalité? (ll. 1–4) [Do you hope, my poems, that posterity will read you forever? Do you hope that the work of a lyre can win such immortality?]

In light of the treatment of the possibility of eternity in the Antiquitez, the answer that Du Bellay’s lines give is a resonant “no,” a rejection of the hope of immortality. An antecedent to the Antiquitez on the question of immortality, the writings of Rome are not immortal;43 rather, they live only in imitative reworkings, in this case those of the new French poetry. Such reworkings will take place until French verse can achieve its own recognition among posterity and function as models for future imitators. And by the transformative effects of time, these lines may one day survive only as an idole to be imitated in French or another language, brought to life by this imitation. Du Bellay must be regarded as a thoroughly modern poet: his work seeks a continuity with a venerated past in order to effect a break with it, such that movement in time toward the future is recognized and engaged.

43 Skenazi writes, “In a France falling prey to religious and social tensions, the obsession with the past was in part a response to the difficulties with foreseeing the immediate future. Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome and Songe raise a question in this regard that has not ceased to intrigue critics: Doesn’t the destiny of the Roman Empire presage the fall of France?” (218–19) (My translation.)

Chapter 3

A Dream Language Questions of Interpretation Since its first appearance in 1558, Du Bellay’s Songe has elicited numerous reactions of puzzlement. The dreamlike imagery and associations of its fifteen sonnets have been termed “obscure” by more than one critic—but there has not been agreement as to whether such a qualification signals a weakness.1 Although critics have lately recognized that Du Bellay’s appending of the Songe ou Vision sur le mesme subject [Dream or Vision on the same subject] to Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] suggests that the author considered the two to be of similar importance, and the second sequence to be another treatment of the subject matter of the first,2 some of the most thoroughgoing critical texts on the Antiquitez devote very little space to the Songe.3 The Songe has often, if not always, been accorded the status of allegory—if it is held to be obscure, the obscurity is either cleared through decipherment or simply left aside.4 Among the critics who have addressed the Songe, who number far fewer than those who have written on the other Roman sonnets, there is no agreement on what the “other story,” so to speak,5 of this allegory is, and the sonnets have invited 1 See M.A. Screech, introduction to Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech, second edition (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 151: “In the Songe, Du Bellay doesn’t always seem to us to avoid a facile obscurantism” (35). (My translation.) In Du Bellay et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), Gilbert Gadoffre terms the Songe “one of the most obscure poetic texts in the French repertory.” He adds, “It is an intentional obscurity.” (My translation.) 2 See, for example, Michael J. Giordano, “Du Bellay’s Songe and the Ambiguity of Narrative Authority,” Oeuvres et Critiques 11.1 (1986): 61; Sharlene May Poliner, “Du Bellay’s Songe: Strategies of Deceit, Poetics of Vision,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 43.3 (1981): 509; Thomas L. Zamparelli, “Du Bellay’s Songe Re-examined,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 28.3 (1992): 209. 3 For example: George Hugo Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay and the Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Margaret M. McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 187–227. 4 Exemplary of assessments through most of the twentieth century is that of L. Clark Keating: “There are among us few readers interested in enigmas in poetic form. Perhaps in his own day, when puzzles and acrostics were a favorite parlor game, the reception of these sonnets may have been more favorable than it is today.” Joachim Du Bellay (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971), 96; qtd in Zamparelli, 209. 5 I am invoking a simple definition of allegory here, that deriving from its etymology.

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extensive speculation. In her contribution to the debates, Sharlene May Poliner suggests that the multiplicity of interpretations is an effect of the particular situation of the poetic signs.6 Of course, attempts have been made to determine this “other story” and to offer a fixed meaning to the elusive words. By no means claiming to exhaust Du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Gilbert Gadoffre does a magisterial decipherment of the Songe as a Gallicanist allegory of pontifical Rome.7 Even Michael Riffaterre’s characteristically thorough reading of Songe 7, leading through a complex series of intertextual signs, ends up settling on a particular chain of signification for the poem’s signifiers.8 Without the least intention of devaluing these and other attempts at tackling such a difficult text, I would like to suggest that the very condition of obscurity in which the signs of the poems find themselves constitutes an essential component of the meaning of the Songe. As I hope to show, this meaning involves the capacity of words to signify in multiple fashion. I am in full agreement with Riffaterre that the purpose of the obscurity of the Songe is to reveal rather than to conceal.9 And in light of the title that Du Bellay gives to the sequence, I hold that this revealing or revelation should be understood as the work of a dream. Throughout this chapter I will demonstrate the functionings of this dreamwork. I will say here that the principal reason for seeing the Songe as such is precisely that, following the opening announcement that the poems report dream contents, Du Bellay’s unexpected associations—the source of obscurity—derive from this clearly stated status. In the present, one can’t discuss dreamwork and dream interpretation without in some fashion encountering the monumentality of Sigmund Freud’s contribution to the subject, if for no other reason than that his work establishes the dream as an object of studied analysis. But it would be a reductionist allegorical procedure to take psychoanalytic notions of dreaming and expect them to render transparent the meaning of the Songe. Although it would be unfortunately simplistic to say that Freudian notions of dreamwork and sixteenth-century French literature have nothing to do with each other because of the more than 300 years that separate them, their historical difference must be accounted for. Rigorous procedure demands, on the one hand, an acknowledgement that Freud’s work didn’t fall out of the sky in the late nineteenth century and that he necessarily drew on at least some predecessors, acknowledged or not; on the other hand, it also demands the recognition that the understanding of dreams that might inform Du Bellay’s composition of the Songe will almost certainly not fully belong to the lineage on which Freud drew. Understanding the Songe as dreamwork with the aid of 6

Poliner, 515: “Despite the specific mention of Rome in the collection’s title, there is so much ambiguity created by the absent name that refuses inscription in the Songe that the images in the visions invite a seemingly endless number of interpretations.” 7 Gadoffre, “Le message codé du Songe,” in Du Bellay et le sacré, 151–82. 8 Michael Riffaterre, “Intertextual Semiosis: Du Bellay’s ‘Songe,’ VII,” in Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 111–24. 9 Ibid., 111.

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psychoanalytic notions, which will help to explain some aspects of the sequence, requires consideration of their historical relationship. Dream Analysis The great value placed on oneiromancy in sixteenth-century France produced many works on the subject.10 Prior to Du Bellay’s and quite available during the 1540s and 1550s, some of the more widely circulating are Francesco Colonna’s Hypertotomachie, ou Discours du Songe de Poliphile, Cicero’s Songe de Scipion, Hélisenne de Crenne’s Songe, and Artemidorus of Daldis’s Oneirocritica (Interpretation of Dreams).11 The one to take up techniques of interpretation in the most detail is that of Artemidorus, which was originally written in the second century C.E. and functioned as a reference book for late antiquity. The Oneirocritica is a strikingly modern book in that it concerns itself with not only the meaning of dreams, but also the rhetorical mechanisms by which dream content may be brought to yield meaning. Moreover, it is the only one of the dream books to which Du Bellay makes direct reference. He does so in the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [Defense and Illustration of the French Language] when justifying the use of different types of play with words and letters as part of a poem’s capacity to produce and reveal meaning: “Artemidore … le Stoïque a laissé en son Livre des Songes un chapitre de l’Anagrammatisme, où il montre que par l’inversion des Lettres on peut exposer les Songes [Artemidorus the Stoic … left us a chapter on anagrams in his book of Dreams, where he shows that one can decipher dreams by scrambling letters].”12 More broadly, Du Bellay is justifying linguistic operations of producing meaning other than purely semantic ones. The strategies he engages in the Songe, which involve unexpected types of linguistic

10 François Berriot provides a brief account of books on dream decipherment and their functions in sixteenth-century France: “Clés des songes françaises à la Renaissance,” in Françoise Charpentier, ed., Le Songe à la Renaissance (Saint-Etienne: Institut d’Etudes de la Renaissance et de l’âge classique, 1987), 21–31. 11 The Oneirocritica of Artemidorus, originally composed in Greek, was available in Janus Cornarius’s Latin translation, which saw many editions in the 1540s and 1550s, usually under the title De somnorium interpretatione. In 1547 a French edition of the first three books of the Oneirocritica appeared in Paris, L’epitome des trois premiers livres… traitant des songes, translated by Charles Fontaine. 12 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. JeanCharles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 156; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 390. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Deffence in the body of the text; translation occasionally altered.

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association, are evidently borrowed from his understanding of dreamwork; he bases these at least in part on a reading of Artemidorus.13 In a consideration of the relationship between Du Bellay’s notions of dreamwork and those of psychoanalysis, a most noteworthy fact is that Freud also states his interest in Artemidorus; Freud names him as a major precursor to his own work and hence tacitly acknowledges that his own title, Traumdeutung, is a citation of Oneirocritica. In a footnote to the fourth edition (1914) of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud goes so far as to credit Artemidorus with “the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practised in the Graeco-Roman world.”14 Artemidorus, Freud finds, deployed a method that strikingly resembled his own—so much that he states a great affinity between his own work and that of his predecessor, with one very significant difference: He insisted on the importance of basing the interpretation of dreams on observation and experience, and made a rigid distinction between his own art and others that were illusory. … A thing in a dream means what it recalls to the mind—to the dream-interpreter’s mind, it need hardly be said. … The technique which I describe differs in one essential respect from the ancient method: it imposes the task of interpretation on the dreamer himself. It is not concerned with what occurs to the interpreter in connection with a particular element of the dream, but with what occurs to the dreamer.15

For Freud and Du Bellay, both drawing on Artemidorus, dream images become signs in a system of signification that an understanding of a certain set of allegorical relations will make available to interpretation. It is of especial note that Artemidorus, in the passage Du Bellay signals,16 focuses on words and letters, in an acknowledgement of this system of signification as linguistic; Du Bellay likewise treats the dream, because of its functioning in this system, as of particular interest to poetry. Freud’s frequent attention to letters and words, as Jacques Lacan underscores in his reading of the Interpretation of Dreams, indicates the affinity in psychoanalysis between dreams and texts, especially literary texts whose

13 The passage from Artemidorus that Du Bellay signals is as follows: “One must also show some degree of independent skill in judging dreams which are mutilated and which do not, as it were, give one anything to hold on to, especially [in the case of very difficult ones] in which certain letters which do not contain a thought that is whole and entire in itself or a meaningless name are seen, sometimes by transposing, sometimes by changing, sometimes by adding letters and syllables to them, sometimes by inventing others that are of equal numerical value, so as to make the meaning clearer.” Artemidorus, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica), trans. Robert J. White (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1975), Book 1, Chapter 11, 22. 14 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 98n1. 15 Ibid. 16 See n13.

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operations of signification demand a labor of interpretation.17 A rapprochement between Du Bellay and Freud, then, is warranted in that they are both interested in dream operations that are closely related by their functioning through associative allegory. Reference to Freud, particularly on dream logic as wish-fulfillment and the basic dream operations of condensation and displacement, will further explain some of the rhetorical strategies of Du Bellay’s poetry. However, the difference that Freud underscores between his own method and that of Artemidorus—that for psychoanalysis the interpretive association must derive from the mind of the dreamer and for Artemidorus the mind of the interpreter—bears consideration. This is not least because Freud’s statement anticipates one of the biggest problems of the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism, which is that he considers his work to pertain to the operation of minds, not of texts; the associations need to take place in the dreamer’s mind, not the interpreter’s (although he doesn’t always adhere to these guidelines himself). The problem his comment signals is where to locate the agency of interpretation, and whether it is necessary to assume that there is at least a hypothetical individual psyche at work in producing the operations of a dream. Much psychoanalytic literary criticism, following Lacan, takes what Freud presents as mainly psychic operations to be rhetorical and cultural procedures, rather than engaging in trivial reconstructions of the author’s mind. As Stephen Greenblatt observes in a remarkable essay, although much in Renaissance literature and culture invites critics to bring psychoanalysis to its interpretation, it also “turns out to baffle and elude that approach.”18 Through a close examination of the case of Martin Guerre, made famous by Montaigne 17

In “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Lacan points out that one of the great values of The Interpretation of Dreams is that it frees the dream-image from its relation to the object it ostensibly represents; it assimilates the signifying capacity of the dream-image to that of a letter, which may, in the innumerable combinations in which written language may place it, produce and traverse any number of meanings. Lacan writes, “The first sentence of the opening chapter [of The Interpretation of Dreams] announces what for the sake of the exposition could not be postponed: that the dream is a rebus. And Freud goes on to stipulate what I have said from the start, that it must be understood quite literally. This derives from the agency in the dream of that same literal (or phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse. So the unnatural images of the boat on the roof, or the man with a comma for a forehead, which are specifically mentioned by Freud, are examples of dream-images that are to be taken only for their value as signifiers, that is to say, in so far as they allow us to spell out the ‘proverb’ presented by the rebus of the dream. The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is the very principle of the ‘significance of the dream,’ the Traumdeutung.” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 159. 18 Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210.

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and more recently by Natalie Zemon Davis, Jean-Claude Carrière, and Daniel Vigne,19 Greenblatt demonstrates that psychoanalysis, attempting to elucidate conflicts of family relation and desire, runs up against the lack of evidence of the existence of any autonomous individual in the modern sense. Rather, it turns out that all identities involved in the history of Martin Guerre in legal and literary documents from the time are produced in networks of what Greenblatt elsewhere calls “social energy.”20 He argues that modern notions of individuality, though spontaneously conceived as universal and transhistorical, are actually the historical result of the development of social formations that coalesce in the Renaissance. These first create the individual in elaborate networks and then, in subsequent modern history, assign him or her an ideological primacy over the institutions in which he or she subsists. The material of psychoanalysis, then, is part of the legacy of the Renaissance, although in the initial formulations of the science this fact goes unrecognized. “Psychoanalysis is, in more than one sense, the end of the Renaissance,” writes Greenblatt.21 He is fully interested in orienting psychoanalysis to the study of the Renaissance because of the insights that such a procedure can yield; but he insists on the necessity of historicizing it, specifically of seeing how “psychonalytic interpretation seems to follow upon rather than to explain Renaissance texts.”22 Greenblatt praises the innovations of Lacanian psychoanalysis for their historicizing effects. In the case of a psychoanalytically-inflected interpretation of Du Bellay’s Songe, I will say that I don’t deploy psychoanalysis as a broadly explanatory model, but rather as a means of illuminating a number of the rhetorical and representational procedures in these sonnets. That this is possible results from the fact that Freud and Du Bellay are addressing the same phenomenon, the dreamwork, and doing so from similar perspectives. This similarity arises because Freud’s elaborate Michel de Montaigne, “Des boyteux” (3.11), in Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: PUF, 1999), vol. 3, 1030; Montaigne, “On the Lame,” in The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 1166; Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Daniel Vigne, dir., The Return of Martin Guerre (Dussault, 1982). 20 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), especially 1–20. 21 Greeblatt, “Psychoanalysis,” 210. 22 Greenblatt continues: “If psychoanalysis was, in effect, made possible by (among other things) the legal and literary proceedings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then its interpretive practice is not irrelevant to those proceedings, nor is it an anachronism. But psychoanalytic interpretation is causally belated, even as it is causally linked: hence the curious effect of a discourse that functions as if the psychological categories it invokes were not only simultaneous with but even prior to and themselves causes of the very phenomena of which in actual fact they were the results. I do not propose that we abandon the attempts at pyschologically deep readings of Renaissance texts; rather, in the company of literary criticism and history, psychoanalysis can redeem its belatedness only when it historicizes its own procedures” (“Psychoanalysis,” 221). 19

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rhetoric of dream operations descends from a portion of the highly developed rhetoric of the Renaissance. Freud draws on this rhetoric by way of a long series of rhetorical treatments of dreams, as is evident in his acknowledgement of Artemidorus as a precursor, and Du Bellay’s Songe exemplifies this series in the Renaissance. My view is that Du Bellay’s poetry engages in certain rhetorical operations connected to dreamwork, and that several of Freud’s important insights contribute to explaining them. However, in keeping with the historicizing shifts in psychoanalysis that Greenblatt cites, I view the individual dreamer with whom Freud is concerned as a result of the rhetorical procedures of the Renaissance that are so very concentrated in Du Bellay’s work. Hence, these procedures are the principal focus of my examination. Words in Transit Of course, attempts to elicit meaning from the Songe also refer to some of the sequence’s principal intertexts, namely Petrarch’s Canzone 323 (through Clément Marot’s translation, “Le Chant des Visions de Pétrarque”),23 the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Book of Revelation, and the 32 foregoing sonnets of the Antiquitez. They are brought into the association through the dreamwork that Du Bellay engages. It is important to note that the two Biblical texts are also available to Du Bellay in the Huguenot translation of the Bible, a later version of which includes Marot’s and Théodore de Bèze’s verse translations of the Psalms, and that Du Bellay takes up and continues the Reformist gesture by deliberately borrowing Biblical phrasing and placing it in a contemporary and local context.24 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Ugo Dotti (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), vol. 2, 842–8; Clément Marot, “Le Chant des Visions de Pétrarque,” in Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1996), vol. 1, 347–9. Spenser translated both, along with Du Bellay’s Songe. All three are in Edmund Spenser, Complaints, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); they are among the texts I treat in Chapters 4–6. 24 I will demonstrate that in one important instance Du Bellay’s wording of biblical allusion shows a closer affinity to the Geneva Bible than to the 1550 Catholic translation of Louvain, the only one permitted in French by Charles Quint. As it is close in a number of ways to Du Bellay’s poetic/spiritual project, I will cite primarily the following edition of the Bible: La Sainte Bible (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1554), 3 vols, BNF MFILM A–313. This edition is based on two Geneva versions: for the Old Testament, the Bible à l’épée of Jean Gérard; and for the New Testament, Calvin’s 1551 revision of Gérard’s text. See Alfred Cartier, Bibliographie des éditions de de Tournes, imprimeurs lyonnais, ed. Marius Audin (1937) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), vol. 1, 364. Although numbered verses didn’t appear in the Bible until Robert Estienne’s Geneva edition of 1553—see Frédéric Delforge, La Bible en France et dans la francophonie. Histoire, traduction, diffusion (Paris: Publisud, 1991), 81–3—for ease of reference I will provide them, depending on the following version: La Bible qui est toute la Saincte escriture du vieil et du nouveau Testament (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1561), BNF digitized version, N053622. This edition reproduces that of 23

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I don’t want to foreclose on the possibilities raised by Gadoffre’s elucidation of Du Bellay’s Gallicanism. But I would like to suggest a syncretism in Du Bellay’s work, which may be more common in writers of the French Renaissance than criticism usually holds. In this respect, I am less interested in available biographical details on Du Bellay’s religious affiliations than in the signifying effects of his writing. Although one could look to the deciphered or decipherable meanings of the intertexts of the Songe in an attempt to fix the meaning of the signs that Du Bellay appropriates from them, such an interpretive gesture would overlook the transformation, often quite radical, that these intertexts undergo in their transfer to his own text. Indeed, I would like to suggest that any attempt to link the signs of Du Bellay’s Songe to other signs in a sequence must account for the fact that the latter signs may be transported, and hence shifted from their initial contextual meanings—that in their initial and new contexts, the meaning of these signs emerges through a linking to other signs. I would like to propose that the allegory of Du Bellay is one that valorizes the distance between one sign and another—that the “other story” of the Songe may concern precisely this distance. Also at issue in this allegory, I hope to show, are the limitations in the signifying capacities of poetic signs when placed in a particular context. Intertextuality is essential to the understanding of Du Bellay’s poetry; especially in the case of the Songe, intertexts must be seen as material to be drawn on for complete reworking in the current, local context, and as bearing a close relationship to dream material. I make this suggestion in light of the relationship of words to their meaning delineated in the Antiquitez. Immediately preceding the Songe in the combined narrative of the two sequences, the Antiquitez ends just before the dream begins— as the opening lines of Songe 1 indicate: C’estoit alors que le present des Dieux Plus doulcement s’écoule aux yeux de l’homme, Calvin and Estienne from 1560 (see Cartier, vol. 2, 513–14), and for the most part modifies only slightly the wording of the Jean de Tournes’s 1554 edition. Cf. Delforge, 75–87. For the English translation, I will quote the 1560 Geneva Bible, which is based closely on the French: The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). It is impossible to gauge exactly to what degree Du Bellay might have had sympathy for aspects of the Reformation; I merely wish to show that his biblical allusions show a close affinity with the Geneva Bible of his time, closer than with the Catholic Bible of 1550. That Catholics were interested in reading the Bible in French is evident on the basis of Charles Quint’s authorization of a French edition. It is quite probable that many Catholics read the Geneva Bible published in France: Jean de Tournes took measures to disguise his reprints of the Geneva Bible as a Catholic version (as Cartier points out, in the passages I have cited), and they were readily available in France. My suggestion concerning Du Bellay is that he shows a strong interest in reading the Bible in French, in the case of the Songe through a careful weaving and reworking of French biblical passages into his own text. In this respect, then, he is sympathetic to the Reformation project of making the Bible available in the modern language and to making it a part of the poetic language that will enrich and augment the expressive capacities of French.

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Faisant noyer dedans l’oubly du somme Tout le soucy du jour laborieux …25 [It was at the time that the gift of the gods most gently flows in the eyes of man, drowning in the forgetfulness of sleep all the care of the toilsome day …]

The more literal representations of Rome in the Antiquitez are the intertexts closest in space and narrative temporality to the Songe. If, in the narrative of the poet who is at work here, the “soucy du jour laborieux [care of the toilsome day]” is an effect of the task of searching undertaken in the Antiquitez, then the beginning of the Songe appears to offer a sweet relief from the uncertainty involved in chanting “L’antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe [The ancient honor of the long-robed people]” (Antiquitez 32, l. 14). Of course, as Du Bellay will show, this relief is only momentary. In the Songe, Du Bellay continues to elaborate the central problem of the Antiquitez, that of the poet searching for a way to ground his words such that their meanings are firm and fixed. To this end, he again puts in practice the notion of imitation, a freeing of signs from their original context and meaning so that they may be used to make entirely new works. In the Antiquitez, as I have demonstrated, words are quite distant and not at all fixed to their meanings, and this state of things is to the poet’s advantage. Immediately following the Antiquitez, the Songe takes the latter as a series of signs to be reworked, treating them as dream material. Du Bellay’s use of signs to construct poetic edifices and his treatment of the physical ruins of Rome as signs indicate his anticipation of the psychoanalytic observation that, in dreams, words are often treated as though they were things.26 Of course, the Songe is the recounting of a dream rather than a dream itself, and it is unlikely that it represents an actual dream.27 But as such, its construction and productions of meaning still involve dreamwork, as the recounting of a dream always does, even if that recounting removes itself from the dream content.28

25 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech, second edition (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 269, ll. 1–4. All subsequent references to the Songe and the Antiquitez will be to this edition; I will designate particular sonnets by number in the body of the text. For the English translation, I will rely on Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” trans. Richard Helgerson. 26 Freud, 303: “The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new language and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source for these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike.” 27 Cf. Fernand Hallyn, “Le Songe de Du Bellay: de l’onirique à l’ironique,” in Georges Cesbron, ed., Du Bellay: Actes du Colloque International d’Angers du 26 au 29 Mai 1989 (Anger: Presses Universitaires d’Anger, 1989), 305. 28 Cf. Freud, 512–32.

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The Names of the Poet Although the images of the Songe continue the pagan references that mark the Antiquitez, we read in the first sonnet a sudden, because apparently unprecedented in the Antiquitez, invocation of Christian terms that comes in answer to uncertainties raised in the Antiquitez. The suddenness is all the more marked because of the way that the poet is brought out of the relief of first sleep into the dream world of Rome, which has contemporary, ancient, and biblical aspects to it. The poet had just fallen asleep, Quand un Demon apparut à mes yeux Dessus le bord du grand fleuve de Rome, Qui m’appelant du nom dont je me nomme, Me commanda regarder vers les cieux. (ll. 5–8) [When a spirit appeared to my eyes on the bank of the great river of Rome, who, calling me by the name with which I name myself, ordered me to look toward the heavens.]

This demon is most likely the “demon romain” of Antiquitez 27 (l. 12) and hence, according to Thomas Zamparelli, “a supernatural being who often served as a mediator between man and the gods.”29 At the outset of this dream and its recounting the demon provides an interpretation, to which I will return. Du Bellay here takes elements of ancient texts to construct the dream: hence it is evident that the series of poems, as with the Antiquitez and in keeping with the notion of imitation, is made up of reworked material, words taken from another context and placed in this new situation. The demon calls the poet “du nom dont je me nomme.” Through the anagrammatical series of demon, du nom, and nomme, the poet is likening his naming capacity to that of the demon, hence giving himself a partly divine place in the interpretation of his own dream. And the use of the word nomme in rhyme with Rome recalls Sonnet 3 of the Antiquitez: the pair again underscores the difficulty of placing the name Rome on the ruins that the poet sees before him. At the same time, this pair valorizes the mobility of the name in its lack of fixity to the thing it supposedly signifies, from which through time it has been distanced. It is the work of the poet to move and relocate names, and here the poet suggests that his own unmentioned name has the same capacities. “Je me nomme” is ostensibly a passive verbal construction; but if it is taken rather as a reflexive, then the power of the poet even to assign himself a name, and hence to produce his own textual persona from disparate elements, is emphasized. But the limitations on this power Zamparelli, 214. See also Giordano: “In and of itself the word démon has a weighty lexical history. The poem’s context, however, suggests its Greek meanings. In Plato, the demon is the intermediary between the gods and men, or the guiding genius that attracts us to our divine origins” (63). 29

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are also underscored: whether the construction is taken as a passive or a reflexive, the poet never gives his name, never names himself. The poetic construction of the poet, like the monuments of ancient Rome, remains tenuous. That the demon directs the gaze of this poetically effected poet, his “vision”— in repetition of the title, further repeated in the many repetitions of and variations on the phrase “je vy [I saw]” throughout the sequence30—compounds what Michael Giordano has termed “the ambiguity of narrative authority.”31 This aspect of the Songe is in keeping with its allegorical functioning, which invites the reader effectively to rewrite the poem—the reader in a way takes the place of the author, who relinquishes strict control over meaning.32 As the poet has no fixed name, the “je [I]” of the narrator may signify in multiple fashion. Du Bellay thereby invites his addressees to continue the procedure that he has initiated with the Antiquitez and the Songe in relation to prior texts, to take pieces of these texts and place them in a new context such that a current meaning may be produced. Addressees are in effect asked to surpass Du Bellay’s series of poems, as Du Bellay is surpassing the poetry of antiquity in his own writing and allegorizing this surpassing. The demon serves as guide, then, not only to the narrating poet but also to an addressee who would decipher the meaning of the Songe; his role as interpreter is thus quite pronounced. Riffaterre astutely points out that the lesson of the Songe is not hidden, as many critics have assumed, but rather given in so many words by the demon in the first tercet, in an echo, repetition, or imitation of a key phrase from the Book of Ecclesiastes:33 Puis m’escria, Voy (dit-il) & contemple Tout ce qui est compris sous ce grand temple, Voy comme tout n’est rien que vanité. (ll. 9–11) [Then cried out to me, See, said he, and reflect on all that is encompassed under this great temple. See how all is nothing but vanity.]

To borrow from the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, there is a condensation here of pagan and Christian terms in the demon’s apparently sudden use of the biblical phrase. I say apparently because this allusion to the Bible opens another possibility of interpretation with regard to Rome: some phrases also borrow from biblical passages in a condensation that produces a meaning that does not derive directly from either source but that is rather effected in the new context. Such condensation, which Freud treats as a basic aspect of dreamwork,34 is integral to the allegorical sense of the Songe. 30 31 32 33 34

Cf. Zamparelli, 210. Giordano, 61. Cf. ibid., 61–2, 66, 68. Riffaterre, 111–12. Freud, 279–304.

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Biblical Dreaming The two books of the Bible most operative in the Songe, Ecclesiastes and Revelation, work together in a dreamlike condensation of Old and New Testament. The aspects drawn from each in Du Bellay’s sequence set the two at odds with each other, especially on the conception of time. The cyclical time of Ecclesiastes—“Toutes choses ont leur saison [To all things there is an appointed time]” (3.1), “Temps de naistre, & temps de mourir [A time to be borne, & time to dye]” (3.2), and so on—stands in contrast to the teleological time of Revelation. The violence of the imagery in the Songe is in part a result of the blend of these two conceptions of time. In Sonnet 14, the poet speaks of seeing “une Cité quasi semblable à celle/Que vit le messager de la bonne nouvelle [a city almost like the one that the herald of good news saw]” (l. 3), an evident allusion to Revelation 21.2: “Et moy Jean vei la saincte Cité de Jerusalem nouvelle [And I John sawe the holie citie new Jerusalem].” This dream version of Rome is the poet’s new Jerusalem, where the wish for the perfection of poetry in French, as expressed in the Deffence, may be fulfilled. His expression of this wish begins on an apocalyptic note: “Le tens viendra [The time will come]” (82/328), he writes, echoing the apocalyptic phrase “le temps est prés [the time is at hand],” when works in French will be regarded as models for poets to draw from, as the works of antiquity are for the French Renaissance poet.35 Du Bellay thus suggests that works in French may also move, over the course of time, into the past, as have the works of Rome. Of course, this poetic new Jerusalem is only “quasi semblable” to the city of Revelation—it is a likeness or image of it, and Du Bellay’s poems in turn present a likeness or image. In the Antiquitez the discovery is that Rome is indeed a thing of the past, a pile of crumbling ruins; the composition of the sonnet sequence in French indicates none other than the wish for the poetic new Jerusalem, or the resurrection of Rome in France. Hence, as Deborah Lesko Baker has keenly demonstrated in connection with the Antiquitez, Du Bellay’s sonnet sequences are marked by a dual conception of time that involves a “double eternity”: the first is “a richly mythic framework … a privileged eternal realm capable of transcending historical reality,”36 which would be represented in the idea of an eternal Rome; the second an eternity of time itself, which consumes “all human things.”37 In the Songe, then, one component of the wish concerns the creation of a poetic new Jerusalem in contemporary Rome, and by extension in France itself—the idea of an eternity transcending time. That the wish is immediately dashed by the consuming powers of time actually involves a second and closely related wish, to which I will return below. The poet’s discovery of the lack of durability of all things extends even to the notion of the linguistic utopia, the poetic new Jerusalem, or the resurrected Rome. The demon periphrastically describes the world—the Rome that, in the 35 36 37

See above, 25–6. Baker, 351. Ibid., 355.

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dream-world, extends over the entire world (“Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome [Rome was the whole world, and the whole world is Rome]” [Antiquitez 26, l. 9])—as “Tout ce qui est compris sous ce grand temple [All that is encompassed under this great temple].” The allusion to Revelation is evident: “Et ne vy point de Temple en elle: car le Seigneur toutpuissant est le Temple d’icelle, & l’Agneau [And I sawe no Temple therein: for the Lord God almightie and the Lambe are the Temple of it]” (21.22).38 Whereas in Revelation the world is a temple precisely because God is present and eternity has arrived on earth, in the Songe the temple-world is temporal and presents only a simulacrum39 of eternity, God remaining unreachable to human effort. Even at the very end of the Antiquitez there is a similar response to the Apocalypse: the only hope for overcoming the corrosive effects of time is in these lines, which has represented “L’antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe [The ancient honor of the long-robed people]” (32, l. 14). The description of the Romans alludes to Revelation, in which those who have entered the new Jerusalem and are with God wear “longues robbes” (7:13–14).40 The expression involves an additional condensation, an allusion to Virgil’s “gentem … togatem”41—the Romans, inhabitants of the eternal city that to the poet’s expressed chagrin has turned out not to be eternal, to have passed away into dust. It is likely, then, that any immortality or eternity that the poet might effect can be nothing but a vanity or simulacrum. In Du Bellay’s problematic, Rome is sought as that which participates in eternity or perhaps even embodies it. But with the discovery that Rome was not the eternal city, its ruins and the poetry about them can do no more than constitute a decayed image or poor copy. However, as I have shown above, in that Du Bellay’s poetry calls into question the firmness and permanency of its models, it produces a space for its own autonomy. A Time of Poetic Words In the final tercet of Songe 1 the question of time arises, in dialogue and continuity with the very same question in Antiquitez 3. In keeping with Du Bellay’s procedure, Songe 1 reworks lines from Antiquitez 3 and a new meaning is produced. The latter laments the “mondaine inconstance” (l. 12) of the contrast between the Tiber, the one piece of ancient Rome that remains intact in modernity, and the rest of the city, which has fallen into ruin. The Tiber remains because of its flow, which bears a similarity to, and even converges with, the flow of time. It is time, to which is

Exactly the same sentence appears in the Catholic Louvain Bible: La Saincte Bible nouvellement translatée de latin en françois (Louvain: Grave, Bergagne et Uvaen, 1550), BNF digitized version, N053708. 39 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14. 40 The Louvain Bible gives the same expression. 41 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1984), Book I, l. 282. 38

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ascribed the erosive power of flowing water, that has destroyed the once-solid and apparently eternal city of Rome: Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistence. (ll. 13–14) [Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time.]

Songe 1 replies to the despair of being unable to lay hold of anything solid or even real in this world, as Du Bellay’s narrating poet hoped to do in traveling to Rome. Now, the “mondaine inconstance,” repeated in this poem, is the fleeting quality of everything. The object of the poet’s quest becomes as follows: Puis que Dieu seul au temps fait resistence N’espere rien qu’en la divinité. (ll. 13–14) [Since God alone resists time, hope for nothing save from the divine.]

George Hugo Tucker suggests that Songe 1 is a “biblical reply … to the pagan questioning” of Antiquitez 32,42 in which the poet wonders if eternity may be hoped for in his verses: the demon replies to him that hope is to be placed only in God, who alone withstands the erosion of time. In an amendment to this interpretation, I would first like to repeat that the pagan questioning of Antiquitez 32 borrows an element from the Book of Revelation in order to suggest that any version of immortality or eternity on earth might be only a simulacrum. The eternal realm remains infinitely distant from finite life on earth; the latter cannot participate in the former, can produce no adequate image of it. Secondly, the assumption of this interpretation is that Du Bellay accepts a particular notion of Christian divinity as a grounding force; but his fascination with the pagan world in the Antiquitez and the Songe extends to the production of an allegory not easily assimilable to Christian decipherment and indeed seriously questions apocalyptic time. Dieu is mentioned in Songe 1 with some ambiguity: the demon invokes the name of God, and the name may actually repeat the phrase “ce qui fuit” rather than simply replace it. According to Ecclesiastes, “Tout est vanité” (1. 2). All that is available to human beings on earth is a series of fleeting images, a simulacrum of permanence—and divine purpose, belonging to the realm of eternity, is not available to human knowledge, which can be based only in an experience consisting of the apprehension of vanities or simulacra. If the eternity of the end of time never comes, then God will never be fully revealed to human eyes but will rather continually flee from them. In the Antiquitez, Rome is sought in order to fix meaning, and Rome is unable to offer such fixing; in the Songe, God cannot or will not do so. Rather, the poet 42

Tucker, 183.

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must learn to live with and in what is fleeting: the texts from which he or she borrows must be viewed as transmutable,43 and the words he or she recasts in new works must be seen as continuing the same movement. The latter is not in the power of the poet, or anyone or anything else in existence, to fix firmly. Hence, as Du Bellay declares in the Deffence, works in French may in the future be taken as models to be imitated and recast, just as the models of antiquity are for the poet of the Renaissance. In this poetic production, the poet hopes that the ancient models will be surpassed by his or her own poetry in French. These models will, in this poetic movement of history, pass away as the “pouldreuses ruines [dusty ruins]” (Antiquitez 27, l. 14) from which Du Bellay’s sonnets were initially created: “Tout est de poudre: & tout retourne en poudre [all was of the dust, and all shal returne to the dust]” (Ecclesiastes 3.20). In the future time when French poetry may offer models, it will already be haunted by the dusty ruins on which it is built, and may well be on the way to the status of antiquity through being imitated—in other words, to a return to dust. The hope that the demon tells the poet to have in divinity may thereby be a hope in the continuation of the flow, mobility, and transmutability of poetic language. Hence the close relationship of the poet with the demon, as mediator between divine and human realms, is pushed further. It is essential to take note, in the demon’s speech, of the transformation of the borrowed biblical text: instead of “tout est vanité,” we read “tout n’est rien que vanité.”44 A negation is added: the word rien (“nothing”) stands in glaring antithesis to the word tout (“all”), and hence the latter word’s emptiness of meaning, or its vanity, is underscored. Vanité signifies not only emptiness but also the fluid relation of a word to its meaning: in the flow of time no word is fixed to its meaning and may indeed lose all meaning, become an image of meaning that is not meaning, a simulacrum. The juxtaposition recalls Du Bellay’s placement of the name Rome in Sonnet 3 of the Antiquitez: Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois … (ll. 1–2) [Newcomer, you who seek Rome in Rome and see nothing of Rome in Rome …]

See Du Bellay, Deffence: “[L]es anciens Romains …, en guise de bons Agriculteurs, l’ont premierement transmuée [leur langue] d’un lieu sauvaige en un domestique [(T)he ancient Romans … like good farmers, first transmuted (their language) from a wild to a cultivated site]” (81/328; my emphasis). See also above, 21–3. 44 Du Bellay’s wording of this very important phrase alludes to the Geneva Bible, not the Catholic Louvain translation, which renders this phrase as follows: “touteschoses sont vanité.” Given that the phrase in the Vulgate is “omnia vanitas,” to which the plural of the Louvain Bible is more faithful, Du Bellay’s phrase strongly suggests an affinity with the Huguenot Bible rather than a dependence on the Vulgate. 43

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The placement of the name Rome next to its repetition demonstrates that, in the continuity of the poem, it is emptied of meaning, that rien is what is left of the meaning of the word. Rome has become vanité, as has the word Rome. As the one eternal thing on earth, or so the poet wishes, it was to be the anchor of meaning for all words. If poetic words could have participated in this eternal thing, they could have offered an image of eternity. But Rome has failed, and all words can be nothing but vanité, fleeting images with no permanence, with no grounding in anything outside the temporal realm, nothing but simulacra. The proximity of the words vanité and divinité, through both rhyme and anagram, suggests a possible convergence of the two—or at least that rien may be known of divinité in the tout of this grand temple. The Songe itself, as a dream, is also a simulacrum, a transformation of words and images from prior texts into words and images that have no existing original object—as the many attempts to decipher the imagery of the Songe usually end up showing. (Ecclesiastes makes the connection among songe, vanité, and a proliferation of words: “Car la ou sont plusieurs songes, la est moult de vanité, & de paroles [For in the multitude of dreames, & vanities are also manie wordes: but feare thou God]” [5:6].) As a dream, the Songe is also a wish-fulfillment. Du Bellay works with the idea of dreams as wish-fulfillment in his presentation of the poetic New Jerusalem; the principle that every dream is a wish-fulfillment informs Freud throughout The Interpretation of Dreams. Du Bellay works with the idea of poetry as wish-fulfillment in the Antiquitez, as I have already suggested; the wishes therein expressed are recast in dream form in the Songe. In fact, the Antiquitez expresses two contradictory wishes: one is that Rome were the eternal city that would ground the meaning of the poet’s words, the poet’s New Jerusalem, and the other is that Rome were in ruin, belonging to the past, a vanity and a demonstration of earthly vanity, a simulacrum. With Rome in ruins, space is made for the grandeur of French poetry—hence the erection of the poetic new Jerusalem, a Rome made of French words, in French-speaking territory. The Solomonic cycle of creation and destruction continues. The work of poetry, borrowing from dreamwork, displaces the wish for a French poetic utopia onto Rome.45 Rome is essential to any conception of temporal and historical change in Renaissance Europe.46 But the wish for Rome’s destruction becomes an anxiety concerning the inevitable destruction of the greatness of French poetry, by the same temporal motion that has made its construction possible in the first place. Wishes for Rome In Antiquitez 9, Du Bellay goes so far as to propose that Rome’s failure to be durable is proof of the impossibility of any durability, even in the divine realm: “ce grand Tout doit quelquefois perir [This great All must one day perish]” (l. 14). See Freud, “The Work of Displacement,” in The Interpretation of Dreams, 305–9. See Edward Benson, “Du Bellay et la perception onirique de l’histoire: pour une lecture interprétative du Songe,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 4 (1986): 63. 45 46

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If the second wish were to come true, then the poet could take what he would from Rome, its ruins, and its writings, which would now be freed from their initial context in order to create the poetry in French that would offer models to posterity. Du Bellay could thereby declare the glory of the French state, the new empire that may rival and surpass Rome in the movement of history (this wish is explicitly stated in the Deffence). This empire may also surpass Renaissance Italy, in both military conquest and poetry: Du Bellay works toward transposing the Petrarchan sonnet into a French form. In doing so he also borrows from Petrarch’s Canzone 323, whose movement of creation and destruction he imitates in the Songe. Despite his disavowal of Marot in the Deffence,47 through allusion Du Bellay implicitly acknowledges a debt to his predecessor. In Songe 13, describing a ship that sinks in a “tempeste cruelle” (l. 5), he writes, “La grand’ richesse à nulle autre seconde [The great wealth second to none]” (l. 11), an exact citation from Marot’s translation of Petrarch’s Canzone 323, the “Chant des visions de Pétrarque.”48 If one understands the Songe as a dream involving two contradictory wishes, it is easy to see why, in each poem, something very beautiful, admirable, or awe-inspiring is described, which at the end falls into complete ruin. Exemplary of the fragility of the monuments described in the Songe is the opening quatrain of Sonnet 14: Ayant tant de malheurs gemy profondement, Je vis une Cité quasi semblable à celle Que vit le messager de la bonne nouvelle, Mais basty sur le sable estoit son fondement. (ll. 1–4) [Having groaned deeply for so many miseries, I saw a city almost like the one that the herald of good news saw, but its foundation was built on sand.]

These lines offer a reworking of the general strategy of the Antiquitez, which is to emphasize the emptiness of Rome’s monuments by not describing them at all—here, in dual wish-fulfillment, the dream produces full and clear images of an eternal city that can’t be eternal because its foundation is built on sand (an allusion to the Gospel of Matthew).49 Also signaled here, of course, is Saint John the Divine, whom Du Bellay identifies according to the convention of his time with Saint John the Apostle, “le messager de la bonne nouvelle [the herald of good news].” Nietzsche has read the Book of Revelation as an extreme expression of wish-fulfillment, a revenge fantasy on the part of the oppressed—he even signals the irony involved in “the profound consistency of Christian instinct,” which

See Du Bellay, Deffence, 120/362–4. Marot, 347, l. 24. See also Hassan Melehy, “‘Grand’ richesse’: Du Bellay and Marot, a Petrarchan Navigation,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 68.3 (2006): 483–97. 49 See Screech, in Du Bellay, Regrets, 320n4. 47

48

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“inscrib[es] this book of hate to the disciple of love.”50 Saint John witnesses the destruction of Rome, the city personified as the Whore of Babylon: “Et vy la femme enyuree du sang des Saints, et du sang des Martyrs de Jesus [And I sawe the woman drunken with the blood of Saintes, & with the blood of the Martyrs of Jesus]” (Apocalypse 17:6). In this dream-vision, the place where Christians have been viciously persecuted will be destroyed; Jerusalem will be built anew, and Christians may live there through eternity. In his dream version of Rome, Du Bellay reworks the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. Indeed, he transforms it from a revenge fantasy into a hope for a continuation of poetry in the repetitions of cyclical time. When he enters the holy city, John describes what he sees in detail: and the architecture is splendid, dazzling, made of the finest, most precious, shiniest materials (Revelation 21). Although M.A. Screech remarks that the details of Du Bellay’s descriptions of buildings in the Songe “correspond to a more or less esoteric signification” that is destined to obscurity,51 Du Bellay’s pattern of offering details strongly resembles that of John the Divine. For example, guided by an angel that Gadoffre has likened to the demon of the Songe,52 John sees Jerusalem from a “montaigne [mountaine],” provides its shape and dimensions, and compares the light from the city to a precious stone, like “Iaspe [jasper],” as clear as “Crystal [cristal]” (21.11). The “muraille [wall]” of the city is built from “or pur [pure gold]” (21.18), and its foundations from precious stone: “Iaspe” and “Esmeraude” (21.19), among others.53 Similarly, in Sonnet 2, the poet sees “Sur la croppe d’un mont [On the top of a hill]” (l. 1) an enormous building, “une Fabrique/De cent brasses de hault [a building one hundred fathoms high]” (ll. 1–2), whose “muraille” is made “d’un luisant crystal [of a shining crystal]”; integral to its construction is “or” (ll. 8–10), and it is decorated with “jaspe” and “esmeraulde” (l. 11). Just as the monuments in the poem are built of materials described in Revelation, the poem is constructed of words that compose the descriptions in the latter as well as of words borrowed from other sources.54 It is quite evident that Du Bellay is imitating Revelation in order to build his poet’s new Jerusalem; this Rome is oneirically resurrected so that the poet may reach the realm of the eternal, firmly ground the meaning of his words, and achieve immortality through the supposed immortality of Rome. But the cyclical time of Ecclesiastes, merging with the movement of Petrarch’s “Vision,” inserts itself in the final tercet: 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35. 51 Screech, 308n14. (My translation.) 52 Gadoffre, 146. 53 The names of the materials are the same in the Louvain Bible. 54 Giles Polizzi explores in detail how some of the descriptive vocabulary of the Songe derives from Petrarch: “‘La toile de Pénélope: le Songe de Du Bellay comme anamorphose,” in Nathalie Dauvois and Jean-Philippe Grosperrin, eds, Songes et songeurs (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003), 91–2.

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O vanité du monde! un soudain tremblement Faisant crouler du mont la plus basse racine, Renversa ce beau lieu depuis le fondement. (ll. 12–14) [O vanity of the world! A sudden earthquake, collapsing the deepest roots of the hill, brought this beautiful structure crashing down from its foundation.]

This new Jerusalem not only lacks firm grounding but also is susceptible of being utterly destroyed, with the cataclysmic suddenness that marks Revelation. The destroyed city also borrows elements from Rome, both ancient and contemporary: Gadoffre points out that the description of the “Poincte aiguisee [pointed obelisk]” of Sonnet 3 refers to the obelisk of the Vatican, the urn on top of which supposedly holds “D’un grand Caesar la cendre composee [the ashes of a great Caesar]” (l. 8).55 Du Bellay here takes the wish of Revelation for the destruction of Rome and the resurrection of Jerusalem as an eternal city, and through a transmutation divides this wish into two wishes: one is for the resurrection of Rome as an eternal city (a new Jerusalem for the Renaissance poet), and the other is for its destruction, the affirmation of its vanity. But this vanity is precisely what allows the poet to take portions of Roman writing through imitation and produce his own writing, which subsequently enters the stream of time and is subject to the transformation that Roman writing has undergone. The poet can’t bring back ancient Rome; writing about it, as Du Bellay does in the Antiquitez and the Songe, will allow an affirmation of its having fallen into the ruin of the past and of the efficacy of present-day poetry. In order to show that wish-fulfillment is always at work even in painful dreams, Freud describes the contradictory wish-fulfillment of an anxiety dream: one wish is countered by another that comes as a defense, if the first one poses too many difficulties to the attempts to maintain the stability of the dreaming subject.56 When this operation occurs in a dream and the unconscious wish persists against the defense, an anxiety dream occurs; the only remaining defense against the first wish is to arouse the dreamer.57 Throughout the Songe, each time a beautiful monument is described one may understand the wish for a recovery of ancient Rome, for the eternal city that Du Bellay’s poetry reveals to be a simulacrum. And one may understand the destruction of each monument as the defense against the durability of Rome enacted by the new French poetry, which will eventually supplant that of antiquity. At the same time, each monument may also be understood as a wish for the construction of the new French poetry, the poetic New Jerusalem, the modern incarnation of Rome in France. However, the defense against the durability of this poetry is a kind of death-wish, a desire to join Rome in the movement of time, to move into the past. As such a drive to stillness in the return to the perfection 55 56 57

Gadoffre, 160–61. Freud, 372–4. Ibid., 380–82.

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found in the past, the cyclical repetitions of the Songe anticipate the repetition of traumatic experience that Freud characterizes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.58 But the wish aims just as much for new life, as it will give way to whatever poetry might follow the French monuments. Apocalyptic time is caught up and undone in the movement of cyclical time. In Sonnet 15 Rome is destroyed, in the allegorical figure of “la soeur du grand Typhee [the sister of the great Typhoeus]” (l. 4),59 who “En majesté sembloit egale aux Dieux [seemed in majesty the equal of the gods],” to the distress of the dreaming poet: Le ciel encor je luy voy guerroyer, Puis tout à coup je la voy fouldroyer, Et du grand bruit en sursault je m’esveille. (ll. 12–14) [I see her wage war against heaven as well. Then all at once I see her struck down by lightning and, at the great noise, with a start I awake.]

Again, Du Bellay effects a condensation of the lightning bolts of Greco-Roman mythology and the spectacular destruction of Babylon or Rome in Revelation 16. Although Freud provides a full explanation of anxiety dreams, he is effectively restating the accepted Renaissance idea that an arousal dream indicates a serious disturbance that might bode ill.60 The dual wish-fulfillment function of the Songe signals such a disturbance and may well be an ill omen for the future of poetry in French. Du Bellay is self-consciously contributing to the monumental status of

58 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth, 1955). Freud proposes the famous relationship between the pleasure principle and the death drive that the repetition compulsion reveals by suggesting that instincts or drives are based in “a need to restore an earlier state of things” (57). The repetition compulsion moves the subject toward a state of stillness, which is also the goal of pleasure, and hence “[t]he pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” (63). 59 See V.-L. Saulnier, “Commentaires sur les Antiquitez de Rome,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 12 (1950): 142–3. 60 See Screech, 322n14. Screech remarks that during the Renaissance, the learned regarded an arousal dream as “boding ill,” but the passage from Rabelais that he quotes in support of his statement indicates a broader set of notions: “En fin vous esveiglastez en sursault fasché, perplex, et indigne. … Sçaichez pour vray, que tout sommeil finissant en sursault, et laissant la peronne fashcée it indignée, ou mal signifie, ou mal praesagist [At the end you awoke with a start, vexed, perplexed, and indignant. … Know for a fact that any sleep ending with a start and leaving the person vexed and indignant either means or presages trouble].” François Rabelais, Le Tiers livre, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 395; Rabelais, Book 3, in The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 299.

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the latter, in execution of the program laid out in the Deffence; but the resulting monument, again, must remain troubled by the ruin from which it is built. A Future of Poetry In the language of the dream he represents, Du Bellay borrows extensively from prior texts to produce his series of poems, a procedure allegorized in the creation of monuments in the dream version of Rome. This very procedure, while affirming the greatness of ancient Rome, must also affirm its ruin and death such that its poetry may be reworked into models in French for the future—as he expressed it in the Deffence, French is the great poetic language of the future, the dream language. And according to Christian apocalyptic narrative, Rome must be destroyed in order to make way for the new Jerusalem. It is not at all clear from his Roman sonnets that Du Bellay accepts this narrative of the arrival of eternity at the end of earthly time. Rather, the wish-fulfillment may also involve an opposition to contemporary Rome, to the Roman Catholic Church, which Du Bellay was hardly in a position to state explicitly. He may be suggesting a sympathy for the Protestant wish for the destruction of contemporary Rome, at least of its imperial domination. However, in this imitation of Roman poetry, of necessity a simulacrum, a vanity that can’t reach immortality, the affirmation is also at least implicit that the same fate may well befall France, the French language, and French poetry—hence the Songe constitutes, in its multiple significations, an ill omen. Built on the ashes, dust, and sand of ancient Rome, French poetry may also fall into ruin, if it will offer models to another era, another language, another poetry. The Songe entails a cyclical time that it borrows from its own condensation of ancient mythology with the Old Testament, finding a confirmation of the latter in the former. The demon tells the poet to place hope in divinity; this hope is expressed in the continuity of poetry, which must periodically fall into ruin only to be resurrected as something that arrives at complete difference through imitation in the next era of greatness. Such a poetry is Du Bellay’s dream.

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PART 2 Spenser

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Chapter 4

Translation, Imitation, Ruin From French to English Until quite recently, criticism has tended toward agreement that Spenser’s translation of Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] and Songe [Dream], published in the 1591 collection titled Complaints, is an awkwardly composed series of sonnets. Commentators have largely followed a judgment made as early as 1928 in one of the few editions of Complaints published in the last century, which is the only one not to include other writings. In a remark on the first sonnet of Ruines of Rome, the editor, W.L. Renwick, underscores Spenser’s rendition of Du Bellay’s “mon cry” as “my shreiking yell.”1 Echoing Renwick’s term “noisy,” which itself echoes and mocks Spenser’s own phrasing, more than one critic has used the word “shrill” to describe the style of the translation.2 In his commentary on the Antiquitez, M.A. Screech settles for saying that the translation is “quite poorly” done. He nonetheless praises Spenser’s capacity to judge French poets and invokes the translation to support his argument that Du Bellay’s sequence should have earned a “more important place” in the history of European poetry.3 Indeed, Ruines and other poems in Complaints have only of late begun to attract much attention, after nearly 70 years of relative neglect. It would be completely unnecessary to cite the number of editions of and studies on The Faerie Queene—but worth noting that Spenser’s allegorical epic has largely obscured most of his other writing.4

1 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Jolliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 272, l. 7; Edmund Spenser, Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 385, l. 8; W.L. Renwick, Commentary, in Edmund Spenser, Complaints, ed. W.L. Renwick (London: Scholartis Press, 1928), 244. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the Antiquitez and the Ruines will be to the editions I cite here, and sonnets will be cited by number in the body of the text. 2 Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 49; Richard Schell, in Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 383. 3 M.A. Screech, Introduction, Du Bellay, Regrets, 33. (My translation.) 4 Recent critical efforts have begun to change this imbalance. Katharine A. Craik proposes an entirely new conception of the relationship between The Faerie Queene and Complaints: “This article argues that Complaints both anticipates and resists a place in the hierarchy of literary kinds that assumes its secondary nature; and then considers how such a reading alters our understanding of Spenser’s literary career. An acknowledgement of what I will call Spenser’s ‘minor’ voice enables us to read Complaints unapologetically both before and after The Faerie Queene and to avoid identifying it as either a training ground

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Ruines has often been considered an apprentice work, translations that Spenser most likely did early in his career;5 Complaints then incorporates a number of variations on the same theme. It would be tempting to explain the presence of the translations in Complaints as an effort to complete the collection. Such a view would support the notion that, as Ronald Bond proposes concerning the timing of publication, Complaints is an attempt on the part of both Spenser and his publisher, William Ponsonby, to capitalize on the popularity of the first part of The Faerie Queene, which had appeared the previous year.6 However, as Anne Lake Prescott and Margaret Ferguson suggest, even if these translations are taken to be part of the poet’s apprenticeship, a thorough understanding of Spenser’s oeuvre calls for a close examination of them.7 And M.L. Stapleton proposes that Ruines merits more attention because of its place in Elizabethan literature, which was self-consciously constituting itself as an autonomous, modern literary canon in a way that owed much to the poetics of the Pléïade.8 Stapleton is among those who demonstrate that what was once assumed to be stylistic awkwardness and even mistranslation actually constitutes a productive reworking of Du Bellay, Pléïade poetics, and a number of other traditions, especially Roman and Italian poetry. I would like to develop further the thesis that Spenser borrows the notion of poetic imitation from the Pléïade in order to effect an imitative reworking of Du Bellay and the other poets, especially Virgil and Petrarch. In so doing I would like to bear in mind the complexities and subtleties of Du Bellay’s notion. The notion of imitation, as Du Bellay articulates and demonstrates it in both the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [The Defense and Illustration of the French Language] and Les Antiquitez de Rome, was familiar to Spenser from as early as adolescence through the agency of his teacher Richard Mulcaster, a Protestant humanist. In his work, Spenser regularly declares his purpose of creating an English literature that would rival that of antiquity and then ultimately surpass it, in tandem with the expression and propagation of evangelical Christianity. The debt to Du Bellay is always evident, and Complaints may well be said to constitute or a kind of nostalgia for epic achievement.” “Spenser’s Complaints and the New Poet,” Huntington Library Quarterly 64.1–2 (2001): 63. 5 See Margaret W. Ferguson, “Complaints: Ruines of Rome: By Bellay,” in A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, and W.F. Blissett, eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 185–6. 6 Ronald Bond, in Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 217. For an alternative to this view, see Craik, 64 ff. 7 Anne Lake Prescott, “Spenser (Re)Reading Du Bellay: Chronology and Literary Response,” in Judith Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson, eds, Spenser’s Life and the Study of Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 132; Margaret W. Ferguson, “‘The Afflatus of Ruin’: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens,” in Annabel Patterson, ed., Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 30. 8 M.L. Stapleton, “Spenser, the Antiquitez de Rome, and the Development of the English Sonnet Form,” Comparative Literature Studies 27 (1990): 259–74.

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a kind of “defense and illustration” of English poetry. Through the inclusion of anglicized versions of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez and Songe, placed in a framework of poems that are similar in theme and, in varying degrees, structure to these, Spenser is able at once to show his debt to antiquity by way of Du Bellay and the French Petrarchan sonnet and to write poetry in English that is specific to his own cultural context and Reformist affiliations. At the same time, the affirmative gesture of writing sonnet sequences in English is a defensive act. Along with Du Bellay’s work against antiquity, Spenser’s writing is defensive against antiquity; it is also defensive against Du Bellay as representative of a modern canon of poetry that Spenser’s new English poetry, beginning with a valorization of his French predecessor, will ultimately surpass.9 Defensive Imitation The defensive aspects, so to speak, of Spenser’s project bear close relations with those of Du Bellay’s. In his admiring translation of Du Bellay’s sonnet sequences, Spenser is encroaching on Du Bellay’s territory. In many ways these translations form the core of Complaints, a strategy of defending English poetry that, like the Deffence, conceals a strong offense.10 I would like to show that Spenser actually ends up displacing Du Bellay, situating French poetry in the past even as he depends on it for the production of English poetry. Now, it is not my interest to engage in debate on the inherent literary quality of the translations. Rather, I would like to examine the strategies at work in Ruines for the promotion of English poetry. In this perspective, as I hope to show, Spenser’s sonnet sequence does in fact constitute a very important contribution to English literature, in the context of Complaints as productive imitation. Recent appreciations notwithstanding, I find it hard to contest some of the charges of awkwardness in their composition. Some of the clunkier word choices (“my shreiking yell” is a case in point) seem to offer strong evidence in support of Du Bellay’s characterization of translation in the Deffence.11 Although Du Bellay underscores the role that translation may play in acquiring “l’Intelligence parfaite des Sciences 9 A.E.B. Coldiron, “How Spenser Excavates Du Bellay’s Antiquitez; or, The Role of the Poet, Lyric Historiography, and the English Sonnet,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101.1 (2002): 42: “Spenser’s Ruines of Rome and Visions of Bellay do clearly seek to translate Du Bellay’s ‘mille lumières’—invention, grand style and magnificent lexicon, his gravitas, his énergie (implying either energeia or enargeia), the boldness and variety of his rhetorical figures.” Also: “[Spenser’s] is an excavation not just of Rome, not just of Du Bellay’s Rome, but of Du Bellay’s way-of-excavating” (43). My own position is that such “excavation,” on the part of both Spenser and Du Bellay, is an act of aggressive defense. 10 See above, 17–19; and Margaret W. Ferguson, “The Exile’s Defense: Du Bellay’s La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse,” PMLA 93.2 (1978): 275. 11 Cf. Stapleton, 259.

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[a perfect knowledge of all branches of learning],”12 which is necessary to the faculty of invention, it is quite otherwise with regard to the various aspects of elocution, which are absolutely essential to well-composed oration and poetry. Du Bellay states: Je ne croyray jamais qu’on puisse bien apprendre tout cela des Traducteurs, pour ce qu’il est impossible de le rendre avecques la mesme grace, dont l’Autheur en a usé: d’autant que chacune Langue a je ne sçay quoy propre seulement à elle, dont si vous efforcez exprimer le Naif en une autre Langue observant la Loy de traduyre, qui est n’espacier point hors des Limites de l’Aucteur, vostre Diction sera contrainte, froide, et de mauvaise grace. (87–8) [I will never believe that one can learn all that from translators, for it is impossible to render a work with the same grace the author put into it, inasmuch as each language has an indescribable something that belongs to it alone, so that if you strive to express its inborn quality in another language, abiding by the law of translation, which is never to stray beyond the bounds of the author, your diction will be constrained, cold, and graceless.] (334)

Translation can bear only on the sense or the signified of language; the “Naif,” the inborn or natural quality, of a language is constituted entirely of signifiers. The notion of “Naif” or “native, inborn” acquires some complexities over the course of the Deffence: in Du Bellay’s metaphor of grafting, what is native or natural in a language is so only in appearance, as it is the result of cultivation or artifice, of which all languages are at least at first in need.13 So whether a certain poem seems to bear a “Naif”—“Naif” being cited as a good quality, paired with “grace”—has to do with how much the foreignness in it has been assimilated or appropriated. If Spenser’s translation seems forced at times, demonstrating this criticism of translation, the effect is to reveal the process of taking something foreign into the native language, or the lack of naïveté of the native language as it is constituting a literary canon. As for mistranslations, which Renwick and others have often found to result from inattention and the requirement to conform to a rhyme scheme,14 Richard Danson Brown goes to great lengths to demonstrate that a number of them are deliberate rather than accidental.15 Although speculating about Spenser’s creative process may be of some explanatory value, I would like to shift the emphasis to the effect that the semantic differences may have, whether they are a result of conscious deliberation Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de La Langue Françoyse, ed. JeanCharles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 86; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 332. 13 See above, 21–3. 14 Renwick, 244. See also various authors, Commentary, in Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 2, ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 378–91. 15 Richard Danson Brown, “The New Poet”: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 85–93. 12

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or not. I would like to state my full agreement with Brown, however, that what many critics have judged to be effectively deviant aspects of Spenser’s translations are in fact quite productive, in ways that are important to reflection on the formation of the early modern English literary canon. Dead Spirits and Living Letters It is of interest that, in his admiration and even canonization of Du Bellay (in the “Envoy” that he appends to Ruines of Rome, Spenser declares Du Bellay to be “Well worthie … of immortalitie”; I will return to this sonnet below), Spenser doesn’t abide by Du Bellay’s observations on translation. While it is the case that in the context of Complaints, Ruines and The Visions of Bellay (Spenser’s translation of the Songe) may be seen as part of an imitation, it is incontestable that they constitute translation, even if they carry notable differences with respect to the originals. This is especially the case for their earliest version, a blank verse translation of 11 of the sonnets of the Songe for Jan van der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldlings in 1569.16 Although Du Bellay’s context is changed with the addition of four sonnets that put forth a version of the Book of Revelation that favors the destruction of present-day Rome and the Catholic Church, and hence may be termed an imitation in Du Bellay’s sense, Spenser’s work is that of translator. The emphasis is more on a faithful rendition of Du Bellay than it is in the later translations, and in not attempting rhymes Spenser doesn’t sacrifice meaning to poetic craft, even extending the eighth sonnet to 15 lines.17 At least at the beginning of his apprenticeship in translatio studii, Spenser places himself in the position of adjunct to Du Bellay and appears to follow the law of translation, as the latter phrases it: “n’espacier point hors des limites de l’aucteur [never to stray beyond the bounds of the author]” (88/334). I am not suggesting that Spenser should be expected to follow Du Bellay’s prescriptions to the letter. To say that there is a univocal “letter” to Du Bellay’s legacy to Spenser would be a tremendous oversimplification; for example, Du Bellay himself translated poetry and composed in Latin, hence violating his own prescriptions.18 Jan van der Noot, A Theatre wherein Be Represented as Well the Miseries and Calamities that Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings (London: Bynneman, 1569). In 1568, the text appeared in London in Dutch and French editions. Nothing is definitively known as to how Spenser, at around the age of sixteen, came to translate the sonnets for van der Noot. See Jan van Dorsten, “A Theatre for Worldlings,” in A.C. Hamilton et al., eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 685. See below, 96–8. 17 Prescott argues that this extra line has the twofold effect of giving the sequence of 15 sonnets a central line and of calling attention to the number 15. She explains the importance of this number in notions of the Apocalypse, in traditions following Augustine. Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 10–11. 18 For a fine, detailed reading of Du Bellay’s incorporation of translation in the Antiquitez from the Latin poems of his contemporary Janus Vitalis, see George Hugo 16

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What the French poet has left, a varied and complicated series of texts, is available to Spenser as a foundation on which to build his own poetic career and an autonomous canon of English poetry. It is notable that, in this canonization of Du Bellay for the purposes of securing the foundations of a new English poetry, Spenser chooses certain of Du Bellay’s works and omits at least portions of others. He appears to follow the prescriptions concerning imitation but not those on translation, and his imitation very explicitly incorporates translation. Hence, in Spenser’s interpretation of Pléïade poetics, translation begins to slip over to imitation when certain portions of a text or an author’s oeuvre are favored over others, when the imitator takes space from the boundaries of this oeuvre—when he or she moves in a space “hors des limites de l’aucteur [beyond the bounds of the author].” That is, as both theorist and practitioner, when Spenser approaches Du Bellay he is already engaging in an imitative reworking of his predecessor’s theory and practice, his own “defense and illustration.” Brown effects very careful readings of the Antiquitez and Ruines to show that the texture of Spenser’s language is quite different from that of Du Bellay’s: whereas Du Bellay writes in a very contemporary, modernizing French, Spenser’s English is punctuated by archaisms.19 Brown signals that Spenser is, in effect, following Du Bellay’s prescription in the Deffence to use “quelques mots antiques en ton Poëme [a few antique words in your poem]” (148/384)20—whereas Du Bellay doesn’t take his own counsel. That is, in distancing his own language in this respect from Du Bellay’s, Spenser is appropriating a portion of Du Bellay’s poetics. And, according to Brown, “The ‘new poet’ achieves distinction through his recovery of a pure English in his verse.”21 I will add that this “purity” is akin to Du Bellay’s “Naif,” and that it regularly reveals its composition from heterogeneous, partly foreign elements. And Spenser’s archaisms mark his poetry as belonging to a long tradition of English verse. Here he differs sharply from Du Bellay, who writes off all medieval French poets except for Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung.22 Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay and the Antiquitez de Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157–73. For a broader comparative analysis of the migration of the lyric poetry on Rome, from Latin into numerous other vernacular languages, see Malcolm Smith, “Looking for Rome in Rome: Janus Vitalis and His Disciples,” Revue de littérature comparée 51.4 (1977): 510–27; Malcolm Smith, “Janus Vitalis Revisited,” Revue de littérature comparée 63.1 (1989): 69–75; and Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, “Du Bellay, Spenser, and Quevedo Search for Rome: A Teacher’s Peregrination,” The French Review 71.2 (1997): 192–203. 19 Brown provides the following examples: “‘Ordre’ becomes ‘course of kinde’ and ‘des affaires humaines’, ‘th’affaires of earthlie creature’” (85). See also Brown, “Forming the ‘First Garland of Free Poësie’: Spenser’s Dialogue with Du Bellay in Ruines of Rome,” Translation and Literature 7.1 (1998): 12. 20 Brown, New Poet, 14. 21 Ibid., 85–6. 22 Du Bellay, Deffence, 121/364: “De tous les anciens Poëtes Françoys, quasi un seul Guillaume de Lauris, et Jan de Meun, sont dignes d’estre leuz, non tant pour ce qu’il y ait

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Although he views his task as no less than a reinvention of English poetry, Spenser draws in the defenses of medievalisms, from a tradition whose French counterpart Du Bellay ostensibly refuses. Hence Spenser defends against Du Bellay on two fronts: that of the strength of an antecedent poetic tradition, and that of the very point of drawing on such a tradition—even though this practice also takes its signal from a statement in Du Bellay’s poetics. In the first of sonnet of Ruines, Spenser begins to offer a Christian dimension that is decidedly less pronounced in the Antiquitez. The opening poem, for both Spenser and Du Bellay, is an invocation of Roman poets—these two sequences of modern poems are begun as contributions to the creation of modern literary canons, positing the grandeur of Roman poetry in order to borrow from it. Below I will provide Du Bellay’s original followed by Spenser’s translation. I will also include Richard Helgerson’s translation of Du Bellay so as to facilitate consideration of Spenser’s work. Divins Esprits, dont la poudreuse cendre Gist sous le faix de tant de murs couvers, Non vostre loz, qui vif par voz beaux vers Ne se verra sous la terre descendre … (ll. 1–4) [Divine Spirits, whose dusty ashes lie under the weight of so many ruined walls (but not your praise, which, alive through your fair verses, will never sink beneath the earth) …]23

And Spenser responds: Ye heavenly spirites, whose ashie cinders lie, Under deep ruines, with huge walls opprest, But not your praise, the which shall never die Through your faire verses, ne in ashes rest … (ll. 1–4)

en eux beaucoup de choses, qui se doyvent immiter des Modernes, comme pour y voir quasi comme une premiere Imaige de la Langue Françoyse, venerable pour son antiquité [Of all the old French poets only one, Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meung, deserve to be read, not so much because there is much in them that moderns should imitate, but in order to see something like a first image of the French language, venerable for its antiquity].” It is interesting that Du Bellay ascribes to French poetic language of the Middle Ages an “antiquité,” a word he generally reserves for Greco-Roman antiquity. Apparently in passing he admits that, as he is writing in French, there must be some dependence on the French language—which of course he needs in his defense against Greco-Roman antiquity. 23 Joachim Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 248. Henceforth cited in the body of the text by sonnet number; translation occasionally altered.

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Du Bellay is calling to “Divins Esprits [Divine Spirits]” who, belonging to the pagan world of antiquity, are not “heavenly” in the Christian sense. These spirits don’t seem to be living on in heaven, as Spenser’s wording suggests. Rather, they are corporeally dead, and living on through their “loz,” their honor or praise that is accomplished through the panegyric of Roman verse. Indeed, the repetition in the first stanza of variations on and approximations of the phoneme o (dont, poudreuse, sous, couvers, non, vostre, loz, vos, beaux, sous) suggests a tone of mourning or lamentation, in keeping with the subtitle of Les Antiquitez de Rome: Contenant une Generale Description de sa Grandeur, et comme une Deploration de sa Ruine [containing a general description of her greatness and, as it were, a lamentation on her ruin] (269/245). Spenser’s translation, here and throughout, is more celebratory of the Roman ruins. But Spenser chooses a title for the sequence that diminishes one dimension of Du Bellay’s: the word antiquité connotes venerability and decrepitude, both of which Du Bellay announces in his subtitle he wishes to convey, but ruine means primarily the latter. One could argue that the word choice is more alliterative; but an answer to that idea is that Du Bellay’s selection affirmatively fails to be alliterative, as he could easily have used the title Ruines de Rome (although he would then have lost the intertextual link with Roman tourist guides—see above, 33, 36–8). Spenser’s use of the word ruines underscores the relation of the English word to its French cognate, whereas antiquities wouldn’t have such a strong effect in this regard. Spenser’s title, then, at once announces a proximity to Du Bellay’s text and takes distance from it. Spenser doesn’t lose Du Bellay’s title entirely: in pursuit of Du Bellay’s final sonnet (to which I will return below), Spenser calls on his lute to “sound these old antiquities” (32, l. 10), a phrase for which, in Smith’s words, “there is no equivalent”24 in Du Bellay’s text. But Spenser has moved the term from Du Bellay’s title to the end of the sequence, retaining the twofold sense of the word. For Du Bellay, the loz or praise involved in poetry will not descend underground—he is maintaining pagan notions of death and afterlife, in which all spirits go underground, not upward to heaven. The spirits go in the same direction as the ashes buried under the ruined walls of the ancient city. Du Bellay is beginning the assimilation that runs throughout the Antiquitez and the Songe of ruins, corpses, and poetry. It is this loz alone that continues to live: Du Bellay signals that poetry, writing, is necessary for there to be life in the loz. It is the task of the modern poet to read and rework the ancient verses, the ruins, such that poetry may live in its new configuration. Where Du Bellay says that the loz is “vif par vos beaux vers [alive through your fair verses],” Spenser has it that the praise “shall never die.” He is ascribing to it an immortality that seems to function independently of the poet’s work, although he wavers on this point—below I will further consider the importance and complexities of such a Christianized notion of immortality in Malcolm Smith, in Joachim Du Bellay, Antiquitez de Rome, Translated by Edmund Spenser as Ruines of Rome, ed. Malcolm Smith (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994), in Du Bellay, Antiquitez/Ruines, 73n. 24

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Spenser’s poetics. Spenser also alters Du Bellay’s phrase “sous la terre descendre [sink beneath the earth]” to “in ashes rest”; he continually retreats from a pagan notion of afterlife and insists on the point that the verses have a life of their own. “Shreiking” Out In the second quatrain, Spenser extends the Christianization of the sonnet sequence through an introduction of a hell that is in tension with the heavenly realm of the spirits. For Du Bellay, the spirits remain firmly underground: Si des humains la voix se peult estendre Depuis icy jusqu’au fond des enfers, Soient à mon cry les abysmes ouvers Tant que d’abas vous me puissiez entendre. (ll. 5–8) [If a human voice can reach from here to the depths of the underworld, let the abyss open to my cry so that from far below you may hear me.]

In his own second quatrain Spenser turns the underground into “hell”: If so be shrilling voyce of wight alive May reach from hence to depth of darkest hell, Then let those Deep Abysses open rive, That ye may understand my shreiking yell. (ll. 5–8)

In Du Bellay’s sonnet, it is from far below—“d’abas”—that the spirits will hear his “cry,” from the underworld, “les enfers” (distinct from the Christian enfer or hell). Since Spenser’s spirits are “heavenly,” hell stands in opposition to them, and his wording doesn’t quite say that they are in hell. Rather, that the “voyce of wight alive/May reach from hence to depth of darkest hell” might signal the desired extent of the voice; that those “Deep Abysses” may split open accentuates the notion of an all-penetrating or “shreiking” yell, one that rhymes with the “hell” to which it should reach. It is important to note that in writing this poem Spenser is crying out not only to the Roman spirits, but just as much if not more so to Du Bellay and other French poets on whom he wishes to signal that it is appropriate for English poets to draw (primarily Guillaume Du Bartas, whom I will address, and also Clément Marot). It is much more in keeping with a Christian perspective that the dead French poets are called “heavenly,” as the pagans would necessarily have gone to hell. The “shreiking yell” represents the English poet’s effort to make the French poets speak in his own language; the “noisy” quality, as Renwick calls it, of this rendition is most appropriate to signal the distance between original and

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translated text, and it is accentuated by the phrase “shrilling voice.”25 Such distance effects a displacement of Du Bellay’s work, moves it into the past to accompany the ruins of Rome that it celebrates and laments. In effecting a translation of the Antiquitez that is also an imitation, Spenser ascribes to Du Bellay’s sonnets the status of ruin. Spenser may then draw on them to contribute to the production of a new English poetry, as Du Bellay has done with respect to the poetry of Rome. In the following two lines, Renwick sees a major mistranslation, and other commentators have not seriously contested the charge. Here are the two versions, as well as Helgerson’s rendition: Trois fois cernant sous le voile des cieux De vos tombeaux le tour devocieux. (ll. 9–10) [Thrice devoutly circling your tombs under the veil of the heavens, aloud I thrice call to you.] Thrice having seene under the heavens veale Your toombs devoted compasse over all. (ll. 9–10)

Renwick remarks, “Spenser has connected cernant with the Latin cernere [seen, made out] whereas Du Bellay means ‘having thrice made the tour of devotion around your tombs’” (245). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are two English cognates of the French cerner (and the related noun cerne): one is a verb, cern, which is short for “concern” or “discern”; the other is a noun, cerne, meaning a circle. Although both are of rare usage, it seems that both are available to Spenser—and his poetic work of translation/imitation selects the English signifier that phonetically resembles the French one (seen/cerner). That is, his English understands a French verb so as to give it an English sense, one with productive effects. The first of these is that the attitude of “devotion,” whose Christian connotations must be considered in both Du Bellay’s and Spenser’s contexts, is transferred from the narrating poet to the tombs he is cerning or seeing. Du Bellay speaks to the spirits of the dead Romans in Christian devotion.26 But Spenser’s “toombs devoted compasse” again Christianizes the spirits to whom he is speaking; Du Bellay (and Du Bartas) are much more likely occupants of tombs that can extend a “devoted compasse” than are the pagan Romans.

25

Smith notes these expressions’ lack of correspondence to anything in the original (21). Coldiron remarks, “Regardless of why or if Spenser misunderstood ‘cerner’ as ‘discern,’ the effect is that the English poet/speaker stands still, instead of circling ritualistically as did the French speaker. Trading incantatory rhymes, ritual threes, and mystical circles for standing still and yelling is not an auspicious beginning for the powers of a poet” (50–51). I see in Spenser’s rendition of Du Bellay’s incantation a stronger reworking of the position of the poet with regard to his predecessors than does Coldiron. 26

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Du Bellay has been factually dead for a number of years the first time Spenser reads him in school, the first time he translates him. And at the time of Complaints, the French author’s poetry is put into a past of ruined poetry such that English verse may come to the fore. A temporality is mapped out in Spenser’s verse: the pagan Romans, followed by the Christian Du Bellay who speaks to the pagan Romans, followed by the more Christian Spenser who speaks to Du Bellay and by way of him to the Romans. Du Bellay belongs to modern poetry insofar as he imitates Roman verse; but insofar as he is connected to the Romans, he belongs to the past of English poetry. In this temporality, each term passes as it comes to the fore; Spenser’s verse renders its antecedents present in order to witness their displacement into the past. Sanctifying Antiquity It is only in the final three lines of the poem, which for Du Bellay constitute a tercet and for Spenser the fourth line of a quatrain followed by a couplet, that the opposition between pagan antiquity and Christian modernity continues. It also continues to be much more pronounced in Spenser’s version: J’invoque icy vostre antique fureur, En ce pendant que d’une saincte horreur Je vays chantant vostre gloire plus belle. (ll. 12–14) [I here invoke your ancient inspiration, while with a holy dread I sing your fairest glory.] And for your antique furie here doo call, The whiles that I with sacred horror sing Your glorie, fairest of all earthly thing. (ll. 12–14)

The “antique fureur” would for Du Bellay be an attribute of the pagans, who now reside in the underworld or hell. And the “saincte” or “sacred” horror that inflects the poet’s song stems from the Christianity of the modern age. Spenser allows the Catholic Du Bellay access to the “antique furie,” which both recognize as a force bound up with the creative power of the poet, and he draws on it by way of Du Bellay. Both of them, then, take on the task of repeating in modernity the poetry of antiquity. Spenser continues to rely on Du Bellay’s effort with the effect of displacing it: this task involves a combination of heavenly and infernal powers. Du Bellay discovers that the life of the ancient poetry continues only in its repetition or imitation in modern poetry. Spenser converges with him, as he terms the “glorie” (which seems to be another word for “loz” or “praise”) an “earthly thing”—belonging to neither heaven nor hell but rather to the world in which the living poet resides. Spenser alludes to a theme that runs throughout Complaints,

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the vanity of earthly things as stated in the Book of Ecclesiastes, a major complaint of the Reformation. It is worth noting that this theme is explicitly pronounced in the Songe in a way that Spenser doesn’t really alter—that, although he appears to distance himself somewhat from the Catholic Du Bellay, he also finds in the latter an ally with Reformist sympathies. Toward the end of Complaints he provides his translation of the Songe, The Visions of Bellay, as well as a translation of Petrarch’s Canzone 32327—which owes at least as much to Marot’s 1544 translation, titled “Le Chant des Visions de Petrarque,”28 as to the Italian original. Indeed, it is by way of Marot that these visions initially came into being. Although Du Bellay disparages Marot in the Deffence (95), he blatantly borrows the subtitle of the Songe ou Vision from the title his predecessor gave to the sequence on which Du Bellay based his own, in its narration of a movement of creation and destruction. It seems that Spenser is tacitly restoring Marot to the group of imitable French poets from which Du Bellay has cast him out, even as Du Bellay depends on his predecessor (see above, 67). In so doing, Spenser locates Du Bellay in the past by borrowing from him the strongest defensive strategy, that of taking antecedent poets as models. All of the borrowed Visions in Complaints—The Visions of Bellay and Visions of Petrarch—are placed after a series of poems of Spenser’s own invention called Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, to complete Complaints and acknowledge their principal sources. Between Ruines and Visions, he inserts another text of his own, Muiopotmos. Spenser changes and interrupts the continuity between his predecessor’s two sequences; Spenser weaves together pieces of text, some borrowed from elsewhere, the others invented through imitations of the borrowings. His composition is an interweaving of signs that resituates signs from previously existing orders. In Complaints, Spenser continues Du Bellay’s procedure of imitation—with respect to ancient Rome, Italian poetry, and by way of Du Bellay. For Spenser, the sonnets of Ruines of Rome become ruins from which he may borrow his own poetic signs. He may then freely rework them in order to contribute, by way of the authorization of antiquity that comes through Du Bellay, to the creation and establishment of a modern poetry in English. Du Bellay transposes Roman poetry, Roman ruins, and poetry about ancient Rome to produce his textual Rome that gives way to poetry in French; this Rome offers the ruins from which Spenser will write his poetry. By naming the poems in English “ruines,” Spenser is locating Du Bellay’s text further in the past, diminishing the grandeur and venerability borne by the title Antiquitez. Spenser thereby creates the space necessary to build an autonomous poetry in English, songs of praise that declare the immortality of their 27

842–8. 28

Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. by Ugo Dotti (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), vol. 2,

Clément Marot, “Le Chant des Visions de Petrarque, translaté de Italien en François,” in Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1996), vol. 1, 347–9. See also Hassan Melehy, “‘Grand’ richesse’: Du Bellay and Marot, a Petrarchan Navigation,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 68.3 (2006): 483–97.

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precursors. But the immortality of Du Bellay and ancient Rome is the immortality of those who now reside in the realm of the dead—hence Spenser may authorize the canonization of his own poetry on this immortality, because the poetry that is evidence of the latter has been displaced by the death of its authors.29 Spenser’s emphasis on this death, and on the concurrent displacement of Du Bellay and Rome further into the past, is evident in his response to Antiquitez 26. Du Bellay writes, “Rome fut tout le monde, & tout le monde est Rome [Rome was the whole world, and the whole world is Rome]” (l. 9). He brings the name Rome out of the past, detaches it from a fallen empire, and places it in the present. Rome is thereby represented as a presence by which all names may be tied to the things implicated in their signification: “Et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme [And if we call the same things by the same names]” (l. 10). Hence, by writing Rome in French, Du Bellay is able to suggest that the French language, and France by way of it, will be able to extend itself over the world, becoming the new “monarchie [universal domination]” (Deffence, 82/328) that will constitute the repetition of the Roman Empire. Spenser makes a small but very significant change in the poem, replying with the following: “Rome was th’whole world, and al the world was Rome” (l. 9). Both clauses of this line are now in the past tense. Continuing his exercise of rendering present in English the poems of Du Bellay, Spenser places them, along with their Roman models, further into the past. In this way Spenser pursues a practice of imitation in his translation, demonstrating the inextricability of the two. Following the model of Du Bellay, Spenser may further declare independence from the tutelage of both Rome and Du Bellay. Finishing the poem, Spenser emphasizes Rome’s location in the past. Du Bellay writes, Ainsi le monde on peult sur Rome compasser. Puis que le plan de Rome est la carte du monde. (ll. 13–14) [So we can measure the world by measuring Rome, for the map of Rome is the map of the world.]

29

Cf. Coldiron, 66–7: “It has long been understood that Spenser carefully replicates selected characteristics of Du Bellay’s work. What has been less often noted is that these translations offer, at a crucial moment for Spenser’s oeuvre and for English lyric more generally, a truly unusual set of claims and possibilities. What has been least well understood is that at the same time Spenser appears to replicate Du Bellay’s poems, in fact, his excavation of Du Bellay involves significant refusals and revisions. Refusing the original contexts of the Antiquitez … plus un Songe, Spenser strongly suggests some productive possibilities for English poetry, demonstrating that lyric, specifically the sonnet sequence, can be a new vehicle for a new kind of historiographic vision in England. Moreover, Spenser’s translations also subtly revise Du Bellay’s doubts about the efficacy of the poet/translator’s role: while still writing the mutability of empires, Spenser grants poets much greater powers against time.”

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Spenser: For th’auncient Plot of Rome displayed plaine, The map of all the wide world doth containe. (ll. 13–14)

Du Bellay writes the name Rome as though it designated something existing in the present, precisely so that he may borrow from its emptiness to create the space for France in the present day; the map he describes is the current map of Rome, the map he is drawing in his poetry. Spenser is also drawing a map, but he distinguishes it from “th’auncient Plot of Rome”:30 his Rome definitively belongs to the ancient world. Nonetheless, his rendition of the poem in English, drawing on a long tradition of English poetry and borrowing from Du Bellay and Rome in order to renew it, suggests that this past may intersect with that of England. He pursues this idea in The Ruines of Time, which opens Complaints—I will return to it in Chapter 6. By implication, the English monarchy will take the place of the Roman one, but it will be less modeled on the details of Rome than Du Bellay would have it.31 The temporal distance he effects from Du Bellay’s Rome further enables his independence, his “defense and illustration” of English verse. Ancient Rome and Du Bellay are indeed canonized, but in such a way as to assure their entombment in the funeral monuments of Spenser’s writing. His practice is very close to that of Du Bellay; through this very closeness, the former takes a distance from the latter.32 Literary Immortality The reflection on the passage of time and its decaying effects leaves Du Bellay uncertain of the durability of his writing; Spenser responds by concluding his translation of the Antiquitez with a statement of the French poet’s immortality. For Du Bellay, the greatness of a civilization and a language is preserved in time only in the next great civilization and language that imitate the former and then displace them. He depicts the cycle of creation and destruction, in which what one takes to be the New Jerusalem itself might turn out to be vanity and become the Rome that is destroyed, in each poem of the Songe. A Protestant, Spenser might wish for the finality of the divine kingdom on earth, and hence an immortality for poets that is independent of the work of future poets. But his answer to Du Bellay’s uncertainty, the “Envoy” he writes to conclude his rendition of Du Bellay, itself presents uncertainties. In the final sonnet of the Antiquitez, Du Bellay expresses his uncertainty as a series of questions: 30 31 32

Cf. Malcolm Smith, 71n. Cf. Brown, New Poet, 88–9, and “Forming,” 15. Cf. Coldiron, 51.

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Esperez vous que la posterité Doive (mes vers) pour tout jamais vous lire? Esperez vous que l’oeuvre d’une lyre Puisse acquerir telle immortalité? (Antiquitez 32, ll. 1–4) [Do you hope, my poems, that posterity will read you forever? Do you hope that the work of a lyre can win such immortality?]

The answer here approaches a resonant “no”—for the poet sees the subject of his series of sonnets as an example of something that should be eternal on earth but is not: Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternité Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire, Non en papier, mais en marbre & porphyre, Eussent gardé leur vive antiquité. (ll. 5–8) [Were there any eternity under heaven, the ancient monuments of which I have made you speak would have survived intact not on paper but in marble and porphyry.]

But the failure of Rome to endure except as something represented in poetry isn’t a reason not to write poetry; on the contrary, it is the very production of the poetry in French that Du Bellay is seeking. To his lute, the poet says, Vanter te peuls, quelque bas que tu sois, D’avoir chanté le premier des François, L’antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe. (ll. 12–14) [You can boast, however lowly you are, that you have sung, first among the French, the ancient honor of the long-robed people.]

The most important difference in Spenser’s translation is that it omits explicit mention of France: That thou art first, which of thy Nation song Th’olde honour of the people gowned long. (ll. 13–14)

In writing “thy Nation” in the place of Du Bellay’s France, Spenser can continue the translatio studii of the Antiquitez and locate the praise of Roman antiquity, and the poetic production it entails, in the nation in which English is spoken. His own “defense and illustration” of the English language borrows from Du Bellay in order to authorize itself; in so doing it acknowledges Du Bellay by name, and hence the

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term Nation may refer as much to England as to France.33 But at the same time, Spenser’s poetry defends against Du Bellay and the greatness of French poetry in favor of English poetry, employing Du Bellay’s defensive strategies to do so. The speaking poet becomes an anglicized and anglophone version of Du Bellay. The two poets, by way of their writing, become fused. Spenser is here following Du Bellay’s macabre description in the Deffence of how the Roman poets proceeded in their apprenticeship, which then becomes an example to imitate, a prescription for the modern poet: Immitant les meilleurs Aucteurs Grecz, se transformant en eux, les devorant, et apres les avoir bien digerez, les convertissant en sang, et nouriture, se proposant, chacun selon son Naturel, et l’Argument qu’il vouloit elire, le meilleur Aucteur, dont ilz observoint diligemment toutes les plus rares, et exquises vertuz … (91) [By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed …] (336)

By engaging in literary cannibalism, Spenser becomes rather like Montaigne’s cannibal who, about to be eaten, informs his captors: Ces muscles, … cette chair et ces veines, ce sont les vostres, pauvres fols que vous estes; vous ne recognoissez pas que la substance des membres de vos ancestres s’y tient encore. [These sinews … this flesh and these veins—poor fools that you are—are your very own; you do not realize that they still contain the very substance of the limbs of your forebears …]34

As Spenser becomes a poet, the very substance of his body is built up from that of Du Bellay—the cannibal announces that he has already defeated his enemies. In reworking Du Bellay, Spenser has effectively displaced him and raised the English nation to prominence. The “saincte horreur” or “sacred horror” of the first of both series of sonnets may be understood as the ritualistic attitude toward this practice of eating the dead so that they become part of one’s body. In order to secure the immortality of English poetry, which will be built in part from the substance of French poetry, Spenser grants immortality to Du Bellay, an immortality that assures the latter’s bodily death. In placing the Muiopotmos in between Ruines and Visions, Spenser effectively separates the questions that end Cf. Brown, New Poet, 88, and Ferguson, “Complaints: Ruins of Rome,” 185. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: PUF, 1999), 212. For the English translation, I quote Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987, 1991), 239. 33 34

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the Antiquitez from the answer in Songe 1, “N’espere rien qu’en la divinité [Hope for nothing save for the divine]” (l. 14). Instead, he provides his own answer to the question in the form of the “Envoy” to Du Bellay. As Spenser has not translated Du Bellay’s initial sonnet that dedicates the Antiquitez to Henri II, and has thereby avoided gallicizing his sequence, his addition restores the number of sonnets to 33. This number is, of course, of great importance to all European Christian traditions with respect to death, resurrection, and eternal life. The “Envoy” is a panegyric to Du Bellay that nonetheless grants him a questionable immortality: Bellay, first garland of free Poësie That France brought forth, though fruitfull of brave wits, Well worthie thou of immortalitie, That long hast traveld by thy learned writs, Olde Rome out of her ashes to revive, And give a second life to dead decayes: Needes must he all eternitie survive, That can to other give eternall dayes. (ll. 1–8)

These lines might seem like a simple answer to a very difficult question concerning the possibility of immortality. Moreover, they effect an inversion of the roles of the poet and his object: whereas the poet was to borrow from Roman grandeur in order to produce his own, now Spenser has it that Rome comes to have “eternall dayes” through the poet’s labor. It is an admission that immortality or eternity subsists in the poet’s repetition of the poetry of a prior age. This repetition necessarily effects a displacement, as the poetry of the present takes on more importance than that of the past.35 Even before the end of the “Envoy,” Du Bellay is displaced by another French poet whom Spenser praises for his explicit Christianity—as I mentioned earlier, it is Guillaume Du Bartas: Thy dayes therefore are endles, and thy prayse Excelling all, that ever went before; And after thee, gins Bartas hie to rayse His heavenly Muse, th’Almightie to adore. Live happie spirits, th’honour of your name, And fill the world with never dying fame. (ll. 9–14)

It is strange praise that, following the translation of 32 sonnets, also includes such strong admiration for another poet. Du Bellay appears to be worthy of immortality because he excels above all who “went before”; the fact that Du Bartas comes “after” him suggests that the Protestant poet and envoy of Henri de Navarre (who at the publication of Complaints had just become Henri IV of France) is more 35

Cf. Coldiron, 53–4.

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praiseworthy, more worthy of immortality. Traditionally, the mention of Du Bartas has been interpreted as a suggestion that Du Bellay’s poetry requires a Protestant revision.36 However, as I proposed in Chapter 3 (57–8, 65), there are textual reasons to believe that Du Bellay was more sympathetic to the Reform than most recent criticism suggests, and there is no evidence that Spenser thought otherwise.37 And although commentators frequently take recourse to what is known of Spenser’s ideological adhesions to explain ambiguous and cryptic passages, research is conflicting on his precise religious orientation.38 As the Songe, a reworking of Revelation, follows the Antiquitez, Spenser finishes Ruines with a sonnet that suggests a continuity between Du Bellay and the Huguenot poet, which then leads to his own work.39 But I propose another reading of the “Envoy”: it takes the place of the Songe, which is displaced to the end of Complaints. In the context of his displacements is a series of poems concerning the vanity of earthly things, each of which narrates a cycle of the creation of something beautiful, often apparently divine and eternal, that before the poet’s eyes falls into ruin. The pattern of this cycle imitates that in the Songe, which in turn imitates Petrarch’s (and Marot’s) “Visions.” In his imitation of Du Bellay in Ruines, Spenser adds a final scene in which Du Bellay’s poetry follows the cycle and falls into ruin; that is, the “Envoy,” as the last sonnet of Ruines, is the first sonnet of Visions. Spenser further ruins Du Bellay’s dual sonnet sequence by interrupting it with works of his own. As ruin, Du Bellay’s text may be reworked by the overtly Protestant Du Bartas, who is more likely to contribute to the construction of the divine kingdom on earth.40 And the cycle continues: 36 See Richard Schell, in Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 404n; Prescott, French Poets, 50–51; Brown, ‘The New Poet,’ 93–4; Brown, “Forming,” 19; Margaret W. Ferguson, “Complaints: Ruins of Rome,” 185; and Ferguson, “Du Bellay, Joachim,” in Hamilton et al., eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 84. 37 Cf. Carl J. Rasmussen, “‘Quietnesse of Minde’: A Theatre for Worldlings as Protestant Poetics,” Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 13–14. 38 See Alan Sinfield, “Puritanism,” in Hamilton et al., eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 573–4. 39 Cf. Prescott, “Spenser (Re)Reading Du Bellay,” 133: “Is praising the Hugenot author of scriptural verse a rebuke to the Catholic writer of ancient Rome’s obituary, a predecessor whom Du Bellay has imitated but must shove aside? Or is the compliment a way to recapture the turn that Du Bellay had effected by appending his more religious Songe? It seems likely that Spenser was captivated by Du Bellay’s melancholia and the frequently emblematic nature of his imagery. I think, too, that he could notice Du Bellay’s poetic patterns and find his satirical vein attractive.” 40 Du Bartas is fairly unreserved about placing himself in the tradition of French poetry founded by Du Bellay and the Pléïade. In the “Advertissement au lecteur” that opens La Muse Chrestienne (1579), he paraphrases prescriptions from the Deffence: “Ami lecteur, m’ayant esté commandé par un grand personnage de ce royaume de rediger l’histoire de Judit en forme d’un poeme epique, je n’ay pas tant suivi l’ordre ou la frase du texte de la Bible, comme j’ay taché (sans toutefois m’esloigner de la verité de l’histoire) d’imiter

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Du Bartas becomes part of Ruines, and Spenser is able to rework both French poets in order to lay the foundation of the poetic New Jerusalem on English ground. As poetry proceeds through the “heavenly muse” of Du Bartas, the immortality it accomplishes for its authors in the repetition or imitation of their work may move closer and closer to the immortality of the soul. Spenser opens Ruines with an invocation to the “Heavenly spirits,” which may be understood as involving Du Bellay and Du Bartas in additon to the ancient poets they represent and progressively Christianize through imitation. An implication that may be drawn from the entire “Envoy” is that the poet who translates, transposes, and imitates Du Bellay transforms him sufficiently to stand in for him, that Spenser himself may gain immortality by giving Du Bellay a “second life” in English precisely by treating Du Bellay’s Antiquitez as a series of ruins. In thus inaugurating the greatness of a new English poetry, Spenser exhorts future generations to write. His own Ruines, and Complaints to whose construction they contribute, may thereby also see a second life in the persistence of literature in English.

Homere en son Iliade, Vergile en son Aeneide, l’Arioste en son Roland, et autres qui nous ont laissé des ouvrages de semblable estoffe; et ce pour en rendre de tant plus mon oeuvre delectable [Friendly reader, having been ordered by a great personage of this kingdom to write the history of Judith in the form of an epic poem, I have not so much followed the order or the letter of the Bible, as I have tried (without however betraying the truth of the story) to imitate Homer in his Iliad, Virgil in his Aeneid, Ariosto in his Orlando, and others who have left us works of similar substance; I have done so to render my work that much more delectable].” Guillaume Du Bartas, La Muse Chrestienne, in The Works of Guillaume Salluste Sieur Du Bartas, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes Jr, John Coriden Lyons, and Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 3. (My translation.) It is more important to Du Bartas to imitate and hence incorporate the works of the ancient and modern epic poets than to to follow the letter of the Bible, although it is to enhance the spirit or meaning of the latter that he puts the work of precursors in service.

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Chapter 5

Visions of Spenser The Space of Early Modern English Culture Spenser finishes Complaints with revisions of the poems that started his career, the Visions of both Petrarch and Du Bellay. He thereby acknowledges the varied tributaries of English poetry. He also recognizes his own apprenticeship in poetry through the influence of Protestant humanism in London, through Richard Mulcaster, who had close ties to the exiled Dutch community.1 Although Protestantism knew extensive variations in the sixteenth century, what occurs in Spenser’s revisions, and what marks Complaints throughout, is a convergence of religious and secular aims in poetry. His own purpose seems to be to create a literature that brings an ethics derived from religious principles into contact with everyday life, to extend religion into secular matters such that what matters most is the lessons it may teach regarding life in a community, involving both individuals and larger groupings such as sects and nations. And poetry becomes the means of communicating these lessons, along with the “complaints” concerning the poor regard in which poetry is held in Spenser’s England. As such, Spenser is writing an affirmatively Protestant poetry, although his adherence to any one ideological strain has proven difficult to establish.2 Complaints, then, constitutes a declaration of his own initiation to the status of “first garland of free Poësie” in English, he assumes the role he assigns to Du Bellay, followed by Du Bartas, in the “Envoy” that he appends to Ruines of Rome. And Complaints, as an accomplished, new poetry in English, is an answer to the very “complaints” it registers with respect to the state of poetry and the other arts. Spenser carries out his purpose in the semantic content of the poems in Complaints as well as in their aesthetic functioning. In this chapter I wish to explore primarily the latter, particularly with regard to Spenser’s incorporation of antecedent texts in Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, The Visions of Bellay, and Visions of Petrarch. These three series close Complaints both to announce explicitly the theme of the collection and to reveal the adaptation or imitation that the entire collection involves; in this respect Spenser is closely following 1 See Jan van Dorsten, “A Theatre for Worldlings,” in A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, and W.F. Blissett, eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 685; and Jan van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden and London: Leiden and Oxford University Presses, 1970), 75–6. 2 See Alan Sinfield, “Puritanism,” in Hamilton et al., eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 573–4.

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Du Bellay’s prescription of imitation, as he alters the texts of his precursors in order to address the local, contemporary context. And in revising the translations he did for van der Noot, he is redirecting the latter’s purpose of writing a religious treatise toward the aim of promoting a certain reconciliation among nations. In this fashion Complaints carries out a geographical extension by way of its linguistic incorporations. Through such cultural transfer, Spenser’s poetry contributes to the invention of a space in which early modern English culture may take place. Beginning With van der Noot’s Theatre Jan van der Noot, having left Antwerp after the Puritan uprising of 1567, became a central figure in the London community of Dutch exiles.3 His Theatre for Worldlings, published in London in 1568 in Dutch and French and in 1569 in English,4 is an astounding confluency of languages, traditions, and adaptations that is illustrative of both the Renaissance and the Reformation, especially in light of Spenser’s subsequent incorporation into Complaints of his own contribution to the English version. The book opens with Petrarch’s Canzone 323, which is also a primary source for Du Bellay in the Songe: each 12-line description of something beautiful that falls into ruin before the narrating poet’s eyes—a wild creature (a hind in the translated versions), a ship, a laurel tree, a spring, a phoenix, and a fair lady—is presented in a series of six “Epigrams,” followed by an envoy that invites death to arrive shortly. For Petrarch, these are lamentations concerning the death of Laura: the laurel tree of the third section is an evident figure of Laura, and the fair lady of the sixth represents her literally. That the laurel tree is hit by lightning also suggests the destructive forces with which poetry meets; but the phoenix of the fifth section implies a hope for rebirth, whether earthly or heavenly. Du Bellay directs this hope toward an earthly rebirth of poetry; for Spenser, at least in the “Envoy” to Ruines of Rome, earthly and heavenly rebirth converge. Van der Noot adapts the hope to a demonstration or “theater” of the fleeing or fleeting nature of the pleasures to be had in earthly things in order to direct attention to exclusive love of the divine. In the French edition, van der Noot simply reprints Marot’s translation of Petrarch’s poem; in the Dutch, he effects a translation that borrows from both Marot’s French and Petrarch’s Italian. These poems are followed by the Sonets, 11 poems borrowed from Du Bellay’s Songe and four additional ones of van der Noot’s own composition. The latter relocate Van Dorsten, Radical, 76. Jan van der Noot, Het Theatre waer in ter eender de ongelucken die den werelts gesinden ende boosen menschen toecomen (London: H. Bynneman, 1568); Le Theatre avquel sont exposés & monstrés les inconueniens & miseres qui suiuent les mondains & vicieux, emsemble les plaisirs & contentements dont les fideles ioüissent (London: John Day, 1568); A Theatre Wherein Be Represented as Wel the Miseries & Calamities That Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, as Also the Greate Ioyes and Pleasures Which the Faithful Do Enioy (London: Bynneman, 1569). 3

4

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Du Bellay’s adaptation of the Bible back into the story of Revelation, describing the destruction of Rome and the arrival of the heavenly New Jerusalem on earth. The French edition consists of Du Bellay’s work and translations of van der Noot’s own poems; and the Dutch version comprises van der Noot’s translations of Du Bellay followed by his own work.5 That van der Noot borrows from both Petrarch and Marot is evident in an examination of the three versions of the first poem in the sequence. All have fairly elaborate rhyme schemes. Petrarch rhymes line 7 with line 6, the latter completing a set of paired tercets; he then completes the poem with two couplets involving new rhymes. Marot writes a combination of mainly rimes plates and rimes embrassées. Van der Noot produces two sets of paired tercets, a scheme that places him closer to Petrarch than to Marot; his wording owes something to both of his predecessors, as the three versions of the first poem show. After quoting all three, I will provide an English translation of Petrarch’s Italian original. I will then provide a detailed commentary on the translation/adaptation of Petrarch by Marot and van der Noot, with the aim of demonstrating the process of literary transfer that is at work. Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra, onde cose vedea tante, et sì nove, ch’era sol di miroar quasi già stancho, una fera m’apparve da man destra, con fronte humana, da far arder Giove, cacciata da duo veltri, un nero, un biancho, che l’un et l’altro fiancho de la fera gentil mordean si forte, che ’n poco tempo la menaro al passo ove, chiusa in un sasso, vinse molta bellezza acerba morte: et mi fe’ sospirar sua dura sorte.6 Un iour estant seulet à la fenestre Vy tant de cas nouveaux devant mes yeux Que d’en tant voir fache me convient estre

5

It is not known whether van der Noot composed the Dutch or the French versions of his four sonnets first; he was fully conversant in both languages, and it is likely that he revised the two sets simultaneously. My examination of the Theatre for Worldlings has been greatly facilitated by the excellent edition of van der Noot’s complete works: Jan van der Noot, Het Bosken en het theatre, ed. W.A.P. Smit (Amsterdam and Antwerp: Wereldbibliotheek, 1953). In the Theatre, the editor prints Petrarch’s, Marot’s, and van der Noot’s versions, in the case of the Epigrams; Du Bellay’s and van der Noot’s versions, in the case of the Sonets. The editor chose not to include van der Noot’s own French versions of the four poems that he added to the Sonets. 6 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Ugo Dotti (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), vol. 2, 842–3. The version of Petrarch’s sequence that is printed in Het Bosken en het theatre is from a 1907 edition of Petrarch; I have chosen to depend on the cited critical edition.

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Si m’apparut une bische à main dextre Belle pour plaire au souverain des Dieux, Chassée estoit de deux Chiens envieux Un blanc, un noir, qui par mortel effort La gente beste aux flans mordoint si fort Qu’au dernier pas en brief temps l’ont menée Cheoir sous ung Roc et la la cruauté De mort vainquit une grande beauté, Dont souspirer me feit sa destinée.7 Syndé eenen dach aen de venstére alleene Sach ick voer my soo wonderlijcke saken Dat ic daer af onstelt was en verslagen, Ter rechter hant sach ick een hinde reene Schoone ghenoech om Iouem te doen blaken: Twee honden snel quamen dees hinde iaghen, D’een wit, d’een swert, die met nijdighe treken De gente beesté in de dyen so beten Dat syse saen brachten met een droef vluchten Onder een roetsé, en hier quam de doot breken De schoonheyt groot in dese hinde geseten: Dies heur misual my hertswerich doet suchten.8 [Being one day all alone at my window, where I saw so many and such strange things that from the mere seeing I was already almost tired, a wild creature appeared to me on the right hand, with a human face such as to enamor Jove, pursued by two hounds, one black, one white, who at both sides of the noble creature were tearing so fiercely that in a short time they brought it to the pass where, closed in a stone, much beauty was vanquished by untimely death and made me sigh for its harsh fate.]9

The French and Dutch versions of the opening line are very precise renderings of the Italian, word-for-word translations. In the second line, van der Noot adds the qualifier “voer my [before me]” to locate the “soo wonderlijcke saken [such marvelous things]”: the first phrase translates nothing in Petrarch, but does capture Marot’s “devant mes yeux”; and the word “soo” translates Petrarch’s “sì,” but Clément Marot, “Le Chant des Visions de Petrarque,” in Oeuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1996), vol. 1, 347. I provide the reference to Marot’s text from this recent edition, since there are some textual differences with the version in Het Bosken en het theatre, which is reprinted from the 1568 French edition of van der Noot’s book. 8 Van der Noot, Het Bosken en het theatre, 194. Although this edition reproduces the texts by Petrarch and Marot, because of a few textual differences I have chosen to depend on critical editions of the latter. 9 Francesco Petrarca, Canzone 323, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 502. 7

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nothing in Marot. In van der Noot’s third line, the witnessing poet was “onstelt … en verslagen” by these things—alarmed and worn down, in translation of both Marot’s “faché [alarmed]” and Petrarch’s “stancho [worn down],” a conjunctive phrase that connects the work of the two earlier poets. Van der Noot’s version combines both its Italian and its French precursors; that is, it incorporates into this piece of Dutch Renaissance poetry both traditions to which it is indebted. The poem is at once a new poem in Dutch, all the more so because it mixes what must be called two different poems, and an acknowledgment of the texts that precede it. The procedure continues: in the fourth line, van der Noot definitely translates Marot, who makes Petrarch’s “una fera [wild creature],” into “une bische [a hind].” Van der Noot renders this directly as “een hinde,” adding the adjective “reene [pure or clean]”—arguably for the sake of rhyme, but also preparing for the qualifier “gentil-gente-gente” in line 8 of all three poems. In the fifth line, van der Noot again takes elements from both Petrarch and Marot: Marot and van der Noot omit Petrarch’s description of the animal, “con fronte humana [with a human face],” substituting “belle” and its perfect equivalent “schoone.” For Marot, the creature is “belle pour plaire au souverain des Dieux [so beautiful as to please the ruler of the gods].” The word assez [enough] is implicit, which van der Noot renders in the phrase “schoone ghenoech [beautiful enough].” He takes the second part of the line directly from Petrarch, not from Marot: “om Iouem te doen blaken [to make Jove burn]” is a perfect translation of “da far arder Giove.” In line 6, van der Noot closely follows Marot. Both he and Marot move Petrarch’s “un nero, un biancho [one black, one white]” to the opening of the following line as “d’een wit, d’een swert” and “un blanc, un noir.” Marot’s “par mortel effort [through deadly force]” to describe the dogs’ disposition has no equivalent in Petrarch, but van der Noot’s “met nijdighe treken [with envious movements]” captures this phrase and combines it with the adjective “envieux” from the preceding line, a word that is also Marot’s addition. Marot transposes lines 7 and 8 of Petrarch’s poem, “che l’un et l’altro fiancho/de la fera gentil mordean si forte,” as a single line: “La gente beste aux flans mordoint si fort [bit the noble beast so hard in the thighs],” which van der Noot follows almost perfectly with “de gente beesté in de dyen so beten.” Marot translates Petrarch’s ninth line nearly word-for-word: “che ’n poco tempo la menaro al passo [that in a short time they brought to the last step]” becomes “qu’au dernier pas en brief temps ont menée.” Van der Noot does almost the same, adding only the phrase “met een droef [with grief]” to enhance the dogs’ actions. This small change effectively moves Marot’s “la cruauté/De mort” (ll. 10–11) up one line, as in van der Noot’s version death is merely “de doot” (l. 10). In Petrarch it is “acerba morte [bitter death]” (l. 11)—so van der Noot simply imitates Marot’s movement of the qualifier away from death, increasing the distance between the two terms. In the final line Marot is largely faithful to Petrarch, using mainly French cognates of the Italian words, substituting “sa destinée” for “sua dura sorte.” Van der Noot translates most of the line directly into Dutch, adding the adverb “hertswerich [painfully]” to augment the sense of mourning that is conveyed more strongly

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by the Italian “sospirar” and the French “souspirer” than by the Dutch “suchten” (all of them meaning “sigh”). Particularly striking in the final two lines is the difference in the rhymes. Both Petrarch and Marot write a couplet; but whereas Petrarch’s rhyme is “mortesorte,” Marot’s is “beauté-destinée.” That is, Petrarch couples the death of the animal with its fate, in contrast to Marot, whose choice specifically accentuates the loss of beauty entailed by the animal’s fate. In a way, then, Marot improves on Petrarch, as the theme of the entire poem is the inevitable fate of beauty. Van der Noot tends to lose this emphasis, as his rhyme is “vluchten-suchten”: his finale lacks the force of the repeating sound of a couplet; his narrator’s sighing is neatly paired with the movement of the hind under a rock, which is what leads to her death. The breath of the speaker, his voice, is thereby closely linked to the deer’s rush to death, and hence the poem effectively speaks death. This linking traverses the distance between the rhymed words and recaptures the force that might be lost in the transformation of the couplet. For all three poets—this is one aspect of the sequence that Du Bellay imitates in the Songe—the words of the poem itself constitute the new life that issues from the death in each part. All three poets finish with an affirmation of a living breath that follows the death of the animal: “sospirar-souspirer-suchten.” The failed beauty described in each poem in the sequence of six thus yields directly to the poetic composition itself, and the correlative hope for a durable beauty through poetry that is built on the pronouncement of death. Moreover, the three poets are trying to create a new poetry that follows the death they describe: Petrarch engages in extensive experimentation with existing Italian rhyme forms;10 Marot follows Petrarch, creating rhyme schemes that illustrate a number of possibilities in French rhyme, which are being codified during the Renaissance; and van der Noot produces a poem in Dutch that imitates Petrarch’s two stanzas, but he adds a symmetry and order not found in the original. Poetic Movements I wish to underscore in van der Noot’s translated poems (which Jan van Dorsten has termed “unremarkable”)11 an unmistakable incorporation and acknowledgment of the poetic work of both his predecessors, Petrarch and Marot. Indeed, he makes Marot’s version as important as Petrarch’s, recognizing it as an original poem in its own right, not simply derivative. And he places elements from both alongside each other. One could explain away the reliance on both authors as signaling an inadequate knowledge of Italian, carelessness, or any number of oversights, but I wish to draw attention to the textual effect of van der Noot’s rendition. His purpose, in Het Theatre, is to convey a Christian message; through the translation of Petrarch/ 10 11

See Robert M. Durling, Preface, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 11–18. Van Dorsten, Radical, 77.

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Marot, he raises the issue of the “rejection of earthly love and worldliness,” as van Dorsten suggests.12 Petrarch was evidently directing his poetic lesson toward such an idea; but Marot likely found in Canzone 323 an occasion for expressing his own religious sentiment, and he was well known by contemporaries and posterity for his interest in the Gospels.13 In this translation van der Noot is engaging in an imitation, in Du Bellay’s sense: rewriting the poems in his own language to address a local, contemporary context, for a specific purpose. In his translation, van der Noot accomplishes a reconciliation between the evangelism of Marot and the Catholicism of Petrarch, who was close to Clement VI and even wished to be made a cardinal.14 The Dutch poet finds in the traditions to which his predecessors belong elements that may contribute to his own Christian message, which in its sources and different versions spans across languages, nations, and sects. The book was after all published in London, not only for Dutch Puritans, but also for English Protestants of various adherence as well as French Huguenots. At the same time, in the procedure of imitation, van der Noot is placing each of his predecessors definitively in the past and emphasizing the importance of the present purpose of his poetry, effectively killing off the contexts of the prior poems. In this perspective, each of the Epigrams, in its description of the destruction of earthly beauty that leaves only the beauty of the poetic description itself, allegorizes the process of its own creation: the poet admires the beauty of a predecessor and then proceeds to displace it with his own version of the poem. This is the very cycle of poetic destruction and re-creation that Du Bellay depicts in the Songe, and hence van der Noot also adapts that sequence to his own purpose. The translations of Du Bellay into Dutch, with the subtraction of four of the sonnets and the addition of four that narrate the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, bring an end to the cycle of destruction and creation by presenting a creation that will supplant earthly vanity.15 Het Theatre constitutes none other than the announcement of this divine creation; poetry converges with the word of God, and the poem allegorizes its own creation as such a convergence. Van Dorsten remarks, “Here as elsewhere Van der Noot … looks upon his art as an art literally of revelation. Surely for that

12

Ibid., 78. See M.A. Screech, Introduction, in Clément Marot: A Renaissance Poet Discovers the Gospels (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1994), 1–8. 14 See Durling, 3–4. 15 Carl J. Rasmussen carefully examines van der Noot’s “Protestant poetics” by way of the Dutch poet’s glosses on the sequences, particularly those bearing on his own apocalyptic sonnets. Rasmussen finds that van der Noot “explicates the New Jerusalem as a spiritual state to be experienced in this world.” Carl J. Rasmussen, “‘Quietnesse of Minde’: A Theatre for Worldlings as Protestant Poetics,” Spenser Studies 1 (1980): 19. Paul J. Smith offers another interpretation of van der Noot’s replacement of Du Bellay’s sonnets with four of his own: “Petrarch Translated and Illustrated in Jan van der Noot’s Theatre (1568),” in Karl A.E. Enenkel and Jan Papy, eds, Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 295–6. 13

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very reason he too called his book, with its titlepage engraved in the manner of Hogenberg, a ‘theatre.’”16 Early in the twentieth century it was widely assumed that Het Theatre was a militant Puritan tract favoring the destruction of papal Rome—this is a judgment made largely by way of the version to which Spenser contributed.17 This assumption has a great deal to do with the opinion that Spenser was an adherent of a particular strain of Puritanism, which has been impossible to establish definitively. Fortunately, since van Dorsten’s groundbreaking work—and owing to his intimate knowledge of the Netherlands and the Dutch language—commentators recognize that “[v]an der Noot’s ultimate message was one of unity and peace.”18 The commentary that van der Noot provides on the poems is, according to van Dorsten, “essentially un-Genevan in its theological content.”19 Anne Lake Prescott provides the following excellent remarks on the English version of the Theatre: Despite its talk of “buggerous Cardinals, and lecherous Prelates,” the Theatre may have been meant to promote broader Christian understanding, not merely to denigrate Rome. The theology is not particularly Protestant and the use of visionary poetry helps make the book more than just an antipapal tract. It is, or means to be, a mnemonic image of a world in which the spirit moves mysteriously behind the literal and material surface of things.20

Prescott notes that, in making his lengthy statements on pride, vanity, and the destruction that results from them, “van der Noot does not seriously misinterpret the Songe.”21 But van der Noot redirects Du Bellay’s meaning in one important way: in the Songe, the Book of Revelation is affirmatively evoked so that the narrative of the sequence may arrive at a different end—an end that doesn’t involve the advent of the New Jerusalem in the temporal framework of this narrative. Du Bellay strongly suggests that any hope for such an end of earthly vanity may itself bring one to vanity and hence further destruction. Du Bellay’s sequence tends to resist a convergence between divine presence and human existence, instead pointing toward a realm of divinity that may never be fully known on earth. But van der Noot borrows from Du Bellay those aspects toward which he may direct his purpose; he then incorporates the French poet’s work into a Dutch version Van Dorsten, Radical, 78. See, for example, Harold Stein, Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 110–11 (henceforth cited in the body of the text); various authors, Commentary, in Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 2, ed. Charles Grosvenor Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 279. 18 Van Dorsten, Radical, 78. 19 Ibid. 20 Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 45. 21 Ibid. 16 17

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that adds four sonnets to redirect the meaning of the sequence. Finally, he places these texts alongside the translations from Petrarch so as to convey a lesson in earthly vanity and the destruction that results from coveting it. That is, he takes a conciliatory attitude toward all the poets he imitates, and in so doing follows Du Bellay’s prescriptions concerning imitation—but this attitude, again, also effects a temporal displacement of the perspectives of his predecessors. The allegory of poetic destruction and resurrection of Du Bellay’s sequence becomes a narrative of the reconciliation of all the faithful, following the passing of worldly things and those who adore them. One of these things, of course, is the lesson that the Songe conveys, which doesn’t advocate awaiting the arrival of full divine presence. Spenser’s Words It is such a polyglot, internationalist, syncretic set of texts that came into the young Spenser’s hands in 1568. And Spenser’s efforts show signs of van der Noot’s procedure, which combines the work of all his predecessors in the production of the new text; van der Noot joins Petrarch, Marot, and Du Bellay in the chain of transmission. As Spenser was to incorporate these translations into Complaints in a way that reveals much about the role of that book in his poetic career and the larger directions of English Renaissance poetry, the “visions” that Spenser offers are suggestive of his own visions for himself and English poetry. Jonathan Crewe asks, “Is Spenser as a young poet … already fixing a distant but rapt gaze on the ‘cynosure’ of the English political world?”22 The pupil of Merchant Taylors’ School who had perhaps already matriculated at Cambridge, very aware of his humble origins, may have seen an entry into the world of the court. The Theatre is, for Spenser as well as van der Noot, not only a place to show a spectacle of earthly vanity, to gaze at it, but also to be seen.23 The sequence begins, after all, with the words “Being one day at my window all alone” 22 Jonathan Crewe, Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), 99. 23 Crewe offers some quite valuable insights concerning the role of the spectator as spectacle in the Theatre. He identifies two phases in the modern interpretations of van der Noot’s career and sees in them a suggestion for understanding Spenser’s: “The first is the one in which [van der Noot’s] role as patriot and Protestant reformer, but also as a possible timeserver who seems to have recanted his Calvinism in his latter days, is taken seriously, and his literary career (or mission) is interpreted in the appropriate contexts of European anti-Catholicism and Dutch-German politics. The second phase is the one in which van der Noot’s enterprise is reinterpreted as that of a self-interested and high-powered operator, never just humbly serving the causes with which he identified himself, but exploiting the conditions of exile, publication, differing religious affiliation, etc., to promote himself, thus making possible his eventual return from exile to a literary career evidently to be pursued in contexts of aristocratic patronage” (101). Crewe has the critical adeptness to admit both of these understandings simultaneously, in relation to both van der Noot and Spenser.

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(my emphasis)—at a window, one may see and be seen at the same time. Crewe points out that the narrator of the sequence is the spectator who mediates between the visions and all other spectators. This figure is at once active and passive: the visions happen to him (I will underscore Spenser’s amplification of the passivity of the narrator) at the same time as he masters them by functioning as the necessary condition of their transmission to the world. Crewe sees in Spenser’s work in the Theatre an allegory of his perception of his own position with respect to the realm of English politics.24 In this respect Spenser imitates not only van der Noot but also Du Bellay, who appears to have been quite sincere in his literary efforts yet still saw in them a way to better his social position. It was to this end that Du Bellay dedicated the Deffence to Jean Du Bellay; his relative then rewarded him with the secretarial position that brought him to Rome. I would like to explore these considerations and to emphasize the internationalist, multilingual, and syncretic aspects of the visions of the Theatre, which more than 20 years later Spenser carries over to and further develops in Complaints. The incorporations from all three of his predecessors are evident in the first poem in the sequence. Although at least since Harold Stein’s 1934 Studies in Spenser’s Complaints, there has been little dispute that the young Spenser depended largely on Marot’s French version of Petrarch for his own translation, there are several important ways that Spenser also tacitly acknowledges Petrarch and van der Noot in the translation. Stein, with good reason, dismisses claims by W.J.B. Pienaar that Spenser’s translation shows dependence on the Dutch: “It is idle to point out places where the English gives a perfect translation of the Flemish (or the Italian) so long as those same passages give equally exact translations of the French.”25 But whereas Stein’s interest is in reconstructing the empirical conditions of translation and authorial intention, mine is rather in finding connections that indicate affinities among the texts. In the latter perspective it makes little difference whether these connections are the result of “accident” or “dependence.”26 (Stein admits a few instances in the translations from Du Bellay in Visions that suggest a dependence on the Dutch of van der Noot—I will return to them below.) Here is the text of Spenser’s 1569 rendition: Being one day at my window all alone, So many strange things hapned me to see, As much it grieveth me to thinke thereon. At my right hande, a Hinde appearde to me, So faire as mought the greatest God delite: Two egre Doges dyd hir pursue in chace, Of which the one was black, the other white. With deadly force so in their cruell race 24

Ibid., 102. Ibid., 120. The article that Stein cites is the following: W.J.B. Pienaar, “Edmund Spenser and Jonker Jan van der Noot,” English Studies 8 (1926): 33–44, 67–76. 26 Stein, 120. 25

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They pinchte the haunches of this gentle beast, That at the last, and in shorte time, I spied, Under a rocke, where she (alas) opprest, Fell to the grounde, and there untimely dide. Cruell death vanquishing so noble beautie, Oft makes me waile so harde a destinie.27

Since Spenser for the most part follows Marot’s text, I will highlight only the points that indicate affinity with van der Noot’s and Petrarch’s versions. The first line of the poem, “Being one day at my window all alone,” exactly reproduces the syntax of the Dutch, “Syndé eenen dach aen de venstére alleene,” not that of the Italian or the French, and takes the English cognate of the final word for the poem’s first rhyme.28 The line is also an exact translation of both the French and the Italian, as I indicated above concerning the Dutch. In the second line Spenser offers the expression “strange things,” which is a closer translation of the Dutch “wonderlijcke saken” than of either the French “cas nouveaux” or the Italian “cose … nove.” And here Spenser amplifies the passivity suggested by the phrase “being one day at my window” by writing, “So many strange things hapned me to see” (my emphasis), where the other poets all use the active voice (“sach ick,” “vy,” “vedea”); this passivity becomes active in its mastery of the vision. In the fourth line the English word Hinde transcribes the Dutch hinde—both exact translations of the French bische. In line 9, Spenser’s “this gentle beast” phonetically echoes van der Noot’s “de gente beesté” somewhat more than it does Marot’s “la gente beste.” The phrase “under a rock,” which opens line 11, is a close approximation of van der Noot’s “onder een roetsé,” and also reproduces Marot’s own word, “Roc.” For the concluding couplet, Spenser imitates Marot’s rhymed pair, replacing “beauté/destinée” with “beautie/destinie.” It is evident from this brief consideration that Spenser, while closely following Marot, also produces affinities with van der Noot’s rendition of the poem, which itself is a conglomeration of both its French and Italian precursors. In this respect Spenser’s version is tied to Petrarch’s original. But in another way this poem is more directly connected to Petrarch, if not to this particular sequence: it is a 14-line sonnet comprising three quatrains and a couplet, as is epigram 3, while the other four are 12-line poems, three quatrains that each approximate the alternating 27 Edmund Spenser, A Theatre for Worldlings, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 464. Hencforth cited in the body of the text. 28 Stein remarks, “It is useless to point out that at times the English and the Flemish are exact rhythmic equivalents; since both are, in general, translations of the same French original, and since both are written in closely allied Germanic languages, inevitably they will have rhythmic approximations with each other and not with the French” (120). Again, I am seeking affinities among the different texts, not incontrovertible proof concerning Spenser’s procedure of translation. So whatever the reasons for the syntactical similarities that I point out, they are still quite worth noting as points of intersection.

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rhymes of Marot, already a hallmark of English verse. In writing two sonnets in this sequence, Spenser is imitating the form to which Petrarch gave currency, imitating the Pléïade poets who were also imitating Petrarch. He is using a form that had little currency in English verse at the time, codifying a certain rhyme scheme, the sequence ABABCDCDEFEFGG that the Earl of Surrey had recently offered.29 He is making what will amount to a major contribution to the invention of the English sonnet form. There has been much speculation as to why Spenser chose to render these two epigrams as sonnets and not the others. The reasons are of little importance, and in any case they can’t be known definitively; but it is noteworthy that Spenser is composing the sonnet that becomes the form of choice in Elizabethan verse, culminating in Shakespeare’s sequence. And in reworking the Epigrams as Visions of Petrarch for Complaints, Spenser is finishing the project he started, engaging in a full-blown imitation of Petrarch by way of the Pléïade and Surrey. Spenser’s version of the Sonets in the Theatre is further removed from the sonnet form than the two epigrams, since they are unrhymed; and as I pointed out in Chapter 4 (79), he extends Sonnet 8 to 15 lines. Following Stein, this extra line, along with the fact that the poems are composed in blank verse, is usually attributed to haste and carelessness.30 But Prescott has offered a very intriguing and plausible explanation for the alteration of the form, involving the number 15, as the fifteenth line of Sonnet 8 is also the central line of the entire sequence of 15 sonnets.31 I would simply like to state here that, whether the sonnets were 29 In Songes and Sonettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earl of Surrey, and Other (1557), reprinted in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2 vols. Only some of Surrey’s poems are composed in the sonnet form. Spenser’s rendition of the two poems of Petrarch as sonnets and then of Du Bellay’s sonnets, in English blank verse, is commonly regarded as among the first sonnet sequences in English. 30 See Stein, 131; Alfred W. Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard, and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 31. 31 “Briefly, ‘fifteen’ has two chief meanings, both relevant to the Theatre. First, there were fifteen steps to the Temple, so that ‘fifteen’ represents spiritual ascent, an ascent providing an answer to the problems set forth in Du Bellay’s visions. Second, ‘fifteen’ combines ‘seven’ and ‘eight,’ and it is to this property of the number that Augustine turns several times and on whch [Petrus] Bongus concentrates. For Augustine, the number ‘seven’ symbolizes the Law, the Old Testament, and the Sabbath ‘quies,’ while ‘eight’ means the New Testament, resurrection, and the New Law. Together they show the harmony of the two Testaments, and since the waters of the Flood rose fifteen cubits above the mountains ‘fifteen’ also indicates baptism, a mystery beyond the learning of the proud. Elsewhere, in a commentary on the sixth psalm, Augustine says ‘seven’ shows man in time, whereas ‘the end of the world will admit us to life everlasting, and then the souls of the just will no longer be subject to the vicissitudes of time.’ Since all time advances by the repetition of the same seven days, the octave may very well signify the eighth day which is beyond such rotation.” Prescott, 47; St. Augustine, Opera Omnia (Paris, 1841), IV, 1144; 1860, VI, 749–50; On the Psalms, trans. Scholastica Hebgin and Felicitas Corrigan (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1960), I, 62–4.

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composed with care or in haste, aspects of their composition indicate important features of the consolidation of English national poetry during the Renaissance, particularly from the retrospective viewpoint of their reworking in Complaints. I will say just a few words about the Sonets before moving on to a discussion of the Visions sequences in Complaints. Stein points out that Spenser executes the 11 sonnets from the Songe according to the “downright method” of line-for-line translation from Du Bellay’s French.32 He signals a few key places where it is evident that van der Noot’s Dutch creeps into Spenser’s otherwise faithful rendition of the French. In line 10 of Sonnet 4, Du Bellay writes “propre main”: Spenser’s phrase “skilfull hande” is closer to the Dutch “geleerde hant.” He also provides the example of Sonnet 5, the tenth line of which is as follows in the three versions: Quand de paisans une troppe barbare … Als eenen hoop groué en barbare boeren … When barbarous villaines in disordered heap …

The phrase “disordered heap” translates the Dutch “eenen hoop groué,” but nothing from the French. Similarly, in Sonnet 10 (Du Bellay’s Sonnet 12), Spenser translates the phrase “celuy que Pactol’ roule parmy la plaine” (l. 4) as “[the shining land] that golden Pactol drives upon the plaine”: the expression “drives upon the plaine” is almost a transcription of the Dutch “dryft op de playne,” and is less accurate with respect to the French. Finally, also in Sonnet 10, Du Bellay’s “villains piedz” (l. 13) becomes “onreyne voeten” for van der Noot, which Spenser renders accurately as “feet uncleane.”33 Stein remarks that these signs of connection to the Dutch “are not numerous, and are not important.”34 However, they demonstrate the acknowledgement, in Spenser’s English, of the work of the two antecedent poets; in mixing the two, the English produces a new text that isn’t completely subordinate to the French as a translation. Spenser does indeed violate Du Bellay’s supreme law of translation, which is “n’espacier point hors des Limites de l’Aucteur [never to stray beyond the bounds of the author]”35 by injecting a bit of Dutch into an otherwise close rendition of the French; Spenser thereby produces a translation that spills over into the realm of imitation. Spenser is in effect writing an original work, as he seemed to wish to affirm in reworking the poems from both Petrarch and Du Bellay (as well as Marot and van der Noot) for Complaints. Spenser is also imitating van der Noot by following his procedure, which involves incorporating multiple sources in the rendition of poetry 32

Stein, 131. Ibid., 122–3. 34 Ibid., 131. 35 Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 88; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 334. See also above, 26–7. 33

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in a new language and hence acknowledging the different viewpoints they entail. The linguistic texture of these poems, then, harmonizes with their conciliatory message. At the same time, van der Noot, and Spenser in service to him, moves toward creating something that places each antecedent text firmly in the past: moving beyond the doubts and cycles of Du Bellay, van der Noot posits the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth, which overcomes opposition and schism within Christianity. Such a position might be viewed as a reconciliation, but it also might be taken as favoring religious absolutism, an acceptance of diversity of confession only within a certain Protestantism. In any case, van der Noot’s adaptation is clearly driven by a purpose and his own local, contemporary context. A Poetics of Invention In the execution of the poems for the Theatre for Worldlings, Spenser remains largely under the tutelage of van der Noot, and in addition Petrarch, Du Bellay, and Marot. In Complaints, however, his poetry moves affirmatively toward autonomy in a number of ways. First, Spenser inverts the order of the Epigrams and Sonets, placing Visions of Petrarch at the very end of his collection, immediately following The Visions of Bellay. These two follow Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, a collection of poems similar in theme and structure to the two subsequent sets of visions. But this collection is of his own invention and wrought in such a way as to call attention to the emergence of an English poetry that enriches the language, in the sense that Du Bellay understood this idea. There is even some question, in the first edition of Complaints, as to whether the title Visions of the Worlds Vanitie also designates the visions of Du Bellay and Petrarch, as the running title is repeated on two of the pages in The Visions of Bellay—apparently a typesetting mistake but nonetheless with an effect worth noting. In any case, the term visions gives the three sequences a unity—Spenser borrows the term from both the title of Du Bellay’s sequence, Songe ou Vision, and that of Marot’s rendering of Petrarch, “Des Visions de Petrarque,” from which Du Bellay too borrows the second part of his title. Spenser thereby also alludes to the widely used title of Petrarch’s Canzone 323, “Canzone delle visioni.” Spenser’s placement of the sequences reverses the temporal order of the composition of the original versions of the poems. It is as though Spenser is showing what lies underneath each sequence of poems—Du Bellay’s and Petrarch’s beneath his own, and Petrarch’s beneath Du Bellay’s.36 He is, in effect, reversing the cycle of creation and destruction that the poems effect with respect to one another, re-placing each sequence that has been displaced by the one that precedes it. In a way, though, this reversal undoes itself, as Spenser is demonstrating that this movement of displacement and destruction is at the very same time one of creation. 36 Cf. John D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111–12.

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The second way that Spenser moves his poetry toward autonomy is that he restores Du Bellay’s sequence, including Sonnets 6, 8, 13, and 14, which van der Noot removed and replaced with his four apocalyptic sonnets. The effect of the choice here is not only to recapture the integrity of the poet whom van der Noot imitated for the Theatre for Worldlings, as did Spenser under his direction, but also to reinstate the cyclical time of the Songe that clashes with the linear and potentially absolutist time that van der Noot puts forth in his polemical tract.37 The cycles of Du Bellay’s poetry are dramatized in Spenser’s imitation, which also separates the translation of the Songe from that of the Antiquitez—the writing of poetry becomes a continual invention of the new, and even as the old is being destroyed, it is renewed through imitation. As Spenser displaces van der Noot’s work, he is also imitating it: he continues the work that he started under the Dutch poet’s tutelage, and he extends the procedure of incorporating antecedent texts into the present text. Although Spenser does move away from van der Noot’s explicitly religious thrust, some of the wording in his translation suggests a Christianization of elements of Du Bellay’s text that may be interpreted as affinities with Greco-Roman paganism. In the Theatre and The Visions of Bellay respectively, the last four lines of Sonnet 1 are as follows: Loe all is nought but flying vanitie. So I knowing the worldes unstedfastnesse, Sith only God surmountes the force of tyme, In God alone do stay my confidence. (ll. 11–14) Lo all is nought but flying vanitee. So I that know this worlds inconstancies, Sith onely God surmounts all times decay, In God alone my confidence do stay.38

In contrast, here is Du Bellay’s version of these lines, followed by Richard Helgerson’s translation: Voy comme tout n’est rien que vanité. Lors cognoissant la mondaine inconstance, Puis que Dieu seul au temps fait resistence, N’espere rien qu’en la divinité.

37 Satterthwaite makes an excellent case that Spenser probably didn’t translate van der Noot’s apocalyptic sonnets into English (255–63); it can’t be discounted that this is among the reasons that Spenser chose not to include these sonnets in Complaints. 38 Edmund Spenser, The Visions of Bellay, in The Shorter Poems, 442, ll. 11–14. I will henceforth cite The Visions of Bellay in the body of the text, designating sonnets by number.

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England [See how all is nothing but vanity. Then, understanding the inconstancy of worldly things, since God alone resists time, hope for nothing save from the divine.]39

There are several notable differences in Spenser’s two versions, mainly having to do with effacing ambiguities that persist in Du Bellay’s composition. Du Bellay’s poet has just heard the words of a “demon,” a word rich in pagan connotations, a mediator between the gods and men (see above, 60–61). In both versions, Spenser uses the word ghost rather than demon, thereby diminishing the pagan suggestions. It is ambiguous whether these final words of Du Bellay’s sonnet are spoken by the demon or the poet—the word espere may function as either an imperative or an indicative in the first-person singular. If the word is an imperative, moreover, it is not clear whether it is addressed to the poet, the reader, or both at once. If the demon (or ghost) speaks these words, a touch of the supernatural is added. Spenser suggests through the use of the word I that it is the poet who is speaking, although it could be the ghost—but in any case the speaker affirms a faith in God.40 Where Du Bellay says “divinité,” Spenser chooses to say “God.” In this choice he follows van der Noot: the Dutch poet writes the pronoun hem, whose antecedent is “God.” By repeating the word God, though, Spenser is placing even more emphasis on it than is van der Noot. And he maintains the repetition through his revisions of the Du Bellay translations. I don’t wish to dispute Albert Satterthwaite’s observation that these word choices are necessitated by rhyme and meter; but I would like to place more emphasis on the notion that the word God is less vague and offers more solidity and grounding than Du Bellay’s divinité.41 Du Bellay writes “N’espere rien,” reaffirming the words of Ecclesiastes that the demon repeats, “Tout n’est rien que vanité”—the word rien, “nothing,” repeats the rien that means and resonates phonetically and graphically with Rome from the Antiquitez (see above, 65–6). Spenser doesn’t repeat his own translation of rien as “nought,” a repetition that would reproduce Du Bellay’s negative definition of God as the “nothing but …” He rather opts for a positive statement concerning God, “in God alone,” which repeats Du Bellay’s “Dieu seul” from the preceding line, and is a more forceful 39 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Jolliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 306, ll. 11–14; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 180. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Songe in the body of the text by sonnet number; translation occasionally altered. 40 Cf. Malcolm Smith, in Antiquitez de Rome, Translated by Edmund Spenser as Ruines of Rome, ed. Malcolm Smith (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994), 89n: “Du Bellay offers an exhortation to the reader, [whereas] Spenser describes his own state of mind (or that of the spirit which had appeared to him: his wording is ambivalent).” 41 Cf. Satterthwaite, 30.

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affirmation than Du Bellay makes of Christian divinity. Another place where Spenser chooses a term with stronger Christian connotations than what is found in Du Bellay’s text in Sonnet 10, where he renders “une Nymphe esploree” (l. 1) as “a virgin fair,” revising his own translation of “a wailing Nimphe” (l. 1) from the Theatre. (Spenser revisits this woman in his major imitation of Du Bellay, The Ruines of Time, the sequence that opens Complaints; I will return to it in the following chapter.) That is, he further Christianizes his own previous work, which van der Noot guided toward a more directly evangelical aim. Spenser moves away from this aim and complicates the religious aspects of his poetry, all the while working toward a convergence of Christian and poetic purposes. Third, the translations from Du Bellay that Spenser publishes in Complaints are thoroughly revised; they are no longer the poems that he executed for van der Noot. They have become sonnets in the English fashion, following the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG and hence contributing to the codification of this exemplary form of English Renaissance verse, of which earlier he was among the first purveyors. He is not only restoring Du Bellay but in the very same gesture freeing himself from the tutelage of the French poet by separating The Visions of Bellay from Ruines of Rome with his own Muiopotmos and Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. And he is placing his own name on what would have been attributed to van der Noot or the translator of the dedicatory epistle and commentary in the Theatre, perhaps as well as the four apocalyptic sonnets, Theodore Roest. At the height of his poetic career, in the immediate aftermath of the success of the first part of The Faerie Queene, he takes credit for what in retrospect turns out to be a key moment in English literary history, the composition of the Theatre for Worldlings; in so doing, he offers his work in what has generally been considered improved form.42 Nonetheless, Spenser still presents The Visions of Bellay as a new work: Visions of Petrarch is said to be “formerly translated.”43 This is a somewhat odd qualification, as he not only revises the two sonnets but also lengthens the other four 12-line poems to 14 lines. But the changes to this sequence are less drastic, as most of the rhymes were already in place. So a plausible explanation for his not qualifying The Visions of Bellay in the same way is that the sequence is extensively reworked.44 Spenser is thereby able to demonstrate his own ascendancy to poet laureate by way of his apprenticeship as translator to Petrarch and Du Bellay. The translations allow him to illustrate his own skill as a poet and contribute to “enriching” the English language (again in the sense that Du Bellay puts forth in the Deffence); they are effectively his own work, built on a foundation of past poets whose verse lies in the kind of ruin from which new edifices may be built. By reordering the translated sequences and interweaving them with his own It is striking in the comparison of The Visions of Bellay with the Sonets that, although the poems are now cast in well-wrought rhyme, they aren’t significantly less accurate as translations than the earlier versions. Cf. Stein, 154. 43 Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 453. 44 Pienaar, 42. 42

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compositions, in a work specific to English poetry and its situation in the late sixteenth century, Spenser brings them into the realm of imitation in a way that owes a great deal to the Deffence. In the context of Complaints, The Visions of Bellay and Visions of Petrarch sequences each function in relation to the preceding sequence: Spenser’s own Visions of the Worlds Vanitie reveals its source in Du Bellay, the foundation on which it is built, which now belongs to the past and lies in ruin. And The Visions of Bellay is connected to Visions of Petrarch in much the same way. Spenser is the witness at the window in Visions of Petrarch who can present all of his Visions in the form he chooses: he can compose Visions of the Worlds Vanitie with a more demanding rhyme scheme and hence present his own work as ascending above that of Du Bellay and Petrarch, with the very gesture by which he acknowledges them as precursors. What the two earlier poets brought to the Theatre, as Crewe puts it, is “a context of extremely high literacy, literary ambition, and cultural prestige.”45 The more mature Spenser, having attained impressive literary and political stature, can look back at the schoolboy of humble background who was willing to take on these literary giants in the hopes of one day mastering them. Spenser’s Vision Spenser opens this announcement of his own poetry and that of English letters by combining elements of what now turn out to be the ruins of Du Bellay and Petrarch. The first of the 12 sonnets in Visions of the Worlds Vanitie is an imitation of the opening sonnet in each of the subsequent Visions sequences: One day, whiles that my daylie cares did sleepe, My spirit, shaking off her earthly prison, Began to enter into meditation deepe Of things exceeding reach of common reason.46

The mention of sleep of course recalls the opening sonnet of the Songe, where Du Bellay writes: C’estoit alors que le present des Dieux Plus doulcement s’écoule aux yeux de l’homme, Faisant noyer dedans l’oubly du somme Tout le soucy du jour laborieux … (ll. 1–4) [It was at the time that the gift of the gods most gently flows in the eyes of man, drowning in the forgetfulness of sleep all the care of the toilsome day …] 45

Crewe, 97. Edmund Spenser, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, in The Shorter Poems, 433, ll. 1–4. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. 46

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But there is no demon or ghost in Spenser’s poem; the visions are introduced as the result of inner reflection, emanations of the narrating poet’s own spirit engaging in an ascesis that might allow freer communication with higher matters.47 It is notable that God is not mentioned, nor any mediator between the human spirit and God. The visions apparently come from an inner morality that goes beyond the received ideas or “common reason” of the era during which and to which the poet is writing: Such as this age, in which all good is geason, And all that humble is and meane debaced, Hath brought forth in her last declining season, Griefe of good mindes, to see goodnesse disgraced. (ll. 5–8)

Spenser here introduces the theme of this sequence of Visions, which is at once an adaptation and a departure from those which Du Bellay and Petrarch present: the degradation of the humble, and the corollary notion that such a degradation is contrary to the good. It is very easy to see an autobiographical element here, in light of Spenser’s own humble origins and the necessity of close connection with the state for any kind of social advancement. But Satterthwaite rightly cautions against understanding this notion narrowly, as “a glorification of people of low degree.”48 He suggests that Spenser is conveying a moral message concerning the pride of the highly placed and their contempt for persons of low origin. I would like to broaden further the understanding of Spenser’s theme: the very poetry that Spenser is composing is part of his own upward mobility, his ascendancy from his humble origins and request for recognition. And this poetry, a new poetry in English, stands in relation to the prestigious letters of France, and both of these face the Italian Renaissance that Petrarch exemplifies. In each case, there is an ostensibly humble poetry that declares its own capacity to equal its mighty predecessor. There is also a more general political allegory, as England achieves a place for itself in European politics, following France, which in turn followed Italy. And this allegory implies a temporality: modern letters progress in the westerly direction of translatio studii, each facing the might represented by the ruins or antiquities of Rome and attempting to equal and even surpass it. Such progression is for Spenser inseparable from religious transformation, in which humble Protestants, of various adherence, find themselves in the shadow and oppression of the haughty Roman Church—ancient Rome allegorizes the Catholic Church. It is notable that Spenser is not strictly calling for a vanquishing of the mighty, but rather a reign of goodness in which the humble will not be “debaced” by the mighty. Although nine of the ten visions (in the ten sonnets following the first one: the last is a conclusion and a statement of the lesson, to which I The expression “earthly prison” is also an allusion to Sidney, who in the Defence of Poesie writes of the “dungeon of the body” from which knowledge releases the mind. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London: Everyman, 1997), 92. 48 Satterthwaite, 120. 47

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will return) concern the weakening or death of a great entity by a small one, the culmination of the sequence, in Sonnet 11, bears on the rescue and preservation of the Roman empire by the agency of a goose. Below I will discuss this apparent contradiction with the theme of Du Bellay’s poetry. The way that Spenser describes the visions appearing to him, in Sonnet 1, suggests that one lowly person may have access to the grandeur of the lesson that they teach: On which when as my thought was throghly placed, Unto my eyes strange showes presented were, Picturing that, which I in minde embraced, That yet those sights empassion me full nere. (ll. 9–12)

In line 9, Spenser attributes the activity of reflection to his narrating poet. But in line 8 he preserves and amplifies the passive voice with respect to seeing that he introduced into the first poem in the early Petrarch sequence. The question arises as to who or what is doing the presenting, the latter apparently a result of the poet’s reflection. Again, Spenser doesn’t mention God, as Du Bellay does, and doesn’t give voice to any messenger of God. The agency of presentation could easily be the texts of Du Bellay, Petrarch, Marot, or even van der Noot— or more generally poetry that offers visions, which would include Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, or the act of writing and reading poetry. Here poetry has an ethical and religious function, and religion is secularized to make contact with moral questions pertinent to everyday life. The word empassion suggests a religious disposition before the pictures that are presented to the poet, which he in turn presents. Spenser dons the mask of the poet to play in this theater of visions. In so doing he asks the mighty to regard him as good and worthy: Such as they were (faire Lady) take in worth, That when time serves, may bring things better forth. (ll. 13–14)

Although Richard Schell states that this Lady is “unidentified,”49 in the dedicatory epistle at the beginning of Muiopotmos Spenser asks Lady Carey “to take in worth” his poem. The repetition of the wording suggests that Visions of the Worlds Vanitie is also addressed to Lady Carey50—Elizabeth Spencer, of the noble family to which Spenser on a number of occasions claims kinship. For example, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe he states: Ne lesse praiseworthie are the sisters three, The honor of the noble family 49 50

Richard Schell, in Spenser, The Shorter Poems, 433n. Cf. Pienaar, 43–4.

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Of which I meanest boast myself to be, And most that unto them I am so nie.51

In the sixteenth dedicatory epistle to The Faerie Queene he writes to Lady Carey, Ne may I, without blot of endlesse blame, You fairest Lady leaue out of this place But with remembrance of your gracious name, Wherewith that courtly garlond most ye grace, And deck the world, adorne these verses base.52

Spenser attaches importance to her name, Spencer, which comes with the “garlond” that belongs both to the courtier and the poet, as that which is attached to his epic and hence lends it prestige. In conventional apology, he offers her his humble “good will,” Which whenas timely meanes it purchase may, In ampler wise it selfe will forth display. (ll. 13–14)

He delivers his promise with Muiopotmos, and also, it seems, Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. The “timely meanes” that Spenser will “purchase”—that is, obtain through petition to authority53—may easily be understood as the material comfort he will obtain from the prestige he expects from publishing The Faerie Queene. Although timely carries its sixteenth-century meaning of “soon,” it is also a Spenserian pun, suggesting the leisure time that his anticipated prestige will entail, during which he may compose more poems. Time is all-important throughout Complaints, as well as in Du Bellay’s work. Time brings ruin, destruction; but the inconstancy that belongs to its movement also gives way to creation. These very poems are new creations, built out of the destruction they describe—and according to their ethical purpose, in time they “may bring things better forth.” The fact that Spenser uses almost the same wording in Visions of the Worlds Vanitie concerning his own poetry as in the dedicatory epistle to Lady Carey in The Faerie Queene is a further suggestion that he is still addressing her. And the poems themselves, over time and in the hands of the mighty, may come to have a value and a durability that will give Spenser the same qualities. Although they describe ugly things—in most cases the weakening or destruction of, in Satterthwaite’s words, “monstrous animals” by “small and

Edmund Spenser, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, in The Shorter Poems, 546, ll. 536–9. 52 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr, and C. Patrick O’Donnell Jr (London: Penguin, 1987), 32, ll. 1–5. Subsequent citations in the body of the text. 53 This is one of the definitions of purchase given in the Oxford English Dictionary, more current during the sixteenth century than that of acquiring through financial transaction. 51

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usually unpleasant animals”54—they are wrought as objects of beauty, already some of the “things better” for which the opening sonnet expresses a wish. In a way, then, the poems are themselves vanities, images of worldly beauty by which Spenser may capture something worldly for himself, the vanity of literary fame and political prestige. In this respect he follows Du Bellay—each poem is itself a vanity, a simulacrum, or dream, and hence carries with it a function of wishfulfillment. But in coupling this vanity with moral lessons to be taught, poetic immortality converges with the immortality of the soul—as it does at the end of Ruines of Rome in Spenser’s amendment to Du Bellay—and poetic purpose with religious purpose. The most evident amendment to Du Bellay in Visions of the Worlds Vanitie is in the culminating poem, Sonnet 11, which bears on ancient Rome. In the context of the sequence, which recounts ten little tales of great entities brought down by small ones, one would expect Rome to be destroyed. This is even more the case given that the sequence, along with many poems in Complaints, takes Du Bellay’s Roman sonnets as its starting point. And one should recall that ancient Rome often figures the Catholic Church in Spenser. But it comes as a surprise that, after all the weakening and destruction, Rome survives—humbled, it is true, but intact as an empire. Spenser takes poetic liberties with history to tell his story: What time the Romaine Empire bore the raine Of all the world, and florisht most in might, The nations gan their soveraigntie disdaine, And cast to quitt them from their bondage quight: So when all shrouded were in silent night, The Galles were, by corrupting of a mayde, Possest nigh of the Capitol through slight, Had not a Goose the treachery bewrayde. If then a Goose great Rome from ruine stayde, And Jove himselfe, the patron of the place, Preservd from being to his foes betrayde, Why do vaine men mean things so much deface, And in their might repose their most assurance, Sith nought on earth can chalenge long endurance? (ll. 141–54)

The alteration of the fate that Du Bellay assigns to Rome is all the more striking, as the last line effectively summarizes the lesson of both the Antiquitez and the Songe that this fate serves to demonstrate. Even the opening of this sonnet sets up the expectation that Rome will fall, since it is presented as the mightiest of nations, holding all the others in hated bondage. The Gauls, a much weaker nation trying to throw off the yoke of oppression, might be expected to overthrow Rome here, especially with the help of a powerless young woman. Spenser borrows this

54

Satterthwaite, 119.

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“mayde” from the story of a much earlier Sabine incursion,55 thereby suggesting the mutability of temporal events when they become involved with poetry. But the goose is here the humble creature; it saves Rome and even initiates Jupiter into a Christian ethic by making him recognize the goodness of the lowly. By preserving Rome at the expense of the Gauls, Spenser is recuperating fragments of Roman letters in order to fend off the imposition of his Gallic predecessors—Marot, Du Bellay, Du Bartas. By resurrecting Rome from its ruins in this fashion, he is able to reassert the force of English letters and hence to continue the cycle of creation and destruction that he borrows from the other poets. The destruction of Rome, its ruin, may also be its creation. This poem suggests a conciliatory attitude toward present-day Rome rather than a militant wish for its destruction—so at the same time as he pushes them aside, Spenser constructs a relationship of mutual respect with his rival poets. That is, he advances a request that his own work, and more broadly English letters, be recognized as on the same footing with their continental antecedents. What Spenser offers with this sequence of sonnets, in the contexts of the Visions sequences and Complaints, is a vision in which worldly vanity must realize its own precariousness, and in which English verse may take advantage of the precariousness of all poetry in order to come into a place of prestige—from which in turn it risks displacement. The concluding sonnet in Visions of the Worlds of Vanitie articulates this vision as well as the doubt that characterizes Du Bellay’s sequences. He even identifies the poems as “ruines,” such that a constructive moral may be drawn from them: And ye, that read these ruines tragicall Learne by their losse to love the low degree, And if that fortune chaunce you up to call To honours seat, forget not what you be: For he that of himselfe is most secure, Shall finde his state most fickle and unsure. (ll. 163–8)

The autobiographical aspect of these poems is repeated, since Spenser implicitly affirms that he won’t forget his origins and will remain aware of the constant flux involved in social mobility. These lines also maintain the other allegorical dimensions of the sequence: the English nation must be tolerant of those its ascendancy may leave below; Protestantism must reinforce the Christian ethic of respect for the lowly; and English verse must maintain an attitude of inclusion toward the national traditions from which it borrows, even as they pass away, and it must converge with the conciliatory, respectful Christianity in which Spenser claims to be writing. As such, English poetry can enjoy the vision of a future in which, at least for a time, it flourishes.

55

Schell, 439n.

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Chapter 6

Antiquities of Britain The Time of Ruins Continuing the progress of poetry, the translatio studii that he borrows in part from Du Bellay, Spenser proceeds to an affirmation of the new life of English poetry with the work that opens Complaints, The Ruines of Time. It is here that he most strongly reworks Du Bellay in order to leave him in the past. As the first poem in the 1591 collection, The Ruines of Time announces an important aspect of the project of the book, the continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: Spenser outlines the foundation of the new English poetry on the ruins of Rome through a reworking primarily of Du Bellay, but also of ancient Rome, by way of Du Bellay and implicitly of Marot and Petrarch. A meditation on the fleeting nature of all worldly things, on the death of Rome in ancient Britain, the poem culminates as a funeral monument to Sidney. Sidney’s death clinches the series of ruins such that the antiquities of Rome become the antiquities of Britain—and the death that enables the creation of the new poetry. The Ruines of Time also functions as Spenser’s own funeral monument, what he will leave in memory of himself and his contribution to the new life of English poetry, a life that is built on ruins and death. The Ruines of Time involves a temporal progression that, in Complaints, starts with Visions of Petrarch and continues through The Visions of Bellay and Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Acknowledging his predecessors at the end of his book, Spenser moves toward a future of English poetry that will be free of the tutelage of these same predecessors and that is built on the funeral monuments of certain English knights—in particular the poet-knight Sidney. Although this temporal progression may or may not coincide with the order in which Spenser composed these poems (their dates of composition and revision have never been firmly established),1 The Ruines of Time describes the temporality of the emergence of English poetry from its antecedents. The Ruines of Time articulates, among other things, the poetics of Complaints and that of the new poetry, a poetics that demands a regard to the past, and by way of the past a regard to the future. In recognizing and crediting his predecessors at the end of Complaints, Spenser is announcing that their poetry is effectively in ruins, ruins from which he will build his own poetry and open the way to that of the future. The temporal reversal that Spenser builds into the order of presentation of his book is at the same time a movement forward, since it demonstrates that the destruction of the old poetry is by its very nature also a creation of the new. 1 See Harold Stein, Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 27–33.

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It is quite fitting that the overture of the series takes time and its ruinous effects as its subject. The temporality of The Ruines of Time carries everything that is created into destruction; but it also brings with every destruction a new creation, to the effect that Du Bellay’s doubts are redirected to optimism.2 Spenser begins with Du Bellay, through translation also wishing to ask, Hope ye my verses that posteritie Of age ensuing shall you ever read? Hope ye that ever immortalitie So meane Harpes worke may chalenge her for meed?3

The quest for eternity is posed as a question; the doubt concerning the persistence of anything created in time haunts The Ruines of Time. The meditations that the book presents on the deaths of certain Englishmen are thus quite in keeping with its opening scene of a conversation with a ghostly woman on the shores of the Thames (who is subsequently identified as the spirit of the former Verlame or Verulamium). Lying beneath the ruins of the present are, of course, the ruins of Rome, represented in a dream vision that reworks elements of history and legend concerning the relationship between Britain and Rome in antiquity. The phrase “ruines of time” is an evident reworking of the phrase “ruines of Rome”; it suggests that Rome is key to understanding the temporal movement in which the new English poetry takes shape. And the graphic and phonetic resonance of the words Thames and time brings England into the picture, in close proximity to Rome—all the more so when Spenser writes the name of the river in its Latinate form, Thamesis. In The Ruines of Time, Spenser raises the key problem of the new poetry, the theme that runs throughout Complaints: whether poetry can move beyond the vanity of earthly things, what relation poetic immortality might have with the immortality of the soul, whether poetic immortality can be anything but vanity or oneiric wish-fulfillment.4 2 Cf. Millar MacLure, “Spenser and the Ruins of Time,” in A Theatre for Spenserians, ed. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 5–6: “Post-sixteenth-century Western science conceives of Time in linear terms … created by the Word.” MacLure should be commended for being the first critic of the last century to read The Ruines of Time as a finished, cohesive text. Although I think Spenser’s notion of time is somewhat more complicated than what MacLure suggests, I am indebted to him for raising the issue with more acuity than most subsequent commentators of The Ruines of Time. 3 Edmund Spenser, Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Sonnet 32, 403–4, ll. 1–4. Henceforth cited in the body of the text by sonnet number. As I am primarily concerned in this chapter with Spenser’s adaptation and reworking of Du Bellay, I will cite Spenser’s translation of the latter unless there is something in the French original that is of concern to Spenser’s project. 4 Cf. Richard Danson Brown, “The New Poet”: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 114–15; and Brown, “A ‘Goodlie

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From Rome to Britain Spenser opens the poem in unmistakable allusion to Du Bellay’s Songe, transporting the ruins of Rome to Britain: It chaunced me on day beside the shore Of silver streaming Thamesis to bee, Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore, Of which there now remaines no memory, Nor anie little moniment to see, By which the travailer, that fares that way, This once was she, may warned be to say.5

It is important for Spenser, as it is for Du Bellay with regard to Rome, to point out that nothing remains of this glorious city of Roman antiquity in Britain. But Spenser goes further than Du Bellay: in the Antiquitez de Rome [Antiquities of Rome] and the Songe [Dream], the ruins are visible so as to signal the nothingness that remains of Rome. In opening Sonnet 3 of the Antiquitez, Du Bellay equates the ruins the poet sees before him with the nothingness that Rome has become: Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all, These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call. (ll. 1–4)

In this quatrain Spenser follows Du Bellay closely, repeating the latter’s repetition of the word Rome to signal that it signifies nothing (see above, 34–6)—but this nothing, in comparison to the nothingness of Verlame, is to be seen in the ruined monuments that remain in the modern city of Rome. Du Bellay’s French affirms the equation in the use of the word rien, which resonates graphically and phonetically with the word Rome: Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois.6

In its transportation into English, the word rien is lost, hence becoming the “nought” that it signifies. The nothingness of Rome is pronounced even further in Spenser’s rendition, seen from the perspective of modern England. Bridge’ between the Old and the New: The Transformation of Complaint in Spenser’s The Ruines of Time,” Renaissance Forum (http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/) 2.1 (1997): ¶35–6. 5 Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Time, in The Shorter Poems, 232, ll. 1–7. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. 6 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Jolliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 275, ll. 1–2. Henceforth I will cite the Antiquitez in the body of the text by sonnet number.

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And in conducting his imitation and transformation of Du Bellay’s work into an independent English poetry, Spenser turns the remnants of Rome in Britain into nothing, a place “Of which there now remaines no memory,/Nor anie little moniment to see.” Whereas Du Bellay’s poet can begin from the matter of Roman ruins that he sees before him, the English poet must begin from nothing—that is, in order to give a place to the new English poetry, Spenser clears away all the space of antiquity and of his French predecessor who transmits antiquity to him. The “moniments” whose ruins remain in Rome (Ruines of Rome 2, l. 13) are not to be found in Britain.7 The spelling that Spenser chooses involves a pun on the word (ad)moni(sh)ment:8 the monuments are awe-inspiring not only because of the past glory to which they point but also because they serve as a warning to the modern Christian poet against the temptation of the vanity of antiquity. One of the problems raised in the opening lines of The Ruines of Time, then, is that the antiquities of Rome in Britain are in such a state of ruin as to be invisible and effectively nonexistent, and hence the “travailer, that fares that way” (l. 6) will not be “warned” (l. 7) against this temptation—hence he or she is all the more susceptible to the temptation of the vanity of antiquity. Presenting the Past Spenser doesn’t announce that what follows in The Ruines of Time is, in effect, a dream-vision. But the allusion to the following, his own translation of the opening sonnet of Du Bellay’s Songe, suggests that it is: It was the time, when rest soft sliding downe From heavens hight into mens heavy eyes, In the forgetfulnes of sleepe doth drowne The carefull thoughts of mortall miseries: Then did a Ghost before mine eyes appeare, On that great rivers banck, that runnes by Rome.9

For Spenser as for Du Bellay, the work of poetry is akin to and borrows from the work of a dream, which takes elements of text and reality out of their original 7 Cf. Deborah Cartmell, “‘Beside the Shore of Siluer Streaming Thamesis’: Spenser’s Ruines of Time,” Spenser Studies 6 (1985), 79: “Rather than a lament for the fallen Rome, the poem is a celebration of the Elizabethan break with Rome.” Cartmell finds that Spenser differs from Du Bellay in this respect; she states, “Rather than Du Bellay, I suggest that Spenser’s main inspiration comes from the 137th Psalm” (79). As my position is that Du Bellay is also interested in effecting a break with the past through an exploration of the remains of ancient Rome in the present, I disagree with her on this point. I can accept Psalm 137 as an inspiration for The Ruines of Time, but not one that takes the place of Du Bellay’s writing. 8 See Richard Schell, in Spenser, The Shorter poems, 232n. 9 Edmund Spenser, The Visions of Bellay, in The Shorter Poems, 442, ll. 1–6. Henceforth cited in the body of the text by sonnet number.

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context and rearranges them in new configurations such that they become signs that signify in unexpected ways (see above, 53–7). Antiquity and modernity are mixed, as are paganism and Christianity; many geographical displacements and re-creations occur. For Spenser, there is more of a problem than for Du Bellay concerning the blend of paganism and Christianity. Where Du Bellay looks toward a pagan-influenced time (which he also derives from the Book of Ecclesiastes, as I demonstrated in Chapter 3 [62–3]) in order to question the linear, apocalyptic time of dominant Christianity, what concerns Spenser is precisely the question of whether there can be any immortality but that conferred by God. In the dreamvision of The Ruines of Time, Spenser stages a dialogue between a representative of antiquity, the “Woman sitting sorrowfullie wailing” (l. 9) on the shore of the Thames, and the Christian poet in the present who wonders at her statements on the immortality that poetry may confer. What is perhaps most striking in Spenser’s reworking of Du Bellay involves the replacement of the Tiber by the Thames. For Du Bellay, the Tiber is all that is visible of ancient Rome among the ruins, and in Sonnet 3 of Ruines of Rome it figures the corrosive force of time: Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall Remaines of all: O worlds inconstancie. That which is firme doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting, doth abide and stay. (ll. 39–42)

The Tiber, moving along with the course of time, remains in place—Du Bellay reinforces the figure of the Tiber as time in Sonnet 9 of the Songe when he gives the Tiber the face of Saturn: in Spenser’s rendition, Du Bellay describes it as being “With …/Sterne face, and front full of Saturnlike awe” (Visions 9, ll. 3–4). In The Ruines of Time, however, the Thames can’t even remain in place. Spenser follows a tradition that situates the Thames near the Roman city of Verulamium in antiquity.10 Although the poet places himself on “the shore/Of silver streaming Thamesis …/Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore” (ll. 2–3), among the woman’s complaints a little later in the poem is the following: And where the christall Thamis wont to slide In silver channell, downe along the Lee, About whose flowrie banks on either side A thousand Nymphes, with mirthfull jollitee Were wont to play, from all annoyance free; There now no rivers course is to be seene, But moorish fennes, and marshes ever greene. (ll. 134–40)

10

See Schell, 232n2.

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The river itself has changed its course, has become something that “doth flit and fall away.” In the wake of this changed flow, nothing at all remains of the Roman glory that once was there. If the Thames also figures time, time itself is subject to the changes it effects on all things; in its own progress it too may alter. Time may then change in such a way that its relationship with eternity is reconfigured. It is here in The Ruines of Time that Spenser seeks a sublime task for poetry: to offer a vision, however brief, of the eternity of heaven in the time of worldly vanity. It becomes the project of Spenserian poetics, that of the new English poetry, to bridge the gap between the wished-for earthly immortality of poetry and the divine eternity conferred by God. Spenser is rewriting Du Bellay, for whom immortality and eternity remain uncertain. When Du Bellay’s poet looks for immortality in Sonnet 1 of the Songe, he sees nothing. In the last line of the poem the following words are spoken, ambiguously attributable to both the Roman demon and Spenser’s narrating poet: “N’espere rien qu’en la divinité [Hope for nothing save from the divine].”11 Indeed, without this synthesis poetry can’t produce immortality; the poems of the ancients, of Petrarch, and of Du Bellay remain in ruin, the ruin on which the new English poetry may be built and the mission of all poetry actualized. The dialogue that the poet has with the woman wailing on the shore of the Thames translates the ruins of ancient Rome from Du Bellay’s French into English, right into England. As she and the poet interact, each may bring something to the other, and the ancient wish for immortality on earth may come to the fore in the material of a Christianized poetry. Spenser advances beyond Du Bellay’s pagantinged Christianity to project a durability on earth, even in the midst of corrosion and decay; The Ruines of Time puts forth this durability. The constant destruction of the movement of time may change into a creation with lasting effects. The woman is a condensation of two personnages from the Songe: the demon of Rome and the woman from Sonnet 10, which begins, “Sur la rive d’un fleuve une Nymphe esploree [on the bank of a river a weeping nymph] …” (l. 1). In The Visions of Bellay Spenser has added a Christianized dimension to both of them, rendering the demon as a ghost and opening Sonnet 10 as follows: “Hard by a rivers side a virgin faire …” (l. 1). But Spenser also retains the woman’s pagan side, making her a fusion of pagan and Christian elements, a remnant of antiquity whose function in modernity is to signal the absence of antiquity.12 In his initial 11 Joachim Du Bellay, Regrets, 307, l. 14; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 280. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Songe in the body of the text by sonnet number; translation occasionally altered. 12 Carl J. Rasmussen proposes that the woman “has affinities with the Roman whore of Babylon”: “‘How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness’: Spenser’s The Ruines of Time,” Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 159. The Roman Whore of Babylon, according to the Geneva Bible, is nothing else than the purest form of worldly vanity, the papacy. I will argue that the woman is an incarnation of vanity, but not one that is to be condemned in the way that

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encounter with the woman, the narrating poet suggests that she is this combination of elements borrowed from Du Bellay’s transcription of Rome: Whether she were one of that Rivers Nymphes Which did the losse of some dere love lament, I doubt; or one of those three fatall Impes, Which draw the dayes of men forth in extent; Or th’auncient Genius of that Citie brent: But seeing her so piteouslie perplexed, I (to her calling) askt what her so vexed. (ll. 15–21)13

In this fashion Spenser’s narrating poet introduces the woman’s discourse. The woman will praise the presence of Rome in ancient Britain and bewail its absence in the present. By enveloping her speech in the dialogical narrative of the poem, Spenser is able to contain the pagan elements such that they are subordinate to Christianity; at the same time, he can allow his narrating poet to be tempted by the praise of the glory of antiquity. The poet, and Spenser, will borrow from the latter in order to proceed with the production of the new English poetry, which bases itself on the ruins of Rome. In this poem these ruins are literally transported to Britain, and the basis in ruins can hence be made all the stronger. Spenser improves on Du Bellay, who needs the empty space of present-day Rome in which to create the new French poetry; Spenser further ruins the ruins by leaving no trace of them. If this empty space is now in Britain, and present-day Britain has its own glories that the poet may sing, the new poetry is on the brink of being produced. All it needs is the work of the poet, which The Ruines of Time calls for and actualizes. The Vanity of Verlame The woman’s speech begins with a full lamentation of the loss of her own past glory, in a rewriting of Du Bellay: Ah what delight (quoth she) in earthlie thing, Or comfort can I wretched creature have? Whose happines the heavens envying, From highest staire to lowest step me drave, And have in mine owne bowels made my grave, That of all Nations now I am forlorne, The worlds sad spectacle, and fortunes scorne. (ll. 22–8)

the Geneva Bible condemns the Whore of Babylon in the notes to the Book of Revelation (see below, n17). 13 The word doubt (l. 17) should be taken in its early modern sense: “wonder” or “suspect.”

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The opening of her speech is effectively a précis of the lesson of Les Antiquitez de Rome, whose subtitle signals that they contain “une generale description de [la] grandeur [de Rome], et comme une deploration de sa ruine [a general description of (the) greatness (of Rome), and, as it were, a lamentation on her ruin].”14 Whereas Du Bellay’s narrating poet, in both the Antiquitez and the Songe, speaks alternately to and of Rome, in the second and third person, the woman speaks of herself in the first person, mourning her own loss. The poem will soon directly address the question of the vanity of all earthly things; this vanity is already at issue in the phrase “the worlds sad spectacle”—an empty image and an image of emptiness, nothing else than a vanity or simulacrum, the spectral presence of the woman that signifies the absence of her past existence. As she mourns her loss, which is effectively the loss of herself and all she was, the pronounced lack of the past glory of ancient Rome moves closer to the narrating poet than it does in the Antiquitez. In the latter, the spirits of Rome don’t speak for themselves but rather only by way of the poet who rewrites ancient texts in a procedure of imitation. In the Songe, the demon and the “virgin faire” of Sonnet 10 speak for themselves. But the demon takes a lesson from the absence of ancient Rome, in his pronouncement that “all is nought but flying vanitee,” which leads to the conclusion of the poem: Sith onely God surmounts all times decay, In God alone my confidence do stay. (Visions, 1, ll. 13–14).

The woman of The Ruines of Time brings ancient Rome into proximity with the poet with the effect of closely connecting modern Britain to the antiquities of Rome—but this connection is one of infinite distance, as the Roman ruins are decidedly absent. The woman mourns the loss of the ruins, wishing they were still there; hence she suggests that she hasn’t learned the lesson of Du Bellay’s demon. The procedure of the poem, which puts the woman in dialogue with the narrating poet, brings about the emergence of the lesson rather than simply announcing it, since the poet responds to her wailing. Spenser’s approach involves dialogue considerably more than Du Bellay’s: through a pathetic presentation of the woman, Spenser invites the reader to participate in the dialogue, to pity the woman and to take her point of view as she speaks in order to arrive at the lesson on the vanity of earthly things. The woman’s words in the lines quoted above bear close resemblance to those of the virgin from Sonnet 10 of The Visions of Bellay, who also speaks of the passing of her own glory: Where is (quoth she) this whilom honoured face? Where the great glorie and the auncient praise, In which all worlds felicitie had place, When Gods and men my honour up did raise? 14

Du Bellay, Regrets, 269; Du Bellay, The Regrets, 245.

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Suffisd’ it not that civill warres me made The whole worlds spoile, but that this Hydra new, Of hundred Hercules to be assaide, Of seven heads budding monstrous crimes anew, So many Neroes and Caligulaes Out of these crooked shores must dayly rayse? (ll. 5–14)

Spenser translates Du Bellay’s text very closely. Here, the woman goes further than mourning the loss of her earlier status, which earned her honor in both the divine and human realms. She indicates an inversion of the status of ancient Rome: it is true that she herself is no longer honored; but in addition, she is debased by the conditions of Rome after the end of the Republic.15 It is not completely evident what Du Bellay’s poem refers to: the woman speaks of Rome in the present tense, as if this proliferation of Neros and Caligulas were an ongoing process. It is clear that Du Bellay is signaling occurrences after Rome consumed itself in civil war. I find it plausible that this poem suggests a criticism of various aspects of presentday Rome, ranging from the corruption of the high clergy that Du Bellay depicts in the Regrets,16 through the excesses of the Borgias, to the abuses of the Holy Roman Empire that he mentions explicitly in Antiquitez 17 (“la corneille Germaine”—“the Germane Raven”). Du Bellay even uses the figure of the seven-headed beast, which is a condensation of the hydra killed by Hercules and the beast of Babylon in the Book of Revelation on whose head sits the Whore of Babylon; this beast has traditionally been taken as Rome, and in the Calvinist gloss on the Bible as papal Rome.17 Dialogue in Passing Such a characterization of Rome made Du Bellay appealing to Protestants, and it is entirely justified to state that Spenser’s translation of Du Bellay targets papal Rome. But in recasting the woman’s speech from Sonnet 10 for The Ruines of Cf. M.A. Screech, in Du Bellay, Regrets, 316n11. For example: Je te raconteray du siege de l’eglise, Qui fait d’oysiveté son plus riche tresor, Et qui dessous l’orgueil de trois couronnes d’or Couve l’ambition, la haine, & la feintise. (Du Bellay, Regrets, Sonnet 78, ll. 5–8, in Regrets, 149) [I will tell you about the Holy See, which makes idleness its richest treasure and which, under the pride of the triple crown of gold, breeds ambition, hate, and dissimulation.] (Joachim Du Bellay, Regrets, trans. Richard Helgerson, 128) 17 The Revelation of John the Divine, in The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd Berry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 17:4 n. f: “This woman is the Antichrist, that is, the Pope with ye whole body of his filthie creatures … whose beautie only standeth in outwarde pompe & impudencie and craft like a strumpet.” 15 16

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Time, Spenser takes the emphasis away from the continuing ruin of ancient Rome by present-day Rome and places it on the loss that the woman has experienced. The remnant of ancient Rome in Britain is not the object of violence, and modern Britain isn’t presented as the purveyor of violence. But in being concerned primarily with the loss of her own glory, the woman is more culpable of the sinfulness of vanity than the woman in Du Bellay’s sonnet, who turns the lamentation of the attack on herself to a criticism of present-day Rome. Indeed, Spenser’s woman is vanity itself, the remainder of an ancient Rome that had faith in the durability of worldly things and hoped to eternize itself through poetry. What has happened to her is the natural fate of vanity, which is to “flit and fall away,” to become the nothingness that the simulacrum of eternity has always been—she is a ruin of time. But she is also the incarnation of ancient poetry, which as a ruin and a dead letter speaks no more, which is available to the modern poet for imitation and reworking as a new and vital poetry. In dialogue with the modern poet who narrates The Ruines of Time, her words become the matter for the new poet, the subject matter from which he starts as well as the material from which he will build the new poetry. Still belonging to antiquity, but very evidently a vanity or simulacrum in modernity, she tempts the poet with the past glory that she describes. As a clinging to worldly things, this vanity is sinful. But in reworking it the poet may redeem it; he may produce a new poetry that transcends that of antiquity, fulfilling the wish that Du Bellay expressed in the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [Defense and Illustration of the French Language]. Taking advantage of the the current alteration of time, this poetry overcomes the tension between the sin of vanity, which involves a strong adherence to temporal things, and the Christian project of offering a view of divine immortality.18 It is evident in the poet’s response that he is tempted by her wailing, and he maintains an interest in discovering exactly who and what she is. Spenser continues: Much was I mooved at her piteous plaint, And felt my heart nigh riven in my brest With tender ruth to see her sore constraint, That shedding teares a while I still did rest, And after did her name of her request. (ll. 29–33)

The modern poet exemplified in Spenser’s narrator falls into temptation by the vanity of past glory. His heart is “riven,” divided between the temptation to vanity and what he knows to be the Christian prescriptions concerning this temptation.19 In the new vision that Spenser is offering, no one and nothing are beyond the possibility of redemption, which begins with the poet’s pity at the state to which the woman has fallen, “her sore constraint.” The poet discovers that she is a vanity, even the “vanitie of vanities” of Ecclesiastes, in truth nothing—by which he is 18 19

Cf. Brown, New Poet, 103, and Rasmussen, 160. Cf. Brown, New Poet, 99–100, and “A ‘Goodlie Bridge,’” ¶3.

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tempted into pity and sympathy, as well as an interest in the glory of which she is a diaphanous trace, the barest of remnants. All she has left are the words that she may speak to the poet, which receive new life in the dialogue that Spenser transcribes. Further drawing him into her vanity, she responds to the poet’s question: Name have I none (quoth she) nor anie being Bereft of both by Fates unjust decreeing. I was that Citie, which the garland wore, Of Britaines pride, delivered unto me By Romane Victors, which it wonne of yore; Though noght at all but ruines now I bee, And lye in mine owne ashes, as ye see: Verlame I was; what bootes it that I was, Sith now I am but weedes and wastfull gras? (ll. 34–42)

The movement of time has separated the woman even from her past name, just as in Du Bellay the name Rome has been removed from the ancient city. But she is more in ruin than Du Bellay’s Rome, since the present city of old ruins still retains its ancient name, however removed that name may be from its past signification. She is nonetheless like Rome in that, in Du Bellay’s rendition, the name Rome signifies nothing: Du Bellay demonstrates this state of things through both the resonance between the words Rome and rien and the complete absence of the names of the ruined monuments delineated in the Antiquitez and the Songe. The woman’s past glory, by way of the Roman conquest, became a monument known effectively throughout the world; and she wished to believe that she would last forever. But she reveals to the poet that nothing on earth is eternal, that all passes away, as it was never anything but vanity. She refers to the work of the Fates as “unjust,” but it is quite evident that their work of destruction is carried out on everything; the injustice lies in the incontrovertible fact that nothing can remain fixed on earth. She wore a “garland,” that of the conquerer and the poet. It is notable that Britain initially became a thing of “pride” through Roman conquest: the implication is that Britain saw its first honor in the glory of Roman conquest, and that modern, Christian Britain owes its existence to this vain pagan past. Modern Britain, however, in the movement of ruin that time inevitably involves, has displaced Roman Britain. Spenser’s poem announces that modern Britain must recognize that it is built on this ruin and that it is effectively itself already a ruin, a vanity that will also “flit and fall away”—and here is where the work of the modern poet becomes important. Verlame speaks of the absolutely unquestionable glory that she knew in her past, which the ruin of time has made her question absolutely. What she deemed at the time to be of incontestable value is in retrospect worth nothing, the nothing that it has now become. In writing this dialogue, Spenser is able to restore the image of this past so that Britain now knows what it is, a ruin of ruinous time.

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Time and Rome Spenser acknowledges the line of transfer between ancient Rome and modern Britain through allusions to Du Bellay, particularly in the words ruines and ashes. In Spenser’s rendition, Sonnet 1 of the Antiquitez begins as follows: Ye heavenly spirites, whose ashie cinders lie Under deep ruines, with huge walls opprest, But not your praise, the which shall never die Through your faire verses, ne in ashes rest. (ll. 1–4)

The verses of Du Bellay underlie those of The Ruines of Time. But the difference is that Verlame states that no glory remains at all, and that furthermore there never was any meaningful glory, since its image was destined by the Fates to fall into complete ruin. But Spenser allows Verlame to utter verses on her own past glory, and hence to move his narrating poet to write verses that offer meditations on death, the vanity of all worldly things, and the possibility of their redemption in verse. Verlame continues, pronouncing the theme that runs throughout Complaints, that indeed constitutes the principal complaint of the collection of poems. Though belonging to pagan antiquity, she borrows from Ecclesiastes: O vaine worlds glory, and unstedfast state Of all that lives, on face of sinfull earth, Which from their first untill their utmost date Tast no one hower of happines or merth, But like as at the ingate of their berth, They crying creep out of their mothers woomb, So wailing backe go to their wofull toomb. (ll. 43–9)

The sinfulness of earth consists in its inhabitants’ quest for the glory that can never be theirs, as time continues its ruinous progress. In stating the progress of a lifetime in two lines, in making the movement of birth into the very same as that of death, and in rhyming “woomb” with “toomb,” Spenser repeats the notion that creation is itself already destruction—but also that destruction constitutes creation. The destruction of Verlame, of Rome in Britain, is the creation of modern Britain; it is the work of poetry that makes and actualizes this discovery. According to Verlame, death haunts life from the very beginning, and all attempts to circumvent it are pure vanity. The living body itself is the incarnation of death: Why then dooth flesh, a bubble glas of breath, Hunt after honour and advauncement vaine, And reare a trophee for devouring death, With so great labour and long lasting paine,

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As if his daies for ever should remaine? Sith all that in this world is great or gaie, Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie. (ll. 50–56)

The honor and glory that the flesh seeks in life render death all the more triumphant; the quest for happiness in durability only increases the “great labour and long lasting paine” of a lifetime. Verlame’s speech is filled with biblical allusions on the vanity of earthly life.20 Even as a pagan divinity, she discovers the lessons of Christianity that Spenser wishes to capture in The Ruines of Time. Spenser conveys her procedure of discovery through a well-crafted series of rhymes: “breath-death,” “paine-remaine,” and “gaie-decaie.” The words in each pair are ostensibly antithetical, but Spenser’s suggestion is that, at least from Verlame’s point of view, what both words signify amounts to the same thing. The fact that Verlame is speaking the verse that Spenser, in effect, transcribes in this poetry on monuments/admonishments contradicts the semantic content of her speech: Spenser is writing a poem that will serve as a monument to certain Englishmen—the Dudleys, especially Sidney—and is thus expressing a hope that some surmounting of the ruin of time is possible. In the work of a poetry that is inflected with Christian lessons and resurrects a spirit of antiquity, an earthly immortality might be reached, which becomes connected with divine immortality.21 Verlame goes on to lament and honor the rise and fall of the great civilizations of Assyria, Persia, and Greece, which the Geneva Bible identifies as the three empires that in succession ruled over the Jews.22 And Rome follows, the empire that through its poetry produced the image of its own immortality. Spenser takes up the task of glorification through poetry, and through a Christianization of the past empires moves toward an immortality that surmounts earthly vanity. The main problem of the poem, staged in the poet’s sympathetic disposition toward Verlame and subsequent withdrawal from her into his own oneiric meditation, is how poetry as a vanity might become something else—it will become something else in its transmission to subsequent generations, who will read it and through imitation produce their own poetry. Spenser’s poetry remains a vanity, a vanishing “vapour,” but one that recognizes that vanity may be transmitted and resuscitated through the labor of poetry. The “bubble glas of breath” may be filled with new breath, the speech of poetry.

20

See Schell, 235nn. Cf. A. Leigh DeNeef, “Complaints: The Ruines of Time,” in A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, and W.F. Blissett, eds, The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 182. 22 Schell, 235n; and Daniel, in The Geneva Bible, 7:3–7 nn. c–h. 21

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Death and Divinity Verlame exhorts the narrating poet to write the funeral monuments of knights who have died for England so that they might gain an earthly immortality. Speaking in what appears to be the voice of Spenser, she sings the eulogy of “a mightie Prince” (l. 184): I saw him die, I saw him die, as one Of the meane people, and brought foorth on a beare, I saw him die, and no man left to mone His dolefull fate, that late him loved deare: Scarse anie left to close his eylids neare; Scarse anie left upon his lips to laie The sacred sod, or Requiem to saie. (ll. 190–96)

Even as she makes this complaint Verlame is answering it, as is Spenser, in this requiem for Dudley. This poetic funeral monument is also a “moniment,” an admonishment to Spenser’s poetic persona, who effectively apologizes for not having written sooner: Ne doth his Colin, carelesse Colin Cloute, Care now his idle bagpipe up to raise, Ne tell his sorrow to the listning rout Of shepherd groomes, which wont his songs to praise. (ll. 225–8)

Through the verses of Verlame, Spenser is doing what she is asking his poetic persona to do. She expresses a wish concerning the durability of poetry that will give earthly immortality to those who have died: Thy Lord shall never die, the whiles this verse Shall live, and surely it shall live for ever: For ever it shall live, and shall rehearse His worthie praise, and vertues dying never, Though death his soule doo from his bodie sever. And thou thyself herein shalt also live; Such grace the heavens doo too my verses give. (ll. 253–9)

This wish is suspect in light of Verlame’s earlier comments on the vanity and vanishing of all earthly things.23 But her verse lives because it is repeated, or rehearsed, in the dialogue with the narrating poet, which in turn is repeated in Spenser’s ostensible transcription of this dialogue. That is, Spenser borrows from 23

Cf. Rasmussen, 168–9.

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the wish of the ancients to last forever in order to write a verse that at once imitates and leaves theirs in the past. The mortality of even the divine Verlame is evident in her requiem for Sir Philip Sidney, which is the culmination of her speech and of the meditation on the death of English knights: Yet whilst the fates affoord me vitall breath, I will it spend in speaking of thy praise And sing to thee, untill that timely death By heavens doome doo ende my earthlie daies. (ll. 309–12)

Divinity itself, at least the earthly divinity of the pagan Verlame, lives on the same breath as those who die and will hence come to an end. In the course of The Ruines of Time, Verlame does indeed disappear: Thus having ended all her piteous plaint, With dolefull shrikes shee vanished away. (ll. 470–71)

That the poet uses the word vanished, the same word that Verlame has used to describe the fate of flesh and the vanity of its worldly struggles, suggests that she dies here (the words vanity and vanish derive from the same Latin root, vanus). The poet is chagrined by her loss, by her vanishing or vanity, effectively repeating her lamentations concerning her own losses. And it is the terror of this absolute vanity that leads the poet to repeat Verlame’s complaint and to proceed toward the final part of the poem, the meditation on the immortality of Sidney. My thought returned greeved home againe, Renewing her complaint with passion strong, For ruth of that same womans piteous paine; Whose wordes recording in my troubled braine, I felt such anguish wound my feeble heart, That frosen horror ran through everie part. (ll. 478–83)

The mental labor of the poet repeats and reworks the words he has heard from the pagan spirit Verlame. Through this painful work, a religious discipline of “passion,” he will make something new, arrive at an optimism concerning the possibility of immortality in poetry. The poet has a series of six visions, which are clearly composed in imitation of both Petrarch’s and Du Bellay’s Visions. Spenser is careful to introduce these pageants in the same fashion in which, in Visions of Petrarch, the visions are presented, which he also repeats in his own Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. They appear to him in a theater, as “tragicke Pageants” (l. 490), a theater that Spenser may present to his readers, taking the role of both performer and spectator. Each of them involves the

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appearance of something beautifully and powerfully imposing; once each figure is appreciated, it falls into ruin and leaves the poet in despair. And the series is followed by the appearance of a “voyce” that is entirely reminiscent of the demon or ghost of the Songe, and that pronounces the very same lesson from Ecclesiastes. In Sonnet 1 of Spenser’s rendition of Du Bellay, the ghost speaks. An ambiguously placed voice, that of the ghost or that of the narrating poet, pronounces a lesson: And crying lowd, loe now beholde (quoth hee) What under this great temple placed is: Lo all is nought but flying vanitee. So I that know this worlds inconstancies, Sith onely God surmounts all times decay, In God alone my confidence do stay. (ll. 9–14)

In The Ruines of Time the voice speaks as follows: Behold (said it) and by ensample see, That all is vanitie and griefe of minde, Ne other comfort in this world can be, But hope of heaven, and heart to God inclinde; For all the rest must needs be left behinde. (ll. 582–6)

In repeating and imitating Du Bellay, Spenser is repeating his predecessor’s lesson, but also trying to find something other than the cycles of creation and destruction that characterize the Songe. Du Bellay remains in doubt as to the possibility of any durability at all, even suggesting that the hope for an apocalyptic transcendence of time by eternity might turn out to be a vanity. But Spenser looks to Philip Sidney and his Defence of Poesy in order to move beyond Du Bellay and the latter’s Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse. In doing so Spenser will arrive at the transformation of Sidney into a being who is immortal both on earth and in heaven, and a domain of poetry that brings earthly life into contact with the divine. That is, in describing the ascendancy of Sidney to immortality, he will add to his dead friend’s poetic project, complementing the Defence of Poesy with this “defense and illustration” of English poetry that The Ruines of Time inaugurates, as overture to Complaints. This Defense incorporates and surpasses its French precursors; but as it still involves a temporal progression, it must itself remain unstable. From Time to Eternity The following six visions also describe cycles of creation and destruction, but in the case of all but the fourth they involve an ascension to heaven of someone or something earthly. For the most part these concern the death and immortality of Philisides (l. 609), or “star lover,” a name that anagrammatically figures that

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of Philip Sidney, and his becoming a constellation visible to the stargazing poet. After the Harpe of Philisides dies, it rises skyward: So now in heaven a signe it doth appeare, The Harpe well knowne beside the Northern Beare. (ll. 615–16)

Sidney takes his place in heaven alongside the bear of the Dudley family (Spenser’s astronomical inaccuracy notwithstanding). It is important that this heaven is a visible one, something that can be seen so as to offer a glimpse into the realm of the divine. It allows for a sensory realm by which material things may have contact with heaven, such that they may be transcribed in the material of poetic texts. Spenser concludes the poem with an affirmation of the passing nature of the poem itself as a material thing; but the conciliatory disposition of The Ruines of Time allows the new poetry to function as a means for touching the immaterial. In the Envoy to the spirit of Sidney that concludes The Ruines of Time, Spenser associates the vanishing material of his poem with a certain access to eternity: Immortal spirite of Philisides, Which now art made the heavens ornament, That whilome wast the worlds chiefst riches; Give leave to him that lov’d thee to lament His losse, by lacke of thee to heaven hent, And with last duties of this broken verse, Broken with sighes, to decke thy sable Herse. (ll. 683–9)

Spenser finds a connection between that which lived and that which is now in heaven. The verses are “broken,” perhaps not completely finished—not finished to the point of actually reaching the point of divine immortality that was the wish of Verlame and Roman poetry, the failure of which Du Bellay laments. But just as Du Bellay leaves his own verse to be decomposed, reworked, and imitated, and hence to attain a life beyond its textual incarnation, Spenser writes “broken” verse, broken with the sighs or breath of the living poet. But Spenser goes a step further: poetry may serve as a means of communicating with the realm of the eternal, of realizing this realm in a time that has been transformed so as no longer to be strictly divided from it. If his own poem will not last more than a certain time, the power that he builds into the new poetry may indeed be durable, something approaching an eternity in time. The final exhortation of Spenser’s poet to Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, is not to mourn her brother’s death too deeply, since the living mind may, even within its temporal limits, reach to the eternity that is the realm of the soul. Through the “moniment” of this poem, such a contact may take place: And ye faire Ladie th’honor of your daies, And glorie of this world, your high thoughts scorne; Vouchsafe this moniment of his last praise,

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England With some few silver dropping teares t’adorne: And as ye be of heavenlie offspring borne, So unto heaven let your high minde aspire, And loath this drosse of sinfull worlds desire. (ll. 680–86)

The earthly honor and glory that attend on the Sidney family are to be scorned in favor of the higher thoughts of eternity to which this monument allows access. In thus permitting access, Spenser’s poetic monument proposes its own durability, and more broadly that of a new English literary canon. The “moniment” is also, of course, an admonishment, a warning that the poem itself is a vanity or a vanishing. But it is a vanity that, declaring itself as such, offers an image of eternity through which the “high minde” may pass in order to become aware of eternity—that is, of the possibility of durability against earthly vanity. The only access to this durability is through a literature that expresses a wish to contact eternity, and in so doing lasts for at least a little while.

PART 3 Montaigne

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Chapter 7

Institutional Authority Instituting Modernity Critics have long recognized that Michel de Montaigne’s “De l’institution des enfans [On Educating Children],”Chapter 26 of Book 1 of the Essais (1580, 1588, 1595), is as much a concentrated continuation of his announced project of selfportraiture as it is a general treatise on the education of children.1 Following his dedication to Diane de Foix, Comtesse de Gurson, and his initial statements that he is offering her counsel on the education of the child she will bear, Montaigne devotes much of the essay to his own person and life experiences. Some have claimed that Montaigne’s concern is exclusively with the high nobility;2 James J. Supple has argued very convincingly that this is simply not the case.3 Although it begins with the education of the nobility, “De l’institution des enfans” has important implications for the recognition of a Western modernity and the concomitant autonomy of French as a modern language with respect to the writings of antiquity—for the founding of both a modern literature and a modern philosophy. Montaigne opens the essay with a quick rhetorical ruse: he begins by speaking of the relationship between father and son, essential to the education and heredity of the house of Foix, and immediately shifts to the relationship between himself and his book: Je ne vis jamais pere, pour teigneux ou bossé que fut son fils, qui laissast de l’avoüer. Non pourtant, s’il est du tout enyvré de cet’ affection, qu’il ne s’apperçoive de sa defaillance; mais tant y a qu’il est sien. Aussi moy, je voy, 1 Pierre Villey, in his magisterial 1930 edition of the Essais, dates the initial composition of “De l’institution des enfans” to late 1579 or early 1580. “Hence it is from the time when Montaigne proposes to ‘depict his own selfe,’ and in fact it plunges through all of the latter’s roots into the life of the author.” Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1999), vol. 1, 145. (My translation.) For the English text, I refer to Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991). All references to the Essais will be to these editions and will be cited in the body of the text by book, chapter, and page numbers. Unless it is important to my argument, I will omit Villey’s indications of the A, B, and C layers of Montaigne’s text, corresponding to the 1580, 1588, and 1595 editions of the Essais. 2 See Paul Porteau, Montaigne et la vie pédagogique de son temps (Paris: Droz, 1935), passim; Pierre Villey, L’Influence de Montaigne sur les idées pédagogiques de Locke et Rousseau (Paris: Hachette, 1911), vol. 1, 21; Villey, in Montaigne, Essais, 145. 3 James J. Supple, Arms versus Letters: The Military and Literary Ideals in the ‘Essais’ of Montaigne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 139–40.

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mieux que tout autre, que ce ne sont icy que resveries d’homme qui n’a gousté des sciences que la crouste premiere, en son enfance, et n’en a retenu qu’un general et informe visage: un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, à la Françoise. (145–6) [I have never known a father fail to acknowledge his son as his own, no matter how scurvy or crook-backed he may be. It is not that he fails to see his infirmities (unless he is quite besotted by his affection): but the thing is his, for all that! The same applies to me: I can see—better than anyone else—that these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge—even that was during his childhood—and who has retained only an ill-formed generic notion of it: a little about everything and nothing about anything, in the French style.] (163)

I will comment on this transposition, especially as it pertains to the paired generation of Montaigne himself as a child and that of his book. Through the production of writing in French (in the French style, “à la Françoise”), his project of selfportraiture or of “peindre son moy” becomes one of generating a modern moy or self—or as Timothy J. Reiss has appropriately spelled it in order to distinguish the notion from much more recent conceptions of an autonomous subject, a modern “selfe.”4 Montaigne’s moy becomes an allegorical moy: it refers ostensibly to Montaigne, but in the generation that brings about Montaigne’s writing and that extends it, this moy becomes the signifier of any number of selves. In the above-quoted passage, Montaigne makes a deft move from the mention of the father’s lineage to a characterization of his own book as both process and product. This move sharply disrupts the very conditions (or institution, if I may extend the meaning of Montaigne’s word) of aristocratic patrilineal transmission that the essay ostensibly addresses. This is none other than the education of the firstborn son of a noble house such that this offspring may one day assume mastery of the house and the proper public functions of an aristocrat. Montaigne doesn’t address the maintainance of the familial lineage, which would preserve the continuity of the noble house as a sameness or resemblance from one generation to the next (and hence the stability of the social order in which the second estate plays an essential role). Instead, he introduces a lack of resemblance within, and a dispersion of, patriarchal authority. In likening the book to male offspring, the father may still claim paternal dominion over him. But the dominion lacks the continuity of familial tradition if the son is deformed and hence cannot be likened in appearance to the father. The deformed book, none other than the writing of the “corps monstrueux [monstrosities]” of the Essais (“De l’amitié [On Affectionate Relationships],” 1.28.183/206), produces a generation of difference and a difference in generation. Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. I take Reiss’s cue and use the older French spelling, moy. 4

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An important part of this generation of difference, as Montaigne indicates toward the end of “De l’institution des enfans,” is the patrimony of the tradition of antiquity, mainly the Latin writings revered by both the scholastics and the early humanists. This patrimony is shaken to its root by its reinscription and displacement by writing in French in the Essais. The lack of resemblance Montaigne describes between his book and himself indicates that the Essais are a poor reflection of himself, but at the same time one that offers a transmission of his own relationship to learning. Rather than doctrine, principle, or argument he writes “resveries”—daydreams, dreams, ravings, delirious words that don’t resemble or particularly represent the “sciences” that are their ostensible starting point. The “visage” that remains of his studies is “informe”—unformed or deformed by his not more than superficial engagement with them, as well as by the time that has passed since his school days over which his notoriously poor memory provides an unstable bridge. It is not much of a face, not one that resembles his own or the face of the studies he once undertook.5 Generation Gaps The most traditional readings of “De l’institution des enfans” view Montaigne as advocating a formation of independent judgment rather than an education based on the knowledge and authority of books. Later in the essay he remarks, “Facheuse suffisance, qu’une suffisance purement livresque! [What a wretched ability it is which is purely and simply bookish!]” (152/170). Without disagreeing with these readings, I would like to emphasize that such statements bear on Montaigne’s concern with altering education such that books don’t have the primacy assigned to them by either scholasticism or, in different ways, humanism.6 Timothy Hampton has stressed the importance for Montaigne of changing the status of the legacy of ancient texts from that of authority to that of a source from which a student may make a judgment concerning the exemplary status of particular passages and texts.7 I will argue that Montaigne is offering an expanded notion of reading according to which other aspects of the world should be read as thoroughly and circumspectly as books, at their best. At the same time, judgment formed in the world through experience, apart from books, is the judgment that should be brought to bear on books. Montaigne assumes the aristocratic duty of guiding in institution or education the future firstborn son of Madame de Foix, and of contributing to its continuity and to the patrilineal, aristocratic social order: Car, ayant eu tant de part à la conduite de vostre mariage, j’ay quelque droit et interest à la grandeur et prosperité de tout ce qui en viendra, outre ce que Cf. Hassan Melehy, Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 19–20. 6 Cf. Supple, 147–8. 7 Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 145. 5

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England l’ancienne possession que vous avez sur ma servitude, m’obligent assez à desirer honneur, bien et advantage à tout ce qui vous touche. (148–9) [Having played so large a part in arranging your marriage I have a rightful concern for the greatness and prosperity of all that springs from it, quite apart from that long enjoyment you have had of my service to you, by which I am indeed bound to desire honour, wealth and success to anything that touches on you.] (167)

Nonetheless, at the outset of the essay he announces his incapacity to undertake such a task: Et n’est enfant des classes moyennes, qui ne se puisse dire plus sçavant que moy, qui n’ay seulement dequoy examiner sur sa premiere leçon: au moins selon icelle. Et, si l’on m’y force, je suis contraint, assez ineptement, d’en tirer quelque matiere de propos universel, sur quoy j’examine son jugement naturel: leçon qui leur est autant incogneue, comme à moy la leur. (146) [(T)here is no boy even in the junior forms who cannot say he is more learned than I am: I could not even test him on his first lesson, at least not in detail. When forced to do so, I am constrained to extract (rather ineptly) something concerning universals, against which I test his inborn judgement—a subject as unknown to the boys as theirs is to me.] (164)

Although it is easy to let the expression “jugement naturel” stand out in this passage such that the latter may be understood as constituting an appeal to a student’s natural abilities and not allowing them to be corrupted by book learning, a close look reveals quite a few complexities in the notion of education that Montaigne is advancing. Because of his mediocrity as a student and his poor memory, Montaigne is far more removed from the subjects of formal education and scholarship than a young student in school. The only examination he could give that student would draw superficially on the latter’s subjects—which might invoke a quotation out of its specific context, such as one of the many on which the writing of the Essais is constructed—to induce the student to go in a direction completely unprescribed by institution or education. Montaigne would ask the student to follow the direction, without taking it as unquestionable authority, that the Essais set, in their formlessness, deformity, unfinished arguments, partial judgments, and rewritings of the tradition of antiquity. Although Montaigne continually avows a bland conservative politics with regard to existing institutions, the proximity in which he brings the functions of education in transmitting patrimony with those of the aristocratic social order in this essay indicates that he is positing at least the potential of turning the process of generation away from the control over which paternal authority works to place it. Montaigne even suggests that generation could be so derailed from patrilineal transmission that it might unseat the male as the principal of the house, in a passage whose subtleties have to my knowledge remained largely neglected:

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Quelcun donq’, ayant veu l’article precedant [Chapter 25, “Du Pedantisme”], me disoit chez moy, l’autre jour, que je me devoy estre un peu estendu sur le discours de l’institution des enfans. Or, Madame, si j’avoy quelque suffisance en ce subject, je ne pourroi la mieux employer que d’en faire un present à ce petit homme qui vous menasse de faire tantost une belle sortie de chez vous (vous estes trop genereuse pour commencer autrement que par un masle). (148) [Now in my home the other day somebody read the previous chapter (“Of Pedantry”) and told me that I ought to spread myself a bit more on the subject of children’s education. If, My Lady, I did have some competence in this matter I could not put it to better use than to make a present of it to that little man who is giving signs that he is soon to make a gallant sortie out of you. (You are too great-souled [genereuse] to begin other than with a boy.)] (167)

Overtly, this passage appears to involve aristocratic formalities that reaffirm the wish of patrilineage. The latter’s descent and preservation would quickly and cleanly be preserved by one of the chief functions of the woman brought into its household, that of childbearer, an adjunct to masculine authority. One thing it does affirm is the intimate tie between the education Montaigne is trying out in this essay (implicit are all its deformity and monstrosity) and the generation of offspring that is necessary to the propagation of an aristocratic house. It is of course true that education is primarily the privilege of males in an aristocratic household. But Montaigne’s wording undercuts the transmission of patrilineal identity, and hence the authority of the father in the aristocratic household, through a polysemous selection of words in this passage: the female is assigned a place in generation and transmission by which her role can’t be seen as strictly subordinate to that of the male. Her place thereby displaces the centrality and principality of paternal authority by which the aristocratic order is organized. In his statement to Madame de Foix that “vous estes trop genereuse pour commencer autrement que par un masle [you are too great-souled to begin other than with a boy],” the overt sense of genereuse is “noble, belonging to a gens,” which, as with the tradition of Latin writing that in part legitimates aristocratic rule, it derives from its ancient precursor, generosus (or the feminine form, generosa). In the sixteenth century the word also has its present meaning of “giving,” from its association with the qualities the aristocracy attributes to itself. The connotation of “giving” also belongs to genereuse partly through a crossbreeding of the multiple meanings of generosus; the Latin word also means “producing or generating well,” specifically in regard to procreation. Montaigne is referring to the fertility of the Comtesse’s womb, to the faculty that neither her husband nor any other man has, the faculty for which aristocratic men require the contribution of women in the transmission of their household, what marks the difference between men and women.8 He is raising the point of her difference from 8 In Mirages of the Selfe, Reiss takes sharp issue with a characterization of the role to which women were assigned in procreation in antiquity and, by implication, through

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men and her capacity to produce something different from what may be directed by paternal authority. Although he affirms that the child she is carrying will be male, and hence capable of maintaining the stability of the house, his opening characterization of his writing as a deformed child and his valorization of the independent generative capacity of the womb are a recognition of the difference between men and women as one that resists subordination to hierarchy. Domestic Policy Montaigne affirms this difference as one bearing on the division of the household. And through another polysemous word choice in the above-quoted passage, he suggests that both the man and the woman of an aristocratic household have roles that may be considered only as a mixture of public and private functions. Montaigne speaks explicitly of Madame de Foix’s womb, referring to it as “chez vous”— although the expression may be appropriate to something connected with her person, it also suggests the overlap between her roles in generation and in the aristocratic much of the Western tradition (he sees a shift in the early modern period, to which I will return below). According to this characterization, women are little but the receptacle for the male contribution to generation, the sperm, which contains the form and hence determines all hereditary characteristics. Reiss notes that “in the past generation” many critics have concluded from such an interpretation of generation that women were effectively nonpersons in antiquity (182). He begins his critique by pointing out that it is pretty much from one passage in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (coupled with one from the Politics) in which women are said to convert nutriment only to the stage of menstrual fluid, which functions as matter in generation, whereas men can take the conversion a step further and bring nutriment to its highest stage, sperm, which functions as the form (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 717b–28a). Underscoring a number of other passages in Aristotle’s works as well as many other writings that contradict Generation, especially those of Galen, Reiss finds that the interpretation of the personhood of women in antiquity as nonexistent is, at best, a serious distortion (182–211). In light of Reiss’s critique, it would be imprudent to say that Montaigne’s valorization of the positive contribution of a woman to generation is radical in the Western tradition; rather, it draws on aspects of the tradition, perhaps contorting some of their dominant strains, that have been available since antiquity. In “De l’oisiveté [On Idleness]” (1. 8) Montaigne also takes issue with the Aristotelian characterization of the role of women in reproduction: although he says that, without the male contribution, “les femmes produisent bien toutes seules, des amas et pieces de chair infomes [women left alone may sometimes be seen to produce shapeless lumps of flesh]” (32/30). (Aristotle goes only so far as to say that women produce menstrual fluid without the intervention of formbearing sperm; Montaigne’s source on women’s production of bits of unformed flesh is Plutarch, Conjugalia praecepta [Advice to the Bride and Groom], in either Jacques Amyot’s or Estienne de La Boétie’s translation.) Although Montaigne remarks that “pour faire une generation bonne et naturelle, il les faut embesoigner d’une autre semence [(they) need to be kept busy by a semen other than their own in order to produce good natural offspring]” (32/30), he compares this generation to the “chimeres et monstres fantasques [chimeras and fantastic monstrosities]” (32/31), of his own mind, thus according it a positive function.

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household and house. This sense is underscored by Montaigne’s use of the words “chez moy” a few lines earlier, clearly referring to his own household. The parallel is quite close, since what Montaigne refers to as being “chez moy” is the previous essay, “Du Pedantisme [On Schoolmasters’ Learning]” (1. 25), and its role in the generation of “De l’institution des enfans”—whose title he reproduces word for word in this sentence, as though the words not only signify the current text but also constitute it. Both these texts are children of his mind, according to the trope with which he opens the essay. “Chez moy” might also refer to the Essais; the multiple meanings generated by the writing of the Essais suggests that they constitute a site of generation. Montaigne’s book contributes to his public life, as an extension of the civic duties to which he has devoted and will continue to devote a good deal of his time; and he terms Madame de Foix’s expected child “ce petit homme,” thereby indicating the future firstborn son’s public role in the aristocratic household. These two texts affirm a cohabitation of both the man’s and the woman’s roles in the maintenance of the household and the latter’s place in the social order and polity. Even though Montaigne signals the mixture of these roles, in the different senses of the expression “chez vous” and in the different roles men and women must take in procreation, he also recognizes their separation. His comparison of the female generative capacity, here and in “De l’oisiveté [On Idleness]” (1. 8),9 to his own production of uncontrollable monsters and vanities in writing further indicates his recognition of both such an overlap and such a difference. Although it is quite evident that Montaigne is not exclusively concerned with the education of the high nobility but rather with ways of diverting its purposes from the fundamental structuring principles of aristocratic society, he overtly states that he is solely interested in the education of males. He reaffirms his lack of concern for a broad education for women in “Sur des vers de Virgile [On Some Verses of Virgil]” (3.5): Nous les dressons [les filles] des l’enfance aus entremises de l’amour: leur grace, leur atiffeure, leur science, leur parole, toute leur instructions ne regarde qu’à ce but. Leurs gouvernantes ne leur impriment autre chose que le visage de l’amour, ne fut qu’en leur representant continuellement pour les en desgouter. (856) [We train women from childhood for the practices of love: their graces, their clothes, their education; their way of speaking regard only that one end. Those in charge of them impress nothing on them but the face of love, if only to put them off it by continually portraying it to them.] (966)

But he continues, giving the somewhat ridiculous example of her governess stopping his daughter, his only child, from reading aloud the word fouteau (another word for hêtre or beech, but taken by the governess as uncomfortably close to foutre, “fuck”), adding, “La police feminine a un trein mysterieux, il faut la leur quitter [feminine polity goes its own mysterious way: we must leave it entirely to them]” 9

See previous note.

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(856/966). His indifference to women’s education may be understood as another affirmation of women’s difference in a polity (graphically and semantically close to the sixteenth-century police) organized by paternal authority. Montaigne allows for women to govern their own domain and accepts the legitimacy of the autonomy of this domain. He has said just a few pages earlier, “Les femmes n’ont pas tort du tout quand elles refusent les reigles de vie qui sont introduites au monde, d’autant que ce sont les hommes qui les ont faictes sans elles [Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them]” (854/964). And he states toward the end of “Sur des vers de Virgile” that the difference between men and women is mainly one produced by the social order: “Je dis que les masles et femelles sont jettez en mesme moule: sauf l’institution et l’usage, la difference n’y est pas grande [I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great]” (897/1016).10 The fact that a woman is the addressee of this essay on education—that the “vous” of the essay is feminine—continues to suggest the overlap between the different roles of men and women in the household, and also to defy the very institution that is the subject of this essay. Montaigne demarcates the difference between his own book and those used in the masculine realm of existing education. This gesture furthers his characterization of his book as disrupting the father-son relationship between author and book, an ancient topos that finds a foundational formulation in Plato’s Phaedrus (275d–e). This relationship is, again, closely related to education as essential to the maintenance of patrilineal transmission in aristocratic society.11 His book extends reading and writing beyond the institutions that have conventionally restricted them; hence it moves away from a strict delineation between masculinity and femininity, as it does from the demarcated realm of aristocracy. Montaigne has characterized his book as a monstrous child, deformed, formless, not conforming to conventional restrictive institutions. And as 10

Cf. Melehy, 17–18. Richard Regosin introduces his Montaigne’s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) with a discussion of Montaigne’s reworking and elaboration the topos of the book as child and its implications of patrilineal transmission (1–9). He finds that Montaigne, in constantly questioning the effectiveness of his own writing and frequently labeling it with variations on the term monstrous, undermines the topos. Regosin’s reading of Plato, which is indebted to that of Jacques Derrida, presents the Phaedrus as itself injecting uncertainty into the topos. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–119. According to Regosin, Montaigne’s various children, textual and fleshly, constitute an “unruly brood: the unanticipated emblem of a multiform textuality marked by competing inclinations, conflicting desires, and incongruous interests and figured by the diverse faces of progeny who represent and mislead; a brood of dutiful sons and daughters, errant and rebellious siblings, offspring well-formed and monstrous” (12). Cf. Steven Rendall, Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 59–63, 73–8. 11

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Montaigne is writing about the education of a child, and as he invokes himself, his own experiences, and his own education as examples throughout, he advances an identity between himself and the book as child.12 His education, which ultimately leads to the writing of the book, is one story of the essay; so the essay allegorizes the writing of the book as well as addressing it literally. I would like to note that Montaigne’s own story, which is of course a highly fragmentary narrative, is also an allegory: the moy or selfe produced in this story of education whose end is the text itself is transferable to an indefinite number of other selves. It is mainly in this fashion that “De l’institution des enfans” turns aristocratic, masculinist education away from its principal purposes. Undermining Citations One way that this narrative exceeds institutionally prescribed limits is that it defies linear temporality, at times reversing prescribed narrative order. Montaigne begins the essay by speaking of the present state of his education; he ends it with the story of how he learned Latin as a first language or “langue … maternelle [mother-tongue]” (175/197) and subsequently progressed through school as a relatively poor student. So the starting point, out of order, is Montaigne’s entry into language, in particular Latin, and the end is the writing of his book in French. “De l’institution des enfans” tells the story of its title, that of the institution or initiation of an infant (from the Latin infans, “unspeaking”), which is precisely its learning to speak. The essay tells a repetition of the same when Montaigne, in school, learns to speak the mother tongue of his fellow students, French, and finally brings that institution to fruition by writing his book in French. Montaigne’s life story presents yet another monstrosity, that of the feminization, through its becoming his mother tongue, of the language of the patrimony of Western civilization in the early modern period, the literary legacy of ancient Rome. The latter is also central, in the institutions of its preservation, to maintaining the patrilineage and paternal authority of aristocratic society. And his book is built around nothing else than Latin quotations, stripped of the name of the author and thereby, to a degree, of their authority or auctoritas—they are starting points, ending points, or middle points in the continuity of Montaigne’s own sequences of sentences. This essay names paternal Latin authority, situates it in such a way as to feminize and displace it, and builds French around its ruins. This is not a French that will simply become the new paternal authority, but a monstrous, wordy, vain, dreamy French, which combines feminine and masculine elements, not assigning ascendancy to any of them, in its own generation. Although Montaigne did learn Latin before French and had one of the best possible humanist educations at the Collège de Guyenne, his citations of authors from the Latin patrimony is rather complicated. In many ways, the Essais constitute 12 Cf. Lawrence Kritzman, “Pedagogical Graffiti and the Rhetoric of Conceit,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15.1 (1985): 71–2.

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a radical break from the scholastic practice of citing auctoritas. His own procedure certainly has its precursors in the humanist tradition—Rabelais stands out among them in early modern France—but that is not to say that Montaigne doesn’t make a very significant contribution to the cultivation of French as a modern literary language. In its barest form, which persists well into early modernity and which Rabelais satirizes heavily, the citation of a canonical author, an auctor, guarantees the truth of what is being stated; familiarity with the Latin language, the texts of the Church fathers, and certain philosophers of Greek and (primarily) Roman antiquity is sufficient for the acquisition of knowledge. It is exactly this model of learning, which is not limited to scholasticism but is also at work in the humanist colleges, that is the object of Montaigne’s sharpest words in “De l’institution des enfans.” Montaigne situates his Latin citations in a completely different manner: they never “prove the truth” of what he is saying. That is partly because he rarely indicates which auctor he is citing, partly because they are placed precisely in the movement of his own discourse and their meanings produced in his context, rather than coming to his text charged with a meaning that derives from their participation in a patrimony.13 They are written and reinscribed in his text, bearing little relation to their function in an original context. Claude Blum points out that one of Montaigne’s most effective strategies of undermining the authority of his citations is to bring in so many of them as to set the auctoritates against one another.14 As Montaigne himself puts it in “Du jeune Caton [On Cato the Younger]” (1. 37):

13

John O’Brien provides several examples to demonstrate Montaigne’s systematic inversion of the original contextual meaning of his citations, which further undermines the authority of the patrimony from which they stem: “Montaigne and Antiquity: Fancies and Grotesques,” in Ullrich Langer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 54–8. 14 Claude Blum, “La fonction du ‘déjà dit’ dans les ‘Essais’: emprunter, alleguer, citer,” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 33 (1981): 41, 48–9. On the scholastic practice of citing auctoritas and its undermining in Montaigne, see Blum, 35–51, and Antoine Compagnon, La Seconde main, ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 236–44. Although Blum states that in this aspect of his strategy Montaigne has predecessors in figures as early as Abélard and Saint Thomas Aquinas, he also credits Montaigne with a vastly important contribution to the emergence of modernity: “In the episteme of the Renaissance, the Essais seem to be one of the sites of transformation of the ancestral tutelage of auctoritas in the area of the autonomy of the subject. Montaigne’s book functions as such by placing at the center of its writing what characterizes this reality, the caution of the already-said, and by ruining bit by bit its traditional value. In the same movement, the self is substituted for what previously grounded all truth, a self whose limits are still undefined and that nothing hinders in its expansion, since it suddenly questions all authority. Hence the form of the Essais, a form that nothing can stop, additions whose profusion only death will silence, a swimming that is all at once freed from the constraints of linear time” (50). (My translation.)

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[J]e ne suis pas icy à mesmes pour traicter de ce riche argument. Je veux seulement faire luiter ensemble les traits de cinq poëtes Latins sur la louange de Caton. (231)15 [I am not up to treating such a rich subject here. I simply wish to make verses from five Latin poets rival each other in their praise of Cato.] (260)

In “De l’institution des enfans,” Montaigne decries the practice of colleges in his time of making students repeat what is shouted at them without speaking their own words (here he alludes to the etymological sens of the word enfant). In a typical inversion of auctoritas, he advocates dialogue as the procedure that his ideal teacher should follow, first mentioning Socrates, one of his preferred exempla especially in the 1595 edition of the Essais: [A] Je ne veux pas qu’il invente et parle seul, je veux qu’il escoute son disciple parler à son tour. [C] Socrates et, depuis, Archesilas faisoient premierement parler leurs disciples, et puis ils parloient à eux. “Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt auctoritas eorum qui docent [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be those who teach].” (150) [(A) I do not want the tutor to be the only one to choose topics or to do all the talking: when the boy’s turn comes let the tutor listen to his pupil talking. (C) Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. “Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt auctoritas eorum qui docent (For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be those who teach).”] (168)16

Montaigne here cites auctoritas—which diverges from auctoritas in that it isn’t subtended by the name of the auctor—on auctoritas, to undermine the imposition of auctoritas. He speaks virulently against the humanist colleges, but suggests that they are much more closely allied with scholasticism than their promoters would like. He situates the quotation in dialogical fashion in his own text in order to illustrate in writing the dialogical procedure he is describing. And he adds his examples, including the quotation, in his last revision of the Essais such that the examples and quotation function within his own text as a dialogue. That is, he makes his point on dialogue through a staging of dialogue. Montaigne’s writing thus places obstacles to its own entry into a position of auctoritas: although the quotation functions effectively in its own context, it is evidently the voice of another, even more pronouncedly so since it is written in Latin.17 Since Montaigne 15

Qtd in Blum, 41. The quotation is from Cicero, De natura deorum, I.v. 17 Cf. Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 108: “Mentioning the author’s name helps to ‘authorize’ the opinion, but if Montaigne has the feeling of a complete identity of thought he can omit the name, even if he doesn’t feel capable of ‘providing on his own’ a style as vigorous as that of his Latin or Greek predecessor. When this happens, the text is no longer a citation 16

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makes the point toward the end of “De l’institution des enfans” that he learned Latin as his “langue maternelle [mother-tongue],” such that French came to him as a foreign language, his French retains an element of strangeness. He says that when he learned French, “Mon Latin s’abastardit incontinent, duquel depuis par desacoustumance j’ay perdu tout usage [My Latin was at once corrupted and, since then, I have lost all use of it from lack of practice]” (175/197). The latter assertion may or may not be true; it probably isn’t entirely, given the extent of the reading in Latin that Montaigne displays and the fluency with which he quotes from it and places it in his own context. However, he may well have lost his ability to speak Latin—he may have become unspeaking or infans, an enfan in the language of his infancy and of paternal authority. Nonetheless, the sentence indicates that neither language has remained for him a complete system with a clear point of origin or paternal authority. The mother tongue, which he learned from an authority hired by his father, was bastardized (s’abastardit) by the second language, which was the mother tongue for his fellow students. That is, in becoming a bastard language, Latin no longer had a legitimate father nor did it offer him paternal authority. Any language in which he writes—and his quotations should be seen as rewritings of prior texts, bringing them into the present context and the very judgment he advocates as the center of a young student’s education—becomes an open system, subject to transmission only by further rewriting or bastardization. The student that Montaigne’s pedagogical procedure is initiating will also become a bastard by not striving to repeat the words of the father, to resemble him, eventually to take his place; rather, he will go in a different direction, overcoming the law of the father by rewriting it.18 Montaigne addresses “De l’institution des enfans” to the mother of the future firstborn son of the aristocratic household, not to the father. Montaigne suggests that the son, in effect, become a bastard, that but a ‘borrowing’ or ‘theft’ (larrecin). Another person speaks in Montaigne’s stead; with his permission, of course, but still it is the other author who dictates what Montaigne is to say.” I would modify this observation slightly and say that Montaigne’s thought doesn’t achieve identity over against the disruptions in the identity of his discourse, and that the author who is dictating is not doing so as an authority, severed as he or she is from his or her cited text. 18 Regosin writes, “The pedagogical program of ‘De l’institution des enfans’ seeks to intervene, to form the child and formulate substantial speech, but it can only represent an ideal toward which the child, like the essayist, endlessly strives and which remains endlessly beyond reach. Montaigne imagines his text as a child who does not (will not or cannot) grow up, the very performance of inadequacy, or limitation, the enactment of the shortcomings of language and of the essayist/child coming up short of his own ends.” Richard Regosin, “Montaigne’s Child of the Mind,” in Raymond C. La Charité, ed., Writing the Renaissance: Essays on Sixteenth-Century French Literature in Honor of Floyd Gray (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1992), 176. Cf. also Regosin, Montaigne’s Unruly Brood, 30. Although I agree with the notion that the child doesn’t grow up to become the father, I differ with Regosin on the point that it is because the father remains an unattainable ideal. Rather, I find that paternity and its legacy become transformed in Montaigne’s educational procedure such that the child no longer has any need to take the place of the father.

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he move in a different direction from the father and open the paternal authority of aristocratic rule to that which it has hitherto excluded. As such, this rule will become something other than what it claims to have always been. Although Montaigne begins the essay as an ostensible concern with the education of a male aristocratic child, this education must move considerably beyond the overlapping domains of aristocracy and masculinity. If the Latin quotations accentuate the heterogeneous composition of Montaigne’s text, the occasional Greek inscription does so even more. Of Greek, he writes, “[j]e n’ay quasi du tout point d’intelligence [I scarcely understand at all]” (174/195). Again, this pronouncement may be untrue, but it does underscore the strangeness of Greek in Montaigne’s writing. In “Des coches [On Coaches]” (3.6) he quotes a line of Greek (from Corinna): “[B] Τῆ χειρὶ δεῖ σπεὶριν, ἀλλὰ μὴ ὁλῳ τῷ θυλακῷ.” He immediately translates the phrase not once but twice: “Il faut, à qui en veut retirer fruict, semer de la main, non pas verser du sac [C] (il faut espandre le grain, non pas le respandre) [‘If you want a good crop, you must broadcast your seed not pour it from your sack.’ (C) Seed must be drilled not spilled]” (903/1023). Rather than assimilating the phrase into his own writing, the immediate translation signals the alienness and unreadability of the Greek in his context—perhaps for Montaigne himself, certainly for the vast majority of his contemporary readers—and further throws into relief the dialogical composition of his text. The translation is a dialogical response to the Greek: it is a riposte in the present that indicates at once the gap between the two, perhaps even the irrelevance of antiquity, and the proximity and relevance to the present that some of the elements of its literary legacy may take on if they are recontextualized and rewritten. Montaigne affirms modernity by relating it to and distinguishing it from antiquity, suggesting that the time that separates the two is composed of moments that are quite heterogeneous with respect to one another. Such a temporal sequence allows signifiers to shift and assume completely different relations to their signifieds from one moment to the next. The movement of time continues in the present, suggesting the incompleteness and open-endedness of modernity owing to its temporality. Montaigne shows this movement by carrying on the dialogue over the years, effecting the translation in a subsequent layer of his text: he translates the translation, renders it a play on words and a line of free verse with an internal rhyme. This verbal texture calls attention to the fact that this line is in French, in no other language, that it is a translation that itself can’t be accurately translated. In effecting this translation of antiquity to modernity, he valorizes French as a language of literary cultivation and cultural transfer. He also makes evident that the Greek quotation functions as the seed of which it speaks, that it seeds his written progression into the modernity of French. The quotation has a singular pertinence to his own discourse and resists the weight of literary patrimony or auctoritas, the hefty sack of antiquity; since each line he writes becomes a seed

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that he is spreading, his book resists becoming a monological, authoritative unity.19 Neither he nor it becomes a father figure; rather, both continue to rewrite the law of the father such that the latter’s implacability is set aside. Books in the World It is important to note the place that Montaigne’s pedagogical procedure gives to the study of books. It has in the schools been the centerpiece of the transmission of the paternal authority of antiquity and its homology in the paternity of the aristocratic household, and hence the source of the student’s misery as he is initiated into his future position. Montaigne wishes to transform the function of books, rewrite them, such that they are no longer at the center but are rather one among many sources for the formation of the student. Experience is an adequate term for what Montaigne wants to see the master offering the student, and the types of experience are innumerable: most valuable are those that bring the student into contact with strangeness, alterity, heterogeneity, in order to be sure that his understanding remains open-ended, that he is aware of its irreparable incompleteness. Montaigne continues to use the metaphor of the book in speaking of experience. For example, “Or, à cet apprentissage, tout ce qui se presente à nos yeux sert de livre suffisant: la malice d’un page, la sottise d’un valet, un propos de table, ce sont autant de nouvelles matieres [Yet for such an apprenticeship everything we see can serve as an excellent book: some cheating by a page, some stupidity on the part of a lackey, something said at table, all supply new material]” (152/172). The effect of this metaphor is to suggest an expansion of the notion of reading such that it encompasses all sorts of interactions. When he speaks of reading in the proper sense, he proposes a picking and choosing (following one sense of the 19 Of course, Montaigne’s book quickly achieved the very canonical stature whose institutions its processes of signification work to undermine. But the seventeenth century, the great epoch of the canonization of French literature, effected some rather extraordinary changes on the Essais: Villey reports that the book was designated the “breviary of gentlemen”: Pierre Villey, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: Société Française d’Éditions Littéraires et Techniques, 1932), 153; and Montaigne devant la postérité (Paris: Boivin, 1935), 308. Among the learned, Montaigne’s book was better known through Pierre Charron’s La Sagesse (1601), composed, as Villey explains, of fragments borrowed from the Essais (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, 157–62). Villey remarks that in this “new grind” of Montaigne’s thought, Charron “squeezes it into methodical and logical expositions, he fits it into a system; such a procedure no doubt betrays it and robs it of its principal charm, but it also dresses it in a suit that will please the learned” (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, 154). (My translation.) This rationalization of the Essais saw its culmination in 1677 with the publication of a book called L’Esprit des Essais [The Spirit of the Essays], of which “the obscure editor … cuts extensively from the digressions; he modifies the titles so as to adapt them to the content of the chapters, or cuts from the text to draw it into the field of the titles” (1932, 162). (My translation.) Cf. Réda Bensmaïa, “L’art de l’essai chez Montaigne,” Continuum 3 (1991): 12.

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Latin lego) that develop judgment such that the latter improves its capacity to pick and choose, and eventually to provide examples for others. All reading hence becomes allegorical, a continual rewriting by which texts and experiences can become pertinent to the local, contemporary situation. His own book, the Essais, rather than making a place for itself in a closed literary canon, opens itself to experience. At the same time, reading becomes a kind of experience, and what is taken from the world is brought back to books. Again, the most important aspect is a constant contiguity with strangeness and alterity. He continues on “nouvelles matieres [new materials]”: À cette cause, le commerce des hommes y est merveilluesement propre, et la visite des pays estrangers, non pour en rapporter seulement, à la mode de nostre noblesse Françoise, combien de pas a Santa Rotonda, ou la richesse des calessons de la Signora Livia, ou, comme d’autres, combien le visage de Neron, de quelque vieille ruyne de là, est plus long ou plus large que celuy de quelque pareille medaille, mais pour en raporter principalement les humeurs de ces nations et leurs façons, et pour frotter et limer nostre cervelle contre celle d’autruy. (153) [For this purpose mixing with people is wonderfully appropriate. So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of the rich embroidery on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humours of those people and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.] (172)

Although noble tourists may have learned nothing in school and may despise reading, as he remarks toward the end of the essay (175/197), their behavior abroad exactly matches their learning in school: they treat all facts as of equal value and of no particular relevance to themselves. Montaigne insists on the interaction with alterity so as to effect a continual change of the brain such that it remains open to any new matters of the world that it may encounter. Montaigne situates the study of books within such experience as follows: “En cette practique des hommes, j’entends y comprendre, et principalement, ceux qui ne vivent qu’en la memoire des livres [In his commerce with men I mean him to include—and that principally—those who live only in the memory of books]” (156/175). He doesn’t advocate that the student become one of those men, but rather that in recognition of their alterity with respect to himself he interact with them and their reading. Reading, again, is an important part of experience, and experience of the world is reading; the student experiences books and reads the world. Antiquity is involved in this experience, as Montaigne indicates with the examples he cites of “ceux qui ne vivent qu’en la memoire des livres [those who live only in the memory of books]”: antiquity is a vast and distant expanse, details of which may be brought close and into focus so as to come to bear on the present context. Such

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reading and experience allow the student to step aside from books, not to be subject to their institutional authority, and to decompose and recompose them as he forms his capacity for judgment. The formation of this capacity is none other than the cultivation of the selfe, a literary cultivation in that it involves this expanded notion of reading and writing that Montaigne presents by way of the metaphor of the book that becomes literal in its deployment. The selfe thus moves outside itself and into the world; when it sees and reads the world, it sees itself as one tiny and, in the extent of its view and in the long run, likely inconsequential detail: Qui se presente, comme dans un tableau, cette grande image de nostre mere nature en son entiere magesté; qui lit en son visage une si generale et constante varieté; qui se remarque là dedans, et non soy, mais tout un royaume, comme un traict d’une poincte tres delicate: celuy-là seul estime les choses selon leur juste grandeur. (157) [Only a man who can picture in his mind (as in a painting) the mighty idea of Mother Nature in her total majesty; who can read in her countenance a variety not so general and so unchanging and then pick out therein not merely himself but an entire kingdom as a tiny, feint point: only he can reckon things at their real size.] (177)

The only magisterial authority remaining in this image is mother nature, herself identical with her own kingdom—the law of the father as autonomous and directive has no place here, and becomes only one among many phenomena the student might encounter in his experience. Recognizing nature as the mother and moving away from the authority and even the role of the father, the student is further bastardized. This image, a painting or picture, isn’t “objective” or “realist” in the sense that the West has understood such concepts since the early modern period, since such “accuracy” would implicate a viewing subject as its external perspectival organizing principle. Rather, Montaigne describes an image without end and in continual transformation, something more akin to abstract art or his own book, in which the selfe may read itself as actually a part of the picture. But the selfe has hardly anything to do with the center; it comprises a fine detail in the painting, a minuscule element in the composition of the whole, which can’t be fully grasped by a judgment that understands itself as remaining open to alterity. Montaigne continues, pursuing the notion of the world as a book to be read and experienced, and of books in the restricted sense comprising one part of that great book: Ce grand monde, que les uns multiplient encore comme especes soubs un genre, c’est le miroüer où il nous faut regarder pour nous connoistre de bon biais. Somme, je veux que ce soit le livre de mon escholier. Tant d’humeurs, de sectes, de jugements, d’opinions, de loix et de coustumes nous apprennent à juger sainement des nostres, et apprennent nostre jugement à reconnoistre son imperfection et sa naturelle foiblesse: qui n’est pas un legier apprentissage. (157–8)

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[This great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant. To sum up then, I want it to be the book which our pupil studies. Such a variety of humours, schools of thought, opinions, laws and customs teach us to judge sanely of our own and teach our judgement to acknowledge its shortcomings and natural weakness. And that is no light apprenticeship.] (177)

Montaigne reminds his readers that even when the selfe has gained a sense of this world without being able to comprehend anything but a small portion of it, this world itself may be a small part of all the worlds in existence—he is alluding to both the Copernican conception of the solar system and the New World. Even if this world were the only one, the only way to have a sense of its grandeur is by remaining open to anything that may be new; and such openness also leads to a sense that there may be other worlds without end. One may arrive at this sense by seeing oneself in the world, and by seeing one’s imperfection, weakness, and incompleteness in the image that presents itself—by seeing the overpowering grandeur of this image. The book of the world, without end, must be open to continual discovery and reinterpretation, as are the books one encounters in it, in which some of the judgments, opinions, and laws that Montaigne speaks of may be found. As Montaigne sets one authority against another in his own text such that none retains ascendancy, his student will do the same as he reads the book and the books of the world. The student must see any image of the selfe as authoritative, self-contained, or autonomous as an utterly vain one. Seeing oneself in the book of the world requires one to see oneself as another.20 In light of Montaigne’s remarks on the very small place of the selfe in the grandeur of the world, his situating of the present with respect to antiquity—that is, in historical perspective—supports his oft-repeated statement, formulated as such in “Du repentir [On Repenting]” (3.2), that the world is a “branloire perenne [perennial seesaw]” (804/907).21 Its constant is change, and modernity is distinguished from antiquity by the intractable difference between the two. His presentation of antiquity in this historical perspective doesn’t allow it to maintain the authoritative unity, as source of paternal law, for which it is invoked in the early Cf. Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 91–2: “Montaigne … valued … a free essential education with a view of the richness of the world—the happy man who is as much at home in society, at court, on the battlefield as he is in the quiet library, a sovereign partner of his intellectual forefathers and involved in a communication with them that can be discontinued, then resumed, at any time, without the restrictions of the specialist, capable of admitting ignorance, ready to engage in self-mockery, attentive to the health of the soul and body, with affection for any type of humanity, well-traveled, versed in the ‘book of the world,’ respecting truth, even when his opponent possesses it, without deception about his own importance, this tiny point in the universe, and thus intolerant of only one thing, namely, arrogance, rigidity, violence.” Cf. also Melehy, 22–3. 21 Cf. Reiss, 440–68. 20

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modern era. In the Essais, the texts and examples of antiquity are decomposed and recomposed to demonstrate the only possible way to view oneself and the world when looking at them, as a continual transformation no part of which has any durable significance. Modernity is this process of change, a universe with no fixed forms or absolutely determinative principles. The Essais are the book, or one book, that grafts itself onto the world, the book of the world, and partakes of this condition: “Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage: non un passage d’aage en autre, ou, comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute [I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute]” (805/908). Complete transformation occurs ceaselessly, from one moment to the next, each moment completely heterogeneous with respect to all others. Antiquity in the Present The education Montaigne advocates for his student, then, involves a constant contact with the world and its changes. Much of the thrust of “De l’institution des enfans” involves a caution against separating the student from things in the world through making eloquence, good use of language for its own sake (closely related to reading for the sake of reading), the center of education. After praising Ronsard and Du Bellay for the “credit” they have given French poetry, he laments the irrelevant turns of phrase into which their poor imitators have retreated: “Je ne vois si petit apprentis qui n’enfle des mots, qui ne renge les cadences à peu près comme eux [every little apprentice I know is doing more or less what they do, using noble words and copying their cadences]” (171/192).22 He insists that an education in which the student must work his way through, without too much questioning, the canon of antiquity and the precepts of rhetoric takes away from engagement with the world: “Nostre enfant … ne doit au pédagisme que les premiers quinze ou seize ans de sa vie: le demeurant est deu à l’action [Our child … owes to his education only the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life; the rest he owes to action]” (163/120–21). Nonetheless, Montaigne’s notion concerning the perspective on the continual transformation of the world doesn’t allow him to back away from the notion that an extensive knowledge of antiquity is of supreme value, even as he remains reserved about the time it may well waste: “C’est un bel 22

Elsewhere it is evident that Montaigne accepts the notion, propagated by members of the Pléïade, that their poetry involved a repetition of that of antiqutiy: “Quant aux [poètes] François, je pense qu’ils l’ont montée [la poésie] au plus haut degré où elle sera jamais; et, aux parties en quoy Ronsart et Du Bellay excellent, je ne les treuve guieres esloignez de la perfection ancienne [As for poets writing in French, I think that they have raised poetry as high as it ever will be and that in those qualities Ronsard and Du Bellay excel I find them close to the perfection of the ancients]” (“De la praesumption [On Presumption],” 2.17.661/750).

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et grand agencement sans doubte que le Grec et le Latin, mais on l’achepte trop cher [There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are fine and great accomplishments; but they are bought too dear]” (173/194). In this fashion, Montaigne introduces the last part of the essay, where he presents himself as exemplum: it is the brief story of his own education, of his father hiring a tutor to teach him Latin during his infancy. That is, he was initiated directly into the patrimony of Western culture through paternal authority, a paternal authority that itself was uninitiated in this respect; his father wished to give his son, and himself retroactively, the means to enter into high service to the state and thereby secure a position in the paternal order of aristocratic society. That is, the father transformed himself into a more complete father by initiating the transformation of his son into a father to the social order, an aristocrat. But Montaigne, never taking well to formal education, couldn’t become that father; hence he continues to step away from aristocratic society and undermine it as the bearer of a central, authoritative ruling principle, as he has throughout the essay. Repeating a commonplace that is very close in phrasing to Du Bellay’s in the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse [Defense and Illustration of the French Language], he provides a justification for his father’s decision: Feu mon pere, ayant fait toutes les recherches qu’homme peut faire, parmy les gens sçavans et d’entendement, d’une forme d’institution exquise, fut advisé de cet inconvenient qui estoit en usage; et luy disoit-on que cette longueur que nous mettions à apprendre les langues, qui ne leur coustoint rien [aux anciens], est la seule cause pourquoy nous ne pouvions arriver à la grandeur d’ame et de cognoissance des anciens Grecs et Romains. (173)23 [My late father, after having made all possible inquiries among the learned and the wise about the choicest form of education, was warned about the disadvantages of the current system: they told him that the length of time we spend learning languages, which cost the Ancients nothing, is the sole reason why we cannot attain to the greatness of mind and knowledge of those old Greeks and Romans.] (194)

According to this commonplace, a full, transparent relationship to the grandeur of antiquity is available in modernity with the knowledge from infancy of the 23

Du Bellay’s words are the following: “Et certes songeant beaucoup de foys, d’où provient que les Hommes de ce Siecle generalement sont moins Sçavans en toutes Sciences, et de moindre prix que les Anciens, entre beaucoup de raysons je treuve cete cy, que j’oseroy’ dire la principale: c’est l’Etude des Langues Grecque, et Latine [And certainly, often wondering how it happens that men of our time are generally less learned in all disciplines and of less worth than the ancients, among many reasons I find this one, which I would dare say is the most important: it is the study of the Greek and Latin languages].” Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. Jean-Charles Monferran (Geneva: Droz, 2001), 103–4; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 348–50.

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language of the Romans (for Latin is at issue here). So whoever learns Latin from infancy may become a full and complete paternal authority, with regard to both learning and the social order. But Montaigne qualifies the statement: “Je ne croy pas que ce en soit la seule cause [I do not believe that to be the sole reason]” (173/194). Montaigne writes these words because, according to his placement of antiquity in the essay thus far, modernity can never be a reproduction of antiquity; whether one repeats what the ancients did or not, the grandeur of antiquity can’t be reconstructed. Modernity can only repeat aspects of antiquity in such a way as to affirm the difference between itself and the latter and hence the internally heterogeneous composition of both of them. This part of the essay is rather curious, as Montaigne presents himself as an exemplum for an early Latin education only to show that his education was a failure.24 He steps away from his status as exemplum, as he steps away throughout the essay from an education that would properly initiate a student into the order of patriarchal society. By the end of the essay, Montaigne has portrayed himself as a failed initiate, unsuited to the offices of a noble, certainly not capable of setting an example or making recommendations for the education of an aristocratic child: Le danger n’estoit pas que je fisse mal, mais que je ne fisse rien. Nul ne prognostiquoit que je deusse devenir mauvais, mais inutile. On y prevoyoit de la faineantise, non pas de la malice. (176) [The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless.] (197)

Theater in the World As though to present something other than the absence of exemplarity in his selfportrait, in another dialogue with his own writing Montaigne tacks an additional passage on to the end of the essay in the 1588 edition, before the two-sentence conclusion. He speaks of the one area where he excelled above all others in school: “J’ai soustenu les premiers personnages és tragedies latines de Bucanan, de Guerente et de Muret, qui se representerent en nostre college de Guienne avec dignité [I played the chief characters in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente and Muret, which were put on in our Collège de Guyenne with dignity]” (176/198). Montaigne achieves the status of exemplum at the end of his essay on the education of children by becoming, as a child, the exemplum in tragedies that presented a simulacrum25 of antiquity. He is exemplary in his capacity to become the simulacrum of an exemplar other than himself, to bring successfully into the modern world an image of an ancient world that can never be recovered except as a simulacrum or theatrical repetition. 24 25

Hampton, 150–51. For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–4.

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Throughout the essay he has presented the ancient world as nothing but a simulacrum in the modern world, an image that maintains relevance only in its transposability to a context that has little or nothing to do with the original of which it is the image—indeed, his procedure sharply calls into question the integrity of the purported original. He cuts his citations and examples out of their prior context and pastes them into his own, thereby affirming the irretrievable nature of that prior context. His characterization of the acquisition of self-knowledge, arriving at the point of seeing oneself from a perspective that has nothing to do with oneself (“de bon biais [from the right slant],” in the above-quoted passage on the book of the world [158/177]), requires the selfe to see itself as a simulacrum. The figure of that simulacrum is here the actor on the stage, portraying a person who he or she is not, seeing him- or herself from the point of view of spectators who observe the simulacrum of theater. The only possible contact with antiquity, then, is by way of this simulacrum, and for Montaigne it is among the most valuable of pedagogical tools. The major shortcoming of education, that it shields the student from things in the world, is here overcome: it is, in Hampton’s words, “an action that is structured by a prescribed text.”26 This prescribed text renders theatrical action a repetition or simulacrum. Montaigne goes on to suggest that acting is important not only to education but also to the good maintenance of the social order, and hence that social action is itself textually prescribed by prior writings that become rewritings in their repetition or performance on the public stage. Citizens watching a play are under the best kind of regulation: [J]’ay toujours accusé d’impertinence ceux qui condemnent ces esbattemens, et d’injustice ceux qui refusent l’entrée de nos bonnes villes aux comediens qui le valent, et envient au peuple ces plaisirs publiques. Les bonnes polices prennent soing d’assembler les citoyens et les r’allier, comme aux offices serieux de la devotion, aussi aux exercices de jeux; la société et amitié s’en augmentent. Et puis on ne leur sçauroit conceder des passetemps plus reglez que ceux qui se font en presence d’un chacun et à la veuë mesme du magistrat. Et trouverois raisonnable que le magistrat, et le prince, à ses despens, en gratifiast quelquefois la commune, d’une affection et bonté comme paternelle … (177) [Those who condemn such entertainments I have even accused of lack of perspicacity; and of injustice, those who deny entry into our goodly towns to worthwhile troops of actors, begrudging the people such public festivities. Good governments take the trouble to bring their citizens together and to assemble them for sports and games just as they do for serious acts of worship: a sense of community and good-will is increased by this. And you could not allow citizens any amusements better regulated than those which take place in the presence of all and in full view of the magistrate. I would find it reasonable that 26

Hampton, 154–5. Hampton effects a superb reading of the end of “De l’institution des enfans,” which differs in a number of respects from mine. I credit his reading with signaling to me the importance of Montaigne’s addition on theater to the essay.

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the magistrate or the monarch should occasionally offer such amusements to the people for nothing, with a kind of fatherly goodness and affection … ] (198–9)

Social authority should, according to Montaigne, present itself through public spectacles as not only paternally authoritative but also as paternally concerned. When the public attention is captured by the theater, there is no better time for authority to conduct the surveillance necessary to the functioning of a well-regulated social order. Here Montaigne affirms the paternal authority of patriarchal rule, but at the same time he leaves it highly questionable. In an allegorical procedure, he displaces the patrimony of Western culture from its ostensibly immutable, central position, along with the ruling principles of the aristocracy, by continually contesting the various manifestations of paternal authority. In the same procedure he enables the transfer of the selfe that he produces in his book to any number of selves. The theater becomes an allegorical figure of this procedure insofar as it allows spectators a certain participation. And by way of the simulacrum they observe on stage, the theater offers transportation to a place outside the here and now; spectators may thus view themselves and their social order as deracinated and ultimately very small in the larger schemes of historical time and the grandeur of the world. (Hampton suggests that Montaigne’s evocation of the theater as a pedagogical tool “might be viewed as a kind of utopian moment in Montaigne’s depiction of the past.”)27 As the social authorities view the citizens watching the spectacles, they themselves become specatators to the entirety of the spectacle and thereby participate in the transportation outside the present situation. In presenting the theater as a figure of his own procedure in writing, Montaigne affirms that the Essais function as a theater of the world, inviting his readers to examine the theatrical aspects of the world and their position in it.28 The Essais present the world in the only way that human intellect can apprehend it, as vanity or simulacrum.

27 28

Hampton, 154. Cf. Alfred Glauser, Montaigne paradoxal (Paris: Nizet, 1972), 130.

Chapter 8

The Words of Vanity Travel and Text When Montaigne explicitly addresses the subject of vanity, in “De la vanité [On Vanity]” (3.9), he wholeheartedly affirms the Solomonic adage that “all is vanity.” He demonstrates quite effectively what is vain about his own writing: its digressions, its refusal to present a topic in anything but partial or superficial fashion without quickly moving on to the next, its emptiness with regard to things in the world.1 And things in the world turn out to be empty themselves, in this apprehension of the world undertaken in the Essais—which constitute, as he represents his text in “De l’institution des enfans [On Educating Children],” a book of the world and an apprehension of the world. In “De la vanité” he engages not only in constant digressions but also in commentary on his digressions; he couples these with descriptions of his travel through Germany and Switzerland to Rome; at the end of the essay he represents the city as a pure vanity. “De la vanité” has long been a focal point in discussions of Montaigne’s essayistic procedure. Critics have given the essay attention in part because of its apparently disorderly sequencing of subjects, one proceeding into the other through digression, and in part because it offers a number of observations on the writing of the Essais, including on the book’s apparently disorderly sequencing of subjects. For years critics tended to follow Grace Norton in discerning two distinct essays, written separately, in “De la vanité,” one on travel and the other on vanity (and hence, as the first vanity Montaigne mentions is the writing of the essays, on the latter), pieced together as a patchwork.2 More recent commentaries have taken issue with this judgment, finding a close intertwining of the themes of travel and vanity or digressive writing.3

1 In the sixteenth century, the primary meaning of vanité is “emptiness,” “inanity,” and so on. But it is evident in “De la vanité” that Montaigne is invoking its other sense, that of pride or self-satisfaction, which was also available at the time. 2 Grace Norton, Studies in Montaigne (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 62–3. Pierre Villey is unequivocal on this point in his opening comments on “De la vanité” in his 1924 edition of the Essais: Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1999), vol. 3, 944. 3 Cf., for example, Virginia M. Green, “Montaigne’s Vanity: Reading Digressions on Travel,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 18.4 (1994): 29; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Destruction/découverte: Le fonctionnement de la rhétorique dans les Essais de Montaigne (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980), 141–2; Margaret McGowan, “Clusterings: Positive and Negative Values in ‘De la Vanité,’” Montaigne Studies 1 (1989): 107–19.

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One might say that in “De la vanité” travel is a metaphor of the procedure of essayistic writing. But one could just as easily say that essayistic writing is a metaphor of travel, above all in “De la vanité.” Metaphor is itself a travel or transportation of words, as signifiers, from their proper meanings or signifieds, and writing on travel may be seen as a dramatization of such movement of words; if the travel described in “De la vanité” is a metaphor of Montaigne’s writing and the continual shifts it effects on meaning, this writing itself is also a figuration of travel, none other than the travel that Montaigne describes.4 I would like to develop the notion that Montaigne’s language often functions both literally and figurally: since figural language involves a displacement of words from their proper meanings, it further demonstrates the disjunction between words and things in the world, or the emptiness or vanity of language. In their relationship with the things to which they refer, Montaigne’s words travel past them and leave them behind only to encounter and generate new things; words themselves become things, and hence signification and referentiality are further complicated.5 Montaigne’s writing involves an interchangeability of figural and literal language that dramatizes the inherent disjunction of both with regard primarily to meaning and secondarily to the things to which they refer. Writing on Vanity Montaigne opens the essay by declaring an identity of vanity and his own writing: “Il n’en est à l’avanture aucune plus expresse que d’en escrire si vainement [There is perhaps (none) more manifest … than writing so vainly about it].”6 He presents his own writing as the model of vanity. Already in this sentence he displays the emptiness of words that he will go to great lengths to dramatize over the course of the essay: its third word is en, that most elastic of French pronouns, which often enough has no meaning but rather forms part of a certain verbal expression (for example, “Je m’en vais”—“I’m going”). And its antecedent may be any syntagma beginning with the preposition de, whether the latter opens an adverbial or genitive phrase or a partitive article. Its use is somewhat stretched here, as its antecedent

Cf. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xxii–xxiii. 5 Cf. Richard Regosin, Montagine’s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 26–7. 6 Montaigne, Essais, ed. Villey, vol. 2, 945; Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 1070. All references to the Essais will be to these editions and will be cited in the body of the text by book, chapter, and page numbers. Unless it is important to my argument, I will omit Villey’s indications of the A, B, and C layers of Montaigne’s text, corresponding to the 1580, 1588, and 1595 editions of the Essais. 4

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is in the title of the essay, not in the previous sentence of the book.7 It becomes an empty pronoun whose antecedent signifies emptiness. Furthermore, owing to the multiple grammatical functions of the word de, the title itself suggests, as do most of Montaigne’s titles, a slippery relationship of words to their meanings: it means at once that the essay is “on vanity,” that it proceeds “from vanity,” and that it is itself “some vanity.” The pronoun en could substitute for the expression de la vanité no matter which of these meanings it bears. Montaigne repeats the word in the sentence, demonstrating the fluidity of its meaning and hence further emptying it of fixed meaning: in the expression “il n’en est à l’avanture” the de of the implied antecedent would be a partitive article; in the phrase “d’en escrire si vainement,” the de would be the preposition opening an adverbial phrase. The latter continues the multiplication of meaning: Montaigne is not only writing on or about vanity; he is also presenting writing as motion (as he does two sentences further in the essay), and en could hence mean that his writing proceeds—literally, figurally, or both—from vanity. The word vainement at the end of the sentence demonstrates the emptiness of the pronoun by following it, in time and space, rather than preceding it; and as an adverb rather than a substantive, it constitutes a failure to state the word vanité in the text following the title; it is also a repetition of a variation on the word from the title, and hence further signifies the emptiness of the word. Montaigne amplifies the repetition by repeating the nasal phoneme ã in the expression à l’avanture; his writing thereby continues to emphasize the disjunction between words and their meanings, through the use of the word avanture, which has connotations of venturing or traveling forth. Tom Conley has pointed out that the letters v, a, and n are common to avanture and vanité.8 Again, elements of the word vanité as a signifier are repeated in a way that dislocates it from its signified and advances its emptiness or vanity, as well as that of all words in their overlapping, juxtaposition, and multidirectional motion. Montaigne continues the procedure in the following sentence, repeating en again, the phoneme ã, and writing two variations on a word that echoes the repetition of vanité by vainement: “Ce que la divinité nous en a si divinement exprimé devroit estre soingneusement et continuellement medité par les gens d’entendement [That which the Godhead has made so godly manifest should be meditated upon by men of intelligence 7 Cf. Mary McKinley, Les Terrains vagues des Essais: Itinéraires et intertextes (Paris: Champion, 1996), 106. 8 Conley writes, “Like the recurring title, à l’avanture happens to fall into the fabric of the essay more often than any other syntagm.” Tom Conley, “Montaigne en Montage: Mapping ‘Vanité’ (III, ix),” Montaigne Studies 3 (1991): 219. He catalogues 14 of its occurrences, including one use of the term avanture in its primary sense: “ils festoyent cette avanture” (985; Conley’s italics). Underscoring the instability of the word as a sign, he suggests, “The term connotes a taste for adventure or travel, but especially within or about surrounding motifs and vocables” (Conley, 219). The motion of the essay and its weaving together of digressions is, Conley finds, the very process of montage that characterizes cinema (208–13).

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anxiously and continuously]” (945/1070). Here he directly ties his text to that of Ecclesiastes, which also repeats the word vanitas: “[V]anitas vanitatum omnia vanitas” (Vulgate 1. 2).9 His text thereby travels forth from and extends the Old Testament, producing something new from it. Montaigne repeats and alters divinité with divinement, a procedure that repeats the repetition of vanité by vainement in the preceding sequence of words. The fact that the word divinité is repeated also suggests its malleability and disjunction with respect to meaning; that divinité and divinement are linked to vanité and vainement only reinforces this notion. Again in this sentence, de la vanité is the implied antecedent of en, in the expression nous en a; and the phoneme ã, along with the vocable en, appears four times in the words les gens d’entendement. Voiding Words Montaigne’s repetitions recall Du Bellay, in poems from both Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] and the Songe [Dream]—Montaigne is linking his text not only to Ecclesiastes but also to one of the important reworkings of it in sixteenth-century French letters. Du Bellay opens Antiquitez 3: Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme. [Newcomer, you who seek Rome in Rome and find nothing of Rome in Rome, these old palaces, these old arches that you see, and these old walls, this is what they call Rome.]10

These verses are marked by repetitions of the word Rome that dramatize its shifts of meaning, empty it of meaning, and link it graphically and semantically with rien (nothing or emptiness), as well as with repetitions of and variations on the phoneme õ, which is in phonetic proximity to ã. They call into question the efficacy of naming, nommer, ironically suggesting that the name from antiquity that would ground all names in the modern world, Rome, has no solid link to that which it purports to name (see above, 34–6). Du Bellay continues the procedure

Biblia Sacra (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969), vol. 2, Ecclesiastes 1.2. Geneva Bible: “[v]anitie of vanities, all is vanitie.” 10 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 272, ll. 1–4; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 250. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Antiquitez in the body of the text by sonnet number, occasionally altering the translation. 9

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in Songe 1, again rhyming nomme and Rome (ll. 6–7), and invoking vanité as rien through the words of his demon: Puis m’escria, Voy (dit-il) et contemple Tout ce qui est compris sous ce grand temple, Voy comme tout n’est rien que vanité. Lors cognoissant la mondaine inconstance, Puis que Dieu seul au temps fait resistence, N’espere rien qu’en la divinité. (ll. 9–14) [Then cried out to me, See, said he, and reflect on all that is encompassed under this great temple. See how all is nothing but vanity. Then, understanding the inconstancy of worldly things, since God alone resists time, hope for nothing save from the divine.]11

Divinité repeats vanité, and both words are explicitly tied to rien. Throughout the two sequences Du Bellay suggests that poetry has the power to approach the divine; but he also signals that poetry itself is a vanity and hence subject to the temporal cycles of Ecclesiastes that govern the pattern of creation and destruction put forth in the Songe (see above, 62–3). Although most commentators don’t draw such a close connection between Montaigne and Du Bellay,12 in my view it is a stretch not to find such an affinity. This is especially the case in light of comments Montaigne makes toward the end of “De la vanité” on the void he finds in Rome that strongly echo Du Bellay’s statements; I will discuss the closing pages of the essay below. Montaigne goes further than Du Bellay, directly affirming in his opening sentences, which rework Du Bellay, the vanity of his own project of writing, and never suggesting any way of approaching divinity. As I presented it in the previous chapter (153–6), he sees in the vastness of the universe an indifference with regard to human matters. He finds that the only one who sees himself in the expanse of the cosmos “comme un traict d’une poincte tres delicate … estime les choses selon leur juste grandeur [as a tiny, feint point … can reckon things at their real size]” (1. 28, “De l’institution des enfans,” 157/177). So it is through examining the world and admitting its vastness, endless variety, and continual change that human beings may apprehend themselves and their place in the world, even if these are largely inconsequential to the world. It is through writing in a digressive, open-ended fashion that admits the partiality of everything it encounters and its incapacity to represent or contain any totality that one may arrive at such an apprehension of the world and oneself. If one undertakes travel “pour frotter et Du Bellay, Regrets, 307, and “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” trans. Helgerson, 280. 12 Eric Macphail notes the affinity between Montaigne’s and Du Bellay’s writings on Rome: The Voyage to Rome in French Renaissance Literature (Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1990), 199–200. 11

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limer nostre cervelle contre celle d’autruy [knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s]” (1. 28.153/172), in order to place oneself in constant contact with alterity and realize that one’s mind hasn’t the least capacity to apprehend the whole of anything, then writing in a way that metaphorically and literally constitutes travel serves the same purpose. Montaigne chooses a title that is at once apt and ironic for the essay in which writing and travel are closely linked. In the third sentence of “De la vanité” he puts the two in motion together, figurally and literally: “Qui ne voit que j’ay pris une route par laquelle, sans cesse et sans travail, j’iray autant qu’il y aura d’ancre et de papier au monde? [Anyone can see that I have set out on a road along which I shall travel without toil and without ceasing as long as the world has ink and paper]” (945/1070). The Pleasure of Digression As its title and opening sentences suggest, “De la vanité” is a treatment of all sorts of inane trifles concerning Montaigne’s life and person, presented in a form that involves constant digression as the means of passage from one vanity to the next. Travel and writing, which amount to the same thing, are as much an exploration of the moy as they are of the relation of the moy to the world; hence they are an exploration of the world that the moy can apprehend only as vanity or simulacrum. Montaigne states what he intially presents as a commonplace: “Parmy les conditions humaines, cette-cy est assez commune: de nous plaire plus des choses estrangeres que des nostres et d’aymer le remuement et le changement [Among men’s characteristics this one is common enough: to delight more in what belongs to others than to ourselves and to love variation and change]” (948/1072–3). But over the course of the essay, it becomes evident that continual encounters with strangeness are disturbing to the complacency of the selfe13 as well as to its sense that it is indeed the master of its surroundings and knowledge. He continues: J’en tiens ma part. Ceux qui suyvent l’autre extremité, de s’agréer en euxmesmes, d’estimer ce qu’ils tiennent au dessus du reste et de ne reconnoistre aucune forme plus belle que celle qu’ils voyent, s’ils ne sont plus advisez que nous, ils sont à la verité plus heureux. Je n’envie point leur sagesse, mais ouy leur bonne fortune. (948) [I have my share of that. Those who go to the other extreme, who are happy with themselves, who esteem above all else whatever they possess and who recognize no form more beautiful than the one they behold, may not be wise as we are but they are truly happier. I do not envy them their wisdom but I do envy them their good fortune.] (1073) I follow Timothy J. Reiss in spelling selfe this way, in order to distinguish what is designated from later conceptions of the self as autonomous subject: Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. Extending Reiss’s observations, I also use the French word moy. 13

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Montaigne’s irony is that this extreme might not be at all uncommon, that it might be more common than the common characteristic he has just mentioned, that such persons might not be outside any borders at all but contained within those of their property and propriety. He suggests exactly that when later in the essay he writes of those he has encountered in his travels: J’ay honte de voir noz hommes enyvrez de cette sotte humeur de s’effaroucher des formes contraires aux leurs: ils leur semble estre hors de leur element quand ils sont hors de leur vilage. Où qu’ils aillent, ils se tiennent à leurs façons, et abominent les estrangers. (985) [I am ashamed at the sight of our Frenchmen befuddled by that stupid humour which shies away from fashions which conflict with their own. Once out of their villages they feel like fish out of water. Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones.] (1114)

He gives attention to such persons probably because he encounters them commonly in his travels. In this sense they are not extreme at all: extreme is from the Latin extremus, superlative of exter, outside, foreign, strange—hence those at an extreme are most outside, most foreign, most strange. But such persons remain or attempt to remain strictly within the borders of their property and propriety. The irony becomes more profound: it is in traveling and digressive writing that the borders of the selfe, its propriety, are challenged; the discovery is continually made that these limits are beyond the limits of apprehension, and hence that the limits of the selfe are such that it cannot apprehend its own limits. Those who are content within their own property and propriety don’t apprehend the fact that they are the farthest outside the limits of their own selves, inasmuch as they have no idea as to where the latter might lie—such persons are at the extreme of these limits. Montaigne is continually testing the limits of his moy, glimpsing their continual change and attendant elusiveness with regard to the apprehending powers of his moy. “Je sçay bien qu’à le prendre à la lettre [I am well aware that, taken literally],” he writes, using a figure that reflects on the letters of his text and their continual movement with regard to orthography, syntax, and semantics, “ce plaisir de voyager porte tesmoignage d’inquietude et d’irresolution. Aussi sont ce nos maistresses qualitez, et praedominantes [this delight in travelling bears witness to restlessness and inconstancy. But those are indeed our dominant masterqualities]” (988/1117). These ruling qualities are also qualities that rule over us, which we can’t master in the sense of establishing our own limits, the disquietude and irresolution of the vagabond selfe. Montaigne continually engages in traveling and writing, traveling as writing, writing as traveling—for example, over the years he regularly returns to the Essais to add to them, extend them, and specifically to incorporate into their writing the travel he undertook to Rome, which was as much made by his Journal de voyage as the latter was made by the voyage it describes. In adding to his text, he rereads his own words and hence reviews the inscription of his moy that they offer him. A few pages

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later he writes, “Mon stile et mon esprit vont vagabondant de mesmes [My pen and my mind both go a-roaming]” (994/1125): his stylus or style engages in a wandering, a continual shifting of their limits, as does his mind, and they do so together, in a fashion that can’t be marked off as property or propriety by either one. The Strangeness of Vanity Montaigne continues to speak of the advantages of travel, bringing into the essay a dialogue with those complacent persons whom Eric Macphail identifies as the author’s “imagined detractors.”14 Digressively returning his text to the topic of vanity, he further affirms the preponderance of that complacent sagesse that, as he has remarked (948/723, qtd above), he doesn’t envy: “—Il y a de la vanité, dictes vous, en cet amusement.—Mais où non? Et ces beaux preceptes sont vanité, et vanité toute la sagesse [‘There is vanity,’ you say, ‘in such a pastime.’—Yes. Where is there not? Those fine precepts are all vanity, and all wisdom is vanity]” (988/1118). Here travel and vanity converge. And Montaigne is celebrating vanity, the concurrent vanity of traveling and writing, as a means of confronting alterity and apprehending one’s own inconsequentialness with regard to both the world and the divinity that has so divinely spoken on vanity. He repeats Ecclesiastes again through repetition of the word vanité. But it is evident that Montaigne is distinguishing his own vanity from that of the complacent persons to whom he is speaking: his own is a vanity that recognizes itself as such and leads to a knowledge of the selfe in the world that is, as he puts it in “De l’institution des enfans,” “de bon biais [from the right slant]” (157/177). In the C layer of the text he adds a follow-up to his dialogue with his imagined detractors—he creates a dialogue with his own text in a third voice: “Dominus novit cogitationes sapientum, quoniam vanae sunt” (988/1118).15 Even within the Bible the sentence has a dialogical function, as it first appears in the Psalms and subsequently in 1 Corinthians. In the Bible it is an instance of the New Testament renewing something old from the Old: Paul’s citation of it places it in a much stronger context of admonition. The dialogue within Montaigne’s text extends itself to this dialogue between the Old and New Testaments, transforming the context of the citation to a celebration of the vanity of travel and digressive writing as furthering knowledge of the selfe. The addition in the C layer changes the sense of the sentence that follows it, from the B layer: “Ces exquises subtilitez ne sont propres qu’au presche: ce sont discours qui nous veulent envoyez tous bastez en l’autre monde [Those exquisite subtleties are only good for sermons: they are themes which seek to drive us into the next world like donkeys]” (988/1118). Rather than referring to “ces beaux preceptes [those fine precepts],” the words “ces exquises subtilitez [those exquisite 14

Macphail, 193. Biblia Sacra, Psalms 93.11 and 1 Corinthians 3.20. Geneva Bible: “The Lord knoweth that the thoghts of the wise be vaine” (1 Corinthians 3.20). 15

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subtleties]” in the later version now appear to mean the biblical citation, or perhaps both antecedent phrases as well as Montaigne’s own “vanité toute sagesse [all wisdom is vanity].” Montaigne is suggesting that even the biblical statements on vanity, with which he begins his own essay, are themselves vanity—biblical writing, his own writing, and indeed all words are vanity, adages belonging to the restricted realm of preaching and to be dispatched to the spiritual world, of which the selfe in this world can have no knowledge. Instead Montaigne prefers to celebrate vanity and the meanderings that it involves in this life, traveling, writing, and living in vagabond fashion. He continues, “La vie est un mouvement materiel et corporel, action imparfaicte de sa propre essence, et desreglée; je m’emploie à la servir selon elle [But life is material motion in the body, an activity, by its very essence, imperfect and unruly: I work to serve it on its own terms]” (988/1118). There is nothing spiritual about the life one may know in this world, and what is material and corporeal is unwieldy, messy, unmasterable, and the selfe begins to apprehend life by submitting itself to the latter’s vagabond motion. Traveling and writing, engaging in both digressively, lead one away from ambitions of mastery and to a pleasure in the life that is inconsequential in the vastness of the world: “[J]e m’emploie à faire valoir la vanité mesme et l’asnerie si elle m’apporte du plaisir, et me laisse aller apres mes inclinations naturelles sans les contreroller de si pres [I … strive to give worth to vanity itself—to doltishness—if it affords me pleasure, and I follow my natural inclinations without accounting for them thus closely]” (996/1127). The Cure of Vanity Of course, it is not only the pursuit of pleasure that is important for Montaigne but also the flight from displeasure: specifically, the wars of religion that are severely disrupting France. Throughout the essay he expresses his conservatism with regard to radical upheavals within a state. He employs the metaphor of the building that falls into ruins—echoing Du Bellay on Rome and anticipating the end of the essay, where he speaks of the literal ruins of Rome—but he continually returns to the metaphor of the sick body that needs to be cured rather than killed: Rien ne presse un estat que l’innovation: le changement donne seul forme à l’injustice et à la tyrannie. Quand quelque piece se démanche on peut l’estayer: on peut s’opposer à ce que l’alteration et corruption naturelle à toutes choses ne nous esloingne trop de nos commencemens et principes. Mais d’entreprendre à refondre une si grande masse et à changer les fondements d’un si grand bastiment, c’est à faire à ceux qui pour descrasser effacent, qui veulent amender les deffauts particuliers par une confusion universelle et guarir les maladies par la mort. … Le monde est inepte à se guarir; il est si impatient de ce qui les presse qu’il ne vise qu’à s’en deffaire, sans regarder à quel pris. Nous voyons par mille exemples qu’il se guarit ordinairement à ses despens: la descharge du mal present n’est pas une guarison, s’il y a en general amendement de condition. (958)

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England [Nothing crushes a State save novelty. Change alone provides the mould for injustice and tyranny. When some part works loose we can prop it up; we can resist being swept away from our original principles by the corruption and degradation natural to all things. But to undertake to recast such a huge lump, to shift the foundations of so great an edifice, is a task for those for whom cleaning means effacing, who seek to emend individual defects by universal disorder and to cure illnesses by death. … The world is not good at curing itself; it is so impatient of pressure that it can think of nothing but breaking loose from it without counting the cost. We know from hundreds of examples that it normally cures itself at the expense of itself. To throw off the burden of a present evil is no cure unless the general condition is improved.] (1085)

In view of the facts that the Bordeaux region is especially torn by the troubles and that one of the displeasures that Montaigne wishes to leave behind in traveling is the management of his estate (“Je me destourne volontiers du gouvernement de ma maison [I am most willing to turn aside from ruling my house]” [948/1073]), one may understand the metaphor of the building fallen into ruin as literally referring to the crumbling to which his own buildings are subject during this difficult period. And the metaphor of the body is apt because of Montaigne’s own ill health, the kidney stones that require the regular attention of a physician. He extends the metaphor to a point where it appears to transform into a literal statement on the function of medicine: La fin du chirurgien n’est pas de faire mourir la mauvaise chair: ce n’est que l’acheminement et sa cure. Il regarde au delà, d’y faire renaistre la naturelle et rendre la partie à son deu estre. (958) [The surgeon’s aim is not to cause the death of foetid flesh: that is merely the means which lead to the cure. He looks beyond that, to making natural flesh grow back again and to restoring the limb to its proper state.] (1085)

Although Montaigne here overtly espouses a conservatism with regard to transformations in existing institutions, the texture of his writing frequently goes in a different direction. As a social order is dependent on the stability of these institutions and their laws, Montaigne’s destablization of language—particularly in this essay, where vanity involves the dislocation of words from their meanings— raises the questions as to the firm foundations of the buildings of the state. In a return to the metaphor of the body later in the essay, Montaigne writes a dazzling sequence of dislocated signifiers that produces meanings moving in directions contrary to one another, in digressive and vagabond fashion: “Je hay moins l’injure professe que trahiteresse, guerriere que pacifique. Nostre fièvre est survenuë en un corps qu’elle n’a de guere empiré: le feu y estoit, la flamme s’y est prinse; le bruit est plus grand, le mal de peu [Avowed injuries I hate less than treacherous ones, and those of war less than those of peace. This fever of ours has occurred in a body which it has hardly made worse: the fire was there already: the flames had already taken. The din is much greater, the evil but little more]” (972/1099–1100).

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The injure that is guerriere is also one that guerit, or cures; it is a wound to the flesh that cures, in keeping with a number of early modern medical practices. The play continues in the next sentence, in which a war becomes both hardly anything (de guere) and the curing wound for the empire, which, if it is similar to the Empire romain, is none other than the tyranny that Montaigne decries. And finally “la flamme s’y est prinse”: the prince is on fire, or fire is the prince—fire is what reigns in the empire, for good, ill, or both. It is just such a disturbance that Montaigne flees in his travels, a situation that disrupts both social stability and any firm knowledge of what is good or ill. In the next sentence he digresses back to travel: “Je respons ordinairement à ceux qui me demandent raison de mes voyages: que je sçay bien ce que je fuis, mais non pas ce que je cerche [When people ask why I go on my travels I usually reply that I know what I am escaping from but not what I am looking for]” (972/1100). He is writing as much of writing as of travel, taking pleasure in his wandering style or stylus, aware of his starting point but never of the objective or goal of the procedure; he is exploring, experimenting, essaying. Roman Vanity On this point, however, “De la vanité” is quite paradoxical: Montaigne’s principal voyage certainly has a goal, Rome, the city that has fascinated him since early childhood; and the essay proceeds in like fashion, arriving at Rome at the end of its dizzying peregrinations. Early in the essay he speaks of the Roman state, drawing parallels between its fall and the end toward which France might be rushing headlong in its current condition. He invokes the Renaissance commonplace of Rome as the most complete state that has ever existed, the model for all other states. But just as Du Bellay complicates Rome as the ground of stability by finding nothing in it and suggesting that its fullness was perhaps never anything but a simulacrum (see above, 44–7), Montaigne sees in the fall of Rome the model for the collapse of every state. It was a state that was complete in every respect, paradoxically including that of being unstable: Nostre police se porte mal; il en a esté pourtant de plus malades sans mourir. Les dieux s’esbatent de nous à la pelote, et nous agitent à toutes mains. … Les astres ont fatalement destiné l’estat de Romme pour exemplaire de ce qu’ils peuvent en ce genre. Il comprend en soy toutes les formes et avantures qui touchent un estat: tout ce que l’ordre y peut et le trouble, et l’heur et le malheur. (960) [Our polity is sick: yet some have been sicker still without dying. The gods use us for games of tennis, knocking us about in numerous ways. … The stars fatally decreed that the Roman State should be the example of what they can achieve in this category, comprising every sort of fortune which can befall a State, all that order can do to it and chaos, every chance and mischance.] (1087)

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As a goal in his travels and his writing, what characterizes the Rome of antiquity is that it no longer exists, that in the space and time of the cosmos it embodies nonexistence. Montaigne is moving toward the vanity that was and continues to be Rome, here following Du Bellay’s lead closely; as in “De l’institution des enfans,” Montaigne presents the most durable part of antiquity as a vanity. Although he doesn’t specifically invoke, as does Du Bellay, the notion of the eternal city, he does speak of Rome as an ideal city in that it is an exemplum for all states, containing all that could exist and occur (and this includes nonexistence) in any state.16 For Du Bellay, Rome presents itself as the embodiment of an ideal; through the work of poetry Rome reveals itself and in turn this ideal to be simulacra. Montaigne follows Du Bellay by presenting Rome as a simulacrum that is allegorically transferable to any number of other states; for Montaigne the most relevant state is that of France. Most astonishing about Rome is that even in its instability it was durable, durable even as a diaphanous image: Tout ce qui branle ne tombe pas. La contexture d’un si grand corps tient à plus d’un clou. Il tient mesme par son antiquité: comme les vieux bastiments, ausquels l’aage a desrobé le pied, sans crouste et sans cyment, qui pourtant vivent et se soustiennent en leur propre poix … (960) [All that totters does not collapse. More than one nail holds up the framework of so mighty a structure. Its very antiquity can hold it up, like old buildings which, without cement or cladding, are propped up by their own mass …] (1088)

Montaigne here borrows from Du Bellay’s description of the decaying monuments of Rome metonymically signifying the ruin and the venerable age (through the double sense of antiquité) of the entire city, empire, and world that were Rome. He also rewrites Du Bellay’s lamenting lines on “mondaine inconstance” from Antiquitez 3: Ce qui est ferme est par le temps destruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistence. (ll. 13–14) [Whatever stands firm is destroyed by time. And whatever flees resists time.]

Writing on Montaigne’s Journal de voyage, David Sedley states, “Montaigne’s sense that early modern responses to Rome do not grant as much glory as they should to its ruins provokes him to declare the absence of those ruins.” Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 28. It is true that Montaigne finds in Rome no substantial traces of the honored city, and hence regard it as a pure vanity or emptiness. Cf. also David Sedley, “Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne,” PMLA 113.5 (1998): 1084. 16

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But unlike Du Bellay, who stages astonishment and deploration at the emptiness his speaker finds in Rome, Montaigne writes of transformation that is first durability and then utter destruction as though they belonged to the course of the movement of the world—hence his introduction of the passage on Rome with reference to “les astres [the stars].” And this same movement of the world, which is both spatial and temporal, is carrying France to the outcome of its disturbances. Just as Rome lasted through the very worst a state could undergo, Nous n’avons pas seulement à tirer consolation de cette société universelle de mal et de menasse, mais encores quelque esperance pour la durée de nostre estat; d’autant que naturellement rien ne tombe là où tout tombe. (961) [We should not only derive consolation from this universal fellowship in evil and menace: we should derive some hope that our State will endure, since in nature, when everything falls in unison, nothing fall.] (1088)

But the natural movement of the universe, after committing France to lasting through its difficulties, may bring on its complete destruction: “Il semble que les astres mesme ordonnent que nous avons assez duré outre les termes ordinaires [It seems that the very stars ordain that we have lasted beyond the normal limits]” (961/1089). Montaigne is invoking the cycles of creation and destruction that mark Du Bellay’s Songe. But given that such movement is part and parcel of the universe that Montaigne seeks to apprehend by engaging in vanity, Rome presents nothing in particular to lament.17 For Du Bellay, “Rome fut tout le monde, & tout le monde est Rome [Rome was the whole world, and the whole world is Rome]” (Antiquitez 26, l. 9). Montaigne appears to view Rome in the same way, and in “De la vanité” it becomes the place where the selfe can most intensively apprehend the world and itself: if the world is vanity, Rome is the ultimate vanity. And that is where the wanderings of “De la vanité” finally lead, to a Rome that no longer exists as such and is the site of Montaigne’s most favored vanity. He passes through Rome in his writing, reworking Du Bellay so as to make Rome the means of exploring his moy: “J’ay veu ailleurs des maisons ruynées, et des statues, et du ciel, et de la terre: ce sont toujours des hommes [I have already seen elsewhere ruined palaces and sculptures of things in heaven and earth: and it is ever the work of Man]” (996/1127). This sentence evidently repeats the “vieux palais, … vieux arcs … , [e]t vieux murs [old palaces, … old arches … , and old walls]” from the first stanza of Antiquitez 3 (ll. 3–4). Montaigne doesn’t mention Rome, although it is quite evident where “ailleurs” is, designated as such because it is somewhere in his travels, a place of encounter with alterity; the omission of the name suggests a vagueness of the place. But he rewrites the word Rome in the words, “ce sont toujours des hommes [these are still human beings]” (my emphasis)—the resonance is strengthened by 17 Cf. Dorothea B. Heitsch, Practising Reform in Montaigne’s Essais (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 122; Macphail, 184.

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his habitual spelling of the name of the city, Romme. Where Du Bellay sees rien, Montaigne takes note of the signs of humanity. The persons involved are dead, but Montaigne doesn’t follow Du Bellay in first making the emptiness of ruin a negation; rather, even though he sees more ruin than Du Bellay,18 he regards Roman emptiness as an affirmation of humanity and its vanity. He goes much further than that, answering his previous sentence as though it were an objection. He continues to speak of death, but as a part of the digressions of time rather than a pure void. The fact of death in Rome is the very thing that gives it an aura of durability: “Tout cela est vray; et si pourtant ne sçauroy revoir si souvent le tombeau de cette ville, si grande et si puissante, que je ne l’admire et revere. Le soing des morts est en recommandation [That is quite true. Yet, however often I were to revisit the tomb of that great and mighty City, I would feel wonder and awe at it. We are enjoined to care for the dead]” (996/1127). Rome is the site of the discovery and constitution of Montaigne’s moy, repeated in his trip to Rome and in his writing about it: Or j’ay esté nourry dés mon enfance avec ceux icy; j’ay eu connoissance des affaires de Romme, long temps avant que je l’aye eue de ceux de ma maison: je sçavois le Capitole et son plant avant que je sceusse le Louvre, et le Tibre avant la Seine. (996) [(A)nd since infancy I was brought up with those dead. I knew about the affairs of Rome long before those of my family; I knew of the Capitol and its site long before I knew of the Louvre, and of the Tiber before the Seine.] (1127)

It is the spatial and temporal alterity of Rome that provides Montaigne the occasion for discovering his moy. The lesson learned from the voyage to Rome concerns both the world’s vanity and that of the selfe, or the latter by way of the former. It is in Rome that Montaigne has received, among his “faveurs venteuses, honnoraires et titulaires, sans substance [honorary titular favours, all wind and no substance],” the “faveur vaine [vain favor]” that pleases him the most: “une bulle authentique de bourgeoisie Romaine, … pompeuse en seaux et lettres dorées [an authentic Bull of Roman Citizenship … resplendent with seals and gilded letters]” (999/1130), the entire text of which constitutes the longest Latin citation in the Essais (999– 1000/1131–2). In the wanderings of the essay that are at the same time the wanderings of Montaigne’s travel to Rome and the meanderings of his life, the end is Rome, the place that has been identified as the beginning of the moy and the model of the world. It is here figured by the “bulle authentique,” a tourist’s souvenir, an obvious simulacrum of the Roman Republic, especially in the repetition in its text of the Margaret McGowan, reading the Journal de voyage, points out that Montaigne sees an emptiness in Rome that is accentuated by the fact that the tourist guides treat the ruined monuments as though they were still discernibly present: Margaret McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 229–31. 18

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acronym S.P.Q.R. (Senatus Populusque Romanus—the Roman Senate and People). Now, this vanity is venteuse (windy) in a number of ways: not only does the word venteuse phonetically and graphically repeat vanité, but it alludes to the meaning of the word from which vanitas was translated, the Hebrew ruach, “wind.”19 As Mary McKinley points out, both the French word bulle and the Latin bulla denote, in addition to the lead seal that is attached to Papal documents and by extension the document itself, a bubble, water or soap film filled with air or wind.20 And Conley offers a French sentence that phonetically corresponds with the pronunciation of the acronym: “Est-ce pet, cul, air [Is this fart, ass, air]?”21 What marks the document as belonging to Rome, tying it to the ancient city, asks if the document is nothing more than intestinal wind.22 When Montaigne finally arrives in the Rome that is so deeply woven into his moy, he finds the most useless kind of air. Rome is such a wind, a vanity or simulacrum, and as model of the world it leaves the world as vanity or simulacrum, the only way it can enter human apprehension. That is why Montaigne remarks, after quoting the entirety of the bull, “Si les autres se regardoient attentivement, comme je fay, ils se trouveroient, comme je fay, pleins d’inanité et de fadaise [If others were to look attentively into themselves as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of emptiness and tomfoolery]” (1000/1132). The End of Vanity And that is also why he can quickly finish the essay as he does, making a statement that the entire chapter has demonstrated at every turn of its meanderings: C’estoit un commandement paradoxe que nous faisoit anciennement ce Dieu à Delphes: Regardez dans vous, reconnoissez vous, tenez vous à vous; vostre esprit et vostre volonté, qui se consomme ailleurs, ramenez la en soy; vous vous escoulez, vous vous respandez; appilez vous, soutenez vous; on vous trahit, on vous dissipe, on vous desrobe à vous. [That commandment given us in ancient times by that god at Delphi was contrary to all expectation: ‘Look back into your self; get to know your self; 19

Green, 32. McKinley, 118–19. 21 Conley, 230–31. 22 In rendering vanitas as a fart by way of the Hebrew ruach, Rabelais is ahead of Montaigne: in Chapter 43 of the Quart Livre [Book 4], “Comment Pantagruel descendit en l’isle de Ruach [How Pantagruel Went Ashore on the Island of Ruach],” the giant and his companions arrive in a country where “Ilz ne vivent que de vent [They live on nothing but wind].” François Rabelais, Quart Livre, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 638; Rabelais, Book 4, in The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 530. The descent to fundamental matters follows quickly. 20

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hold on to your self.’ Bring back to your self your mind and our will which are being squandered elsewhere; you are draining and frittering your self away. Consolidate yourself; rein your self back. They are cheating you, distracting you, robbing you of yourself.] (1132)

Continuing to wander out to and out of the simulacrum of antiquity, Montaigne does an extended and windy gloss on the dictum of the god at Delphi. Advancing one’s knowledge of oneself involves nothing but discovering the void, wind, vanity, or simulacrum other than which the selfe cannot be. The god of wisdom pronounces the dictum to all selves—hence Montaigne says that it is made to “nous” and renders it as a command to “vous,” which here indicates a plural. The command is paradoxical because in the knowledge of itself that the selfe gains in wandering away from its initially prescribed limits, in seeing itself as another, it sees that this other that constitutes itself is in continual dispersion and flow, that it is nothing to be known, a vanity. In what appears to be closest to itself, its own selfe, the selfe realizes that there is nothing further from itself—and that its own selfe is its only way of knowing the world, which is also at an unfathomable distance from its knowledge.23 It is also the wandering movement of writing, a writing that the selfe writes and then returns to in order to see itself as another, that permits the selfe to see the void that it is; the selfe thereby discovers itself in a world that is made of ungraspable substance and that also thus presents itself as vanity, void, and simulacrum. When Montaigne continues his gloss, he switches to the second-person singular. He addresses both a single person and all of “man,” homme, as a being living in the world, another selfe that is close to itself, a “thyselfe,” and at the same time as far from himself as is his own selfe. Voy tu pas que ce monde tient toutes ses veues contraintes au dedans et ses yeux ouverts à se contempler soy-mesme? C’est toujours vanité pour toy, dedans et dehors, mais elle est moins vanité quand elle est moins estendue. Sauf toy, ô homme, cháque chose s’estudie la premiere et a, selon son besoin, des limites à ses travaux et desirs. Il n’en est une seule si vuide et necessiteuse que toy, qui embrasses l’univers; tu es le scrutateur sans connoissance, le magistrat sans jurisdiction et apres tout le badin de la farce. (1001) [Can you not see that this world of ours keeps its gaze bent ever inwards and its eyes ever open to contemplate itself ? It is always vanity in your case, within and without, but a vanity which is less, the less it extends. Except you alone, O Man, said that god, each creature first studies its own self, and, according to its needs, has limits to its labours and desires. Not one is as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe: you are the seeker with no knowledge, the judge with no jurisdiction and, when all is done, the jester of the farce.] (1133)

23

Cf. Jean-Yves Pouilloux, “Un commandement paradoxe,” Po&sie 83 (1998): 108.

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The world itself turns its sight inward; the one who tries to know and command it finds what the world has already found, which is nothing to know or command. The selfe finds itself on view in the world, with no substantial knowledge, presiding over no discernible realm, the buffoon in an undirected farce24 that proceeds by improvisation to unexpected scenes and comes to no end. This badin speaks the foolish, vain words that indicate the vanity and foolishness of all purported wisdom, on a stage that is none other than all the world. At the end of “De l’institution des enfans,” Montaigne presents the world as such a theater. But if there is no other world outside this theater that would constitute the foundation of the latter’s representations, then every motion in life is a vanity, a simulacrum, and there is no discernible origin on which the selfe would be grounded. Such is the joyous lesson of pointlessly wandering through the vanity of the entire world.

24 Cf. Alba-Maria Robbiati Gastaldi, in “Forum: Sur la dernière page du chapitre ‘De la vanité’ (III, 9),” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 15–16 (July–December 1999): 133: “Derived fom the Latin farcio, ‘stuff,’ the word farce designates a blend of different themes, just like the Latin word for satire, satura, with a reminder of the inclusion of profane and popular buffoonery in the ‘mysteries’ of the Middle Ages.” (My translation.)

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Chapter 9

America, the End of Western Dreaming Older and Newer Worlds It is the good fortune of the reading of the Essais that commentaries on “Des cannibales [On the Cannibals]” (1. 31) have reduced their emphasis on Montaigne’s assimilation of the indigenous inhabitants of America to the Greco-Roman ancients. Whether these understandings held that Montaigne was valorizing the civility of the Amerindians or erasing their radical alterity in favor of European values, carried from antiquity to early modern humanism by the westering movement of translatio studii, criticism saw a broad and durable consensus that the essayist was indeed engaging in such an appropriation and even expropriation.1 Some of the most interesting readings re-examine Montaigne’s evident comparison between the relative barbarism of Europeans, in connection with the extreme violence of the religious troubles in France, and the relative civility of Amerindians. These readings often involve an allegorization of European violence through the rituals of war and anthropophagia in the Americas.2 What persists in most older and newer interpretations is the notion of Montaigne as cultural relativist—in contrast to the cultural absolutist of those who insist on an effacement of the radical other in “Des cannibales,” who nonetheless disguises himself as a relativist. Among the points I would like to raise here is that Montaigne’s strategies of writing don’t maintain a strict opposition between relativism and absolutism. In the case of “Des cannibales” (and “Des coches [On Coaches],” which I will also address), Montaigne does internalize radical alterity by writing about it, and may hence from this perspective be called a cultural absolutist. But as I have argued in the two previous chapters and elsewhere,3 the semiotic placement and re-placement that occur in the Essais involve, in the encounter with alterity, a

1 For a superb account of the contours of the debates over “Des cannibales,” see Zahi Zalloua, “Sameness and Difference: Portraying the Other in Montaigne’s ‘De l’amitié’ (I, 28) and ‘Des cannibales’ (I, 31),” Montaigne Studies 15.1–2 (2003): 177–90, especially 179–86; also Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2005), 118–22. I will return to Zalloua’s evaluation of “Des cannibales,” as it takes the genuinely philosophical dimension of the essay further than any commentary I know of. 2 See especially George Hoffman, “Anatomy of the Mass: Montaigne’s ‘Cannibals,’” PMLA 117.2 (2002): 207–21; David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 75–101, and “A Reconsideration of Montaigne’s Des cannibales,” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 51.4 (1990): 459–89. 3 Hassan Melehy, Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 47–69.

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dissolution of the integrity of the text and of the writing and written selfe.4 By writing about the Amerindians and bringing them into the text, the selfe enacted in the writing must also move out of itself and become epistemologically open to the beings that it experiences as other, to become other itself. Such a movement in both directions then disallows the fixed, central perspective that absolutism would necessitate; and yet the perspectival positions that arise in this movement are not simply arbitrary, so not in the strict sense relativist.5 As I argued in Chapters 7 and 8, Montaigne presents antiquity as available only as a simulacrum;6 hence he renders the modern selfe that has propped itself up on antiquity as a sheer tenuousness. Antiquity is an other to modernity that the latter both internalizes and externalizes; modernity and antiquity thereby each provide a perspective that can’t rigorously be called either relativist or absolutist. And just as Montaigne presents antiquity as available to cognition only as a simulacrum, the beginning of knowledge of the radically other cultures of the Americas must occur in the simulacrum of these cultures that he offers in “Des cannibales” and “Des coches.” I don’t disagree with the interpretations of the many intelligent I follow Timothy J. Reiss in spelling selfe this way, in order to distinguish what is designated from later conceptions of the self as autonomous subject: Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. Extending Reiss’s observations, I also use the French word moy. 5 I cite an account of relativism versus absolutism with respect to philosophical hermeneutics: “In the case of relativism, two positions may serve as a start, after which it will be possible to add further refinements. The question is whether a position can be formulated in such a way as to be at least rational enough to be seriously plausible. There is a weak sense of relativism whereby saying ‘the text means such-and-such’ only means ‘it means this to me’ or ‘I like it read this way.’ In contrast to this subjectivistic kind of relativism, which results in an impossibility of agreement through rational discourse, it is easy to formulate very generally another position that does not lead to such irrationality. This version can be called contextualism, for according to it, the interpretation is dependent upon, or ‘relative to,’ the circumstances in which it occurs—that is, to its context (particular frameworks or sets of interpretive concepts, including methods). For contextualism, rational reflection and dispute do not stop with the interpreter’s personal preferences. On the contrary, although the choice of the context for an interpetation is underdetermined by the evidence, justifying reasons for the appropriateness of that context rather than alternative ones can and should be given. Since no context is absolute, different lines of interpretation are possible. But this is not radical relativism, since not all contexts are equally appropriate or justifiable. Contextualism denies that there is an objectively neutral first step providing an unquestionable methodology. This general position is not properly called relativism because it is held by both relativists and nonrelativists.” David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 69. According to this set of definitions, Montaigne is a contextualist, allowing a shift in his European point of view as it confronts the vastness of another part of the world. Montaigne’s point of view is a modest one, admitting its own limits and even looking for them as it faces much larger geographical realities. 6 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14. 4

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people who have seen an assimilation of the Amerindians to the ancients. I would merely add that this assimilation is also a dissimilation, since antiquity itself is made other in the Essais, and that this double movement by no means constitutes an exclusion or effacement. For Montaigne, antiquity presents alterity through its unfathomable distance in time and space from the modern Western selfe. Like the essays addressing antiquity that I have considered, the essays on America offer a meditation on geological and historical time, on the spatial distribution that the cycles of life and death necessitate, on the possibilities of apprehending alterity, and on the affirmative failure of the selfe ever to reach integral unity. The allegorical dimensions that critics have signaled in “Des cannibales” are essential to these projects; allegory is precisely the discursive strategy by which the other may speak in a language from which it is absent, by which the dominant languages may hence become other. But as with one of the most striking allegories in the Essais, the reflection on the reason and intelligence of animals in the “Apologie de Raimond Sebond [An Apology for Raymond Sebond]” (2.12), as I have argued elsewhere, this allegory functions in mixed fashion, also involving a consideration of its literally addressed topics.7 Montaigne’s allegorization doesn’t recognize a hierarchy between literal and figural meanings. Extensions of Empire Of course, Montaigne presents a dream version of America, projecting a utopia that collapses on itself in the vagaries of his writing. This simulacrum allegorizes the limits of Western apprehension to grasp the radical alterity offered by the New World.8 Closely bound to these limits is one of Montaigne’s favorite areas of inquiry, that of the unfathomable immensity of the universe and the unending variations on all life, human life in particular. “Des cannibales” functions as a site in the Essais where Montaigne in most concentrated fashion confronts the radical alterity that his writing continually faces in demonstration of its own heterogeneous composition. One of its principal thrusts is that of a critical epistemology.9 “De l’amitié 7

Hassan Melehy, “Silencing the Animals: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Hyperbole of Reason,” symplokē 13.1–2 (2005): 263–82. 8 Frank Lestringant presents the utopianism of Montaigne’s New World essays as a “thought experiment” that deeply challenges the certainty of received knowledge of the geography of the world. Montaigne adds to the speculations of the ancients because, in contrast to their imaginative geographies, he has before him an empirically verifiable other world. Frank Lestringant, “Paradoxe, voyage et expérience de pensée: Note sur le Nouveau Monde de Montaigne,” Versants 50 (2005): 95–113. 9 Sylvie Romanowski also reads “Des cannibales” as an epistemology: Through Strangers’ Eyes: Fictional Foreigners in Old Regime France (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 17–37. Stating that the central problem of the essay is an epistemological one, she explains, “[T]he Cannibals are an example, a tangent to the main movement of the essay” (24). My own position is rather that the cannibals are the

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[On Affectionate Relationships]” (1. 28) and “Des cannibales” stand on each side of Book 1’s absent center, the emptiness of Chapter 29, the endlessly deferred genesis of the Essais that marks Montaigne’s book as an assembly in continual becoming. Each essay approaches alterity, the one personal alterity and the other cultural alterity. “Des coches” is similarly near the center of Book 3.10 As Montaigne’s book grafts itself onto the world, both “Des cannibales” and “Des coches” take a hard look at the heterogeneous composition of humanity and the world, of the very civilization and civility that Montaigne invokes at the beginning of “Des cannibales.” Pyrrhus’ battle with the Romans is scarcely an arbitrary choice. In contrast to much humanist writing against empire, Montaigne finds translatio studii and translatio imperii once again coupled; this example is among his attempts to debunk their effectiveness. Montaigne begins the essay with something from early in the history of and toward the east of what was becoming the West. It is the very moment when this Greek recognizes the civility of the Romans, when barbarian becomes civil and Greek becomes barbarian, a moment in translatio imperii that promotes Greco-Roman antiquity as well as the West and its movement westward. Starting with this example, Montaigne moves to a part of the world that is west of the West. If one were to take translatio imperii a few narrative steps further, one would have to admit that civilization could reach a higher point in America. Given what is known—or, properly speaking, what is not known—of this western region, both translatio imperii and translatio studii begin to be untenable. Throughout the Essais Montaigne raises complications with respect to notions of the effectiveness of the West, and in his essays on the New World he does so in quite pointed fashion. This first passage of “Des cannibales” has been quite widely understood as Montaigne’s opening gesture in the essay of relativizing European culture. For reasons I’ve just adduced, the passage merits closer examination: [A] Quand le Roy Pyrrhus passa en Italie, apres qu’il eut reconneu l’ordonnance de l’armée que les Romains luy envoyaient au devant: Je ne sçay, dit-il, quels barbares sont ceux-ci (car les Grecs appeloyent ainsi toutes les nations estrangieres), mais la disposition de cette armée que je voy, n’est aucunement barbare. Autant en dirent les Grecs de celle que Flaminius fit passer en leur païs, [C] et Philippus, voyant d’un tertre l’ordre et distribution du camp Romain en son royaume, sous Publius Sulpicius Galba. [A] Voylà comment il faut se garder de s’atacher aux opinions vulgaires, et les faut juger par la voye de la raison, non par la voix commune. [(A) When King Pyrrhus crossed into Italy, after noting the excellent formation of the army which the Romans had sent ahead towards him he said, ‘I do not know what kind of Barbarians these are’ (for the Greeks called all foreigners Barbarians) ‘but there is nothing barbarous about the ordering of the army very occasion for Montaigne’s reflections. The vast epistemological reorientation of early modernity has everything to do with the encounter with the New World. 10 See Tom Conley, The Self Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 269; Zalloua, Montaigne, 125–31.

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which I can see!’ The Greeks said the same about the army which Flaminius brought over to their country, (C) as did Philip when he saw from a hill-top in his kingdom the order and plan of the Roman encampment under Publius Sulpicius Galba. (A) We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote.] (202/228)11

It is important to note that in the C layer of the Essais, Montaigne augments the example by switching from the initial Greek repulsion of Rome to the Roman conquest of Greece—to a privileged moment of translatio imperii and translatio studii. The essay—and more so “Des coches,” as I will present it below—concerns the extension of empire into the Americas and hence the targeted culmination of translatio imperii. Montaigne is examining the tenuousness of the entire Western project of empire by looking simultaneously toward either end of it, temporally and spatially. Very far from grounding his position in a solid notion of antiquity, he is pointing to the latter’s motion and instability, its conflicts, and the defeat of Greece that was integral to the ascension of Rome. Similarly, the encounter with and conquest of America threatens to expose the diaphanousness of European dreams of empire, the destruction that necessarily accompanies extension. Montaigne also finds this logic of imperial expansion at work in his voyage to Italy. The trip, which reproduces and in a way parodies that undertaken by younger French bourgeois and nobles to complete their education—to participate in translatio studii12—reveals nothing but emptiness, vanity, not even the ruins of Du Bellay’s ruined seat of empire (see above, Chapter 2). It is true that this passage involves an inversion of the notions of barbarism and civility, but not one that purely relativizes the terms. Rather, it enables a shift in perspective such that avenues of apprehension other than a fixed and hierarchized position would become possible; the latter would be necessary to the maintenance of an imperial power. Pyrrhus still refers to the Romans as “barbares [Barbarians],” and Montaigne explains the locality of this Greek perspective: “car les Grecs appelloyent ainsi toutes les nations estrangieres [for so the Greeks called all foreign nations].” The Greeks might claim an absolutist position from which they would view themselves as central and at the top of a hierarchy of civilization; but Montaigne reveals this position to be dependent on a geographical and cultural context, and as one among a number of others available to Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus begins his sentence with the equation of foreignness and barbarism and finishes it with the paradoxical Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), vol. 1, 202; Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 150. All references to the Essais will be to these editions and will be cited in the body of the text by book, chapter, and page numbers. Unless it is important to my argument, I will omit Villey’s indications of the A, B, and C layers of Montaigne’s text, corresponding to the 1580, 1588, and 1595 editions of the Essais. Translation occasionally altered. 12 See Jean Balsamo, “Le voyage d’Italie et la formation des élite françaises,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 27.2 (2003): 12–16. 11

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recognition that these barbarians are not barbaric in their military disposition—the latter is mostly what counts here. Montaigne’s account effects a recognition that the terms barbarism and civility aren’t mutually exclusive, that a cognitive shift occurs when one designated as outsider and other is recognized as a version, though still largely unknown, of oneself. Here, as in the encounter with America, the situation that jolts the absolutist perspective is one of progressively mounting violence.13 Hence Montaigne’s lesson that “il faut se garder de s’atacher aux opinions vulgaires, et les faut juger par la voye de la raison, non par la voye commune [We should be similarly wary of accepting common opinions; we should judge them by the ways of reason not by popular vote]” (202/228). The “voye de la raison [the ways of reason]” is precisely that contextual situation that allows the selfe to step outside itself while facing the other and recognizing the latter in its specificity. It is a reason that allows itself to shift, unlike the particular and provincial viewpoints that would present themselves as universal. The difference between these two is the same as that between a “voye” and a “voix,” homonyms that here end up in opposition to each other. But the homonym also suggests that the “voye” leads to a “voix” and vice versa: Montaigne doesn’t state a hierarchy between reason and opinion, but rather sees them both as involving perspectival judgments, and hence as unsettled from fixity. Judgment is made according to the “voye de la raison,” but it is often hard to say just what this “voye” is, or in what direction it proceeds. Coming to See America Although this opening functions as an example, it is not an authoritative one, not the auctoritas that Montaigne is fond of debunking (see above, 147–52). It rather serves to state the interrogation of the opposition between civility and barbarism that is one of the principal objects of the essay; it functions in parallel with the account of “cet autre monde qui a esté descouvert en nostre siecle [that other world which was discovered in our century]” (203/228) that Montaigne begins immediately afterwards. There isn’t a hierarchy between these two parts of “Des cannibales,” but instead a change from a perspective on antiquity to one on the New World. The essay’s implication of perspective is further illustrated by Montaigne’s introduction of “un homme [a man]” in his employ “qui avoit demeuré dix ou douze ans en cet autre monde [who stayed some ten or twelve years in that other world]” (203/228), “[un] homme simple et grossier, qui est une condition propre à rendre veritable tesmoignage [a simple, rough fellow — qualities that make for a good witness]” (205/231). Bearing witness is nothing else than affirming a perspective, as Montaigne indicates in “Des boyteux [On the Lame]” (3.11): Le stile à Romme portoit que cela mesme qu’un tesmoin deposoit pour l’avoir veu de ses yeux, et ce qu’un juge ordonnoit de sa plus certaine science, estoit conceu en cette forme de parler: Il me semble. (1030) 13

Cf. Zalloua’s reading of the opening of “Des cannibales”: Montaigne, 112–25.

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[In Rome, the legal style required that even the testimony of an eye-witness or the sentence of a judge based on his most certain knowledge had to be couched in the formula, ‘It seems to me that …’] (1165)

Through this simple and rough man Montaigne will offer his own perspective. It has of course been widely discussed just what the function of this eyewitness is, and if he even existed.14 It is easy to take the eyewitness as Montaigne’s guarantee of the authenticity of his account—and just as easy to see that this guarantee breaks down quickly. Montaigne offers his man as a counterpoint: … car les fines gens remarquent bien plus curieusement et plus de choses, mais ils les glosent; et, pour faire valoir leur interprétation et la persuader, ils ne se peuvent garder d’alterer un peu l’Histoire: ils ne vous representent les choses pures, ils les inclinent et masquent selon le visage qu’ils leur ont veu; et, pour donner credit à leur jugement et vous y attirer, prestent volontiers de ce costé là la matiere, l’alongent et l’amplifient. Ou il faut un homme tres-fidelle, ou si simple qu’il n’ait pas dequoy bastir et donner de la vray-semblance, à des inventions fauces; et qui n’ait rien espousé. Le mien estoit tel; et, outre cela, il m’a faict voir à diverses fois plusieurs matelots et marchans qu’ils avoit cogneuz en ce voyage. Ainsi je me contente de cette information, sans m’enquerir de ce que les cosmographes en disent. (1.31.205) [… those clever chaps notice more things more carefully but are always adding glosses; they cannot help changing their story a little in order to make their views triumph and be more persuasive; they never show you anything purely as it is: they bend it and disguise it to fit in with their own views. To make their judgement more credible and to win you over they emphasize their own side, amplify it and extend it. So you need either a very trustworthy man or else a man so simple that he has nothing in him on which to build such false discoveries or make them plausible; and he must be wedded to no cause. Such was my man; moreover on various occasions he showed me several seamen and merchants whom he knew on that voyage. So I am content with what he told me, without inquiring what the cosmographers have to say about it.] (231)

14

See, among others, Michel de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals’: The Savage ‘I,’” in Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 73–4; Gérard Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne: L’écriture comme présence (Paris/Geneva: Champion/Slatkine, 1987), 163–4, and “Un cannibale en haut de chausses: Montaigne, la différence et la logique de l’identité,” MLN 97 (1982): 941–2; Edwin M. Duval, “Lessons of the New World: Design and Meaning in Montaigne’s ‘Des cannibales’ (I:31) and ‘Des coches’ (III:6),” Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 100–101; Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France and England (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2004), 127–8; Guy Mermier, “L’essai Des Cannibales de Montaigne,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 7–8 (July–December 1973): 30.

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The sheer length of this series of affirmations of authenticity gives it the appearance of a defense, in both the legal and psychoanalytic senses of the term; it is overdone to the point where it invites questioning and indeed betrays its author’s effort to hide something, from others as well as himself. Nonetheless, Montaigne makes a quick gesture of placing himself in proximity to the cannibals he is about to describe. His eyewitness is effectively his possession (“Cet homme que j’avoy [This man of mine],” “Le mien [my man]” [205/231; my emphasis]). As Guy Mermier has signaled, “The words simple and rough refer directly to cannibal, through opposition to civilization. … The expression ‘true witness’ is linked to simple and rough, hence to cannibal.”15 Montaigne thereby links his own words, through this man, to the cannibals. He seems to be countering his statement in the opening of the Essais, “Au lecteur [To the Reader],” of the impossibility, in language and culture, of directly apprehending one’s object: “Que si j’eusse esté entre ces nations qu’on dict vivre encore sous la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure que je m’y fusse tres-volontiers peint tout entier, et tout nud [For had I found myself among those peoples who are said still to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s primal laws, I can assure you that I would most willingly have portrayed myself whole, and wholely naked]” (3/lix). His own staged wish in “Au lecteur” is to engage in the immediacy of experience that the nostalgic version of the Amerindians presents them as having. In this text that opens the Essais, Montaigne states the utopian dimension of his project. He is effectively assimilating his eyewitness to the simplicity of cannibal life, as he expresses it in the most famous passage of “Des cannibales”: “Les paroles mesmes qui signifient le mensonge, la trahison, la dissimulation, l’avarice, l’envie, la detraction, le pardon, inouies [Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness]” (206–7/233). Both the cannibal and the crude and simple man have escaped the self-reflection of civilization that makes deception possible.16 The man has been in “direct” contact with the Amerindians; so Montaigne’s words lay claim to being an unmediated representation of the latter—which the essay just as quickly reveals as impossible, in part by requiring the mediation of this man who has access to “les choses pures [anything purely as it is]” (205/231). As Marc Fumaroli has characterized him, Montaigne is both an antirhetorican and a master of rhetoric.17 It isn’t hard to see that, even if this man’s and a few other eyewitnesses’ accounts are the starting point of Montaigne’s presentation, Montaigne himself glosses his sources. As a virtuoso of the art of persuasion, Montaigne is, in Gérard Defaux’s words, “one of those ‘clever chaps’ who pride themselves on writing, who are quite capable of ‘changing their story a little,’ able 15

Mermier, 30. (My translation.) David Quint comments quite aptly on this passage: “These terms suggest that what the cannibal lacks, above all, is the self-consciousness and self-division of the European” (75). 17 Marc Fumaroli, “Les Anciens du Nouveau Monde,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 29–32 (1992–93): 21. 16

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to ‘build … false discoveries or make them plausible’ and ‘never show you anything purely as it is,’ who ‘bend and disguise it to fit their own views.’”18 Moreover, no one contests the notion that Montaigne borrows heavily from other texts, here and throughout the Essais. In “Des cannibales” he draws on at least four—those of Nicolas Barré, Jéronimo Osório, Jean de Léry, and André Thevet19—and probably more. That is, parts of his texts are borrowings from the very cosmographers whom Montaigne claims not to be interested in consulting.20 Léry’s and Thevet’s books were so widely read that one may register the explicitness of the dialogical relationship between the Essais and these French sources. Montaigne is here engaging in a negotiation of the discourses on the New World. The upshot is that Montaigne’s mention of the eyewitness is a rhetorical strategy that is at the same time antirhetorical, as it undermines itself in its enunciation. The question of whether Montaigne invented his eyewitness is largely irrelevant, since answering it is completely unnecessary to understanding the discursive strategies of the essay. Indeed the question detracts from such an understanding. Montaigne mentions the eyewitness at the beginning of the essay, before the cannibals themselves, and then the crude man makes no further appearance. Hence Montaigne displaces his own knowledge to another source, disavowing responsibility for it by saying it comes from this man. And the source of the man’s knowledge is the Amerindians themselves, whom Montaigne claims to want to represent as directly as possible; but the indirectness is necessary in that they are removed twice from him, then a third time by way of the cosmographers that he is relying on even as he insists he isn’t. The indigenous inhabitants of the Americas seem to be completely obscured by this series of relations, which necessarily leads to the question of whether their radical alterity with respect to Europe can be represented at all. Montaigne stages a deliberate fiction or simulacrum in order to interrogate this problem, in the opening of which the eyewitness functions as a key element. Everything Montaigne adds to his text to bring the Amerindians closer to full representation only stands in the way of apprehending them in their specificity.21 18

Defaux, 164. (My translation.) Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1494–5 n. 1 to p. 205, n. 2 to p. 209, and n. 1 to p. 211; Bernard Weinberg, “Montaigne’s Readings for Des Cannibales,” in George Bernard Daniel Jr, ed., Renaissance and Other Studies in Honor of William Leon Wiley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 261–79. 20 Conley conducts a very compelling reading of Montaigne’s strategic rewriting, in “Des coches,” of Martin Fumée’s 1569 translation of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las India (270–73). 21 Michael J. Giordano has very convincingly addressed this set of relations in terms of the supplement, that which at once adds to and supplants, is both necessary and superfluous: “Re-Reading Des Cannibales: ‘Veritable Tesmoignage’ and the Chain of Supplements,” Neophilologus 69 (1985): 25–33. On the supplement, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 141–64. 19

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Conquests of Wind and Sand But even before Montaigne really introduces the eyewitness, in the pages between the initial mention of him and the questionable justification for depending on him, the text launches into digressions. George Hoffman has suggested that these are among the “troubling inconsistencies in the body of the essay.” He asks if Montaigne’s consideration of whether “[c]ette descouverte d’un païs infini [(t)his discovery of a boundless territory]” (203/228–9) was foreseen by the ancients, at least in the Platonic account of Atlantis, “dull[s] the effect of the essay’s provocative title.”22 My response is that this series of digressions functions integrally in Montaigne’s essayistic strategy of examining the limits of Western knowledge and the possibility of apprehending the radical alterity of the Amerindians and their land. These pages are no less than an examination of European imperial strategies of unending land acquisition and their simulacrum of continuity with ancient empire: as Montaigne remarks in the first digression, “J’ay peur que nous avons les yeux plus grand que le ventre, et plus de curiosité que nous avons de capacité. Nous embrassons tout, mais nous n’étreignons que du vent [I fear that our eyes are bigger than our bellies, our curiosity more than we can stomach. We grasp at everything but clasp at nothing but wind]” (203/229). Montaigne employs a digestive metaphor, to which he returns over the following pages and in “Des coches”; the “vent [wind]” he invokes here is connected to vanité as I treated it in the previous chapter (both words are translations of the Hebrew ruach—see above, 174–5). Although he hasn’t yet composed “De la vanité [On Vanity],” the semiotic linkages of the word are available to him. In “Des coches” he also returns to “vent,” there connecting it with digestion—and through digestion, Montaigne is addressing his cannibals’ dietary practices. If all one can eat is vent, if vent fills the ventre (“belly”), then the digestive consequence is burping and farting. Hence all three essays are linked in that they address eating, farting, other winds of various sorts, and the semantically and graphically related vanité. In the case of both “Des cannibales” and “Des coches,” he presents accounts that allegorize the extension of empire. His treatment of ancient geography and the myth of Atlantis is of interest because it connects with translatio studii: in attributing the myth, through the personage of Solon, to Plato, he invokes a vastly important point of reference for philosophy from that time and place belonging to the genesis of the West. But since this new land is not Atlantis, the West—from its origins to its present knowledge, acquired in good part by translatio studii—runs up against its limits. The geographical sites named coincide more or less with the empire that Alexander wanted and the one that the Romans gained—hence it elaborates on the opening of the essay. He addresses what is known of the geography of the New World, affirming with the cosmographers that it is not an island, and that it may or may not be connected to “l’Inde orientale [the East Indies]” and “les deux pôles [both 22

Hoffman, 208.

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the Poles]” (204/230). The next part of the digression, added in the B and C layers, turns the topic to that of movements of bodies of land, which one might take to be continents. But Montaigne’s illustration involves a much more local phenomenon, which nonetheless may have global consequences: Quand je considere l’impression que ma riviere Dordoigne faict de mon temps vers la rive droicte de sa descente, et qu’en vingt ans elle a tant gaigné, et desrobé le fondement à plusieurs bastimens, je vois bien que c’est une agitation extraordinaire: car, si elle fut tousjours allée ce train, ou deut aller à l’advenir, la figure du monde seroit renversée. (204) [When I consider how my own local river the Dordogne has, during my own lifetime, been encroaching on the right-hand bank going downstream and has taken over so much land that it has robbed many buildings of their foundation, I realize that it has been suffering from some unusual upset: for if it had always gone on like this or were to do so in the future, the whole face of the world would be distorted.] (230)

Montaigne is here discussing the taking, or gaining (“elle a tant gaigné [it has taken over so much land]”; my emphasis), or conquering of land, in this case by his own nearby river. He is already addressing, by allegorizing them, the destructive effects of the imperial conquest that become a major question in “Des coches.” This conquest of land by water has “desrobé le fondement à plusieurs bastimens [robbed many buildings of their foundation]” through “une agitation extraordinaire [some unusual upset].” Before one connects this passage with its parallel in “Des coches,” it may seem quite hyperbolic for Montaigne to say that, if this agitation continued, “la figure du monde seroit renversée [the whole face of the world would be distorted].” The passage from “Des coches” is one of the best-known in the Essais, owing to its unequivocal condemnation of the Spanish assaults in Mexico and Peru: Tant de villes rasées, tant de nations exterminées, tant de millions de peuples passez au fil de l’espée, et la plus riche et belle partie du monde bouleversée pour la negotiation des perles et du poivre: mechaniques victoires. (910) [So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations wiped out, so many millions of individuals put to the sword, and the most beautiful and richest part of the world shattered, on behalf of the pearls-and-pepper business! Tradesmen’s victories!] (1031)

There is a close correspondence between the fact that the Dordogne has “desrobé le fondement à plusieurs bastimens [robbed many buildings of their foundation]” and the many “villes rasées [cities razed to the ground],” “nations exterminées [nations wiped out],” and “millions de peuples passez au fil de l’espée [so many millions of individuals put to the sword].” “La figure du monde seroit renversée [the whole face of the world

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would be distorted]” from this destruction, and “la plus riche et belle partie du monde … bouleversée [the most beautiful and richest part of the world shattered].” That this part of “Des cannibales” bears on imperial conquest becomes more explicit as Montaigne continues his series of metaphors involving the taking of land by water: En Medoc, le long de la mer, mon frere, Sieur d’Arsac, voit une sienne terre ensevelie soubs les sables que la mer vomit devant elle; le feste d’aucuns bastimens paroist encore; ses rentes et domaines se sont eschangez en pacquages bien maigres. Les habitans disent que, depuis quelque temps, la mer se pousse si fort vers eux qu’ils ont perdu quatre lieuës de terre. Ces sables sont ses fourriers: et voyons des grandes montjoies d’arène mouvante qui marchent d’une demi lieue devant elle, et gaignent païs. (204) [By the coast-line in Médoc, my brother the Sieur d’Arsac can see lands of his lying buried under sand spewed up by the sea: the tops of some of the buildings are still visible: his rents and arable fields have been changed into very sparse grazing. The locals say that the sea has been thrusting so hard against them for some time now that they have lost four leagues of land. These sands are the sea’s pioneer-corps: and we can see those huge shifting sand-dunes marching a halfleague ahead in the vanguard, capturing territory.] (230)

Here is another version of the loss of land, this time when the water vomits sand onto fertile ground. Ensevelir, “to bury,” can involve objects other than persons and their remains; but the word is more commonly associated with bodies, dead and sometimes living, the latter of which may die in the process. “[S]es rentes et domaines se sont eschangez en pacquages bien maigres [his rents and arable fields have been changed in to very sparse grazing]”: the agricultural and hence economic productivity of Montaigne’s land is severely reduced by this action on the part of the sea, this vomiting of sand. Montaigne resumes the metaphor of digestion: what the sea has eaten that it is now vomiting up is—other land. As in the procedure of the movement of empire, in its conception as translatio imperii, the earlier parts of the empire must be destroyed in order for the subsequent ones to arise and conduct their own conquests. They thereby place themselves in a weaker position with respect to the new, more westerly areas. In their dreams of expansion, empires eat too much: Montaigne has said that “nous avons les yeux plus grand que le ventre [our eyes are bigger than our bellies]” (203/229). In the resulting indigestion, in addition to farting its own image and that of its conquests, an empire must puke up its prior conquests in order to conduct new ones.23 Elaborating the metaphor, Montaigne further allegorizes imperial expansion. The vomited sands are the “fourriers” of the sea: Villey defines this word as “avant-

23

De Certeau draws a fascinating set of connections between the movement of water and sand and that of the semiotics of barbarism versus civility: Michel de Certeau, “Le lieu de l’autre: Montaigne, ‘Des cannibales,’” Oeuvres & Critiques 8.1–2 (1983): 62–5.

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courreurs,”24 which in the sixteenth-century usage designates a field sergeant responsible for the encampment of troops.25 These soldiers then “marchent [march]” and continue their conquest of land—they “gaignent païs [captur(e) territory].” In this last part of the sentence Montaigne uses the word arène instead of sable, having already written the latter twice. In the sixteenth century arène is a common enough synonym of sable, but I propose also to understand it in its other, metonymic sense. The combat field of a Roman arena, a site of entertainment that dramatizes the violence of imperial conquest, is covered with sand.26 So Montaigne is presenting this ruining of the land by the sea as involving violent conquest. The fact that these big piles of sand “gaignent païs” ties them even to the French efforts in Brazil that Montaigne has just mentioned. More broadly, they suggest the larger-scale and more violent European conquests in America: the name Vilegaignon is graphically and phonetically linked to ville-gaignant, a conquerer of cities, as he will present the Spanish and others in “Des coches,” and to vil-gaignant, a vile conquerer. Arenas of Spectacle Parallel passages in “Des coches” support and augment this reading. Opening with a general statement on “causes” (898/1017),27 Montaigne proceeds to an apparently unrelated series of sentences on the fact that “[n]ous produisons trois sortes de vent [we produce three sorts of wind]”—“celuy qui sort par embas [that which issues lower down],” “celuy qui sort de la bouche [the one which issues from the mouth],” and “l’estrenuement [sneezing]” (1017). The vent that “sort par embas” recalls the farting that occurs in and comes out particularly at the end of “De la vanité.” That which “sort de la bouche” hearkens back to the process of overeating, burping, and puking that culminates in the metaphors of imperial conquest, which begins with the notion that “nous … étreignons [or eat, in the context of the passage] … du vent” (203). Etreignons is graphically and phonetically connected Villey, in Montaigne, Essais, vol. 1, 204n3. Le Grand Robert de la langue française (Paris: Robert, 2001), t. 1. This definition dates from 1452, the end of the Hundred Years War, which marks the beginning of French national consolidation and imperial projects. 26 According to Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and Englishe Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), the word is in use in both senses in the early modern period. 27 Conley has underscored the ways that the word cause, in the opening in sentence, is tied to the title and part of the subject of the essay: “[H]ere the cause is embroiled in the effect. The coche, a word bearing aural and visual resemblance to ‘cause,’ is defined by the nature of its tenor (the horse or animal that pulls, conveys, or conduces it) and its own effect as vehicle (the coach itself). In the wit of the essay the end or cause of the chapter is the cause of the effect, the essay on coaches.” Tom Conley, “The Essays and the New World,” in Ullrich Langer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 86. 24 25

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to estrenuement, so sneezing is also implicated in the digestive metaphors. And the next part of the essay is precisely about digestion or its failure: the “soulesvement de l’estomac [vomiting from the stomach]” (899/1018), the puking that occurs in sea travel. Although Montaigne discusses Plutarch’s etiology of seasickness, this passage fits in very well with the imperial expansion to the West by sea that this essay and “Des cannibales” address. The coches of the title and the ships of conquest are connected in that both are vehicles in often unsteady motion. Another passage, complete with references to the Roman empire, sea travel, vomiting, and the arène that “Des cannibales” has marked as the site and means of conquest, addresses the “spectacles” in imperial Rome: C’estoit … une belle chose, d’aller faire apporter et planter en la place aus arenes une grande quantité de gros arbres, tous branchus et tous verts, representans une grande forest ombrageuse, despartie en belle symmetrie, et, le premier plan du jour, jetter là dedans mille austruches, mille cerfs, mille sangliers et mille dains, les abandonnant à piller au peuple; le lendemain, faire assommer en sa presence cent gros lions, cent leopards, et trois cent ours, et, pour le troisiesme jour, faire combatre à outrance trois cens pairs de gladiateurs, comme fit l’Empereur Probus. (905; my emphasis) [[T]here was beauty in providing a great quantity of mature trees, with thick green branches, and in planting them beautifully and symmetrically in the arena to make a great shady forest, and then, on the first day, in releasing within it a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand wild boars and a thousand deer and in handing it over to the populace to pillage; then, on the following day, in killing them off before them a hundred full-grown lions, a hundred leopards and three hundred bears; then, on the third day, in having three hundred pairs of gladiators fight to the finish, as did the Emperor Probus.] (1025; my emphasis)

In the arena or sandy site, all of these plants and animals are brought together as a microcosm of the empire. The repetition of mille (“a thousand”) emphasizes the geographical extension of the empire, mile after mile. Mille resonates with “piller [pillage],” which in turn connects with “peuple,” who will piller in this simulacrum of the procedures of empire—they will do what imperial conquest effectively does. Just as antiquity can be apprehended in modernity only by way of a simulacrum, imperial power is propagated, over both the people in the metropolis and the distant lands constitutive of the empire, through the image this microcosm offers. And the movement is from animals who pose no threat to the people, to violent animals, to the gladiators, whose combat is a simulacrum of the cruel bloodiness of conquest. The empire wouldn’t exist as such, wouldn’t be available to view and cognition, without such a simulacrum in the sand or arena of conquest. It was a pleasure to see, continues Montaigne, … la place du fons, où les jeux se jouoyent, la faire premierement, par art, entr’ouvrir et fendre en crevasses representant des antres qui vomissoint les bestes destinées au spectacle; et puis secondement l’innonder d’une mer profonde, qui

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charrioit force monstres marins, chargée de vaisseaux armez, à representer une bataille navale; et tiercement, l’aplanir et assecher de nouveau pour le combat des gladiateurs; et pour la quatriesme façon, la sabler de vermillon et de storax, au lieu d’arene, pour y dresser un festin solemne à tout ce nombre infiny de peuple: le dernier acte d’un seul jour … (906; my emphasis) [… the base of the arena where the games took place dug up and divided into caverns representing lairs which spewed forth the animals destined for the spectacle; subsequently to flood it with a deep sea of water, sweeping along many a sea-monster and bearing armed warships to enact a naval engagement; then, thirdly, to flatten it and drain it out afresh for the gladiatorial combats; and then, for the fourth act, to strew it, not with sand but with vermilion and aromatic resin in order to prepare upon it a formal banquet for that infinite crowd of people — the final scene on one single day!] (1026; my emphasis)

The passage links vomir, sable, and arene in ways that continue and allegorize the passage with the same words from “Des cannibales.” In this spectacle or simulacrum of imperial conquering, the first creatures that represent and accomplish the conquest of this “place aus arenes,” this sandy place, the arena, are vomited out of the sand and onto the sand. They are immediately followed by the deployment of other instruments and metonymies of conquest, armed ships performing the theatrical simulacrum of a naval battle on water that is now covering the sand, as water does in the opening of “Des cannibales.” These ships are accompanied by “monstres”—a word that Montaigne will repeat in “Des coches” when describing an early encounter between Europeans and Amerindians. Then the gladiators follow, making a spectacle of armed combat and shedding real blood onto the sand. And the fourth and last act of this play involves strewing or sanding (“sabler”) the arena with substances other than sand: vermillion and storax, red and brown to cover and spectacularize the wet and dried blood in the sand. In this site and sight of violence and bloodshed, sand is again part and parcel of the simulacrum of conquest. And the conquest itself can’t be effective without its simulacrum. As though to leave it unmistakable that this description allegorizes conquest through a spectacle that itself allegorizes conquest, Montaigne once again refers to conquest as puking, with “un grand navire [a great ship]” that, “apres avoir vomy de son ventre quatre ou cinq cens bestes à combat, se resserroit et s’esvanouissoit, sans ayde [it … spewed forth from its belly four or five hundred beasts of combat, reassembled itself unaided and vanished from sight]” (906/1026). Although in the sixteenth century vomir also carries the meaning of “sending forth,” Montaigne assures a link to its principal meaning by mentioning the “ventre” of the ship. In this passage Montaigne uses arene in both its senses, further underscoring the linkage of sand and imperial conquest. This ventre is linked to the vent that both escapes from a ventre, from either end of its tract, and that drives the ship across the sea so that it may attempt to fill its ventre in conquest. The ship “s’esvanoussissait,” vanished, left emptiness or vanity behind it, nothing but the simulated image of domination.

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At the end of this lengthy description of imperial Roman spectacles that seems almost laudatory, Montaigne suddenly changes tone: “S’il y a quelque chose qui soit excusable en tels excez, c’est où l’invention et la nouveauté fournit d’admiration, non pas la despence [If anything can justify such excesses, it is the cases where the amazement was caused not by the expense but by the originality and ingenuity]” (907/1027). And he refers to this method of maintaining order in the empire, both at home and in the conquered lands, as “vanitez” (907/1027)—empty things, which recall vent, farting, and the empty puking that is related to farting at the beginning of the essay, burping. Such bodily winds point to the lesson of the allegories of both “Des cannibales” and “Des coches.” Montaigne offers all manner of illustration of this lesson throughout the Essais. Here he announces it explicitly: Je crains que nostre connaissance soit foible en tous sens, nous ne voyons ny gueres loin, ny gueres arriere; elle embrasse peu et vit peu, courte et en estandue de temps et en estandue de matiere … (907) [I am afraid that our knowledge is in every sense weak; we cannot see very far ahead nor very far behind; it grasps little, lives little, skimped in terms of both time and matter.] (1027)

Again, Montaigne is engaging in epistemological considerations: he is examining the temporal and spatial limits of Western cognition, which in its imperial dreams would like to achieve its ends without bound; he echoes the statement from “Des cannibales” that “Nous embrassons tout, mais nous n’étreignons que du vent [We grasp at everything but clasp at nothing but wind]” (203/229). In these characterizations, historical time offers no continuity of understanding or intellect; geological time only emphasizes the utter disparity between one place and another, and that within the same place over a long period. The project of the Essais involves the projection of a critical utopian space, an imagined geographical site in which the terms of these disparities may be grasped together. From this imaginary location, one may look back toward the locality from which one’s own point of view originates and reflect on its limits, interests, and biases. Inventions of Conquest To minimize the global significance of Western dreaming, Montaigne writes, “Nous nous escriïons de l’invention de nostre artillerie, de nostre impression; d’autres hommes, un autre bout du monde à la Chine, en jouyssait mille ans auparavant [When we our artillery and printing were invented we clamored about miracles: yet at the other end of the world in China men had been enjoying them over a thousand years earlier]” (908/1028). Montaigne here notes the twin engines of translatio imperii and translatio studii in modernity—again, unlike many humanists who precede him, he sees the two as operating in tandem. Rabelais, for example, invokes the same commonplace of Renaissance progress: “Les impressions sont elegantes

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et correctes en usance, qui ont esté inventé de mon eage par inspiration divine, comme à contrefil l’artillerie par suggestion diabolicque [Truly elegant and correct printings are now customary, which were invented in my time by divine inspiration, as was conversely, artillery by diabolic suggestion].”28 Projecting a critical utopia by stepping outside the frustrations of Western progress into another time and place, another selfe—“d’autres hommes, un autre bout du monde à la Chine, en jouyssait mille ans auparavant [at the other end of the world in China men had been enjoying them over a thousand years earlier]”—so as to judge of the West with circumspection, Montaigne finds the latter reduced to nothing. China is a part of the world to which the West has as yet never been able to lay claim; a thousand years earlier the Roman Empire had fallen into ruin and anything like the continuation of the West was yet to occur. The modernity that these inventions signal can hardly indicate progress, as their praise is but a reminder that “nostre cognoissance … embrasse peu et vit peu [our knowledge … grasps little, lives little].” Through stunning polysemy, Montaigne accomplishes the strict coupling of artillery and printing in the following passage. His first mention of the New World is at almost the exact midpoint of the essay and ostensibly a continuation of his announced lesson. Here he also repeats the negative characterization of this still largely unknown world that belongs to the tradition of utopian narratives—but in notably redirecting this tradition toward a critical orientation: Nostre monde vient d’en trouver un autre (et qui nous respond si c’est le dernier de ses freres, puis que les Daemons, les Sybilles et nous, nous l’avons ignoré cettuyci jusqu’asture?) non moins grand, plain et membru que luy, toutefois si nouveau et si enfant qu’on luy aprend encore son a, b, c: il n’y a pas cinquante ans qu’il ne sçavoit ny lettres, ny pois, ny mesure, ny vestements, ny bleds, ny vignes. (908) [Our world has just discovered another one: and who will answer for its being the last of its brothers, since up till now its existence was unknown to the daemons, to the Sybils, and to ourselves? It is no less big and full and solid than our own; its limbs are as well developed: yet it is so new, such a child, that we are still 28 François Rabelais, Pantagruel, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 243–4; Rabelais, Pantagruel, in The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 160. Timothy Hampton, in Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), has astutely observed that Montaigne omits one of the three terms of this topos of progress and expansion, that of the compass (202–3). Montaigne underscores the omission, Hampton signals, by citing Lucretius twice right after commenting on the topos, “the same author whose shipwreck allegory opens the third book” (203); the second citation concerns advances in navigation. The compass, then, is “the evidence that questions [Montaigne’s] own questioning of the greatness of his age. Its hidden presence functions as a kind of crossroads where diachronic binaries (ancients versus moderns) intersect with synchronic binaries (Europeans versus Americans)” (203). Cf. also Timothy Hampton, “The Subject of America: History and Alterity in Montaigne’s ‘Des coches,’” The Romanic Review 88.2 (1997): 204.

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teaching it its ABC; a mere fifty years ago it knew nothing of writing, weights and measures, clothing, any sort of corn or wine.] (1029)

The polysemy is in the homonymy of “a, b, c” and abaissé—brought down, knocked down, demoted, abased, subjguated.29 In the attempts to teach Amerindians alphabetic, European languages, to teach them to write (since, in Montaigne’s irony, they didn’t have letters fifty years ago), to impose European writing on them and at the same time to write of them or on them, they are knocked down and subjugated.30 As the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas are brought into the European dream of expansion—reduced to the European system of writing and subsumed in the translatio studii that is one with translatio imperii—it becomes evident that artillery and the printing press amount to the same invention. This invention has the purpose of violent wish-fulfillment, which, even as Montaigne announces it, he also undermines. Although in “Des cannibales” he has provided the known geography of America, indicating that it either borders or comes close to Asia and the poles (204/230), his comments suggest the dual, contradictory wish-fulfillment of an anxiety dream,31 in this case the two wishes that the West conquer the entire world and that it never run out of worlds to conquer. He invokes daimons and Sibyls, predictors of the future and dream messengers who have failed “us,” in order to augment the anxiety. If the other worlds are inexhaustible to Western knowledge, the West itself is then reduced to one among many, likely subordinate to another world as it wishes that the New World were subordinate to it. Hence the very procedure of its dreams of conquest necessitates an end to that dreaming, in that against an anxiety dream the sleeper’s defense is to wake up.32 This awakening is not, however, that of an individual, but rather involves the paralysis of the cultural process of imagining conquest. This other world is “si nouveau et si enfant qu’on luy apprend son a, b, c [so new, such a child, that we are still teaching it its ABC].” Montaigne plays on the descriptive and normative senses of the designation “nouveau monde” and makes no neat decision between the two. In addition to the sense of “newly found,” he attributes a temporal newness to this world, owing to the proximity of the indigenous inhabitants to commonplace European notions of a natural state. He also suggests that this world is “nouveau” because of its newness to a European perspective, since its discovery was unforeseen as long ago as antiquity. I owe this insight to Tom Conley: The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 157. 30 Cf. Conley, Self, 276. 31 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 372–4. 32 Cf. ibid., Freud’s insight is far from original, and has a clear antecedent in the Renaissance. Michael Screech cites Rabelais to support the claim that the learned regarded an arousal dream as “boding ill.” Screech, in Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 322n14. See above, 60. 29

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And this new world is also “enfant,” both a child and infans, unspeaking, since its inhabitants have little to no voice in the European cognition and language whose efficacy Montaigne is questioning. The project of empire is yet another “institution des enfants”; in this case the institution or education involves the erasure of the specificity of these Amerindian enfants. At the same time, though, in their proximity to a commonplace of nature, the inhabitants are like the ancients. But they are more ancient than the ancients: the historical time of translatio imperii and translatio studii is sabotaged, for these newly encountered peoples stand quite outside its progression. Geological time also finds itself shattered into multiple components that are at an utter distance from each other; geological time has no progressive effect, has not brought the West to a valuable point of global culmination. Again Montaigne refers to antiquity to make this point: Si nous concluons bien de nostre fin, et ce poëte [Lucretius] de la jeunesse de son siecle, cet autre monde ne faira qu’entrer en lumiere quand le nostre en soritra. L’univers tombera en paralisie; l’un membre sera perclus, l’autre en vigueur. (908–9) [If we are right to conclude that our end is nigh, and that poet [Lucretius] is right that his world is young, then that other world will only be emerging into light when ours is leaving it. The world will be struck with the palsy: one of its limbs will be paralyzed while the other is fully vigorous …] (1029)

The New World will be reaching its own version of antiquity when the Old World arrives at second childhood.33 Textualizing Alterities Montaigne isn’t exempting himself from the movement of subjugating the Amerindians to his writing or the violence of translatio. As I have mentioned, in both “Des cannibales” and “Des coches” he engages in writing a fantasy version of the New World that is certainly not its reality, that in fact obscures this reality. A number of commentators leaped on this fact in the 1990s, in my view wrongly emphasizing Montaigne’s intellectual complicity in the colonial enterprise through his avoidance of an examination of the specificity of the radical other; certain critics granted that such a task, at least in the sixteenth century, was largely if

33 Cf. Fumaroli, 26: “Montaigne’s savages are ancients who are more ancient than the Old World, for they are still closer to the state of nature than the distant European ancestors. This praise has nonetheless nothing in common with the idyllic, elegiac nostalgia that defines the pastoral genre from Sannazar to de Montemayor. Montaigne’s America is not Arcadia. The praise Montaigne gives to American aborigines does not attribute to them an ideal innocence, but rather a plenitude of simple, high, and strong humanity.” (My translation.)

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not entirely impossible.34 But as usual, Montaigne is working in two directions at once: while he is building the integrity of his discourse on the otherness of the Amerindians, he is plunging himself into this otherness in order to disallow for an integral text. In the cracks and interstices of “Des cannibales” and “Des coches,” in their discontinuities and partial affirmations, the cannibal is indicated. The Essais thereby produce a utopian space of cognition in which the other may be conceived—at first as only a gap in the totality of European knowledge, but nonetheless as the beginning of a new knowledge. I have suggested that this procedure involves allegorization: the ostensible account is this dream version of the New World, and what is allegorized is the other who doesn’t speak in the dominating language except through the alteration of signification that occurs in allegory. Tzvetan Todorov states, concerning the negative characterization of this projected utopia cited above from “Des cannibales,” and by extension its repetition in “Des coches,” “Montaigne follows in fact a rhetorical topos [according to which] the golden age is … evoked in negative terms.” The reason Todorov provides, however, only partially explains Montaigne’s failure to do so: “precisely because it is only the reverse description of our reality.”35 Rather, Montaigne deploys this topos in order to invert it, to show the inadequacies of a language that presents itself as fully capable of designating what is new and other to it. Hoffman keenly points out Montaigne’s irony: this description “runs directly counter to the rest of the essay, in which Montaigne takes great pains to demonstrate that the natives have evolved a highly complex civilization.”36 Montaigne’s utopia is a critical one that points to a different kind 34

Cf. Jack I. Abecassis, “‘Des canibales’ et la logique de la représentation de l’altérité chez Montaigne,” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 29–32 (1992–93): 195–205; Sanford Budick, “Crises of Alterity: Cultural Untranslatability and the Experience of Secondary Otherness,” in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds, The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 20; Defaux, Marot, Rabelais, Montaigne and “Un cannibale”; and Tzvetan Todorov, “L’Etre et l’Autre: Montaigne,” trans. Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale French Studies 64 (1983): 113–44. I appreciate the position that Quint takes on these commentaries by way of a response to Defaux: “As helpful as Defaux’s arguments are in demystifying the claims of the essay to an impartial, factual account of the cannibals and their society, his conclusions are unnecessarily drastic. The ideal of an objective or transparent reporting of the practices of an alien culture—just the facts, please—is indeed utopian. There are no ‘facts’ without interpretation, since ‘facts’ are constituted by the language that describes them, in this case the language and cultural codes of the European observer of the New World peoples. But it does not follow that everything gets lost in the translation, that nothing of the cannibals’ culture can get through the interpretative accounts made of it both by the cosmographers and by Montaigne himself, however distorting these accounts may be” (Montaigne, 77–8). 35 Todorov, 122. 36 Hoffman, 208. Terrence Malick, in The New World (New Line Cinema, 2005), borrows Montaigne’s strategy by having John Smith (Colin Farrell) speak, in off-image monologue, Montaigne’s negative characterization of the Amerindians while he is living with them: “The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have

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of knowledge: this knowledge involves forebearance, recognizing its own limits, such that it may begin to apprehend radical alterity in the latter’s specificity. In a highly striking passage in “Des coches,” Montaigne presents the imagined point of view of the Amerindians, and thereby raises the possibility of conceiving European conquest from outside Europe. He vividly develops the critical utopian function of the Essais. He does so through negative characterization of the invading troops, staging a scarcity of language for describing them. From the point of view he generates in this exercise, Montaigne demonstrates that in order to impose their power on the Amerindians, the invaders must produce a theatrical image or simulacrum of themselves. Without such an image, they would have no success: “pour ceux qui les ont subjuguez, qu’ils ostent les ruses et batelages dequoy ils se sont servis à les piper [(A)s regards those men who subjugated them, were you to take away from them the trickery and sleight-of-hand which they used to deceive them]” (909/1030). This simulacrum is one that imposes itself on reality, presenting itself as truth and thereby doing violence to reality. In this account, the reaction of the Indians involves seeing a spectacle, surprising because of its indescribability. It is even more surprising, as Montaigne indicates through polysemy, by virtue of being made mainly for show. He writes of … le juste estonnement qu’aportoit à ces nations là de voir arriver si inopinéement des gens barbus, divers en langage, religion, en forme et en contenance, d’un endroict du monde si esloigné et où ils n’avoyent jamais imaginé qu’il y eust habitation quelconque, montez sur des grands monstres incogneuz … (909) [… the justified ecstasy of amazement which struck those peoples at the sight of the totally unexpected landing of bearded men, differing from them in language, religion, build, and facial features, coming from a world so remote and from regions in which they had never even dreamed that there were any humans dwelling whatsoever; men mounted on big unknown monsters …] (1030)

In his utopian projection into the perspective of the Amerindians, Montaigne indicates a viewpoint in which the striking strangeness of the attackers is their principal weapon. “Montez [mounted]” resonates with “monstres,” and both of them are close to the French montre, an alternate spelling of which is monstre; the two words stem from the Latin monstrum, “something shown,” “portent”— a spectacular image. Even the force of artillery lies principally in the show it puts never been heard” (this is Malick’s own translation/imitation of Montaigne). In the sequence in which this monologue occurs, Powhattan’s people reveal themselves through visual and verbal signs to be entirely capable of deceit, since they plan to use Smith to protect and advance their own interests against the British. They are also capable of forgiveness, which they show by releasing him. Malick borrows from Montaigne’s rhetorical strategy: Smith, trying to be firm in his commonplaces, all the more underscores their disruption through experience. A Heideggerian phenomenologist by training, Malick has succeeded in making one of the few movies in the Euro-American tradition that explores in detail the logic of the colonial apprehension of alterity.

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on: “adjoustez y les foudres et tonnerres de nos pieces et harquebouses [to which add the lightning flashes of our cannons, the thundering of our harquebuses]” (909/1030). The European conquests would never have happened, and empire never extended, without this extreme capacity to project an image of might: “contez, dis-je, aux conquerans cette disparité, vous leur ostez toute l’occasion de tant de victoires [remove (I say) from the Conquistadores such advantages and you strip them of what made so many victories possible]” (910/1030).37 Other Cannibals This is not simply a case of speaking or standing in for the other, but rather of recognizing a basic affinity with the other so as to empathize with him or her, without an initial comprehension. To a degree, the European selfe, in contact with signs related to the other, confronts it own limits and begins the process of becoming the other. The selfe engages in a process wherein he or she recognizes the condition of radical alterity, and then the mutual radical alterity between sameness and difference—the sameness of reciprocal difference, as it were. When the category of becoming is introduced,38 the notion of the being of the selfe and 37 Conley has made among the most engaging remarks on this passage: Graphic Unconscious, 155, and “New World,” 88. 38 Cf. A similar movement away from dominant hierarchy in Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 232–309. Rather than exploiting a relationship between Man and two of his others, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate that the very fact that woman and animal have been made other reveals the counterfeit nature of the central position Man has claimed: he has done so by granting himself an essence in opposition to the privation of his others. Becoming then emerges from the restrictions of essence or being: “Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming … does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing’” (239). Here the authors elaborate the Nietzschean proposal that what philosophy has taken for being is a disguised, arrested, and crippled version of becoming. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), §1062: “If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were in any way capable of pausing and becoming fixed, of ‘being,’ if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed for even a moment this capability of ‘being,’ then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all ‘spirit.’ The fact of ‘spirit’ as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.” Montaigne apprises himself well of becoming, and of the difficulty that his writing poses to its capture as being, when he writes in “Du repentir [On Repenting]” (3.2), “Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage: non un passage d’aage en autre, ou, comme dit le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jour, de minute en minute [I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage

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the being of the other may be undone. Zahi Zalloua has criticized the tendency to see a persistence of the binary opposition of sameness and difference in Montaigne. In connection with “De l’amitié” and “Des cannibales” Zalloua writes, “Montaigne’s portraying of the other reveals indeed that sameness and difference are precisely not exclusive.”39 Although Jack I. Abecassis has stated in reference to Montaigne’s writing selfe, “In order to state the other, I must cannibalize him,”40 Montaigne’s textual incorporation of signs of the cannibal other is precisely not a cannibalization. The European procedures of apprehending the cannibal other that Montaigne addresses do indeed amount to cultural cannibalism; but in his own practice the selfe recognizes the other as other and also as another selfe. Montaigne works against the European cultural cannibalism that produces a representation of the Amerindians for the purpose of devouring them in conquest. In Montaigne’s account, the selfe both distances itself from and approaches the other, and the other engages in reciprocal motion. Rather than accept the translatio studii that, in colonial expansion, is enlisted as the companion of translatio imperii, Montaigne offers this alteration of it: to take a language that would otherwise silence those who are other to it, and to create a type of arrangement of its signs, the essay, in which the other may begin to find the capacity to make itself known.41 The West, unable to find its firm beginnings, can’t firmly extend and propagate itself; facing America, it must witness the end of its dreaming and begin to recognize the limits of its knowledge. America, then, occupies a singular location in Montaigne’s epistemology. It also offers the space of exteriority with respect to European culture into which Montaigne may project his critical utopia and promote such epistemological reflections.

from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute]” (805/908). From one moment to the next, in Montaigne’s apprehension of the world, there is no unification of being; concomitantly, the arc of historical and geological time offers no integrity to civilization, “Man,” or the West. 39 Zalloua, “Sameness,” 188. The rest of the paragraph is worth quoting: “To be sure, Montaigne’s essaying of the other is conditioned by, or must pass through, a process of internalization: the author of the Essais makes the other’s consciousness, text, or cultural voice his own. This process, however, should not hastily be read as a violent appropriation, the literary expression of a narcissistic self. On the contrary, Montaigne’s essays reveal a profound sensibility to the other’s alterity, an ethical sensibility enacted in language by means of a double movement: first, the digestion of alterity through the repetition of humanist topoi, and second, the recognition of difference, or more correctly stated, the re-inscription of difference through creative imitation and sublime paradoxes.” 40 Abecassis, 204. (My translation.) 41 For a somewhat different perspective on Montaigne’s critique of translatio studii in “Des coches,” cf. Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in Budick and Iser, eds, The Translatability of Cultures, 65–6.

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PART 4 Shakespeare

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Chapter 10

The Sonnets and Time Shakespeare and the Renaissance Sonnet This chapter is a follow-up to a 1983 study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A. Kent Hieatt very effectively demonstrated the relation between the Sonnets and Spenser’s translation of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome [Antiquities of Rome], addressing in particular the phrasing attendant on the theme of time.1 It is striking that for more than 25 years there has been little follow-up on this article, since it provides very engaging suggestions for comparative Renaissance studies.2 Many have been aware that Spenser was influenced by Du Bellay and Shakespeare in turn by Spenser. But the implications of Shakespeare’s heavy borrowing from a sonnet sequence frequently regarded as of secondary importance merit close attention. It’s true that a strong scholarly focus on translation as a site of literary production is fairly recent; this delay is probably due to the investment, particularly in early modern studies, in notions of national unity and integrity. The questioning of such concepts becomes more and more inevitable in an increasingly global institutional situation. But to give short shrift to a finding that plainly exposes a close intertextual relationship and addresses problems of literary imitation is to overlook a singularly important aspect of how the Sonnets comment on the capacity of poetic language, their own included, to generate meaning. It is not only the case that meaning is strongly conditioned by intertextual relations, but also, as I have shown in Chapters 1–6, that it is made possible by the placement of language in time. By incorporating Spenser’s phrasing on time from Ruines of Rome in a sequence that addresses the relationship of poetry and time, Shakspeare does no less than raise the vast question of the nature of poetic signification. He does so in the wake of both Spenser and Du Bellay, engaging in his inquiry through a dramatization of the mobility of poetic signifiers from context to context.

A. Kent Hieatt, “The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Spenser’s Ruines of Rome: by Bellay,” PMLA 98.5 (1983): 800–814. 2 Both Gary Smidgall and Anne Lake Prescott wrote letters to the editor suggesting amendments to Hieatt’s findings, addressing other places in English Renaissance verse where some phrases related to time occur: Gary Smidgall and A. Kent Hieatt, “Shakespeare and Spenser,” PMLA 99.2 (1984): 244–5; Anne Lake Prescott and A. Kent Hieatt, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” PMLA 100.5 (1985): 820–22. These observations don’t affect the lineage that Hieatt discerns, other than to question its linearity—which Hieatt never insists on. In his replies to Smidgall and Prescott, Hieatt is right to signal that the points they raise don’t alter his thesis. 1

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The Theme of Time One observer has remarked, “In Shakespeare’s Sonnets time has structural and emotional functions that make it the dominant and most persistent of all the issues the speaker has on his mind. As such it has drawn the attention of almost every reader and crticic.”3 I distinguish my approach in that I treat time not merely as a theme contained in the Sonnets, but also as implicating the latter in the temporality of the sonnet tradition with which it has an evident intertextual relationship.4 That is, I don’t consider the theme of time as primarily an expression of Shakespeare’s ideas; I view it rather as necessitated by the situation of the sonnet as a form and in relation to its tradition. As such, the Sonnets not only negotiate historically specific discourses concerning time, but also situate themselves in a temporal relationship with the material instantiations of these discourses. That is not to say that there is not much valuable material for my treatment of time in the Sonnets in the existing commentaries that address time mainly as a theme—I will draw enthusiastically on a number of them. In the passage I just quoted, the phrase concerning what “the speaker has on his mind” stands out: it as though Shakespeare and his speaker are empirical givens, and that they have certain ideas on their mind for the principal reason that they are free-thinking, grounded subjects.5 Many studies tend to regard Shakespeare as transcendent authorial subject, not having significantly altered the fundamental assumptions in a work on Shakespeare’s philosophy of time from nearly 40 years ago, Frederick Turner’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Time. Turner writes, “If … we are to pursue Shakespeare’s ideas about time, we must do it largely through the images he uses.”6 Although Turner is entirely correct that Shakespeare’s ideas are accessible mainly through the language he uses, the implication of this wording is that these ideas still do subsist somewhere other than in their crystallization in language, though they are “largely” available through the latter. Ideas still earn priority over language in that they are held to oversee the execution of the language. In this perspective these ideas are available only through a classical allegorical interpretation that presents the ideas as essence and the language as appearance. What I wish to pursue, in contrast, is the temporal allegorization of 3 Robert L. Montgomery, “The Present Tense: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Menaces of Time,” Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999): 147. 4 Dympna Callaghan goes well beyond the traditional treatment of time as a theme in the Sonnets, detailing the relationship of this theme to historically specific notions of time and the material practices involved in writing sonnets under the constraint of time: “Confounded by Winter: Speeding Time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Michael Schoenfeldt, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 104–18. 5 Of course, Fineman’s monumental work on Shakespeare and subjectivity is of immense value to my approach. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 6 Frederick Turner, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 7.

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the language of the Sonnets: their meaning is produced only in the dynamic of their motion, and cannot be separated from a close consideration of their langauge, although it is not identical to the latter. Of course, many studies in the last 30 years or so have engaged philosophical texts and ideas, and have also very effectively placed Shakespeare in the context of Renaissance discursive practices. But the absence in criticism of the Sonnets of work on time as a constitutive condition of poetry,7 and on the realm in which poetic signification takes place, is telling with regard to the persistent status of Shakespeare as canonical author. It is as though criticism has been largely unable to place this status in question, or to examine just what makes a canon and authors such as Shakespeare in their continued readability possible. Although it would be silly to make general claims as to what renders a particular author durable and “great”—and simply to legitimize the question-resistant position that Shakespeare holds—it is a significant oversight not to examine Shakespeare’s placement of his writing with respect to the temporality of poetry. This is especially the case since the most widely discussed sequence of poems in English addresses the possibility of its own durability, and does so by borrowing its phrasing on the temporality of this durability from poems on time. In raising the question of time, the very purpose of these poems has to do with the possibility of a durable canon of poetry in English. I should add that the theme of time in the Sonnets is not consistent—there are some places where Shakespeare embraces the durability of love, poetry, or both against the ravages of time, and other places where he calls it very much into doubt. Inasmuch as durability would entail consistency, and a lack of mutability on both the diachronic and the synchronic axes, here I privilege the skeptical sonnets as raising questions concerning the entire enterprise of eternizing poetry. Toward the end of this chapter I will return to the point of Shakespeare’s inconsistency. It is of vital importance to place Shakespeare’s work in dialogue with other texts and discursive practices of the early modern era—as New Historicism has done, more than any other critical practice. My concern has more to do with the relationship of the Sonnets to other poetic texts, even other sequences of sonnets. Since I am raising the question of time, my interest is in considering the conditions that foster the production and transmission of a literary canon and the high-canonical status of an author such as Shakespeare. This consideration necessarily bears on the contemporary institutionality of literary studies: it involves the relationship of our present to the past, approaching these two as mutually constitutive. My starting point is, of course, Hieatt’s observations on the language of time in Shakespeare as borrowed from Spenser. In addition to the poems of Spenser and Du Bellay that 7 R.L. Kesler examines the temporality of the sonnet form in order to pursue a broader discussion of the relationship between history and form. But he omits any consideration of the connections between this temporality and the theme of time that so distinctly marks a number of the early modern sonnet sequences that he examines: “Formalism and the Problem of History,” in Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 177–93.

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Hieatt notes as Shakespeare’s sources, I will look at a few others that address the theme of the temporality of poetry that Shakespeare’s Sonnets take up. Timely Monuments Of the sonnets that specifically mention time, I will address in detail three that raise the question of poetry’s durability—in the order of my text, 55, 17, and 60—with brief comments on a few others, beginning with those which also raise this question. Sonnet 55 most evidently repeats both the wording and the thematic of Spenser and Du Bellay:8 “Not marble, nor the guilded monuments,/Of Princes shall out-live this powrefull rime” (ll. 1–2).9 Here, toward the middle of his sequence, Shakespeare places a repetition of a number of Du Bellay’s and Spenser’s sonnets—most notably Antiquitez 32, which is translated/imitated as Ruines 32. This is the last in Du Bellay’s sequence and the penultimate in Spenser’s, just before the latter’s “Envoy.” Du Bellay’s poem voices the wish that poetry might find some version of eternity in a context that calls the possibility seriously into doubt, to the point of negating it in the ruin that the poetry laments. Du Bellay thereby anticipates the cycles of ruin that the sonnets of the Songe describe. In sonnet 32 of the Antiquitez, Du Bellay provides a straightforward reason for this negation: Si sous le ciel fust quelque eternité, Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire, Non en papier, mais en marbre & porphyre, Eussent gardé leur vive antiquité. [Were there any eternity under heaven, the ancient monuments of which I have made you speak would have survived intact not on paper but in marble and porphyry.]10 Hieatt, 807: “In the eternity topos of Sonnets 55, ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments,’ Shakespeare is close to Ruines at a number of points beyond the verbal repetitions and the inversion of the theme; similarly, Ruines 32 contains material paralleled elsewhere in Sonnets. Shakespeare’s references in Sonnets 55 to stone structures affected by age—the unswept stone, the overturned statues, and the uprooted masonry—relate to what amounts to a massive, shared subtheme in the two sequences.” 9 Here and throughout I depend on Stephen Booth’s indispensable edition of the sonnets: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). I will refer to each sonnet by number. Since Shakespeare’s spelling is inseparable from the understanding of his texts, I will preserve the spelling of the 1609 Quarto, which Booth provides on facing text pages in facsimile. I make exceptions for certain period conventions, such as appropriately using v for u and s instead of ſ. I do this because often enough, a certain spelling has an effect on the meaning of the text. Another reason is that the differences in spelling are the best reminder of the temporal distance that separates these early modern texts from the present. 10 Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M.A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 306, ll. 4–8; Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The 8

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If anything could last, it would be marble and porphyry. Their failure to last is the object of the staged mourning of the Antiquitez, the sonnets of which end up celebrating the destruction of Rome as making possible their own coming into existence. As for the durability of these verses—which have already outlasted Roman monuments of both stone and paper—it will convey none other than the durability of the poet writing them: Ne laisse pas toutefois de sonner Luth, qu’Apollon m’a bien daigné donner: Car si le temps ta gloire ne desrobbe, Vanter te peuls, quelque bas que tu sois, D’avoir chanté le premier des François, L’antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe. (ll. 9–14) [Do not for all that cease playing, lute, which Apollo has deigned to give me, for if time does not steal away your glory. You can boast, however lowly you are, that you have sung, first among the French, the ancient honor of the long-robed people.]

By the end of the Antiquitez the Roman people, their stone monuments, and their verse are quite dead, persisting as a simulacrum11 in this sonnet sequence and serving as a vehicle for the durability of this verse and their author. But the very fact that the Antiquitez sound the death knell of Rome announces an anticipation of their own demise—their durability will consist in their becoming a simulacrum. They do so by way of Spenser, who replaces “les François” with “thy Nation,”12 cheating in his translation enough to move the durability across the Channel to England and himself (see above, 89–90). This eternizing is further taken up in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55, in a gesture that also announces the death of its antecedents in Du Bellay and Spenser. A first reading of Sonnet 55 might suggest a fairly straightforward rendition of the Horatian topos of the eternity of poetic monuments, an answer to Du Bellay and Spenser’s questioning, and a transformation of the doubt with which Du Bellay answers his own questions by following them with the Songe (see above, 60–61). However, as with all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, complications emerge with just a little proximity to the text. In the first place, to define the temporality of the poem

Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language,” trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 278. I will henceforth cite both the original and the translation of the Antiquitez in the body of the text by sonnet number; translation occasionally altered. 11 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14. 12 Edmund Spenser, Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 404, l. 13. Henceforth cited in the body of the text by sonnet number.

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by writing the word time in imitation of Spenser and Du Bellay,13 in such a way as to place them in the past, is already to raise a question concerning the durability of poetry in time. Poems written against the ravages of time both persist and are ruined in the subsequent poems that rewrite them, as this one does. In the second place, Shakespeare’s alteration of the negativity of Du Bellay’s phrasing is not simply an inversion of it; the result isn’t a mere affirmation. Du Bellay writes of “Les monuments que je vous ay fait dire,/Non en papier, mais en marbre & porphyre”; and Spenser translates this phrase closely as “These moniments, which not in paper writ,/But in Porphyre and Marble doo appeare” (ll. 6–7, for both poems). Shakespeare writes the following words: Not marble, nor the guilded monuments, Of Princes shall out-live this powrefull rime But you shall shine more bright in these contents Then unswept stone, besmeer d with sluttish time. (ll. 1–4)

Although even in the present day one might be tempted to speak of poetry as having an inherent durability, following endless readings of Shakespeare to that effect,14 a glance at this poem and others on the same theme in the Sonnets indicates a strong ambiguity in such a notion of poetry. As soon as Shakespeare states that “this powerfull rime” will live at least as long as monuments of stone, it becomes evident that not just any poem will do so: at issue is a poem about “you,” the young man of most of the sonnets. And the young man is what will “shine more bright in these contents”: so the question arises as to whether the young man or the poem on its own, representative of the young man, is doing the shining. In any case, the two are bound up with each other, and there doesn’t seem to be any power inherent in poetry at all that makes it durable, according to this sonnet. It seems rather to be sheer erotic force that effects durability, the same desire for continuity that drives physical reproduction. Moreover, the word “contents,” as Stephen Booth signals, 13 Although Hieatt devotes fair space to Sonnet 55, he doesn’t note the phrasing borrowed from Spenser and hence Du Bellay. But in the framework of his article, which concerns itself with the permutations of phrases with the word time in them, there is no need to do so. The phrase in this sonnet is “sluttish time” (Shakespeare, l. 4), which doesn’t have an exact antecedent in Spenser, but which is a wonderful abasement of the idealized Petrarchan female whose beauty is supposed to outlive the ruins of time through the poetry that will make itself eternal by virtue of celebrating her—incidentally, destroying her by becoming her funeral monument. When this sculpted marble female becomes a slut, she might wreak all manner of havoc, even on the hardest, tallest tower—and maybe especially there. 14 Jonathan Hart provides an excellent account of the conflict between the incontrovertible ruining power of time and the poetic wish for eternal monuments: “Conflicting Monuments: Time, Beyond Time, and the Poetics of Shakespeare’s Dramatic and Nondramatic Sonnets,” in Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, eds, In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 177–205.

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suggests the idea of the “poem as receptacle,”15 the monument as a coffin, tomb, and funeral monument. So Shakespeare suggests a very ambiguous eternizing praise, one that is predicated on the death of the young man. If the poem is an image of or vessel bearing the young man, it is an image of death; its durability is hence of questionable value. As this sonnet closely echoes Spenser’s rendition of Du Bellay that I just quoted, one should understand “monuments” as implying “moniments”: this Spenserian pun suggests that a monument has the ambiguous status of an admonishment, a warning of impending doom. The wish for eternity that is expressed in the writing of poetry portends death, a traditional coupling of Eros and Thanatos. The “you” of the poem might also then be allegorically transferred to antecedent poetry, specifically the verses of Spenser and Du Bellay contained in this poem and throughout the Sonnets. In incorporating these two poets, Shakespeare effectively kills them. As I outline it here, the tradition of monumentalizing poetry implies its own death and hence questions its own possibility. That the topos of poetry outlasting stone monuments is attributed principally to Horace, and not even by Hieatt to Du Bellay and Spenser, indicates just how effectively a poetic imitation may displace the very tradition its creative power depends on. Words drift along the currents of time, becoming disconnected from their antecedents and hence from any fixed meaning; these claims of eternity in verse could end up quite empty over time. It is in congress with “sluttish time” that these words become loosened in this fashion—if not “besmeer d,” then somewhat more shaken than the wish for eternity would have it. Or at least, this wish can be carried out only by the transmission through tradition, through subsequent imitations: yes, this poem and “you” will live, but they might do so in slovenly disfiguration, involving an improperly directed libido that doesn’t result in the kind of generation that produces strict continuity. Death in Time What is striking is the ambiguity in the language of this sonnet, which links it to the tradition of the sonnet that it at once draws from and leaves behind, in rigorously imitative fashion. The notion of poetic immortality in this poem is a wish rather than an affirmation. The sonnet is indeed acknowledging its relationship to the lineage of modern poetry and the time that constitutes the latter; it thereby offers commentary on the function of poetry and the conditions of its own existence. The rest of the poem continues both the wish and its undercutting, the latter through a recognition of the operations of poetic transmission. In delineating the durability of poetry, it proposes images of the highly destructive phenomenon of war: When wastefull warre shall Statues over-turne, And broiles to roote out the worke of masonry, 15

Stephen Booth, “Commentary,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 228.

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Not Mars his sword, nor warres quick fire shall burne: The living record of your memory. (ll. 5–8)

Booth points out the ambiguity of lines 7–8.16 As for all writers of the early modern period in Europe, the materiality of writing is inevitable for Shakespeare. Whatever the power of poetic words, as much as one might wish for a transcendent realm of poetry and language, language is written on paper, a “living record,” and hence vulnerable to destruction. The “record of your memory” is “living”: it would seem then to be subject, as the young man very explicitly is, to death. The very procedure by which the poem lives is its death. Booth also signals the repetition of various figurative expressions connected to living—“quick” (l. 7); “Gainst death” (l. 9); “Shall you pace forth” (l. 10); “live,” “dwell” (l. 14)—none of which involve the literal sense. They thereby stress the absence of this sense from the poem and leave readers with the idea of death. “Memory” is memorial or monument and the death they connote. In the third quatrain and the couplet, Shakespeare alludes to Spenser and Du Bellay, the destruction of Rome that for these two signaled the ineluctable mortality of everything, and to the companion piece to Ruines of Rome, The Visions of Bellay, which is Spenser’s translation of the Songe [Dream]. Despite the plainness of Shakespeare’s series of allusions, to my knowledge no other commentator has raised this intertextuality and its importance. Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth, your praise shall stil finde roome, Even in the eyes of all posterity That weare this world out to the ending doome. So til the judgement that your selfe arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers eies. (ll. 9–14)

Since Du Bellay and Spenser so closely connect praise with Rome, it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare does likewise: “roome” is, in effect, an alternate spelling of Rome, and the Elizabethan pronunciation of both words is the same.17 Spenser takes advantage of this homophony in Sonnet 5 of Ruines of Rome, rhyming “Rome” and “tomb,” and then in the next quatrain “entombed” and “enwombed.” Rome is closely connected with death and rebirth: implicit in the sequence of rhymes is the notion of clearing room or space with the destruction of antiquity such that modernity can occupy a place in it. (I examine this notion especially in Chapter 1, but also in the subsequent chapters on Du Bellay and Spenser.) For Shakespeare, if “your praise shall stil finde roome,” it will connect itself with the praise of Rome and hence follow Rome into ruin. It will also, through poetic imitation, be part of the rebirth of poetry in modernity, 16

Ibid., 229. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare puns on Rome and room several times. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: Arden, 1998), 3.1.288, 3.2.164, and 3.2.166. 17

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which in the progression of time is bound to see the same fate. Imitation should here be understood as not just the reworking of antecedent poetry but also the representation of “you,” which necessarily transforms “you”; of course, as I just pointed out, in the context of the Sonnets this “you” is allegorically quite transferable to antecedent poetry. In Sonnet 53, Shakespeare uses the word imitate (l. 6) such that one may easily read it in both senses. My reading of the word roome, with its implications of Rome, antiquity, and destruction, is borne out by the word Shakespeare rhymes with it, doome. This rhyme also brings the sonnet into dialogue with Du Bellay’s Songe [Dream] and Spenser’s translation of it, The Visions of Bellay, as it would be difficult not to accept “the ending doome” as referring to the Last Judgment—especially given the word “judgement” in line 13.18 Although the Last Judgment would normally involve a resurrection, and the second life that poetry is aiming for—just as the text of Sonnet 55 apparently says—one shouldn’t overlook the degree to which Shakespeare here engages Du Bellay and Spenser. The Revelation of the Songe is highly ambiguous, bringing about not the eternity of the Christian apocalypse but rather the cycles of creation and destruction that Du Bellay borrows in a reading of Ecclesiastes. If the poem is not utterly explicit about such cycles, having displaced its principal antecedents so that they have to be unearthed in a reading that amounts to an excavation, it evidently participates in them. Hence, it appears that the young man really dies, in the very procedure of being immortalized in poetry.19 Shakespeare figures time in Sonnet 55 such that it is a constitutive condition of poetry, and not something poetry has any inherent power to overcome.20 Rather, as Shakespeare says at the end of the poem, any overcoming of death will occur in the eyes of the beholders of the young man’s image. That is, second life or immortality depends on “posterity,” which is the life as it subsists in these “eies.” Second life is hence no life at all,21 but rather the activity of those who live subsequently and whatever they do in their view or imitation of the poems of the

18

Booth, 229–30; G. Blakemore Evans, “The Commentary,” in William Shakespeare, The Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 154. 19 Hart underscores the paradoxical nature of the immortalizing power of poetry. On the image of poetry as monument he remarks, “This conceit is bold but becomes more equivocal in the wider context of the Sonnets, where, whatever order, an oscillation, if not a vacillation, occurs in vaunting the power of poetry against time and the potence of the temporal” (190). 20 In connection with Sonnet 65, Hart makes an observation appropriate to all the sonnets about poetry’s resistance to time: “The conceit of the power of verse has its own limits and depends on the very abyss of Time that it labors against” (191). 21 Cf. Fineman, 157: “There is … a kind of mimic, generally visual, correspondence between the poet’s elegiac praise and that which it commemorates, a specular resemblance that is oddly morbid in its iconicity … [The] poet’s ‘living record of your memory’ gloomily memorializes a kind of living death …”

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past that they read.22 Shakespeare says almost exactly that in Sonnet 17, which addresses the continuation of life through sexual reproduction. In this sonnet, the life-giving power of poetry becomes an imitation of erotic activity. The erotic, seductive function of writing sonnets then also takes part in the process. But since producing children for posterity, in order to preserve one’s image, entails the mortality of the person engaging in it, poetry as an imitation of this procedure is also bound up with its own death. Life and the Death of Poetry Sonnet 17 begins with a staged questioning of poetry’s immortalizing function— although in the couplet, curiously, the answer to the rhetorical question becomes highly ambiguous. So the initial question turns out to be, despite its presentation as rhetorical, ambiguously literal: something similar happens when Du Bellay and Spenser pose the question of the durability of verse. This question takes part in one of the many rhetorical transformations and shifts that contribute to a continuing interest in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Who will beleeve my verse in time to come If it were fild with your most high deserts? (ll. 1–2)

In the next line, “Though yet heaven knowes it is but as a tombe” (l. 3), the phrase “time to come” is ingeniously negated by its rhyme, “tombe.” If this poetry is a “tombe,” it can be nothing for “time to come” but the signal that the young man isn’t there. Not only does “tombe” partially anagrammatize “time to come,” but it also connects the pair “come-tombe” with “Ro(o)me” and “doome” from Sonnet 55, and hence to Spenser and Du Bellay’s poetic treatments of poetry and its failure to immortalize. The sonnet continues with a declarative description of poetry’s incapacity to capture life in any way that might preserve it, the “correct” answer to the opening rhetorical question: If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say this Poet lies, Such heavenly touches nere toucht earthly faces. (ll. 5–8)

To write about writing “the beauty of your eyes” is precisely not to write this beauty; rather, the written statement of the wish to write it is the admission of the failure to do so. This is also the case for numbering the graces. Indeed, Shakespeare’s 22 Cf. Hart, 194: “At worst, writing extends life when posterity re-creates the apparently lifeless signs of ink on page.”

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wording contributes to the impression of a failed task, and the failure of the plenary erotic satisfaction that genuine immortality would be. “Fresh numbers” would be both new and lively verses, ostensibly ones that avoid the deadness of cliché.23 The repetition of the word number makes it in its very utterance already a cliché; this preponderance of the word also signals the absence of other words, which would fill the verses involving the task of praise and immortality. The poet can’t accomplish this task. The condition of the sentence defines the poem’s temporality, as it solicits a response from the future. The response is that the poet engages in the activity that the existence of language makes possible and even necessitates, lying. It is inevitable that a system of signs will frequently fail to correspond to its set of referents, and that signifiers and signifieds will have fluid relationships.24 In this case the lie would be in the lack of correspondence between the description of the young man’s beauty and the beauty itself: the gap between sign and referent, as well as its corollary, that between signifier and signified. The absence of the young man to the future will produce a separation between any description of him and his person; and this absence will aggravate the drifting away of signifier from signified, the temporalizing process that constitutes poetic language. The “touches” of the hypothetical poem in which the young man is described are at odds with the truth, since in the repetition of Shakespeare’s phrasing they don’t touch “earthly faces.” Touches that don’t touch are in effect not touches, and are neither rhetorically nor erotically effective. As with the repetition of the word number, this repetition signals the absence of touches from the poem.25 Indeed, there is no direct praise in the poem, but rather talk of direct praise. The condition of the conditional sentence of this quatrain is not met. The response from the future as the poem presents it, then, can’t possibly come; the poem fails to immortalize, and consequently stages its own failure to last. Nothing lies in the future except death and the decrepitude of antiquity. The next stanza indicates as much. The poet knows that time will devour the young man, himself, and his poetry. Of course, the verbs are still in the conditional, and the condition remains unfulfilled.26 Rather than describing the beauty of the young man in temporally effective terms, the poem continues to describe its failure to present such description: So should my papers (yellowed with their age) Be scorn d, like old men of lesse truth then tongue, 23

Booth, 160. Cf. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 7: “Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to tell a lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all. I think that the definition of a ‘theory of the lie’ should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.” 25 Fineman discusses the use of these “ephuistic cognate accusatives” (153). 26 Cf. David Kaula, “In War with Time: Temporal Perspectives in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 3.1 (1963): 49. 24

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The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England And your true rights be termd a Poets rage, And stretched miter of an Antique song. (ll. 9–12)

Poetry, written on paper and not subsisting in some quintessential realm, ages just like flesh, if not as quickly. And like babbling men of advanced age, it is treated as senile, falling into decrepitude and ruin because of its antiquity. Shakespeare alludes to ancient conceptions of poetry with the notion of the “Poets rage,” the state of the poet through whom a divine force speaks, which has little to do with true knowledge of things.27 Shakespeare uses the word rage as a synomym of furor or fury: the latter is also in the opening sonnet of Spenser’s Ruines of Rome, translating Du Bellay’s “fureur.” The phrases are “antique furie” (l. 12) and “antique fureur” (l. 12) respectively. As is the case for Spenser and Du Bellay, in Shakespeare’s sonnet the word antique carries the senses of both “venerable” and “decrepit.”28 And as his two predecessors signal, Shakespeare suggests that these senses converge. Venerable poetry, the poetry of antiquity or of an antiquity, such as Spenser’s sonnet sequences and/or their French antecedents, is also decrepit. It becomes devoid of meaning over time; it is revitalized in the repetition and reworking of modernity, which leaves antiquity behind. The “stretched miter” of this “Antique song” is the extension over time that antecedent poetry undergoes in its continuing repetitions. The “stretched miter,” as Helen Vendler has pointed out, is stretched to the point of anagrammatically implying the two rhyming words of the couplet, time and rime.29 The rhyme, along with the coincidence of these two words in miter, suggests that in Shakespeare’s presentation time is closely related to rhyme, and more broadly to poetry, all of them converging in miter. Indeed, the Greek antecedent of the word rhyme is rhuthmos, from which rhythm also derives. Rhythm is measure or time. Rhyme is another form of rhythm, a repetition that marks the progress to a subsequent line—rhythm or meter has of course to do with the timing of a single line, and with the repetition of that timing. Poetry, then, is the repetition that composes the movement of time. Time occurs in a single line, across a single poem, in a sequence of sonnets through the repetition of a form, 27 The most canonically classical formulation of this idea is in Plato’s Ion. Here Socrates convinces the rhapsode Ion that in reciting Homer and speaking of him, he is possessed by a divine spirit and not speaking of things with true knowledge of them, and that Homer did likewise. Plato, Ion, trans. Paul Woodruff, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 937–49 passim. 28 Hieatt examines the relationship between Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s uses of the words antique and antiquity (804–5). 29 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 118: “The poem is full of echoes, which enact mimesis empowered and mimesis undone (even stretchèd is the echo-antithesis of touched). It is probably not accidental that the denigrating ‘stretchèd’ miter (of the Quarto spelling) is triumphantly revealed, in the endword anagram of the couplet, to contain both time and rime, and perhaps, graphically, mīt.”

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and also in the relation between a sonnet or sequence of sonnets to its antecedents. Time is the condition by which poetry will be perpetuated, in a repetition that in the couplet Shakespeare links to human reproduction. Here is the corrected answer to the rhetorical question that opens the sonnet: But were some childe of yours alive that time, You should live twise in it, and in my rime. (ll. 13–14)

The image of the young man that the poetry would present will last through time if an image of the young man in his offspring is alive so as to verify it. The erotic function of the Sonnets would succeed in the continuity of this offspring. The phrase “live twise” echoes the “second life” that Spenser states Du Bellay has given to Roman poetry in the “Envoy” of Ruines of Rome. The repetition is underscored by the anagrammatical relationship of Rome and rime. In linking the second life of poetry with that of a human being in a child, Shakespeare is using the topos of writing as reproduction, and also giving a second life, in hardly recognizable form, to Spenser and Du Bellay’s poetry of Rome. Just as the existence of the man’s son, especially if there is a close resemblance to the two, is testimony to the man’s absence and death, the poem will survive only in an image or simulacrum30—its own rewriting, which is a new edition of itself or a rewriting in subsequent poetry. As is the case for Sonnet 55, the durability of the poem depends on posterity: on the existence of a lineage who will preserve the image of its predecessors, in both flesh and poetry, and on the future work of poetry to address its antecedents. Here it is evident that time is not simply one theme among others in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but rather the theme that addresses the nature of poetic signification and even the very existence of poetry. One thing that becomes plain in close readings of a number of the sonnets on time is the notion that there is nothing in any one poetry that makes it inherently durable; it must rather be moved forward by the continued activity of poetry. In Shakespeare, time carries with it an irrevocable finality. But in reading the Sonnets, and rewriting them, one may address and engage the ruin that time wreaks. Verse Over Time Of the many Shakespearean sonnets that treat the theme of time, Sonnet 60 is of particular interest because it is about time and repetition in such a way as to repeat Du Bellay’s repetition/translation of Ovid’s poetic rendition of Heraclitus that I discussed in Chapter 2 (43–4). In the first quatrain, which makes explicit comparison between waves and time as a succession of moments, the repetition is particularly marked: 30

Cf. Fineman, 205–6, 252.

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Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore, So do our minuites hasten to their end, Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toile all forwards do contend. (ll. 1–4)

The similarity between Shakespeare’s wording and Du Bellay’s is so striking that one should term Sonnet 60 an imitation: ainsi que l’onde pousse l’onde, Et que premiere à l’une, à l’autre elle est seconde, Ainsi le temps leger se fuyt en se suyvant Et tousjours est nouveau … (ll. 3–6)31 [just as wave drives wave, and leading one, it follows another, so swift time flees as it continues, and is always new.]

Sonnet 60 then figures not just some vague and vaguely philosophical notion of time, but rather the time of poetic repetition, each antecedent constituting one of any number of moments involved in the sequence: Shakespeare–Du Bellay–Ovid– Heraclitus, and the irretrievable and uncountable others who also constitute terms in the transmission. However, whereas Du Bellay says that time “tousjours est nouveau,” Shakespeare speaks of minutes that “hasten to their end.” In repeating Du Bellay, Shakespeare alters his text. But this alteration might be a shift in perspective rather than a denial of the continuation of time. In the notions of repetitive temporality that I have raised throughout this book, moments do come to an end even as they lead to their own repetition and displacement. Shakespeare is simply emphasizing one aspect of this procedure over another. Du Bellay’s text both disappears and is repeated in Shakespeare’s. Although the couplet seems to present a reversal, in the continuing repetitions of the poem it also offers a perspectival shift: And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand Praising thy worth, dispight his cruell hand. (ll. 13–14)

Joachim Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, vol. 6, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Droz, 1931), 430. (My translation.) As many English Renaissance scholars do, Booth assumes that Shakespeare’s source text is Latin and not French. He states, “Ovid accurately describes the physics of the progress of toward the shore. Shakespeare’s third line does not; waves do not exchange places with one another” (“Commentary,” 239). But Du Bellay’s text states that a wave has a relative position with regard to other waves. Shakespeare’s “changing place” translates Du Bellay and winds up meaning the same thing. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller and J.P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), k. 15, l. 181. 31

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The verse will stand ostensibly against the eroding powers of time. But in the context of the rest of the sonnet and the treatment of time in the Sonnets that I have outlined here, the verse must also insert itself into time and persist by way of its own repetitions. Standard commentaries notwithstanding, one thing that this sonnet does not address is poetry’s inherent power to immortalize itself and its subjects—no more than Sonnet 55 proposes a poetry that will outlast stone monuments or Sonnet 17 a poetry that will last without the work of posterity in subsequent rewritings. Of course, the theme of time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is quite multifaceted. The sonnets I have addressed here present one approach to the question of the ravages of time, the possibility of resisting them, and the relationship between time and poetic language. The very capacity of language to signify and to be composed as poetry is an effect of time, which takes place as series of repetitions of particular arrangements of signs. In Sonnets 55, 17, and 60, these repetitions are evident not only in the temporal processes they describe but also in their relationship to the antecedent poems of Spenser and Du Bellay, from which they derive the language of the descriptions. They valorize the transformation that time produces as integral to the functioning of poetry. But there are other currents regarding time in the Sonnets that appear to run contrary to this one. Although a close reading would reveal complexities in these, the following couplets give credence to the idea of poetry as life’s effective vehicle of resistance to time: Yet doe thy worst ould Time dispight thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young. (Sonnet 19) His beautie shall in these blacke lines be seene, And they shall live, and he in them still greene. (Sonnet 63) Give my love fame faster then time wasts life, So thou prevent his sieth, and crooked knife. (Sonnet 100) And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants crests and tombs of brasse are spent. (Sonnet 107)

A question persists as to whether it is love, the young man’s beauty, or poetry that will last: but in the Sonnets these all figure each other—they allegorize and hence become each other over the course of the Sonnets. It would be a ludicrous mistake to provide Shakespeare’s “position” on time, as though the Sonnets were a treatise and not a work of literature with any number of surfaces and depths. But I would like to signal a tendency, and that is toward the futility of a poetry that can resist time, in favor of verse that engages with time. This poetry shows itself to constitute the very life of whose loss it stages the lamentation. These statements from the Sonnets on the durability of poetry involve a wish for eternity; in the

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sonnets I’ve considered closely in this chapter, such a wish is also expressed, a wish that turns out to be futile. This futility can’t be overlooked in a consideration of the above-quoted sonnets. In the Sonnets taken together, there is then the tendency toward a severe and continual questioning of the notion of inherently durable poetry. Considering them as a partial reworking of language and thematics from Spenser and Du Bellay amplifies this understanding. Shakespeare’s Durability As the most canonical author in English literature, Shakespeare has often been read as a poet who promotes entirely durable poetry. In such readings he becomes fully self-legitimating, as well as the guarantor of an unshakable English canon. Although it has been a long time since such a criticism was wholeheartedly practiced, one may still find strong remnants of it in the work that doesn’t raise any questions concerning Shakespeare’s canonical status. Studies of the last two decades involving the social institutions and the cultural circumstance of early modern literature certainly do pose such questions. I hope to have shown that treating the Sonnets to a careful textual analysis contributes to advancing such an inquiry. I find it quite noteworthy that Shakespeare so effectively raises questions of literary durability and still persists as a prime example of the same in literary studies. The two are, I believe, related. Since the theme of time and the power of poetry is so extensively explored in the Sonnets, the sequence has invited continual revisiting. I’m not saying that it has made itself great—that would be too ridiculous for discussion—but rather that it has occupied a place in literary studies in which it serves as a touchstone for literary durability. In this chapter I am making a request: that Shakespeare’s observations on durable poetry be seen in the context of their own presentation of time and temporality, such that procedures and practices of canon formation and maintenance come to light. In this book I begin a response, which is to see the Sonnets in the context of the series of repetitions in which the sequence participates, and to examine the systems of representation and their legitimation that have been deployed over the last few centuries through this series.

Chapter 11

Old and New Roman Times Rome and Early Modern England Whether Shakespeare knew a great deal about ancient Rome or not,1 he extensively explores the role of Rome for Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This role bears on the foundation of both political legitimacy and the English literary canon, the latter serving an integral function to the former as it did for Spenser, and as the French canon did for Du Bellay. The Roman plays are an examination of the stage of power as it functions under English rule,2 and they tend to reflect the workings of the state as they took shape under James I. Although current consensus places the first performance of Julius Caesar in 1599,3 during the reign of Elizabeth, the role of king that James assumed was at least partially prepared for him by cultural conditions, in which the stage played a large part. Already in his responses to Rome as a model for kingdom and empire, Shakespeare maps the machinations of the emerging English state. If James was able to celebrate his kingship publicly through a Romanized spectacle of entry that turned the city of London into a theater, it is because there was already a close relationship between the theater, displays of royal power, and Rome as a theatrical model for London.4 Shakespeare contributed heavily to the staging of Rome during 1 In the mid-1970s, Paul Cantor made the case that despite centuries of assumptions about Shakespeare’s knowledge of Rome, based on old prejudices concerning the Bard’s education, Shakespeare does indeed show an impressive grasp of Rome, especially in his distinction between Republic and Empire and the intricacies of the Roman state: Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 7–18. 2 Cf. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 164–209. 3 I rely on the New Cambridge Shakespeare for this date: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. And also for the following: Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–6, probably written somewhere between 1588 and 1594; Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1, probably written 1608; Coriolanus, ed. Lee Bliss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), probably written 1609; Cymbaline, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6, probably written 1610. 4 D.J. Hopkins, “Performance and Urban Space in Shakespeare’s Rome, or ‘S.P.Q.L.,’” in Bryan Reynolds and William N. West, eds, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 35–8.

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this period. In the Roman plays, Shakespeare’s signature metatheatrical reflections provide an examination of the dramatic function of the staging of Rome. This examination involves not only the role of Rome in the theater but also, insofar as the Roman plays are political dramas, the role of theater in politics.5 In this chapter I will explore these questions through a reading of Julius Caesar. The Meaning of Rome Of the Roman plays, Julius Caesar offers a particular concentration of both political machinations and metatheater. And since the theatricalization of action is none other than the affirmation of its repeatability, the relationship with Rome that Shakespeare maps is a temporal one; just as in the Sonnets, time is the force of change and decay. Shakespeare represents Rome as a place that is continuously changing in time, and also in time giving way to subsequent kingdoms and empires. Just as for Du Bellay and Spenser, the prognosis for a state that models itself on Rome is not an optimistic one. But just as for all his predecessors that I have so far examined, for Shakespeare the role of literature is precisely the reflection on this condition of social life. In Julius Caesar, the broader reflections on temporality that run through the Sonnets are brought to bear on the state and historical time. Du Bellay very effectively shows the poetic wish that Rome would function as an anchor of meaning (see above, 38–40), and one of the points of Les Antiquitez de Rome [The Antiquities of Rome] and the Songe [Dream] is to demonstrate the untenability of this notion. Shakespeare extends this line of questioning to the use of Rome as political legitimation. The great historical irony of looking to Rome for this function, as Du Bellay signals, is that Rome in fact fell, so to base one’s own solidity on Rome is perhaps to destine oneself to future failure (see above, Chapters 1–3). Although the poetic wish that Du Bellay stages is for Rome to be the eternal city, in modernity Rome is always bound up with the temporality of cataclysmic historical transformation. As Gail Kern Paster points out, “Like the Elizabethan historians who associated the city with civil war, Shakespeare is particularly drawn to those moments in the Roman past which brought the internal order of the city to a point of critical change, when one kind of city was giving way to another.”6 The temporality of Rome can thereby authorize the transformation of England from one condition to another, that is, from a regional kingdom to Great Britain, which is becoming the predominant empire in the emerging colonial world. But in Shakespeare, the firmness of Rome that might provide a source of stability in modernity is always 5 Cf. Jack D’Amico, “Shakespeare’s Rome: Politics and Theater,” Modern Language Studies 22.1 (Winter 1992): 75: “In Shakespeare’s Rome public life and political life are synonymous; to be a noted man or woman is to perform in the theater of Rome and to participate in those rituals, debates, and spectacles that define both ambition and become the means of controlling destiny.” 6 Gail Kern Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 58.

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shaken by the ceaseless violence of the dramatic setting.7 In Julius Caesar, although it is Brutus’ intention to end the unchecked growth of Caesar’s power and restore order to Rome, the death of Caesar only brings more instability.8 The play presents this death as a supremely defining moment. As such a moment, it is entirely theatrical, carried out in front of the audience of conspirators, who are also actors in both principal senses of the word. Brutus is continually conscious that a public image must be maintained; he moves to make a spectacle of the transfer of power, as well as of the return from the chaos of tyranny to the settlement of peace and freedom. Cassius responds by noting that the assassination thereby destines itself to the repetition of theatrical temporality. If in this scene Julius Caesar presents its own action as definitive, at issue is a definitiveness that leads to unending cycles of sacrificial violence: BRUTUS Stoope Romans, stoope, And let us bathe our hands in Caesars blood Up to the Elbowes, and besmeare our Swords: Then walke we forth even to the Market place, And waving our red Weapons o’re our heads Let’s all cry Peace, Freedome, and Liberty. CASSIUS Stoop then, and wash. How many Ages hence Shall this our lofty Scene be acted over, In State unborne, and Accents yet unknowne? BRUTUS How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, That now in Pompeys Basis lye along, No worthier then the dust? CASSIUS So oft as that shall be, So often shall the knot of us be call’d, The Men who gave their Country liberty.9

7

David L. Kranz writes, “Banishments, treason, rapes, and assassinations illustrate the aggressive and destructive tensions found throughout Shakespeare’s selected Roman history. More importantly, these destructive tensions are frequently found between countrymen, close friends, and family relations.” “Shakespeare’s New Idea of Rome,” in P.A. Ramsay, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982), 372. 8 Paster, 85. 9 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: Arden, 1998), 3.1.105–19. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. I restore the First Folio spelling, relying on William Shakespeare, The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, ed. Neil Freeman (New York and London: Applause, 1998). I do this because, often enough, a certain spelling is important for understanding the meaning of the text. Although Shakespeare’s hand was likely distant from the text that was typeset as the First Folio, the differences of the

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Whatever actually happened in ancient Rome is of less importance than the spectacle that Caesar’s death presents on the English stage and the meaning it has, not least for the modern apprehension of Rome that the play is participating in. Indeed, one of the basic questions that this scene raises involves what can be known of ancient Rome in modernity, how it can be known, and what importance it continues to have in the re-enactment. Although the question of whether Shakespeare gets Rome right is of limited interest, this theatrical representation indeed involves the real Rome insofar as the image it offers is fully informed by the role of the knowledge of Rome in early modern England. What happens here is that Cassius’ lines shift attention from the past action of the assassination of Caesar to the present and to the very play that is being performed. The scene that Brutus is staging with the call to “bathe our hands in Caesars blood” becomes Shakespeare’s own scene.10 As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, the metatheatrical dimension of Julius Caesar is part of a reflection on epistemology, in this case historical epistemology.11 Jonathan Goldberg very astutely argues that Shakespeare here suggests that history cannot be separated from its representations, even though it can often be shown that the latter distort the former.12 But this distortion, rather than being extrinsic to history, is essential to the latter’s effectiveness over time and therefore to its reality. This series of repetitions of the death of Caesar is its allegorization, in that the replays address an unfathomable variety of historical and social contexts. The aggregate of signs becomes fully transferable to these other contexts such that a series of meanings is produced. This allegorization may turn out to be what is most valuable about the initial event, the only procedure by which this event is in any way meaningful. latter’s spelling from current conventions is the best reminder of the temporal distance that separates Shakespeare’s writing from the present. 10 Cf. Hopkins, 45: “Brutus’ staging of the conspirators’ public appearance is met with a reply that displaces the scene from civic performance to the public theater: Cassius’ lines refer to Shakespeare’s own production, in which, ‘ages hence’ the murderers’ ‘lofty scene’ was indeed ‘acted over.’” 11 Goran V. Stanivukovic speaks of the “epistemology of history in Julius Caesar”: “‘Phantasma or a hideous dream’: Style, History and the Ruins of Rome in Julius Caesar,” Studia Neophilologica 73.55–7 (2001): 55–6. Dennis Kezar, addressing the metatheatricality of the play, reads Julius Caesar as “a critical representation of the public theater’s epistemological economy.” “Julius Caesar and the Properties of Shakespeare’s Globe,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 20. 12 Goldberg offers the following comments on the exchange between Brutus and Cassius: “The ‘now’ in this performance demands that it refer to the real event, not the staged one. Yet, in fact, the lines are about that performance, too, and the claims upon an audience that they can make. They can make us believe that the staged event is real. The ‘acting over,’ the representation before our eyes, may be taken for the act itself; and perhaps what the perfect reciprocity of metaphor hints is that history itself may be a series of representations. The acts on the stage of history in Brutus’ formulation embody power in a form of transcendent constancy; events recur but do not change, unique events are acted over” (166–7).

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Constancy A major aspect of the continuing appeal of Shakespeare is his capacity to explore numerous and surprising dimensions of the subjects he treats—a capacity that is akin to Montaigne’s essayistic procedure and very likely owes something to it. This affinity between the two authors is what probably led Nietzsche to name Montaigne as Shakespeare’s model.13 (In the next chapter, I will examine Shakespeare’s treament of the epistemology of the New World other, which I will argue builds more heavily than has been generally acknowledged on Montaigne’s.) What happens to Rome and the Romans in Julius Caesar is that, in the very process by which they are brought close to an apprehension in modernity, any proximity that may be established with them disappears in a burgeoning complexity. Julius Caesar stages the problem of whether Rome can be known in plenary fashion. If it cannot, the question that follows is whether it can serve as the bedrock of legitimation and model of state power for which its image is deployed in early modern England. As for Du Bellay, Spenser, and Montaigne, the very durability that enables Rome to serve as model is undermined by the fact of its having faded in the past. Rome remains available mainly as a simulacrum14—for Shakespeare, as a blatantly theatrical image of something that was apparently quite theatrical to begin with. Rome’s failure is none other than an effect of time, the time that destroyed it and continues to increase its separation from modernity. Although some editors feel compelled to reassure readers that there is nothing disruptive about the anachronism of the clock in 1.2, the fact that this Roman setting is decked out with trappings from early modern London is a major part of how the play formally marks the temporal distance of ancient Rome from its theatrical simulacrum.15 Since the anachronism involves a clock, it underscores the question of time. If the dramatic impact of the clock signals that the action is “here and now” rather than “then,” as David Daniell puts it,16 and hence functions to bring Rome into the present, then the play indeed dramatizes the difference between itself and its Roman model and questions the accessibility of the latter to modern knowledge. Daniell also suggests that the bell-notes signal a change in dramatic timing, prompting a focus on the urgency of decision-making: this point further supports an understanding of the anachronism as a heavy emphasis on time. The dramatic suspense is a reminder that the world of Julius Caesar is one of great uncertainty and rapid changes of circumstance in the course of time. The play examines the durability of state power over time by foregrounding an outstanding Roman virtue, constancy, the quality that makes for a decisive, resolute, and completely effective ruler. Constancy is thereby the basic quality 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), aphorism 176. 14 For the definition of the term simulacrum as I use it, see the Introduction, 12–14. 15 Cf. Hopkins, 41. 16 David Daniell, in his edition of Julius Caesar, 209n.

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of a durable state: in Sonnet 3 of Les Antiquitez de Rome, Du Bellay writes “O mondaine inconstance [O worldly inconstancy]!” as a lamentation of the failure of Rome to be durable. As such, constancy is a central theme of Julius Caesar. Geoffrey Miles notes that contancy “was for Shakespeare and his contemporaries perhaps the quintessential Roman virtue.”17 He reports that the standard Roman sources in Shakespeare’s time were Cicero and Seneca, as well as “Continental ‘Neostoics’ like Justus Lipsius and Montaigne.”18 Shakespeare continually examines and negotiates the meaning of constancy and stages the question of its effectiveness on the political stage that his Roman world represents. There is a question, a typically Shakespearean paradox, of whether constancy itself can even be constant, and hence whether what is constant and durable about Rome can last into modernity. Again, Shakespeare brings the very possibility that Rome and the Romans can function as models for the state and sovereign into serious question.19 In the case of this examination of constancy, Shakespeare asks whether it can be anything but a theatrical virtue, an effect of the simulated image of the theater as well as of the theatrical functioning of political life, just one disposition in the wavering substance of the selfe20 that, as Miles argues, Shakespeare borrows from Montaigne’s refutations of Stoicism.21 Miles treats the question of the reach of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare as unresolved, pointing out that most critics are willing to accept extensive textual borrowings. He cites the long-established knowledge that Shakespeare knew John Florio and hence may well have read the translation of the Essais before its 1603 publication (83–4).22 17 Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 127: “Rome itself, the Eternal City, is an archetype of stability and permanence, with its straight roads and marble columns and arches, enduring even in ruins—though those ruins also imply the limits of worldly constancy.” 20 I follow Timothy J. Reiss in spelling selfe this way, in order to distinguish what is designated from later conceptions of the self as autonomous subject: Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. 21 Ibid., 83–109. Miles quotes Florio’s translation of Montaigne: “There is nothing I so hardly beleeve to be in man, as constancie, and nothing so easy to be found in him, as inconstancy” (89). The quotation is from Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. John Florio (London: Sims, 1603), 2.1, “On the Inconstancie of Our Actions,” 193. The edition I have consulted is Michel de Montaigne, Essayes (Meston: Scolar, 1969). The French is as follows: “Je croy des hommes plus mal aiséement la costance, que toute autre chose, et rien plus aiséement que l’inconstance.” Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 2.1, “De l’inconstance de nos actions,” 332. I will henceforth cite both of these in the body of the text. 22 Elizabeth Robbins Hooker first suggested that Shakespeare likely read Florio’s translation of Montaigne in manuscript: “The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne,” PMLA 17.2 (1902): 349–50.

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The first time that the word constancy occurs in Julius Caesar, Brutus uses it to urge his fellow conspirators to be careful not to betray their plan. He gives the word an entirely theatrical sense: Good Gentlemen, looke fresh and merrily, Let not our lookes put on our purposes, But beare it as our Roman Actors do, With untyr’d Spirits, and formall Constancie. (2.1.223–6)

A number of commentaries have very effectively examined the wonderful paradox of insisting on the constancy of actors. Although actors have a stake in maintaining the consistency of characters that they’re playing and will do so to a fault, the fact that they can also drop a character on short notice in order to play another one suggests an extreme of inconstancy.23 Miles points out that the expression “formal constancy” implies a theatrical quality, the disposition of actors who maintain the outward form of constancy.24 Of course, Brutus is asking his fellow conspirators to be constant in the concealment of their plans, but the use of the term raises the question of just what the very important theme of constancy means over the course of the play: this use suggests doubt as to the possibility of a bedrock of ontological constancy subtending appearances. It also involves consideration of the relationship of politics to theater and theatricality. Furthermore, it begins to suggest that the constancy of Rome, which was not steady enough to keep Rome from going through major political upheavals and eventually to fall, may only be conveyed to modernity as a theatrical image, since that is perhaps mainly what it was in its own time. The temporality implicated by the series of theatrical repetitions by which Roman constancy comes to the London stage may be precisely what disallows constancy. In the allegorization of Rome that this repetition produces, it may become evident that this archetypal value of Rome was never anything but a simulacrum. Shakespeare, Justus Lipsius, and Montaigne The relationship between constancy and theatricality is also a subject for one of Shakespeare’s principal sources on constancy, Justus Lipsius, whose 1584 De constantia was translated into English in 1594 and widely read in the last decade of the sixteenth century. But instead of equating theatricality with constancy, Lipsius opposes them. In Chapter 8 of Book 1 of Of Constancie, in his presentation of constancy as the remedy for the social turbulence manifested in the Dutch civil wars, Lipsius identifies the three greatest enemies of constancy as “DISSIMULATION, PIETIE, COMMISERATION or PITTY [Simulatio, Pietas, Miseratio].”25 By 23

Goldberg, 164–76; Miles, 123–48. Miles, 123. 25 Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, trans. Sir John Stradling (Exeter, UK: Bristol Phoenix, 2006), 44. I have restored the early modern spelling and undone the occasional “corrections” 24

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addressing it first, he accords dissimulation the greatest importance among the three. To illustrate his point that those people do great damage to a country who make any claim to being concerned for its welfare rather than their own during a calamity, he provides the example of one of the best-known Roman actors: And as it is recorded in histories of Polus a notable stage-player, that playing his part on the stage in it behooved him to expresse some great sorrow, he brought with him privily the bones of his dead son, & so the remembrance thereof caused him to fil the theatre with true teares indeed. (44/18–19) [Quod de Polo histrione nobili traditum est, cùm Athenis fabulam actitaret in quâ dolor repraesentandus, eum filii sui defuncti ossa & urnam clàm intulisse, & theatrum totum vero gemitu luctuque complesse: idem hîc dixerim plerisque vestrûm.] (12)

The actor engages in pure dissimulation by presenting emotions genuinely inspired by personal grief as something quite different, the grief of the character he is playing. Lipsius continues the comparison with the person who would lament troubles to his country: “You play a Comedy, & under the person of your country, you bewail with tears your private miseries [Comoediam ô boni luditis, & velati persona patriae, privata vestra damna veris & spirantibus lacrymis lugetis]” (45/19/12). So, in this conception, the politician who pretends to be concerned for his country is acting only out of self-interest. It looks very much as though Shakespeare is responding directly to Lipsius here: the Bard is writing a play about politicians who continually claim to be acting on behalf of Rome, most of whom are clearly acting out of self-interest, and for whom constancy is a central question. In any case, Shakespeare is inverting Lipsius’s notion of constancy by making it mainly a matter of theatrics. The characters in Julius Caesar present constancy as having little to do with inner conviction but instead largely with outward appearance. Constancy stems from the ability to maintain dissimulation over time, against sometimes violent inclinations and the general human tendency to waver that interests Montaigne throughout the Essais, and in particular in his essays on the subject, “De la constance [On Constancy]” (1. 12) and “De l’inconstance de nos actions [On the Inconstancy of Our Actions]” (2.1). One is also reminded of Hamlet, who in his inconstancy becomes envious of an actor for being able to put on a show of grief, in words that seem to allude to the phrase “fil the theatre with true teares,” from the English version of Lipsius’ text: What would he doe, Had he the Motive and the Cue for passion That I have? He would drowne the Stage with teares, that this edition provides to the original. My source is the facsimile of Of Constancie (London: Richard Johnes, 1594), available in PDF through Early English Books Online (http://eebo. chadwyck.com), 18. For the Latin, I have relied on De constantia libri duo (London: George Bishop, 1586), also available in PDF through EEBO, 12. For each subsequent citation from Lipsius, I will provide all three page numbers in the body of the text.

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And cleave the generall eare with horrid speech; Make mad the guilty and apale the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed, The very faculty of Eyes and Eares.26

Unlike Polus, Hamlet’s actor can put on a convincing show of tears with no real cause for grief; having such a cause would only make his display that much more spectacular. The actor’s simulation demonstrates what Hamlet is not doing, and provides him with a model for expressing his own grief. In contrast to the actor who needs true grief in order to cry convincingly, as in Lipsius’ treatise, Hamlet looks to the actor as a counterexample to his own lack of decisiveness, or his own inconstancy, following his father’s murder. Lipsius continues his comparison between theater and politics by quoting Petronius: “The whole world is a stage-play [Mundus universus exercet histrionam]” (45/19/12). Shakespeare renders this phrase as one of his most famous lines, “All the world’s a stage,” in As You Like It,27 which announces the most pervasive and overarching theme in the corpus of his drama. But he examines its inevitability and consequences, remaining very far from affirming Lipsius’ idea that it is an enemy of constancy. Shakespeare’s treatment of constancy bears an affinity to that of Montaigne. In Chapter 10 of Book 3 of the Essais, “De mesnager sa volonté [How One Ought to Govern His Will],” Montaigne quotes the same sentence from Petronius in Latin, which Florio renders as follows: “All the world doth practise stage-playing” (604). Montaigne is discussing exactly the difference between the public persona and the private person of a politician, offering the example of himself as mayor of Bordeaux: “The Maior of Bordeaux and Michell Lord of Montaigne, have ever beene two, by an evident separation [Le Maire et Montaigne ont toujours esté deux, d’une separation bien claire]” (605/1011). By the time he composed the first version of “De mesnager sa volonté” in the late 1580s,28 Montaigne had read Lipsius’ De constantia.29 Elsewhere in the Essais he responds explicitly to Lipsius; given the fact that he is borrowing Lipsius’ citation of Petronius,30 he is likely also responding to him here. Shakespeare’s wording in As You Like It suggests a reading of both Stradling’s Lipsius (especially in light of the borrowings in Julius Caesar and Hamlet) and Florio’s Montaigne. As Miles demonstrates, Montaigne is also a source for important aspects of the 26 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden, 2006), 2.2.497–501; my emphasis. For the First Folio spelling, The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, ed. Neil Freeman (New York and London: Applause, 2000). 27 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Arden, 2006), 2.7.140. The First Folio spelling is the same. 28 This is the date that Pierre Villey provides in his introduction to this essay: Montaigne, 1002. 29 Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne, 2 vols in one binding (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1976), vol. 1, 178. 30 Villey, Sources, vol. 1, 210.

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notion of constancy that Shakespeare treats in Julius Caesar. Although there have been no studies linking Shakespeare and Justus Lipsius in any detail,31 it is evident that in Julius Caesar Shakespeare is taking issue to the point of parody with Lipsius’ notion that the greatest enemy of constancy is dissimulation. Lipsius himself sees constancy as of vast importance to political theory: it is the fundamental quality of the effective ruler, on which the stability of the state rests.32 A Mark of Constancy The words constant, constancy, and constantly appear a total of eight times in Julius Caesar, in most cases with a blatantly theatrical connotation. According to Miles, the words figure nine times in Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s “Life of Marcus Brutus.”33 Miles explains that both North and Jacques Amyot, whose French translation North worked from, use the words in order “to translate a variety of Greek expressions, and by introducing them as moral glosses without warrant in the original text.”34 This is the work of imitation as I have characterized it, borrowing from a text and altering it in order to address the local, contemporary context. Although at least some commonalities may be established between an early modern understanding of constancy and its Roman equivalent, the early modern simulacrum of Rome magnifies the notion in order to bring to the fore this virtue that holds a particular importance in early modern moral and political theory. In North’s Plutarch, the words appear in largely unproblematic usage, having none of the connotation that Shakespeare gives them. For example, Brutus is said to have a “wit, which was gentle and constant,” in comparison to his ancestor and namesake Junius Brutus, who was “of a sower stearne nature, not softnd by reason.”35 In his rewriting of North, Shakespeare continues the process of imitation. In so doing he dramatizes its effects by showing how constancy functions as a theatrical image, also imitating and redirecting Lipsius. Soon after Brutus utters the word, Portia repeats it in order to signal an impressive image of her constancy.

31 Miles provides a six-page exposition of Lipsius’s thought (70–75), but suggests no specific textual links with Shakespeare. In The Northern Star: Shakespeare and the Theme of Constancy (Worcester, UK: Blackthorn, 1989), Charles Wells quotes Lipsius in Stradling’s translation as the epigraph to the first section of his book (13), without commentary specifically tying the words to Shakespeare nor any further mention. Goldberg makes no reference to Lipsius. 32 See Jan Waszink, “Introduction,” in Justus Lipsius, Politica: Six Books of Politics or Politica or Political Instruction, ed. Jan Waszink (Assen: van Gorcum, 2004), 28–30. 33 Miles, 111. 34 Ibid., 110. 35 Plutarch, The Life of Marcus Brutus, trans. Sir Thomas North, in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. 5, 90.

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She begins by offering an apology for her feminine selfe, in order to strengthen the impression of this image. I graunt I am a Woman; but withall, A Woman that Lord Brutus took to Wife: I graunt I am a woman; but withall, A Woman well reputed: Cato’s daughter. Thinke you, I am no stronger than my Sex Being so Father’d, and so Husbanded? Tell me your Counsels, I will not disclose ’em: I have made strong proofe of my Constancie, Giving my selfe a voluntary wound, Heere, in the Thigh. (2.1.291–300)

Even the pedigree that she can boast, close connections to two supreme models of Roman constancy, doesn’t dispel the doubts raised by the fact that she is a woman. She must, then, make a classic Stoic display of the triumph of the will over corporeal vulnerability by wounding herself. What is most important about the act of self-mutilation is the spectacular sign it leaves behind. This moment is singularly important in the play because it focuses on the problem of virtue as a matter of outward signs or theatrical appearance. The substance of virtue may well be there, but it is only substantiated, so to speak, by the spectacle. Her words, “Heere, in the Thigh,” indicate that she calls attention to the wound, showing it to Brutus as well as the audience such that its spectacle becomes part of the theatrical image. That a visible sign of proof would be needed suggests that there is reason to doubt her virtue; such doubt easily derives from her femininity, thrown into relief on a male-dominated London stage representing a much more male-dominated Rome in idealized fashion.36 It is certainly true that this wound is a castration,37 the mark of sexual difference in patriarchal culture, the proof that this woman has subordinated herself to the motion of the phallus, that principle of masculine unity and solidity that she lacks. But as the imprint of such a principle, the wound is its image and substitutes for it. It is striking that this image, a crystallization of the image of constancy that the play has so far presented, can function as though it were the real thing. That is, it can serve as a cover for the inconstancy and temporal shifting that are displaced onto women—this is a disturbance from which it might turn out the men actually suffer too, against their own constant assurances.

36

Coppélia Kahn offers the following on these lines, noting a combination of Roman and English ethical principles: “Women—untrained in reason, dwellers in the domus excluded from the forum, and susceptible in the extreme to the affections—lack access to ‘constancy,’ meaning control over the affections, adherence to rationally-grounded principles like those of the republic, firmness. It is men who are firm, women who aren’t. Sir Thomas Elyot states that woman’s inconstancy is ‘a natural sickeness’ …” Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 97. 37 Ibid., 101.

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The next use of the term is also Portia’s, and she continues to emphasize the struggle between constancy and the vagaries of passion in such a way as to mark the gendering of constancy: O Constancie, be strong upon my side, Set a huge Mountaine ’tweene my Heart and Tongue: I have a mans minde, but a womans might: How hard it is for women to keepe counsell. (2.4.6–10)

Portia here characterizes “Heart” and physical weakness as feminine qualities, and mental strength or constancy as masculine ones. However, by attributing a “mans minde” to herself, she is suggesting that these qualities don’t belong in essential fashion to either of the sexes. In the context of the play, where social and political roles are continually adopted and changed in extensive strategies of dissimulation, a woman can take on a trait that is highly proper to a man, a masculine mental disposition. Portia’s words suggest the malleability, or inconstancy, of the gender division itself; as the notion of constancy is developed in the play it becomes evident that, very much like women, men are also subject to continual wavering, against which they bring the image of their constancy. Portia’s phrase “Set a huge Mountaine ’tweene my Heart and Tongue” connects intertextually with Lipsius, who writes, “You shall find many times greate difference betwixt the tongue and the heart [reperies plerumque discidium aliquod lignae & cordis]” (44; 18; 12). However, whereas Portia is characterizing this mountain or distance between tongue and heart as the very condition of constancy, Lipsius understands it as figuring the state of dissimulation that is the greatest enemy of constancy. Shakespeare’s inversion of Lipsian constancy continues systematically. Shows of Constancy In the most concentrated exposition of constancy in the play, that of Julius Caesar himself, the problems of wavering and dissimulation become clear. Caesar certainly gives a firm display in his words; but if these words are those of an actor and do not match a good number of his actions, then the very idea of constancy as something other than a theatrical image subject to temporal change is called into question. Just before leaving his house for the Senate, Caesar exposes the difference between his constant persona and his inconstant person, presenting constancy as part of the theatrics necessary to the maintenance of power. In the exchange with Calphurnia that begins with her account of the portents of his death (2.2), Caesar sways repeatedly in the face of her emotions. In response to her, he at first insists on his firmness. But she has raised enough doubt that he consults a servant who has spoken with augurers, who also tells him of the ill omen of a beast lacking a heart. Caesar continues to maintain his mastery of fear:

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The Gods do this in shame of Cowardice: Caesar should be a Beast without a heart If he should stay at home today for feare: No Caesar shall not. (2.2.41–4)

As he does later in the Senate, Caesar speaks of himself in the third person. He is the only character in the play to do so; his manner is an aspect of the grandeur that he ambitiously attributes to himself, but it also reflects the disposition of an actor speaking of a role he is playing. He repeats himself, as though hesitating on the question of his fear. But Calphurnia continues to insist, asking him to regard the fear as her own and not his. Moved by her pleading, he tells her, “For thy humor I will stay at home” (2.2.56). He thus allows himself to be inconstant, displacing his fear onto the very worst, quite feminine source of inconstancy, her “humor.” But a moment later he is swayed again. When Decius appears to escort him to the Senate, Caesar responds by saying that he isn’t going: “The cause is in my Will” (2.271). Now he is appealing to the Stoic agency of constancy, the will, which will overcome every conceivable opposition. Shakespeare is also punning on his own name, suggesting that Caesar’s constancy is an effect of the dramatist’s work and of drama itself. It takes very little time for Decius to overpower Caesar’s will: he does so through theatrical persuasion. Since Decius is one of the conspirators, it is clear that he is being constant in dissembling his reasons for convincing Caesar to accompany him, that he is being a “Roman actor” in presenting his arguments, the first of which is an alternate interpretation of Calphurnia’s foreboding dream. His subsequent proposals have the character of theater and also underscore the inconstancy that runs through Roman state functions: The Senate have concluded To give this day, a Crowne to mighty Caesar. If you shall send them word you will not come, Their mindes may change. Besides, it were a mocke Apt to be render’d, for some one to say, Breake up the Senate, till another time: When Caesars wife shall meete with better Dreames. If Caesar hide himselfe, shall they not whisper Loe Caesar is affraid? (2.2.93–101)

Decius tries to tempt Caesar with the trappings of spectacle, the crown to confirm the public image of his imperial status. He indicates that it is Caesar’s very constancy that prompts the Senate to do this, and that a lack of resolve on Caesar’s part will lead to the Senate’s own inconstancy on the matter. Then he attempts to persuade Caesar with the prospect of mockery at having given in to Calphurnia’s humor. That is, Caesar needs to keep up appearances in order to maintain his power over the Senators. Part of these appearances, Decius says, involves an image of fearlessness. Decius’s suggestion is that suspicions of Caesar’s fear may be well founded. All of these considerations affect Ceasar’s ability to be constant before the Senate. Curiously, in order to maintain his constancy, he responds with

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inconstancy by yielding to Decius’ theatrics and changing his mind. It isn’t clear which of Decius’ arguments Caesar is reacting to; if it is all or any one of them, his words expose his constancy as a theatrical effect, performed in response to the theatrics of Decius and the Senate. “Immovable Caesar vacillates between the demands of fear, ambition, and dread of ridicule,” writes Miles.38 Caesar’s greatest display of constancy, his refusal before the Senate to pardon Publius Cimber, comes off as a show. Indeed, it is in this scene that constancy itself becomes a matter of spectacle. Responding to the emotive theatrics of Metellus Cimber on behalf of his brother, Caesar affirms his immunity to the spectacle that throughout the play easily moves the crowd: I must prevent thee Cymber: These couchings, and these lowly courtesies Might fire the blood of ordinary men, And turne pre-Ordinance, and first Decree, Into the lane of Children. Be not fond, To thinke that Caesar beares such Rebell blood That will be thaw’d from the true quality With that which melteth Fooles, I meane sweet words, Low-crooked-curtsies, and base Spaniell fawning. (3.1.35–43)

In order to be the leader of the least constant men, and of any men less than utterly constant, he insists that he must be the very image of constancy, of the principle of unity and solidity. That is the gist of his reaction to Cassius’ plea for clemency: I could be well mov’d, if I were as you, If I could pray to moove, Prayers would moove me: But I am constant as the Northerne Starre, Of whose true fixt, and resting quality, There is no fellow in the Firmament. The Skies are painted with unnumbered sparkes, They are all Fire, and every one doth shine: But, there’s but one in all doth hold his place. So, in the World; ’Tis furnish’d well with Men, And Men are Flesh and Blood, and apprehensive; Yet in the number, I do know but One That unassayleable holds on his Ranke, Unshak’d of Motion: And that I am he, Let me a little shew it, even in this: That I was constant Cymber should be banish’d, And constant do remaine to keep him so. (3.1.58–73)

In grand imperial fashion, Caesar claims to be as unmoving as the most immobile thing in the universe, which is the principle by which every affair and motion is directed and oriented. Mobility and mutability belong to the fire that the stars are 38

Miles, 131.

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made of and even more so to flesh and blood, and Caesar places himself absolutely above all inconstancy. However, the last lines refer back to the notion of constancy that the play has so far proposed through Brutus and Portia, and hence change the tenor of the whole speech: being constant isn’t enough, as Caesar must “shew” it. It turns out that his refusal to pardon Publius Cimber is a display at least as much as an action in itself—or rather, that it can be an effective action only if he presents it as a show. He carries out the refusal in order to be sure that the Senate recognizes his imperial and even divine qualities. At its end, then, Caesar’s speech reveals itself to be a display of theatrics, of his capacity to appear constant, as well as an affirmation of the necessity to do so; the aim of this display is to dissemble the fact that he himself is human, flesh and blood, and movable. The reaction of the conspirators follows up on the demonstration, showing Caesar to be as much flesh and blood as any of them. Even at the moment of his death, he affirms the theatrical nature of his persona, Caesar: the Latin phrase, “Et tu, Brute?” (3.1.77), is nothing if not the height of drama. The words with which he follows it, “Then fall Caesar,” are a stage direction to this character whom he has created, the completely constant Caesar. The Specter of Rome Brutus intends the death of Caesar to be a resolution, a definitive act that brings an end to the instability brought about by Caesar’s ambition—one may appropriately term the latter the inconstancy of Caesar’s constancy. The conspirators bring immobility to Caesar only through the finality of death, and the ensuing stillness is supposed to bring back a firmness and durability to Rome. However, Shakespeare makes it clear in the play that the definitive act of killing Caesar only unleashes more uncertainty, that the attempt to restore order against the instability with which the play opens directly and solely results in greater instability. Although Rome serves in early modern England as a source of legitimacy and durability, Shakespeare’s depiction of the city in Julius Caesar places it in the very flux of time that brings it to modernity. Its temporality is that of unending transformation. Even in the finality of death, Caesar doesn’t stop his transformational activity. The appearance of his ghost to Brutus (4.3.272–84) is an indication of the lack of resolution of his death. This lack stems from the repetitiveness in which the death is necessarily implicated in its enactment, the fact that this “lofty Scene” will be “acted over” in “Ages hence” (3.1.111–12). In the repetition necessitated by the momentousness of the act, the trace of Caesar spills over beyond the limits of his life. The persistent haunting of this specter is what leads to the death of Brutus, the signal to him that his “houre is come” (5.5.20). Brutus’ suicide is the final proof of his constancy, the defining moment that prompts Antony to declare him “the Noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.69). But in the Rome that Shakespeare depicts, this nobility, grounded on a very theatrical version of constancy, is apt to lead to further instability—hence what follows Julius Caesar is the world of

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excessive mutability in which Antony and Cleopatra takes place.39 It is because of this very mutability, which manifests itself in the conveyance of the legacy of an image to subsequent ages, that Rome is available for representation in early modern England. In representing Rome through the specters that it has left behind, Shakespeare is also allegorizing its cultural function. On the one hand Rome offers a source of stability and durability; on the other hand, it undermines these by the very fact that it is present only as a specter or simulacrum, and furthermore that his durability was principally the effect of theatrics. Caesar’s ghost allegorizes the specter of Rome by continuing to direct the action of the play. In the ghost, Julius Caesar also allegorizes itself: the apparition figures the play’s role on the early modern English stage, bringing with it the Roman sources on which the rising British empire is building itself.40 The ghost confronts Brutus, namesake of the founder of Britain in the history told by Geoffrey of Monmouth.41 This history had enough currency in early modern England that William Camden felt compelled to spend several pages discrediting it in his Britannia.42 In materials readily available to Shakespeare, there is an onomastic identity between Lucius Junius Brutus, who drove the Tarquins out of Rome, Marcus Brutus the founder of the new Rome on the death of Caesar (these two are linked by Plutarch),43 and Brutus the mythical founder of Britain. By allegory, the new empire of Great Britain is implicated in the play, and Brutus stands in for this political entity. The specter of Caesar occasions Brutus’ coming to fulfillment, as both completion and death. By reminding his English audience of its relationship with the spectral simulacrum of Rome, Shakespeare signals the beginning of the new empire and at the same time suggests the possibility of its end.

Miles provides an overview of the critical assessments of Antony and Cleopatra on this point (168–9). 40 Although she does not consider Julius Caesar, Heather James addresses Shakespeare’s relationship to translatio imperii in his negotiation and imitation of Roman sources: Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). She examines the legitimation of London as Troynovant or the new Troy, founded by Brutus, descendant of Aeneas, which depends heavily on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s extension of Virgil (15–30). For Shakespeare’s radically skeptical treatment of imperial legitimation through classical authority, see especially 30–37. 41 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannia of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 1, ed. Neill Wright (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 2–3; Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 53–74. 42 William Camden, Britannia (London: George Bishop, 1590), 5–7. William Camden, Britain, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Eliot’s Court, 1610), 6–8. Facsimiles from Early English Books Online (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). 43 Plutarch, 90: “Marcus Brutus came of that Junius Brutus, for whome the auncient Romanes made his statue of brasse to be set up in the Capitoll, with the images of the kings, holding a naked sword in his hand: bicause he had vailliantly put down the Tarquines from their kingdom of Rome.” 39

Chapter 12

The Representation of the Other Literature and Historical Circumstances Although Montaigne’s “Des cannibales,” in John Florio’s 1603 translation, remains the “only undisputed source for any part of The Tempest,”1 there has been little detailed exploration of the relationship between Montaigne’s outlook on the New World and Shakespeare’s presentation of the non-European other.2 Among reasons for such exploration is a development of the ways that both texts engage in an examination of how a European capacity for knowledge responds to the encounter with the New World as well as with other areas of increasing interest in the burgeoning empires. As I showed in Chapter 9, Montaigne builds such an epistemological critique in negotiating a number of specific reactions to the encounter with the New World. Many critics of the last 30 years, particularly those with ties to New Historicism, have demonstrated how Shakespeare works with the various discourses around early modern colonial and domestic state enterprises, in which, according to the Foucaldian notion of discourse, objects of knowledge are produced.3 My interest here is to consider how Shakespeare’s epistemological explorations may be more completely understood in connection with his appropriations from Montaigne.4 I will also show in what ways these explorations 1 Frank Kermode, Introduction, in William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Kermode (London: Arden, 1987), xxxiv. 2 There are several notable exceptions in recent criticism. John D. Cox examines the similarities and differences between Montaigne’s and Shakespeare’s epistemologies as expressed in the texts in question: “Shakespeare and the French Epistemologists,” Cithara 45.2 (May 2006): 23–45, especially 28–30. William M. Hamlin offers some very compelling insights on the relationship in The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare: Renaissance Ethnography and Literary Reflection (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 97–130. David Norbrook presents Shakespeare’s adaptation of Montaigne as a strategic reading of the latter: “‘What Cares These Roarers For the Name of King?’: Language and Utopia in The Tempest,” in Kiernan Ryan, ed., Shakespeare: The Last Plays (New York: Longman, 1999), 252–8. 3 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 40–49. 4 Hamlin provides some excellent reasons for more closely considering the relationship between Montaigne and Shakespeare in connection with The Tempest: “[N]either Kermode nor [Leo] Marx acknowledges the full complexity of Montaigne; they readily admit that his ‘primitivism’ is not as lightly dismissed by Shakespeare as other critics have maintained, but they neglect to show that he also articulates a tempering anti-primitivism that goes far toward suggesting a ground for The Tempest’s ambivalences about nature” (122). My focus

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are specifically epistemological5 and hence related to the metatheatrical dimensions of The Tempest, which New Historicism has neglected. But the importance of New Historicism’s contributions can’t be overestimated. Treating literature as the site of intersection and interaction of multiple discourses rather than the creation or compilation of some version or other of a creative mind has gone a great distance in demonstrating the social importance of literature. New Historicism has not done this at the expense of artistic creation, as some objections would have it; rather, it has materially situated processes of artistic creation and increased understanding of how they work in relation to the cultures in which they operate. Since they do operate with respect to existing materials, the term production might be better suited to what New Historicism describes, since this word diminishes connotations of creation ex nihilo. Nor has New Historicism reduced the value of literature by lowering it to the level of more mundane social dealings and discourses. To the contrary, its characterization of literature as the privileged site of the intersection and negotiation of discourses fully recognizes the singular importance of literature with respect to the forces that make and shape societies.6 Literature therefore offers a particularly powerful approach to understanding the logic and effectiveness of these discourses, and it can teach us much about the necessity of closely examining them. Texts such as those of Montaigne and Shakespeare incorporate, interweave, parody, recast, and redirect discourses seemingly without end, from all manner of social settings. In so doing, they draw these discourses out to the point of exposing their contradictions, gaps, and limits. Such an approach foregrounds intertextuality and “con-texts,”7 viewing the literary text as implicated in a concentrated network of discourses that are discernible in available texts from the period.

is rather on how Montaigne and Shakespeare negotiate and articulate an epistemology involving otherness. 5 B.J. Sokol has extensively examined The Tempest in connection with epistemology: A Brave New World of Knowledge: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Early Modern Epistemology (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). But his interest is more in the extent than the limits of European knowledge in the face of the New World. He also does not see a contribution of more than a bit of text from “Des cannibales” to Shakespeare’s outlook (86). 6 Despite what his detractors have attributed to him, Stephen Greenblatt has said nothing else: “Whereas most collective expressions moved from their original setting to a new place or time are dead on arrival, the social energy encoded in certain works of art continues to generate the illusion of life for centuries. I want to understand the negotiations through which works of art obtain and amplify such powerful energy.” Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 7. 7 Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive ‘Con-texts’ of The Tempest,” in John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, second edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 195–209.

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At its best, literature is thereby of necessity critical in that it doesn’t allow discourses to remain in the strict control of the ideologies that would direct their circulation. It is true that Shakespeare and Montaigne are subversive with respect to the discourses that they treat; but it is also something of a banality to point that out, since it is in the nature of well-executed literary texts to be subversive. That is not to say that clearly stated positions can’t be found in literary texts and even attributed to the authors. But such positions are often malleable parts of a text; an author’s positions constitute a dimension of intertextuality. Although one shouldn’t neglect them, they are of varying importance. In any case, it is less important whether Shakespeare or Montaigne was for or against the colonial enterprise than that each presents a negotiation of the various discourses traversing it. Each, hence, offers an excellent avenue into the critical examination of this enterprise. Knowledge of the Other As I examined it in Chapter 9, the epistemology that Montaigne develops is interesting as a position because it results from his text’s situating of the various discourses on the New World and demonstration of the limits of European apprehension. Montaigne does state an anticolonial position in “Des coches [On Coaches],” one that has continued to resonate. Specifically, he declares an opposition to the violence permeating everything he discusses about the colonial enterprise: Tant de villes rasées, tant de nations exterminées, tant de millions de peuples passez au fil de l’espée, et la plus riche et belle partie du monde bouleversée pour la negotiation des perles et du poivre: mechaniques victoires. [So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations wiped out, so many millions of individuals put to the sword, and the most beautiful and richest part of the world shattered, on behalf of the pearls-and-pepper business! Tradesmen’s victories!]8

Many of us, of course, are happy to find such an affinity with our own views in Montaigne; but rigor demands that we also consider the way that Montaigne comes to this position. Doing so in a detailed, engaged practice of literary criticism can strengthen our own position in dialogic fashion. Montaigne’s statements against colonial violence are prompted by an ethic of forebearance with regard to the colonial other that is a direct consequence of the epistemology he develops in both “Des coches” and “Des cannibales [On the Cannibals].” He indicates that colonial violence is closely related to the colonial experience of not being able to know the other in plenary fashion. It is evident, in this instance, that approaches valorizing Montaigne’s skepticism and partial Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey (Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), vol. 3, 910; Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987, 1991), 1031. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. See above, 189–90. 8

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relativism can lead to a foregrounding of the author’s ethical positions.9 Although he usually avoids unequivocal stances on ethical matters, when he takes one here, it derives rigorously from his essayistic procedure. It is of course quite correct to attribute this view to Montaigne, but what is most important to literary criticism is to understand it as resulting from this procedure. It is a position necessary to the examination that Montaigne’s text undertakes in its network of interconnectiions, and all the more forceful for being so. Similarly, in The Tempest, the many discourses that Shakespeare engages10 also result in an epistemology with respect to the New World that lends itself to certain ethical positions. The fact that, for a good part of the twentieth century, The Tempest has been rewritten in various colonial and postcolonial settings in order to valorize Caliban as a hero is of great significance in this regard: this fact suggests the multifacetedness of Shakespeare’s text in its capacity to be a model, in the sense that I have developed throughout this book. Besides Aimé Césaire’s very widely discussed Une tempête, Caliban has been recast in the Americas, Africa, and Asia.11 Although further consideration of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is a very important part of the way that Shakespeare’s text suggests a set of ethical positions deriving from the complex interaction of discourses that it presents. In contrast to the case of Montaigne, there is no interest in attributing this position personally to Shakespeare, and indeed the irrelevancy of doing so is all the more evident when one sees to what degree The Tempest is a masterful assembly of quite varied discourses. I will show that this set of positions has a great deal to do with the epistemology that emerges in the composition of The Tempest, and furthermore that this epistemology is closely related to Montaigne’s project.

9 The best study of Montaigne’s ethics as a function of skepticism is Zahi Zalloua, Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood, 2005). 10 Stephen Greenblatt has not been outdone in the demonstration of Shakespeare’s engagement of different discourses in The Tempest: see especially “Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,” in Shakespearean Negotiations, 129–63. 11 The bibliography of this material is vast. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan cover much of it in Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially 144–71. See also Jonathan Goldberg, Tempest in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), especially 3–37, for remarks on the broader colonial situation of Caliban; Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Spring 1987): 557–78; and various essays in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds, “The Tempest” and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Ania Loomba has written concisely and very articulately on the anticolonial appropriations of The Tempest and their connection to the New Historicist and deconstructive approaches to the play: Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 161–8.

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Shakespeare, Montaigne, Politics, and Theater As I pointed out in the preceeding chapter, Shakespeare assembles and redirects different texts in a fashion quite similar to that of Montaigne. But more than that, it is in his concrete intertextual appropriation of Montaigne in The Tempest, which amounts to a reading of his predecessor, that basic aspects of this epistemology and its development become evident. The specific importance of Montaigne in The Tempest is greater than criticism has so far recognized. Of Shakespeare’s intertextual connections, I am mainly interested here in the one with Montaigne. When Shakespeare imports Montaigne’s text, he also engages part of the essayist’s network of discourses, including a very important one on state power and its legitimation. In the passage in Act 2 in which Gonzalo’s words closely paraphrase Montaigne’s “Of the Canniballes,” of the changes Shakespeare makes, his addition of a few words of introduction situates the text in this discourse. Gonzalo modifies Montaigne’s reference point, Plato, only to place the following words of the essayist in one of the principal English discourses implicating the Greek philosopher: I’th’Commonwealth I would (by contraries) Execute all things: For no kinde of Trafficke Would I admit: No name of Magistrate: Letters should not be knowne: Riches, poverty, And use of service, none: Contract, Succession, Borne, bound of Land, Tilth, Vineyard, none: No use of Mettall, Corne, or Wine, or Oyle: No occupation, all men idle, all: And Women too, but innocent and pure: No Soveraignty.12

12 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (London: Arden, 2005), 2.1.148–9. Henceforth cited in the body of the text. I restore the First Folio spelling, relying on Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Neil Freeman (New York and London: Applause, 1998). I do this because, often enough, a certain spelling is important for understanding the meaning of the text. Although Shakespeare’s hand was likely distant from the text that was typeset as the First Folio, the differences of the latter’s spelling from current conventions is the best reminder of the temporal distance that separates Shakespeare’s writing from the present. Montaigne’s text, in Florio’s translation, is as follows: “It is a nation, I would answere Plato, that hath no kinde of trafficke, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politicke superioritie, no use of service, of riches, or of poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle, no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or mettle.” Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. John Florio (London: Sims, 1603), 102. The facsimile edition of Florio’s Montaigne that I have consulted is The Essayes (Meston: Scolar, 1969). And in French: “C’est une nation, diroy je à Platon, en laquelle il n’y a aucune espece de trafique; nulle cognoissance de lettres; nulles science de nombres; nul nom de magistrat, ny de superiorité politique; nul usage de service, de richesse ou de pauvreté; nuls contrats; nulles successions; nuls partages; nulles occupations

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Shakespeare presents this passage such that it is, as in Montaigne’s context, evidently a European fantasy of unspoiled territory: from a European perspective, the utopia of the New World can only be imagined in negative terms as what European civilization is not. Just as the cannibals that Montaigne describes in detail clearly have a developed civilization and are far from corresponding to this idyllic description, Gonzalo’s fantasy is quite contradicted by the realities of the island. The latter manifest themselves in both Prospero’s establishment of a small society and Caliban’s condition as cunning and nasty, but at the same time sympathetically and complexly human.13 Montaigne offers this passage as both a rhetorical setup for the discovery of the Amerindians and an exposure of the limits of European knowledge; similarly, Shakespeare demonstrates that this image of an unspoiled land and people belongs to an apparatus of epistemological and political power that is driven to conquer what it doesn’t understand. That these contrasts are deliberate is evident in Gonzalo’s statement that he would rule “by contraries.” The biggest contrary is the one his comrades point out, which is that he fantasizes his idyllic, primitivist society in order to be its king, that the fantasy only follows from his first question, “And were the King on’t, what would I do?” (2.1.146). Antonio jokes, “The latter end of his Common-wealth forgets the beginning” (2.1.158–9), to recall that this fantasy is that of a sovereign who wishes to efface the effects of his rule and to believe that he is not imposing his image on those he conquers. The effect of the passage as an engagement with discourses of state power is augmented considerably by the biggest change from Montaigne’s text, in which the passage occurs in a discussion of Plato; in French humanism, Plato is the most important of the ancient philosophers, and along with Aristotle the one cited most frequently in connection with questions of the state. As is often the case with Montaigne, he is conducting a dialogue: here it is with Plato, eventually one of his models for the dialogical form of the essay.14 Montaigne presents his fantasy image of Amerindian culture as an answer to Plato, for the latter’s not having seen such a perfect society (and also, as Montaigne suggests earlier in the essay, for his not having known of the existence of the Americas at all). Since Montaigne mentions Lycurgus, the reference is the Laws; but as he also speaks of the management of a society, the Republic necessarily comes into the picture. qu’oysives; nul respect de parenté que commun; nuls vestemens; nulle agriculture; nul metal; nul usage de vin ou de bled” (Essais 1.31, “Des Cannibales,” 206). 13 Cf. Hamlin, 122. 14 “Platon me semble avoir aymé cette forme de philosopher par dialogues, à escient, pour loger plus decemment en diverses bouches la diversité et variation de ses propres fantasies [Plato seems to have quite knowingly chosen to treat philosophy in the form of dialogues: he was better able to expound the diversity and variety of his concepts by putting them appropriately into the mouths of diverse speakers].” Montaigne, Essais, 2.12.509/568. This statement is quite similar to some of Montaigne’s descriptions of his own approach to the vast variety of subjects of the Essais.

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Shakespeare obliquely preserves this reference by writing “I’th’Commonwealth.” One word with which Plato’s name was definitively associated in early modern England was commonwealth (or commonweale): in 1598, Adam Islip published an English translation of Louis Leroy’s edition of Aristotle’s Politiques, with commentary and “Expositions taken out of the best Authours, specially out of Aristotle himselfe, and out of Plato.”15 The opening section continually refers to “Plato’s Commonweale.” “Commonweale” is also the English title of Jean Bodin’s Republique (published in 1606, also by Islip),16 by far the most important book of absolutist theory in early modern France,17 which involves extensive commentary on Plato. Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611—another publication of Islip)18 provides “the Commonwealth” as a definition of republique. In writings of the French Renaissance one frequently sees the term chose publique, a translation of the Latin res publica; it is in turn easily and accurately rendered as commonwealth. Although Plato was widely read in France, few of his works were available in English during the Renaissance. Other than Spenser’s translation of the Axiochus (1592), the works in which Plato’s texts were known were the two aforementioned volumes, where his name is firmly linked to the word commweale through extensive quotation, paraphrase, and commentary.19 Although there is no doubt that, as Vaughan and Vaughan indicate in their gloss, “[t]he word appears frequently and variously in Tudor and Stuart writings, including twenty-seven times in Shakespeare’s plays,”20 the fact that Shakespeare would use it to replace the name “Plato” in Montaigne’s text strongly suggests a connection to these texts and the discourse of sovereignty and legitimation to which they belong in early modern England. In Montaigne, the references to and discussions of Plato serve to indicate both the inadequacy of European knowledge to apprehend the Amerindians (and by extension all radical others to European culture) as well as the abuses of the intolerant French state. Both of these result from a refusal to allow the other to subsist as other, not strictly dominated by the political epistemology of the existing state. The context of the passage’s reworking in The Tempest also indicates an engagement with this discourse and Montaigne’s critique. In referring to the Aristotle, Aristotle’s Politiques or Discourses of Government (London: Adam Islip, 1598), title page, available in PDF through Early English Books Online (http:// eebo.chadwyck.com). 16 Jean Bodin, The Six Books of a Common-weale, trans. Richard Knolles (London: Adam Islip, 1606), available in PDF facsimile through Early English Books Online (http:// eebo.chadwyck.com). 17 Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 18 Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611): http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cotgrave/. 19 See Sears Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 115–33. 20 Vaughan and Vaughan, in their edition of The Tempest, 194n. 15

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commonwealth and hence alluding to Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare inscribes The Tempest in the Renaissance tradition of critical utopias that sees a prescursor in the Republic and passes through Thomas More’s Utopia (1515), François Rabelais’ Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), as well as Montaigne’s New World essays. Scholarship has long held that Shakespeare was familiar with all of the modern sources. As I developed the notion in Chapter 9, one of the functions of a critical utopia is to present through imaginative construction a space of exteriority with respect to the present situation so as to provide for a critical outlook on it. This critical utopia often enough begins as the contrary of the familiar situation: in Gargantua, for example, Rabelais gives the Abbaye de Thélème as many characteristics as possible that are simply the opposite of monastic convention in his time.21 Similarly, Montaigne starts with a purely negative characterization of Amerindian society in order to lead to a presentation of his contemporary European society that contextualizes the latter’s customs and ideology. In Montaigne, although the representation of the New World proves to be principally assembled from familiar elements of European culture, the recombination of these elements in response to the real existence of Amerindian culture allows for their integrity and fixity to be challenged. As such, the limits of European knowledge are thrown into relief and a receptive knowledge of the other begins to be possible. Shakespeare follows this strategy on the stage by imagining a world composed of features drawn from European representations of the New World and other sites of colonial exploration. The stage is particularly well suited to such an exercise, since it invites spectators into a fictional transportation to another location, and uses an often elaborate technology of special effects in order to engage them in the viewing experience. Shakespeare’s productions were especially recognized in their time for the use of all available technology of mise-en-scène. This is especially the case with The Tempest, whose machinations mimic Prospero’s own special effects, and through the latter offer a reflection of this very function of the theater.22 Spectators of The Tempest are thereby invited to respond passionately and enter the world that the play presents, as well as to look at the attempts at control that Prospero effects.23 The play further carries out its task by dramatizing the process of transportation to another world through the shipwreck—that is, through the tempest that makes it happen, provides much of the atmosphere of the play, and shapes the latter’s developing action. François Rabelais, Gargantua, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mireille Huchon and François Moreau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 137–50; Rabelais, Gargantua, in The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 116–30. 22 Cf. Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 196–7. 23 In Shakespearian Negotiations, Greenblatt speaks of the “techniques of arousing and manipulating anxiety, [which] are crucial elements in the representational technology of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater” (133). 21

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According to the tradition of the play-within-the-play, which in the West is probably as old as the theater itself and which Shakespeare develops so effectively for modernity,24 the characters function as onstage stand-ins for the spectators. The theater thus offers them a fantasy version of the island in Gonzalo’s speech. And by situating this speech as both a commentary on politics and political theory, Shakespeare enables Montaigne’s words to function further as a critical reflection on sovereignty, domination, and cultural epistemology. As it is a negative characterization of the island and hence only admits to wishing for a place that is not the familiar one, it reveals itself to be a fantasy belonging to a European imagination, the product of a sovereignty attempting to impose itself on this new world and to know it through such imposition. When Sebastian and Antonio mock Gonzalo, they reveal his fantasy to be the failed attempt at sovereign imposition. When this imposition collapses, it exposes the mechanisms of fantasy, just as in Montaigne’s essay, as belonging to the familiar European culture: it hence opens the possibility for this culture to recognize the limits of its own knowledge. Giving the cue to their spectators, these characters are then situated for a more receptive apprehension of the island. And the play makes it clear that there is a sharp contrast between Gonzalo’s fantasy and the realities of the island, just as is the case in Montaigne’s “Des cannibales” in the text that follows the passage that Shakespeare borrows. Caliban’s Deformity Of all the elements of The Tempest, the figure of Caliban most upsets Gonzalo’s idyllic fantasy of island inhabitants; he also presents a vigorous challenge to the adequacy of European representation, constituting an aggregate of horrific fantasies of the non-European other. Prospero is a less benevolent, more blatantly authoritarian version of the king that Gonzalo wishes to be. When he first stages Montaigne’s text through Gonzalo’s speech, Shakespeare presents the possibility of viewing Utopia only to expose its plenary representation as a dead end. The island, whose society is founded on the antagonism between Prospero and Caliban, reveals the complexities and power investments of imperial domination. The Tempest continues to tie itself to a negotiation of a discourse of sovereign legitimation, and in so doing raises questions of the efficacy of this discourse. It hence offers the possibility of a critical 24 Much cinema that engages in self-reflection does so by way of the theater, incorporating the conventions of the play-within-the-play, and often Shakespeare. The obvious example of this phenomenon is Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (Allarts, 1991), which uses The Tempest’s self-reflexivity and special effects to present a meditation on the technology of cinema. But the best film in the Euro-American tradition that draws on the play-within-the-play is Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (Romaine Film Corporation, 1942), which continually presents and reworks Shakespeare, and by reflecting on theatrical and cinematic representation engages in a thorough examination of the propaganda mechanisms of National Socialism. See my “Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be: The Question of Simulation in Cinema,” Film Criticism 26.2 (2001–2002): 19–40.

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reflection on them. It develops for the stage Montaigne’s critique of the limits of knowledge and representation and examines in particular the theatrical procedure by which imperial sovereignty represents itself. In The Tempest, the theater becomes the site of the examination of this self-representation and, at the same time, the site where it may be critically considered. As an anagrammatical distortion of cannibal and hence a further incorporation of Montaigne’s essay, Caliban’s name supplements the evidence that The Tempest involves an engagement with Montaigne, discourses of sovereign legitimation, and political epistemology. Designated by a deformation of the word that Montaigne uses, Caliban becomes a deformed creature. The word cannibal itself is already a European disfiguration of a sign whose initial reading presented great difficulty and that demonstrates problems of cultural epistemology: it is a version of the Arawakan word that Columbus first wrote down, which he came across as designating some of the inhabitants of the Caribbean region who were reputed to eat flesh. The word was written down alternately as Caníbales and Caríbales (closely related to Carib), according to the American Heritage Dictionary; it was resituated in the European alphabet so as to designate primarily those who practice anthropophagia. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the alternate versions came about from the interchangeability in Arawakan and other American languages of the phonemes transcribed as l, n, and r. Although these particular transpositions also occur in European languages (in Italian, the word became Calibana),25 writing the word down fixes its phonetics and consequently contributes to stabilizing its meaning, which has more to do with European colonial apprehensions than the reality of the Caribbean. As an anagram and disfiguration, the name Caliban may also be another transcription of a version of the original word, which works against the phonetic and semantic fixity of the established European versions. As a signifier produced in European discourse out of elements of the representation of Amerindian culture, the name Caliban is apt to designate this creature because the Europeans decide that it suits the attributes they assign him;26 at the same time, the name bears with it traces of the series of distortions involved in the representation of this creature. Hence Shakespeare demonstrates the ways in which signs that eluded colonial epistemology were forced into readability through disfiguration. If Caliban’s name is a disfiguration of cannibal, it takes its place in the series of disfigurations that results when a colonial apprehension, refusing to forebear in recognizing its own limits, imposes itself on newly encountered territory and establishes itself as sovereign. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, 27n12. In Shakespeare’s Caliban, Vaughan and Vaughan provide an account of the various etymologies of the name Caliban that have been proposed in the history of Shakespeare criticism (26–36). They also suggest that the Gypsy word “cauliban,” meaning “black” or “blackness,” which is likely to have been in some usage in early seventeenth-century England, may have contributed to Shakespeare’s choice (33–4). Kermode also indicates this possibility (xxxviii n2). 25 26

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In more than his name, the figure of Caliban is Shakespeare’s dramatization of the mechanisms by which the colonial other is produced in the language and representation of the colonizer. It becomes quite evident in the course of the play that Caliban is, as the character notes indicate, “a salvage and deformed slave” at least as much from Prospero’s placement of him in the small empire of the island as from his own natural condition. Prospero continually fixes and restricts Caliban’s identity through description, addressed to his slave as well as others, with disparaging reminders that the indigenous inhabitant of the island is the child of Sycorax: Then was this Island (Save for the Son that [s]he did littour heere, A frekelld whelpe, hag-borne) not honour’d with A humane shape. (1.2.281–4) Thou poysonous slave, got by ÿ divell himselfe Upon thy wicked Dam … (1.2.320–21) I have us’d thee (Filth as thou art) with humane care … (1.2.346–7) A Devill, a borne-Devill, on whose nature Nurture can never sticke: on whom my paines Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost, And, as with age, his body ouglier growes, So his minde cankers … (4.1.188–92)

Prospero’s regular insistences that Caliban stands, at best, at the periphery of humanity constitute both a description of and an effort to mold and classify him, to demarcate him with respect to the humanness that is a continual point of reference. Prospero is reaffirming the boundaries between civilized, European man and the “savage.” In this linguistic determination, Caliban stands in opposition to a number of qualities that European culture designates as belonging to its own other: he is evil, affiliated with the devil; he belongs to nature, the useless version of nature that is resistant to European cultivation (“nurture”); he is filth, what doesn’t belong in the domain of the selfe27 yet persists in turning up there. This description is a European creation, since it is composed of attributes that European culture evaluates as opposite its own. Like the Amerindians Montaigne initially describes with a fascination that Gonzalo assumes, Caliban is composed of negative characteristics; but instead of the innocence that Montaigne’s description suggests, Caliban is quite a brutal character, a rough rejoinder to idyllic, domesticable fantasies of otherness. Although I follow Timothy J. Reiss in spelling selfe this way, in order to distinguish what is designated from later conceptions of the self as autonomous subject: Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25. 27

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Prospero makes continual attempts to dominate him, in his characterization Caliban displays a resistance to the fixing that is imposed on him. Caliban is deformed, monstrous, ugly, and hence difficult to apprehend. There is no vestige here, as there is in Gonzalo’s speech following Montaigne, of opposing a positive image of nonEuropeans (in the figure of the “noble savage”) to a negative one, the latter an attempt to incarnate in the non-European all that the European absolutely does not want to be, an essential component of the latter’s self-definition.28 Rather, the logic of The Tempest engages this negative image and pushes it to the extreme, with the effect of showing how it is produced in the technology of theater, and more broadly in cultural and political systems of representation. Caliban is a dreamlike condensation of some of the very worst and most terrifying images of the colonial other, having roots in English representations of North and South American Indians, gypsies, Africans of various regions, and Irish.29 He is also tinged with remnants of the “borderline figure” of the medieval wild man, who challenges the integrity of a definitive boundary between humanity and animals, and also embodies the anxiety of a close encounter with a highly dangerous, utterly uncivilized human being.30 Caliban’s Monstrosity Because he is a liminal figure, Caliban provides much material in The Tempest that demonstrates the limits of apprehension. He responds to the characterizations imposed on him, but even in so doing he exceeds and resists them. He achieves this through being placed in the epistemological category of “monster,” which is necessarily a hybrid, and he is termed as such because many of his traits don’t fit into neat classifications. On first seeing Caliban, Trinculo has trouble locating him on one side or the other of several very basic divisions: What have we here, a man, or a fish? dead or alive? a fish, hee smels like a fish: a very ancient and fish-like smell: a kinde of, not the newest poore-John: a strange fish: Were I in England now (as once I was) and had but this fish painted; not a holiday-foole there but would give a peece of silver: There, would this Monster, make a man: any strange beast there, makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame Begger, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian … (2.2.24–32)

Trinculo’s comments bear not only on Caliban’s capacity to resist the domination of categorization; they also address the way that this capacity, very precisely monstrosity, 28 Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 35: “Caliban is anything but a Noble Savage. Shakespeare does not shrink from the darkest European fantasies about the Wild Man; indeed he exaggerates them: Caliban is deformed, lecherous, evil-smelling, idle, treacherous, naive, drunken, rebellious, violent, and devil-worshipping.” 29 Cf. Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, 23–55; also Loomba, 165. 30 Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, 62–71.

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can be turned to exotic appeal through a more aggressive effort at domination. Trinculo calls attention to the draw of Shakespeare’s theater, attracting interest and making money by presenting this exotic location and its figures. The two meanings of his comment that “There, would this Monster, make a man” are interrelated. In a society that is increasingly heterogeneous because of its rising imperial standing, the category of “man” is less and less integral and unusual creatures may occupy it. Because of this shift, inhabitants are willing to engage in the domination of turning a fellow creature into spectacle, at the expense of those who can’t be put in that position, and make the showman rich, or simply “make” him.31 That Shakespeare’s example of an exotic spectacle is “Indian” confirms the play’s allusiveness primarily to the Americas, and secondarily to the Indian subcontinent.32 Caliban’s monstrosity, which is his indomitable hybridity, is a recurring theme in The Tempest. After enslaving Caliban, Stephano calls him “My man-Monster” (3.2.11). Caliban is another version of the “monstrous child” that Montaigne describes in the essay of this title (2.30). That creature, with two bodies and one head, is recognizably human but repulsively not so, arousing anxiety by challenging deep-seated cultural and epistemological parameters, and enabling his parents to make money by putting him on display. Montaigne remarks, “Nous appelons contre nature ce qui advient contre la coustume: rien n’est que selon elle, quel qu’il soit [Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her]” (713/808). Although Caliban is correctly associated with nature in the most traditional of readings, it is with an unruly nature that will not submit to European culture— a nature contrary to custom, the latter presented by the Europeans as universal. He is placed in the category of “natural” precisely because of his monstrosity: he is somewhat recognizable as a man but doesn’t submit to the restrictions of culture. Miranda, augmenting her father’s disparagement, suggests this dynamic: Abhorred Slave, Which any print of goodnesse wilt not take, Being capable of all ill … (1.2.352–4)

The metaphor of printing33 refers to a principal part of the technology by which Europe will translate territories and the peoples that it has encountered; it will teach the latter European language and thereby write them into the narrative of its progress. As I showed in Chapter 9, Montaigne explores this very important dynamic of colonialism, a domination through technology that involves language and both 31 Cf. Terence Hawkes’ excellent comments on this passage: “Swisser-Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters,” in Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, 26–30. 32 On the practice of displaying Amerindians in England, see Alden T. Vaughan, “Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England,” in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman, eds,“The Tempest” and Its Travels, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) 49–59. 33 Kermode, 32n.

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written and graphic representation. The importance of the operations of language and printing is famously signaled in Caliban’s reply to Miranda’s speech: You taught me Language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse … (1.2.364–5)

Caliban’s resistance foregrounds the importance of the combined technology of printing and language. Greenblatt comments, “Caliban … for an instant achieves an absolute if intolerable moral victory.”34 In appropriating language for the purpose of cursing, Caliban is living up to the moral representation of him that Prospero and Miranda have effected. But he is also resisting this representation by claiming agency within it and turning their language against them. He is able to use this language to represent, in a way that Miranda and Prospero can’t escape understanding, at least some of what once belonged to him when he was his own “King” (1.2.343), in command of his own culture and epistemology. It is also evident that he responds to printing as part of the colonial apparatus. Caliban points out to his co-conspirators against Prospero: Remember First to possesse his Bookes; for without them Hee’s but a Sot, as I am; nor hath not One Spirit to command: They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burne but his books … (3.2.91–5)

Caliban characterizes print technology as bound up with the propagation of imperial culture, here illustrated as the domestication of the servants.35 The Art of Representation The recurring tension in the representation of Caliban bears on his monstrosity, his stretching of the category of human36—on whether or not the epistemologies that the play engages are adequate to present him as human. The play more broadly dramatizes the tension between the projection of a utopian space that the theater offers and the concomitant attempts to restrict that space, first in Gonzalo’s almost 34

Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse,” 35. In Shakespearian Negotiations, Greenblatt points out that after their production in the theater, Shakespeare’s writings have come to us in the form of books that hold a magisterial position in the Western canon and its imperial investments: “Those works have been widely acknowledged as the central literary achievement of English culture. As such they served—and continue to serve—as a fetish of Western civilization, a fetish Caliban curiously anticipates when he counsels Stephano and Trinculo to cut Prospero’s throat: … ‘Burn but his books’” (160–61). 36 Cf. Hamlin, 110: “For every suggestion that Caliban is not fully human, a countersuggestion emerges that he is.” 35

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spontaneous assignment of himself as king to the idyllic society he fantasizes, and then in Prospero’s continued effort to mold the wild, unruly environment of the island. Prospero’s own practice depends on the quality of the island as a utopian space, since it offers him the occasion to remake the hierarchies of the European empire from which Alonso and his men have come. In this process, Prospero becomes a reflection of European political and cultural power, an image of it by which spectators may see it as other than what they are familiar with. In producing this utopian space, the theater operates through the same power that Prospero commands, his “Art.”37 The term Art, in this usage, is well defined as “technique,” and involves an apprehension of nature that forces it, brings it forth, shapes it, and assumes it as knowable.38 Prospero’s Art is integral to the operations of epistemology that Shakespeare examines in The Tempest. Despite its frequently cruel uses, Prospero’s magic is established as embodying goodness against the sorcery or dark magic of Sycorax:39 This damn’d Witch Sycorax, For mischiefes manifold, and sorceries terrible To enter humane hearing, from Argier,40 Thou knowst was banished … (1.2.263–6)

37

Kermode chooses to follow the First Folio in spelling “Art” with a capital, “a recognized method of indicating that it is a technical usage” (xli n4). 38 That the term art in the early modern period has this meaning is strongly suggested by a survey of titles from early seventeenth-century England. A WorldCat search using the term “art” as a title keyword, limiting the years to 1600–1610, yielded the following: “the arte of prophesying,” “the art of gunnery,” “the arte of gardening,” “the art of navigation,” “ye art militarie,” “the art of musicke,” “the damned art of witchcraft,” “the arte of vulgar arithmetic,” and “the true art of living well,” among others. The early modern English art still retains the meaning of its Latin antecedent, arte, a translation of the Greek tekhnē. Martin Heidegger’s explorations of modern tekhnē and its implications for knowledge are of enormous value: “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture,” both in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35 and 115–54, respectively. 39 Barbara Mowat provides an account of the different magical traditions that the representation of Prospero’s art draws on, showing that it is important to contrast his practice with the sorcery of Sycorax: “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,” in Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, eds, Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 193–213. 40 In his Arden Shakespeare edition, Kermode provides this spelling, but in their own Vaughan and Vaughan change to Algiers. This particular emendation is unfortunate because it effaces the phonetic malleability of early modern English and its affinity in this respect with the Native American languages from which the series cannibal, Caliban, and Caribbean is drawn.

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Tied as such with Argier or Algiers, Sycorax belongs to the realm of the Muslim other that European culture had not yet succeeded, in Shakespeare’s time, in banishing from its domestic space. In the utopian space Prospero is establishing, his refined, learned magic will transform those parts of the island that still show signs of her hegemony. He recounts the event that signals his triumph in establishing a colonial realm, the transfer of Ariel from the captivity that Sycorax created. He claims a superiority for his Art because it goes further than Sycorax could with hers, thus allowing him to place Ariel in servitude: it was a torment To lay upon the damn’d, which Sycorax Could not againe undoe: it was mine Art, When I arriv’d, and heard thee, that made gape The Pyne, and let thee out. (1.2.289–93)

Ariel’s service enables Prospero to extend the power of his Art. Throughout the play, Ariel’s role is that of stage manager in Prospero’s spectacles, which by the end become mainly theatrical. Theater and the Representation of the Other The thematization of theater as the technology of representation, with its implications for sovereignty and epistemology, occurs most pointedly in the masque of Act 4, the part of The Tempest that places it among Shakespeare’s most plainly metatheatrical texts.41 Although I am approaching it from a mainly formal perspective, gauging its aesthetic functions in relation to the colonial aspects of The Tempest so as to consider the play’s engagement with and situating of epistemology, the known material reasons for its inclusion signal its importance in the maintenance of royal power. Formal and historical analyses too often tend to be separate; even if material reasons can be fully adduced for some part of a work of art, that part will always also have a formal function. This idea is only a corollary of the platitude, which is nonetheless entirely true, that every artistic form has an internal, synchronic poetics and is also historically, and hence diachronically, conditioned. The masque itself is a court formality, and Shakespeare most likely put it in The Tempest to respond to the convention. Although the play was performed at court, there is no reason to believe that it was written expressly for that purpose, much less for a royal wedding.42 But audiences recognized the royal ritual in the play, and likely achieved a vicarious participation in the wedding of Princess Elizabeth 41 See Ernest B. Gilman, “‘All Eyes’: Prospero’s Inverted Masque,” Renaissance Quarterly 33.2 (Summer 1980): 214–30, for a discussion of the masque in The Tempest as highly detailed metatheater, and of how it suggests a reading of the play. 42 David Bevington, “The Tempest and the Jacobean Court Masque,” in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–19.

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and Frederick V, the only participation the public could have in an event open only to those of the highest rank. By making a more public spectacle of this event and ceremoniously placing it at the center of his audience’s attention, Shakespeare is contributing heavily to the promotion of the image of royal power and hence to its maintenance.43 Through the masque, Prospero reaffirms his own position as ruler; the parallels between James I and Prospero have been well documented, and Frank Kermode further explains that James considered his own political power as akin to magic.44 The masque is thus a mise-en-scène of the work of the theater in legitimating sovereignty, and of course of the playwright in relation to the king. Prospero, though, can scarcely be seen as a straight stand-in for Shakespeare. I view him rather as someone who has at his disposal the same technology of representation as Shakespeare, in an analogous institutional setting, but who might use them quite differently. Through his theatrical magic, he demonstrates the function that Shakespeare as playwright carries out. As metatheater, the masque examines the mechanisms of royal power’s self-representation, and hence furthers the consideration of the relationship between epistemology and sovereignty that the play initiates in connection with the colonial situation. In Act 4, Prospero has put the men from Milan and Naples through his spectacles, and he is moving toward the reconciliation that the union of Ferdinand and Miranda accomplishes. As part of representing himself as a beneficent sovereign and hence giving his subjects reasons to submit to him, Prospero wants to put his Art to use for their pleasure. He is both the sovereign and the dramaturge who will display spectacle before his spectators; he will also assign them a place in the hierarchy that the spectacle addresses and represents. He calls on Ariel’s service in this task; the spirit becomes his promoter and ticketmaster, quite evidently an agent in the maintenance of power: goe bring the rabble (Ore whom I give thee powre) here, to this place: Incite them to quick motion, for I must Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple Some vanity of my Art: it is my promise, And they expect it from me. (4.1.37–42)

As it usually does, Shakespeare’s practice of metatheater has a multiple function: it contributes to the phenomenon it represents, that of the maintenance of sovereign 43

Louis Marin observes, “Scenes and sites of this power that it exhibits in the play of forms and figures—of flesh, of land, and of air—that the vision—the poetic phantasia— could project to the outside by determining and qualifying itself there, The Tempest also exerts the same power on the gaze of the audience in order to seduce it by carrying it into the magical space of the stage, leading it back to the forgotten and immemorial requirements of a properly human destiny.” Pouvoirs de l’image. Gloses (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 169–70. (My translation.) 44 Kermode, xli n5.

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power; but in representing this power onstage, it also invites a critical perspective on it. The theater, in presenting created environments, makes a necessary appeal to utopian interest: it produces a space of exteriority from which a public may see itself and hence question the ways in which it is implicated in culture, politics, and epistemology. Just as Montaigne brings European apprehension to expose and reflect on its own limits, in The Tempest Shakespeare puts on stage the mechanisms of colonization and shows their contradictions and failures, in part by calling attention to the construction and limits of the very theatrical image he offers to his spectators. When English culture is beginning to extend itself over the globe, Shakespeare demonstrates that this culture is made of and propagated by spectacle, which operates according to certain procedures. Prospero elaborates this notion when he speaks of the spectacle of his masque, simultaneously pointing out its power and its limits, as it establishes itself geographically: These our actors, (As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre, And, like the baseless fabricke of this vision And Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces, The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantiall Pageant faded Leave not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe As dreames are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleepe. (4.1.148–58)

The Tempest shows Prospero’s spectacle, which overlaps with its own, to be an integral part of the culture that is propagating itself across the globe in the form of the emerging British empire; this extension and all within it are revealed to be spectacle, “such stuffe/As dreames are made on.”45 Montaigne is interested in showing how the extension of an empire is the fulfillment of a fantasy, a wish, or the realization of a dream. It becomes evident that the technology of theatrical representation moves in multiple directions, both legitimating and critical. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has a great deal to do with the cultural policy of the state, although it would be reckless to call it the pure expression of this policy. The projected dominion over the globe here appears as a utopian ideal; in the utopian space of the theater, because of the mechanisms by which this space must operate, the possibility of quite a different vision presents itself.46 45 See Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 216–21, for a different but highly compelling reading of the political functions and implications of the masque. 46 Cf. Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals, 211: “Yet the question remains: what will the great Globe (Prospero’s gesture must include the theater) inherit? If plays are ephemeral, what of the greater ‘play’ in the greater ‘Globe’ outside the theater? What future

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The many anticolonial rewritings of Caliban confirm that The Tempest in its continuing circulation participates in the production of such a critical stance, even as it has contributed to the colonialist ideology that traversed its initial production.47 The play presents the theater as a principal site of representation of the colonial other, through Caliban as well as through its many references to different aspects of early modern English imperial practices. This representation extends to an examination of the limits of apprehension of colonial practices and the relationship to the other that borrows from and extends Montaigne’s critical epistemology. Although there is no question that Shakespeare’s theater formed a part of the early modern English state apparatus, this apparatus did not succeed at becoming monolithic: Shakespeare engages with the various discourses of colonialism and state legitimacy such that his theater invites a continuing critical examination of their machinations, effectiveness, achievements, and limitations.

lies ahead for the culture the lesser Globe contained, enacted, and helped, by its ‘talking’ to reinforce and create? Shakespeare’s last play looks to a new world.” 47 In a close examination of a number of the important anticolonialist readings and rewritings of The Tempest, Loomba offers the following: “If we consider the issues raised by anti-colonialist appropriations alongside those that emerge when we assess the ‘originating moment of the play’, then a ‘historically correct reading’ of a text need not be pitted against locating ‘what history has made of it’: radical readings are not about investing a text with what isn’t there at all. Can we suggest, instead, that the struggle over meaning is intensified in the case of a text which is itself polyphonic and that the contradictions within the text and the struggle between its different appropriations are inter-related?” Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 146.

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Index Abecassis, Jack I. 198n34, 201 allegory and alterity 181, 198 and poetic meaning 206–7 as theatrical procedure 224, 236 and time 219–20 Amerindians European representations of 179–201, 237–55 Amyot, Jacques 230 Aneau, Barthélemy 17, 21n11 antiquity, see also Rome and modernity 17–18, 26, 29, 85–8, 151–8, 180 as simulacrum 158–60, 180–81 and the New World 179, 180–84 aristocracy and education 142–3, 144–7, 157–8 and generation, 146–7, 151–2 Aristotle 242–3 Artemidorus of Daldis 53–5 auctoritas and autonomy 147–52 Augustine, Saint 40 Baker, Deborah Lesko 35n10, 41–2, 62 Barré, Nicolas 187 Barthes, Roland 5 Baudrillard, Jean 12–13 Bensmaïa, Réda 152n19 Bèze, Théodore 57 Bible, the 4, 168; see also Christianity Book of Ecclesiastes 57, 61, 62, 64–5, 66, 86, 123, 128–9, 130, 134, 164–5, 168, 213 Book of Revelation 5, 57, 62–3, 67–71, 79, 92, 97, 102, 124–5n12, 127, 213 Gospel of Matthew 67 Marot’s interest in 101 Protestant 57–8, 65, 86, 124–5n12, 131

Blum, Claude 148 Bodin, Jean 243 Bond, Ronald 76 Booth, Stephen 208n9, 210–12, 213n18, 215n23, 218n31 Bowen, Barbara 6, 35n10, 42n25 Brown, Richard Danson 78–9, 80, 88n30, 92n36, 120–21n4 Calvin, Jean 57–8n24 Camden, William 236 Cantor, Paul 221n1 Carey, Lady (Elizabeth Spencer) 114–15 Carrière, Jean-Claude 56 Carron, Jean-Claude 27–9 Cave, Terence 18 Césaire, Aimé 7, 240 Charles Quint 57 Charles VIII 19 Charron, Pierre 152n19 Christianity, see also Bible, the conflicts within 79, 88, 91–2, 101–8, 116–17, 127–8, 169 and paganism 40, 64, 82–3, 84–6, 111, 123, 124–5 Cicero 27n26, 45n34, 226 Coldiron, A.E.B. 77n9, 84n26, 87n29, 88n30 Collège de Guyenne 147, 158 Colonialism, see New World, the Colonna, Francesco 53 Conley, Tom 163, 175, 187n20, 191n27, 196nn constancy and femininity 231–2 and poetic durability 225–7 and theatrical representation 226–30 as virtue 225–35 Cotgrave, Randle 191n26, 243 Crewe, Jonathan 103–4, 112 Curtius, Ernst Robert 27–8

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Da Vinci, Leonardo 20 Daniel, David 225 Davis, Natalie Zemon 56 death, see time Defaux, Gérard 185n14, 186–7, 198n34 Deguy, Michel 29 Deleuze, Gilles 12–14, 200n38 der Noot, Jan van 79, 96–112, 114 Derrida, Jacques 146n11, 187n21 di Rienzo, Cola 36 Dorsten, Jan van 95n1, 96n3, 100, 101–2 dream, see also Freud, Sigmund; psychoanalysis New World as 179–201 as poetic procedure 51–71 and simulacrum 66, 244–5 and theatrical representation 254–5 Du Bartas, Guillaume 83, 84, 91–3, 95, 117 Du Bellay, Cardinal Jean 19, 31, 104 Du Bellay, Joachim 1, 2–5, 6, 11, 14, 15–71 passim, 114, 117, 119–30, 133–4, 156, 183, 221 Amores, 39 Antiquitez de Rome, Les [The Antiquities of Rome] 2–4, 19, 21, 31–50, 51, 58–9, 60–61, 63–7, 69, 75–93, 96–7, 116–17, 126, 129, 164, 171–4, 205–20, 222, 226 Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, La [The Defense and Illustration of the French Language] 11, 17–29, 31–2, 47, 53, 65, 67, 71, 76, 77–8, 80–81, 90, 104, 107, 111, 128, 134, 157–8 Regrets, Les [The Regrets] 31 and Shakespeare 205–20 Songe [Dream] 4, 43, 51–71, 75, 86, 90–92, 96–7, 101, 102–3, 108–12, 113, 116–17, 122, 124, 126, 129, 164–5, 169, 209, 212, 222 and Spenser 73–136 passim, 205–20 Dudley, Ambrose (Third Earl of Warwick) 132 Eco, Umberto 215n24 Elizabeth, Princess 252 empire, see New World, the; Rome epistemology, see also simulacrum and history 224–5

and metatheater 222–36, 245, 250–55 and the New World 181–201, 237–55 and theatrical representation 237–55 Erasmus, Desiderius 27n26, 49n42 experience and reading, 152–6 Fauno, Lucio 3, 37 Ferguson, Margaret 18, 27n25, 29n30, 32, 76, 77n10, 92n36 Florio, John 226, 229–30, 237 Foix, Diane de (Comtesse de Gurson) 137–8, 141–2, 144–5 Foucault, Michel 237 François Ier 36 Frederick V 253 Freud, Sigmund 52–3, 54–7, 59nn, 61n34, 66, 69–70, 196nn; see also Psychoanalysis Fulvio, Andrea 33, 37, 42 Fumaroli, Marc 186, 197n33 Gadoffre, Gilbert 36, 40, 46n36, 49n42, 52, 68, 69 Gallagher, Catherine 5–6 generation and masculine authority 143, 146–7, 151–2 and social order 142–7 Geoffrey of Monmouth 236 Giordani, Françoise 46n36 Giordano, Michael J. 51n2, 60n29, 61, 187n21 Goldberg, Jonathan 221n2, 224, 240n11 Gray, Floyd 26, 35n10, 40 Greenblatt, Stephen 5–6, 8–10, 238n6, 240n10, 244n23, 248n28, 250 on pyschoanalysis 55–6 Guerre, Martin 55–6 Hampton, Timothy 141, 159, 160, 195n28 Hawkes, Terence 7 Helgerson, Richard 81, 84 Henri II 19, 91 Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) 91 Heraclitus 43–4, 217–18 Hieatt, A. Kent 205, 207–8, 210n13, 216n27 Hoffman, George 179n2, 188, 198

Index Horace 27n26 Hutcheon, Linda 5 imitation, see also simulacrum as poetic procedure 26–9, 32, 48–50, 205–20 and simulacrum 29 intertextuality as critical concept 5 Islip, Adam 243 James I 221, 253 John the Divine, Saint 67–8 Julius III, Pope 19 Kermode 237n1, 249n33, 251n37, 251n40, 253 Kerouac, Jack 7 Kristeva, Julia 5 Lacan, Jacques 54–5 Leroy, Louis 243 Léry, Jean de 187 Ligorio, Pirro 3, 33 Lipsius, Justus 226, 227–30 Livy 37 Lubitsch, Ernst 7, 245n24 Lucretius 195n28, 197 MacPhail, Eric 21n11, 43, 165n12, 168 Malick, Terence 198–9n36 Marliani, Giovanni Bartolomeo (John Bartholomew Marlianus) 3, 33, 36–8, 40n19, 42 Marot, Clément 57, 67, 83, 86, 92, 96–108, 112, 114, 117, 119 Mauro, Lucio 3, 33n7 McKinley, Mary 163n7, 175 Merchant Taylors’ School 103 Mermier, Guy 185n14, 186 metatheater, see also theater and alterity 252–5 and epistemology 222–36, 245, 250–55 and representation 9 and utopia 254–5 Michelet, Jules 19 Miles, Geoffrey 226, 230, 234 Montaigne, Michel de 1, 6, 11, 55–6, 137–201 passim

275

“Au lecteur [To the Reader]” 186 conservatism of 170 “De la vanité” 161–77, 188, 191 “De l’amitié [On Affectionate Relationships]” 140, 181–2, 201 “De l’institution des enfans [On Educating Children]” 137–60, 161, 165–6, 168, 172–3 “De l’oisiveté [On Idleness]” 145 “Des boyteux [On the Lame]” 184–5 “Des cannibales [On the Cannibals]” 9, 90, 179–87, 192–201, 237–55 “Des coches [On Coaches]” 179–201, 239 “Du jeune Caton [On Cato the Younger]” 148 “Du pedantisme [On Schoolmasters’ Learning]” 145 “Du repentir [On Repenting]” 155 Journal de voyage 3, 167 on the New World 179–201, 237–55 and Shakespeare 225–6, 227–30, 237–55 “Sur des vers de Virgile [On Some Verses of Virgil]” 145–6 Montgomery, Robert L. 206 More, Thomas 244 Mulcaster, Richard 95 National Socialism 7 Navarrete, Ignacio 24, 27n26, 28n28 New Historicism as critical approach 207, 238 and literary theory 2, 3–10 New World, the and antiquity 179, 180–84 as dream 179–201 and epistemology 181–201, 237–55 and literary transfer 1, 9, 179–201, 237–55 Montaigne on 155, 179–201, 237–55 and Rome 192–4 and Shakespeare 237–55 as simulacrum 180–81 and translatio studii 188–9 as utopia 194, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 67–8, 200n38, 225 North, Sir Thomas 230–31 Norton, Grace 161 Notz, Marie-Françoise 45

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O’Brien, John 148 Osório, Jéronimo 187 Ovid 3, 44, 217–18 Palladio, Andrea 3, 33, 36–8, 42 Paster, Gail Kern 222, 223n8 Paul, Saint 168 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 1, 28n28, 36 Canzone 323 57, 67, 68, 76, 86, 92, 95, 96–112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 124, 133 Petronius 229 Pienaar, W.J.B. 104, 111n44, 114n50 Plato 13, 241–4 Axiochus 243 Ion 216n27 Laws 242 Phaedrus 146 Republic 242–4 Pléïade, la 19, 76, 106 Pliny the Elder 37 Plutarch 37, 144n8, 192, 230–31, 236 Poliner, Sharlene May 51n2, 52 Ponsonby, William 76 Prescott, Anne Lake 75n2, 76, 79n17, 92n39, 102, 106, 205n2 Protestantism, see Christianity, conflicts within psychoanalysis, see also Dream; Freud, Sigmund as critical approach 12, 53–7 Pyrrhus 182–4 Rabelais, François 6–7, 70n60, 148, 175n22, 194–5, 196n32, 244 Rebhorn, Wayne A. 39n16, 48 Regosin, Richard 146n11, 162n5 Reiss, Timothy J. 140, 143–4n8, 155n21, 166n13, 180n4, 226n20, 247n27 Renwick, W.L. 75, 78, 83–4 Riffaterre, Michael 5, 52, 61 Roest, Theodore 111 Rome, see also antiquity and Catholic Church 113–17 and Holy Roman Empire 49, 127 as literary model 1, 2–4, 11, 14, 17–29, 31–50, 62–71, 82, 87–8, 113, 119– 36, 147, 161–77, 212–13, 221–36 and the New World 192–4 politics of 221, 224

and Protestantism 71 as simulacrum 42–3, 44–50, 69, 171, 225, 235–6 tourist guidebooks in 3, 33, 36–8, 47 Ronsard, Pierre de 156 Satterthwaite, Alfred W. 106n30, 109n37, 110, 113, 115–16 Schell, Richard 114 Screech, M.A. 48, 49, 51n1, 68, 70n60, 75, 101n13, 196n32 Seneca 226 Shakespeare, William 1, 203–55 passim and Du Bellay 205–20 Julius Caesar 11, 221–36 and Montaigne 225–6, 226, 227–30, 237–55 and the New World 237–55 Sonnets 205–20 and Spenser 205–20 The Tempest 7, 9, 237–55 Sidney, Mary (Countess of Pembroke) 135–6 Sidney, Sir Philip 119, 133–6 simulacrum, see also epistemology; imitation antiquity as 158–60, 180 as critical concept, 12–14, 21 and dream 66 and imitation 29 the New World as 181 Rome as 42–3, 44–50, 69, 171, 225, 235–6 world as 177 Socrates 149, 216n27 Spenser, Edmund 1, 4, 11, 28n28, 57n23, 73–136 passim, 221, 243 Colin Clouts Come Home Again 114–15 Complaints 73–136 passim and Du Bellay 73–136 passim, 205–20 The Faerie Queene 75, 76, 111, 115 Muiopotmos 86, 90–91, 114–15 Ruines of Rome 75–93, 95, 96–7, 116, 205–20 The Ruines of Time 111, 119–36 and Shakespeare 205–20 Theatre for Worldlings 96–112 The Visions of Bellay 75, 86, 90–92, 95–6, 108–12, 113, 117, 119, 124, 126–7, 133, 212

Index

277

Visions of Petrarch 86, 90–91, 95–108, 111–12, 113, 117, 119, 133 Visions of the Worlds Vanitie 86, 95–6, 108, 112–17, 133 Speroni, Sperone 24–5, 27, 28 Stapleton, M.L. 76, 77n11 Stein, Harold 102n17, 104–7, 111n42, 119n1 Supple, James J. 137, 141n6 Surrey, Earl of (Henry Howard) 106

translation, see also translatio studii as poetic practice 26–7, 75–93, 95–112 Tucker, George Hugo 31n2, 33, 39n15, 41n24, 42, 43, 51n3, 64, 79–80n18 Turner, Frederick 206

theater, see also metatheater world as 160, 177 Thevet, André 187 time and allegory 219–20 and poetic meaning 43–6, 63–4, 119–36, 205–20 and rhyme 216–17 and theatrical representation 222 Todorov, Tzvetan 198 translatio studii 26–9, 113, 119, 179; see also translation and the New World 182–3, 188–9 and translatio imperii 49, 182–4, 190, 194–6, 197, 201

Vaughan, Alden T. 240n11, 243, 246nn, 248nn, 249n32 Vaughan, Virginia Mason 240n11, 243, 246nn, 248nn Vendler, Helen 216 Vigne, Daniel 56 Villey, Pierre 24, 137n3, 152n19, 190–91, 229nn Virgil 3, 63, 76 Vitalis, Janus 33, 47, 79–80n18

utopia and culture, 26 and metatheater 254–5 the New World as 194, 199

WorldCat 4 Zalloua, Zahi 179n1, 184, 201 Zamparelli, Thomas 60, 61n30